I had a weird dream last night that my M1 MacBook Pro had a 5 1/4” floppy drive still. No idea why or what brought that on but to wake up and read this was refreshing :)
The floppy disk just won’t die
111–120 of 180 posts
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The speakers buzzing just before getting a SMS text is the closest I’ve gotten to predicting the future.
Speaking of that... Why did that go away? Less 3g? Moore speakers with better insulation?
It was a peculiarity of the 2G signal. While the frequency of the signal itself was high enough that it did not interfere with speakers, the channel was shared between phones using TDMA, in which the channel is divided in fixed-size slots, and a phone transmits in only one of these slots while remaining silent for the rest of them. It's the envelope of these transmissions (transmit for a while, stay silent for a while, repeat) which caused the interference with the speakers.
According to Wikipedia (if I understood it correctly), the interval between the start of one transmission and the next one is 4.615 ms, or 9.230 ms for half-rate, which corresponds to 217 Hz or 108 Hz (if I did the calculations right), well within audible range.
Newer cellular standards use CDMA or OFDMA instead of TDMA, so they do not have that same low-frequency on-off behavior.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#113There 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 liked the old floppies. They were great for backing up personal data. They were easy to write on and store in special trays. I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one. Anyone have a good way?
Buy a luggage tag if you want more surface to write on?
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Loud is a typist typing away ferociously on an IBM Model M.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#115There 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…
I recently replaced an 80MB hard drive in a 1991 computer with a Compact Flash card. The computer is now silent, with no moving parts at all.
It's much more enjoyable to use.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#116> 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…
Newer floppies are unreliable. Older floppies of somewhat reputable brands are not nearly as bad as what people remember from the latter days of the floppy-era. They got their bad reputation from the deluge of throw-away bad quality disks and drives which hit the market around the dot.com boom.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#117There 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 found the zip drive way more satisfying! Minidisc wasn’t bad either.
CDs are the least satisfying though. Fiddly, easily scratched, long time to spin up, can get wedged into tray, laptop CD drives are flimsy too.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#118There 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.
What kind of crappy floppies were you using? In my experience, floppy disks were astoundingly reliable as long as they were handled correctly (and even when not), up until the late-90s when they became vestigial and manufacturing quality dropped. Back in the 8-bit micro days, they worked extremely well.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
All the HD 3½" (90mm, dammit) floppies I have tried from around 1988-1995 work. They're formatted to Acorn ADFS at 1.6MB.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
2.88 was pushed by IBM with their PS/2 line that tried to push the clones out of the market and take over with their own, very expensive, and completely proprietary PC computers. They came with 2.88MB drives, but no one else adopted them, or most other technologies included in the PS/2 line. So the disks stayed expensive and uncommon, and went nowhere.