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The last person standing in the floppy disk business

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Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#191

Post by Plasmoid »

laumars wrote: post #101
asciimov wrote: post #30

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…

My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies of the same files across different disks because odds are one of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to zip any files up as odds are you’d end up with a failed CRC. I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing. I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and N…

I remember buying boxes of floppies hoping that I'd get one that would be error free.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#192

Post by throwanem »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #182
asciimov wrote: post #30

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…

Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.

They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240 "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo information on the medium in order to achieve tracking precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media) write more information in the same area. They were back-compatible with regular 3.5" floppies, but they were also slow, flaky, expensive, and introduced after Zip disks but not long enough before writable CD media, and so they failed to compete.

If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB, with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which in its default state would likely find this all very confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk" devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a disk, and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in their fully stock configuration. [1]

I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun.

[1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven forfend its hard drive ever fail, though...

edits: correcting misrecalled SuperDisk technical details

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#193

Post by duskwuff »

bombcar wrote: post #100
NoGravitas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.

People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds. Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in…

> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.

I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combination of slow Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most users.

No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't be until considerably later that casually transferring files over the Internet would become feasible.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#194

Post by Fileformat »

WalterBright wrote: post #127

I've used punch cards, paper tape, DECtapes, magtapes, cartridge tapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and Bluray disks. I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance. Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective. Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too. Today I use terabyte drives, and have a b…

I've been collecting photos of them all:

https://www.fileformat.info/media/a.htm

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#195

Post by asciimov »

laumars wrote: post #101
asciimov wrote: post #30

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…

My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies of the same files across different disks because odds are one of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to zip any files up as odds are you’d end up with a failed CRC. I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing. I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and N…

A few years back I was doing some cleanup of old media. Checking to see what was on stuff and what I could toss. Of the hundreds of floppies, I had a file failure rate of about 5%. However, my CD/DVD failure rate was around 22% including factory stamped discs.

Now, true, a lot of the dud floppies had been filtered out back in the day. But I was shocked at how well they had faired over the long term vs optical media.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#196

Post by asciimov »

stinos wrote: post #91
asciimov wrote: post #30

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…

I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player, 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.

It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#197

Post by devilbunny »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #182
asciimov wrote: post #30

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…

Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.

Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that I can tell, but even the original stored about 140 MB (in 1992, that was a lot of data in the size of a floppy and a far sturdier package). It wasn't a ton of space, but you didn't have to worry about static, or malicious devices masquerading as HID, and it was certainly good enough that if magneto-optical drives had been continuously developed, we'd be looking at pretty reasonable capacities today.

Yes, much lower capacity per dollar than silicon, but if it were very sturdy (it was) and offered near-infinite rewriteability (it did), it could have had a market.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#198

Post by asciimov »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #182
asciimov wrote: post #30

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…

Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.

Loads of companies tried back in the late 90's and through the very early 2000's. Zip disks, Jaz, Clik! All had the same problem, the drives needed to read them weren't found on every computer. The winners ended up being writable optical media and USB thumbdrives.

Personally, I wish someone would produce a consumer grade tape system, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#199

Post by WalterBright »

Fileformat wrote: post #194
WalterBright wrote: post #127

I've used punch cards, paper tape, DECtapes, magtapes, cartridge tapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and Bluray disks. I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance. Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective. Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too. Today I use terabyte drives, and have a b…

I've been collecting photos of them all: https://www.fileformat.info/media/a.htm

Nice to meet another data hoarder :-)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#200

Post by asciimov »

mikehotel wrote: post #107
asciimov wrote: post #30

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…

You might be interested in this floppy disk upgrade using sd cards. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8IZcP0oP0OU

That's neat!
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