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I prob have 2 boxes, shrink wrapping intact... in my storage closet.
I have 2 boxes somewhere that I bought when Staples in the UK was closing down; they presumably found them right at the back of a shelf in the stores. 50p a box I think.
https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...
You haven't lived until you installed an operating system from 38 floppy disks. Slackware and OS/2 for example My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2 Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you were dead in the water.
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SCO Xenix was every bit as bad, and yes, I did the Slackware "download floppy images, make a stack of floppies, spend hours installing" dance as well. I remember being very relieved by the rise of CD-ROM and CD-R.
ISTR a couple of boot floppies was enough to get the attached Wangtek drive spinning so you could bootstrap a DC600 tape and load from there. I don't recall if this was an official implementation or something we cooked up. Oh yes, and there was the floppy way too.
Heck, I still should have a pile of those stashed in the basement, maybe it's a good time to plug the reader to my PC, and dig through those?
This article was really well written, good reading!
I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr. Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of…
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And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.
Especially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.
The money quote from the article - and it is so well put - is : "Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me." My floppy story is: In the late 90s 3.5" floppies were ubiquitous and the Zi…
Recent and related: Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32663995 - Aug 2022 (130 comments) Less recent and related: Ask HN: Why is there still a market for floppy disks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31658880 - June 2022 (12 comments) Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064316 - Nov 2021 (12 comments…
This data leak, due to obscurity and the volume was more of a joke in my country, than a serious news. I do however wonder, what it was back in the day? I've never heard of any large scale data leaks involving floppy disks, perhaps I'm too young.
> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-dri…