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The floppy disk just won’t die

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Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#61

Post by toast0 »

dale_glass wrote: post #47
pmontra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were 2.88" floppy disks, not mainstream. From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over. We had CD burners…

Yeah, but I recall that in the CD era, there were attempts to push the envelope. Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the normal end on standard CDs, because people figured that you can squeeze things a bit tighter and cut the corners a bit more here and there, and with the right drives that worked. I'm wondering why they didn't do that with floppy drives. It was definitely a thing on…

You having a fancy drive that could write more data isn't super useful unless other drives are likely to be able to read it. Looks like there was some softwarw [1] to jam more data onto disks, and Microsoft used an advanced format for software distribution on floppies as well.

I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the 80/90 minute cds came several years later.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#62

Post by shagie »

rr888 wrote: post #29
causi wrote: post #5

There 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.

Similarly its terrifying when you hear the drive clunking away on a bad disk when you know there will be an error before the screen shows it.

In a lab that I hung out in as a student... there was a wang semi compatible (it only had 512k of base ram rather than 640k) that linux was ported to (there was some fun with LILO if I recall correctly).

This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made.

The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#63

Post by jccalhoun »

PaulHoule wrote: post #8
johnwalkr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!

The obsolete format I’ve most recently gotten into is VHS tape. Used decks go for $10 or $20 at our reuse center, you can buy prerecorded tapes for 50 cents. If a deck fails or a tape gets pulled you won’t feel so bad. Decks from 2000 or so are solidly better than they were in the 1980s, particularly they all support HiFi sound which is excellent. The quality is not so good as a DVD or Blu-Ray but a good movie on VHS…

Getting the best quality out of VHS is a rabbit hole I went down last year. There are a couple movies that I have that weren't released in any format besides VHS and I spent quite a lot of time trying to get the best quality digital copy I could. There are a dozen or so (mostly s-vhs jvc) models that have circuitry to stabilize the images and they start at $300 on ebay.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#64

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

jaclaz wrote: post #2

Hmmm. All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names): https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61

as soon as I saw the article title I figured someone had figured out a simple/cheap emulation solution and the comments would link to it. Thanks!

They seem super cheap on ebay too https://www.ebay.com/itm/364063791560

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#65

Post by userbinator »

causi wrote: post #5

There 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.

...and the feeling of relief at the fact that, unlike a USB drive, it'll never turn into something else like a keyboard and perhaps do something malicious.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#66

Post by lenkite »

charles_f wrote: post #7

> 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…

The floppy disks made in the 200x era are terrible. The ones in the 90s were amazingly reliable and work to even this day.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#67

Post by virgulino »

causi wrote: post #5

There 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.

Behold the Floppotron!

https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#68

Post by abruzzi »

jaclaz wrote: post #2

Hmmm. All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names): https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61

gotek is fine if your device uses FAT formatted floppies. If your device has a custom format, you need an HxC drive or HxC firmware fr a Gotek drive. Also, I have some devices that don't use standard 34 pin floppy connectors so I had to learn Kicad to build 26 to 34 pin adapters.

All of my floppy using devices are synthesizers or samplers, and keeping them around is not a matter of not being able to afford to upgrade, but rather than many of these devices have very unique sounds that aren't replicated by newer equipment.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#70

Post by dehrmann »

I recently saw the Sony MSAC-FD2MA. It's a memory stick to floppy adapter. I assume an SD to memory stick adapter would work with it. I'm curious how it works internally. How does it interface with the read/write head? How does it map logical data (files, FS) to sectors and tracks? Or if it doesn't, how does it even map a flat image file? Floppies can be formatted all sorts of ways.
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