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The floppy disk just won’t die

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Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#121

Post by the_third_wave »

Tor3 wrote: post #101
TonyTrapp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Back when we started to use CDs for backups I was horrified when I found that in general those CDs started to become unreadable after only a year in storage. We never had any problems with original CDs (say, the tons of CDs that came with an SGI computer), but the consumer-type writable ones didn't last at all. I think the technology got better after some years, but I still wouldn't trust a writable CD or DVD to last…

Just like floppies got their bad reputation from the throw-away disks and drives which hit the market in the latter days of their era the same is true for writeable CDs and DVDs. I have tons of older Kodak Gold CD-Rs which are still perfectly readable after ~30 years. I bought these back then to use as archive medium - back when 650 MB still seemed like quite a lot of data - and can only conclude I made the right choice.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#122

Post by wazoox »

Tor3 wrote: post #100
wazoox wrote: post #35

Earlier 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…

In my experience old HDD floppies work quite fine really. But the ones made after 2000 failed en masse.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#123

Post by bombolo »

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…

> but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible

Not in my experience. Mine all failed.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#124

Post by kwhitefoot »

Dalewyn wrote: post #114
bombolo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should have heard my teleprinter. Hooked up to my Nascom-2 with the UART driving a transistor that in turn drove a reed relay for the 170 V (I think) signal. It was only five bit code so I had to write a driver for it.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#125

Post by shakow »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #110
theamk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers. But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would…

I'm surprised this was your experience, because I lost many more USB thumbdrives (especially in the early 2000's) than I lost floppies.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#126

Post by shakow »

open-paren wrote: post #74
pjot wrote: post #72

Earlier 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?

Did it go away?

When we are on Teamspeak/Mumble with friends, we can always tell who will be receiving a text in the coming seconds; I assumed the headset wires were acting as an antenna and catching the SMS radio signal.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#128

Post by vt240 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #55
tablespoon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful. IIRC, the last big customer for cassette tapes was prisoners in the prison system, so "new" tape players are universally garbage (because priority 1 is complying with prison regulations, priority 2 is being as cheap as possible, and priority 3 is having ni…

People are making players today, this one is hipsterish and better than some (stereo not mono) https://www.wearerewind.com/en-us But “crème de le crème” doesn’t apply here in that the wow and flutter on an old Sony Walkman is much less.

That product just uses the same Tanashin tape mechanism though, just in a fancier looking box...

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#129

Post by xmodem »

dehrmann wrote: post #70

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.

It uses the magnetic head of the floppy drive for IO. Devices like that don't function without the correct driver and are thus unsuitable for embedded devices.

Re: The floppy disk just won’t die

#130

Post by patates »

shakow wrote: post #125
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers. But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would…

I'm surprised this was your experience, because I lost many more USB thumbdrives (especially in the early 2000's) than I lost floppies.

You mean lost, as in they got misplaced, right? I used to transfer files a lot with usb sticks and had one fail only once.
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