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The floppy disk just won’t die

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Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#91

Post by [deleted] »

theamk wrote: post #79
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.

The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.

[deleted]

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#92

Post by WalterBright »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #24
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.

I shoot on DVCAM tape a bit, and I have to say there are few things as mechanically satisfying as putting one of the full-size DVCAM tapes into the camera and hoisting it onto your shoulder.

Turning your V8 over and having it cough into life is very satisfying.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#93

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

toast0 wrote: post #22
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…

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…

2.88 ED disks were available in the US. They were obscenely expensive and few stores carried them.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#95

Post by kkielhofner »

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.

I've fallen deeper and deeper into the nostalgia of retro computing YouTube channels. They're amazing (and make YouTube tolerable). They have all kinds of interesting devices and adapters to make SD cards appear as SCSI HDs for old Macs (or whatever), I think even floppies and such going as far back as the Apple II.

One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0].

Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein.

[0] - https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-...

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#96

Post by bombolo »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #21
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, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future. I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning…

You think hard drives were loud? My dad had a dot matrix printer.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#97

Post by anaganisk »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #75

Why should old things always die if there is a demand and they are working fine for intended purposes? Let there be a cottage industry selling a single new floppy disk to upgrade flight software for $999, beats buying a new airplane. If we lost ability to make previously commonplace objects in limited quantity when needed, that's not good for our economy, environment or preserving entire cultural legacy of our civili…

The real question is, do shareholders see it as an advantage or profitable?? Isn't that the final question for every industry? We can't even have good things that are relevant today because of unlimited growth expectations.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#98

Post by Tor3 »

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.

The memories I have are more connected to the sound of the floppy drives on an Apple II, it was very special. It's probably connected to the fact that I was relatively young, and the feeling of using an active computer and software - but there was something special with the Apple II, I think I connected the stripes of colours with the sound somehow. But it was magic to listen to that sound while loading a floppy. Which is why the emulators don't really work for me..

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#99

Post by ibcj »

I still have a sheet of the write-protect tabs for 5.25" floppies that I, for some unknown reason, refuse to throw away. I have one flash drive that I stuck a tab on ages ago for giggles (I didn't want to lose the contents until I got it replicated), and it still makes me smile.

I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#100

Post by Tor3 »

wazoox wrote: post #35
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…

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, utilitie…

That's my experience as well. The ones that fail are 3.5" HD floppies (1.44MB). Over on the ctech mailing list an old-timer expert explained that it's basically because the 3.5" HD floppies are just above the density limit the medium and technology can handle, which is why the 720KB DD floppies are fine (and 1.2MB 5.25" ones are also fine), but the HD ones fail. I tried to recover all my floppies from the eighties and nineties, it went very well except for the 3.5" HD ones - couldn't recover a single one, whatever drives I used. From what I'm told the 8" ones should read fine too, we'll see.. I have many, and I have a drive, but I haven't got it set up yet.
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