Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last person standing in the floppy disk business

eyeondesign.aiga.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 363 posts

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#321

Post by Tor3 »

blantonl wrote: post #63

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.

It's not less painful to install and set up an IRIX system with a couple dozen CDs.. (except that CDs didn't often fail to read). In fact it was so tiring that after the first couple of times I would always just copy the CDs to a disk on another computer and point the installation there, one directory at the time (fortunately SGI machines could NFS-mount filesystems from the monitor)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#322

Post by fatneckbeardz »

mark_round wrote: post #54
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 wrote about this a few years ago on my blog when I re-fitted my old Commodore Amiga with a floppy drive after years of using SD-card floppy emulators: http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/ There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather…

and when people stopped telling stories around the fire, and instead people went to their rooms to read books... something was lost then too. and something gained.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#323

Post by Tor3 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #299
doomlaser wrote: post #4

When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like S…

> Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world. “The last person standing” is self-proclaimed, and even on quick search [0] there are other floppy disk makers, just not in the US and not answering magazine interviews. In particular Hitachi-Maxxel was outsourcing floppy disk to a chinese maker, and I’d expect that company to still be producing…

I could buy 3.5" floppies in a Japanese supermarket just a few years ago. Heck, I could buy cassette tape as well.. and I did! :-)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#324

Post by gambiting »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #256
gambiting wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all the pairs I own it's some arcane combination to enter pairing mode, and then have you tried adding BT headphones to windows when the same ones were paired in the past? You have to remove them first then go back into pairing mode again. It's more bullshit than I'm willing to deal with. With a jack you plug them in and they work.

You don't have to enter pairing mode if the device remembers previous pairings, which is not that strange.

If they are(or were) connected to my laptop and phone and both devices are nearby, then they will default to my phone. There is nothing I can do on my laptop to force them to connect there instead(and believe me I tried). I have to either remove them on my phone(pain) or enter pairing mode and re-pair them with the laptop(even greater pain).

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#325

Post by Tor3 »

int_19h wrote: post #292
jlarcombe wrote: post #215

About five or six years ago there was a single packet of 5.25 inch floppy discs for sale in the window of a strange shop near my office in London. It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed to come in or go…

Sounds like https://wiki.lspace.org/Wandering_Shop

Ah, wandering shops. Maybe 25 years ago I was walking the streets of Rome, as I had been doing for years on my days off. Maps were left behind years before - didn't need them. That day I was on the Tevere side of the Tiber (well, that would sound strange in Italian..), anyway, I suddenly came across a shop I had never seen before, or at least not noticed. In the window they displayed the most fantastic steam-punk coffee machine, with pipes going everywhere, but not that big either. I instantly wanted it. But it was a Sunday and the shop was closed so I decided to call it a day. It was just a short straight walk from the shop to a major intersection near the river, and then to a bridge and eventually to where I was going.

So I went back as soon as I could a few days later, walked to that intersection and up that road, about a hundred meters.. and the shop was not there. There was nothing on that corner. I thought I was losing my mind, or at least I had managed to mess up something.. after that I started out from every bridge on the Tiber, walked to the nearby major intersection, and up whatever street in the right direction. Nothing.

I continued my search for years after that whenever I came back to Rome, but I never found the shop. At that time I didn't really want to buy the coffee machine anymore, I just wanted to solve the mystery.

Obviously (if I think logically) there's a natural explanation, but it still comes back to me now and then, all these years later. Back when I read that Pratchett book in your link, which went into details about how a Wandering Shop behaves, I suffered major déjà vu!

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#326

Post by Tor3 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #203

I found "NIUB" (New In Unopened Box) floppies at home: 5"1/4 floppies, never used. I've got no idea: are they still as good as new even though they're something like 35 years old? I found more than that: I found my "time capsule" C128 (safely stored for 30 years+, still working, non polluted by anything modern). I found a "copier" software (Fast Hack'Em II IIRC) still working and managed to use it to copy a still wor…

As themagician says. Unless they're of a particularly notoriously bad brand.. I can't remember the name now but I'll recognize it when I see it. Can you see what brand it is?

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#327

Post by RF_Savage »

duskwuff wrote: post #193
bombcar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 combinatio…

Yeah. My computer in 1998 had a 28.8k modem and my dad's machine had the fast 56k one.

Used floppies to transfer data to and from the fast computer until 2002 or 2003.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#328

Post by Tor3 »

paulirish wrote: post #302

In the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), which I've kept. About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate…

If it was HD then the data is probably gone. Or at least the floppy will have read issues. 720KB should do a bit better.

I have recovered data from a lot of old media, CCT tapes, floppies, 3.5" floppies - except that in practice it turned out that a) CCT ok. No problems. b) 8" floppies ok. No problems. c) 5.25" floppies (low density, high density) ok. No problems (except that for a while I didn't have a controller which could read a minority of them - they're FM, not MFM), d) 3.5" Not ok. All unreadable. All of them. And that was not due to the drive - I have lots of drives, including one I bought because it was calibrated. All of the media had been stored either in the same location or in a similar environment, but at this point I don't even bother trying those darn 3.5" floppies unless they're written recently. I'll just be a ton of read errors.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#329

Post by ido »

doomlaser wrote: post #81
ido wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least of the 3 examples on that webpage it seems like you made remakes of existing simple games (tetris, sokoban, pong) - did you try making new designs of your own and if not, why not?

Sure. In 2007 I started up a new label at http://doomlaser.com . Made a bunch of indie stuff as that scene was really starting to bloom. Helped build some big franchises like Tap Tap Revenge, the iOS game for The Hunger Games, alongside irreverent stuff like https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364 , and personal stuff like https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits (a game named after the Mac's low-level…

Thanks! I'm not sure why I was downvoted, maybe people thought I was being negative but I really did just ask because I wanted to know. Your stuff looks great!

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#330

Post by Tor3 »

_tom_ wrote: post #280
quickthrower2 wrote: post #275

How about a floppy to USB/flash/SSD adapter. Do we need to make the physical thing still?

3.5" external usb drives are easy to find on amazon, etc. If anyone knows of a 5.25 (5 1/4) external usb drive, please tell me! I still have thousands of old 5.25 floppies. I've transferred or tossed most of the 3.5, since I was able to get a drive for that.

Just be aware that the USB external drives are pre-coded for "PC" formats only, so you can't use those as a source for a generic floppy recover session. I.e. you can't expect to be able to ready anything from some other non-PC brand of computer.
Post reply on HN