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…
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#291Archivers of that time had an interesting dilemma. If you are compressing a bunch of files, it's more effective to concatenate them all first and then process the resulting bundle - like .tar.gz etc - since compression algorithms can then deduplicate across file boundaries. But if you do that, damage to any part of the archive corrupts the whole thing, which is especially likely when splitting it across multiple floppies. So DOS archivers generally defaulted to compressing files first and then bundling the result. RAR was an interesting case in that it let the user decide on a case by case basis between regular and "solid" (pre-bundled) archives.