One of only very few boot devices, I wouldn't want to be completely without.
The floppy disk just won’t die
31–40 of 180 posts
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#32> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as so…
If you bought floppy drives at the tail end of their run and disks at the tail end of their run, then yes. Everything was engineered good enough to work a couple times and that was it, because files were too big and 1.44mb wasn't enough; 2.88 was Japan only; people were moving on to zip drives or ls-120 drives (which were also quite good at reading 1.44 media), cd-rs sometimes, and usb mass storage (with drives that…
It goes both ways. Things at the tail end are also optimised for cost so extremely and they were valued so little by the users by then that the latest stuff is junk.
It ends up being that some manufacturers made good stuff and some made junk, but you don't know which until much later.
I have a batch of nos nameless 3.5" 720k I got from floppydisk.com that are basically all junk. Fail to even verify a format, or maybe succeeds once and then fails within 3 uses.
I have other even older, actually labelled as single sided 3.5", but made by Basf that just run and run and run.
In fact most 8" are even more reliable than any of the later versions because a lot of 8" machines spun the disks the entire time the machine was on. All day every day at work that disk is just grinding away... so they had to be good just to be usable at all.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#33There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
At around 1990 as a high school student I was working in a wholesale supermarket and in the office they had a microcomputer (IIRC a MicroVAX) which had audible database transactions. Every time one of the cashiers scanned an item, you could hear the hard disk move into place to write out the data. I found that endless fascinating for the same reason.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#34One of the things I wonder about in retrospect is why floppy drives remained at a static level of ability for the most part. I mean I know there were the LS120 and such things, but why wasn't there a manufacturer just pushing the tech a bit further? Like why not have a drive made with additional precision and capable of squeezing 3 MB into a floppy?
Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#35> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as so…
Actually late floppies from the early 00s are terrible, but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible. I have a huge pile of floppies from 1988 to 1992 and they all work. Even HDD ones formatted as FDD, though it's not recommended, still work fine 30 years later.
I have a 1987 Apple //c with a bunch of 5.25" floppies of the same period and they all work just fine : games, UCSD Pascal, utilities, Mouse Desk...
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#36> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as so…
To be fair, a few years ago I bought 8" floppies for the Ohio Scientific system that had been in storage since the late 80s. One of the labels had a 1979 date on it. I sent them to a guy who writes the emulator for that system and three out of four were totally readable.
three out of four were totally readable.
This is probably fine for writing emulators, but it is not quite the reliability I expect from aviation!
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#37> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as so…
Yes, it does happen, but in my experience they are much more reliable than most people seem to remember. I've had a few floppies that couldn't even be salvaged by a reformat (as mentioned in the article), but I also have many more original 3.5" floppies from the 90s that are still perfectly readable, and without errors (I know that as they contain data with checksums). "Utterly unrealiable" isn't doing them justice.
I remember picking up floppies from the stack of "ok to erase" ones, and having one not formatting being a common occurrence. Certainly we were using them quite a bit and it was a while back, but still, reliability was nowhere near a USB stick as long as you don't buy the cheapest ones
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#38There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
The sound of a disk II digesting a 5.25 floppy is even better.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it does happen, but in my experience they are much more reliable than most people seem to remember. I've had a few floppies that couldn't even be salvaged by a reformat (as mentioned in the article), but I also have many more original 3.5" floppies from the 90s that are still perfectly readable, and without errors (I know that as they contain data with checksums). "Utterly unrealiable" isn't doing them justice.
I remember picking up floppies from the stack of "ok to erase" ones, and having one not formatting being a common occurrence. Certainly we were using them quite a bit and it was a while back, but still, reliability was nowhere near a USB stick as long as you don't buy the cheapest ones
Let's go revisit some USB sticks that hasn't been touched in 10-20 years though. Flash memory can also get unreliable if you don't access it for a prolonged time. SSDs should be powered on regularly to keep the data alive.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#40Is there a company that refurbished floppy disks? I've got maybe 50 of them and wouldn't mind giving them to some rodeo, or company that still needs them.
That's an interesting idea.
I tend to keep pretty much everything, at least for a while. I'd call myself a "hoarder", but really, I have a fairly decent system for categorization and storage, and clean everything out every couple of years and sell a lot of it online.
I have a storage tote full of floppy disks - there have to be hundreds of them in there, though I've not counted. I think I'll go grab that box tonight and see if I can't sell them on eBay or something.