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Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

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Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#31

Post by AkBKukU »

rwmj wrote: post #18

It's a shame that he glosses over 3" disks. They were widely used in the UK of all places throughout the 1980s because Amstrad selected them for their Z80-based office systems. I'd love to know what cheap deal Alan Sugar got with Hitachi to offload old stock that made this happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

(I'm the video author)

The focus was more on how the Sony drive became the standard and less about all the competing formats. The CFD was the only serious competition and, in the US at least, it never reached the levels of putting up a fight like the ZipDisk vs. SuperDisk or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.

The Amstrad was the only system OEM I found that really used it, so while it did have some market it definitely wasn't wide spread to other systems like the BBC Micro, Acorn, or (Proper) Sinlcairs.

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#32

Post by rwmj »

AkBKukU wrote: post #31
rwmj wrote: post #18

It's a shame that he glosses over 3" disks. They were widely used in the UK of all places throughout the 1980s because Amstrad selected them for their Z80-based office systems. I'd love to know what cheap deal Alan Sugar got with Hitachi to offload old stock that made this happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

(I'm the video author) The focus was more on how the Sony drive became the standard and less about all the competing formats. The CFD was the only serious competition and, in the US at least, it never reached the levels of putting up a fight like the ZipDisk vs. SuperDisk or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. The Amstrad was the only system OEM I found that really used it, so while it did have some market it definitely wasn't wide…

Great video & channel BTW.

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#33

Post by AkBKukU »

kiritanpo wrote: post #25
yodsanklai wrote: post #23

Suppose I pick my 30+ year old Amiga floppies from the basement. Any chance that there are still readable? what would be the simplest way to copy the content on a modern storage so I could inspect them on an emulator.

I'm currently in the process of dumping all my old Amiga floppies too. If your basement was relatively not too humid or hot, the disks should all still be readable. There are two popular USB floppy drive controllers for archiving Amiga disks: KryoFlux and Greaseweazle. You need a standard disk reader to use along (not a USB one). The KryoFlux is a bit more expensive but can create complete archival level images (call…

The Greaseweazle can directly read/write KyroFlux stream files as well. The KryoFlux files are my preferred "archival grade" backup format because they also store multiple reads of the disk tracks in each file to get a consensus on a "good" read.

You can easily convert to other formats with the HxC Floppy Software.

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#34

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

jerriep wrote: post #5

Fun fact: In South Africa we called these a "stiffy" because it was so rigid compared to the 5¼-inch floppy.

Back in the 90s I was doing work at an NCR facility and one of the corporate culture bits I never could get the hang of was referring to a 3.5in floppy as a "flex."

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#35

Post by cubefox »

This format was great initially, but it was hopelessly undersized after around ten years. It was a shame there was never a proper successor. The 1.44 MB double density were simply too little after many years, it wasn't even enough for a single DOC file with a few images. This created the situation where for a long time, it was a major pain to exchange small-to-medium sized files. A successor format with 10 to 50 MB capacity would have alleviated a lot of this pain.

There were eventually "Zip disks" with 100 megabytes, but I think those were proprietary Iomega products and rather expensive, so normal PCs didn support them by default. Only when CD recorders became common, there was a replacement for floppy disks. But even these were suboptimal. They required cumbersome special software just to "burn" your CDs, since Windows didn't support them natively for several years. Moreover, it wasn't a format you could arbitrarily read and write data on. So it wasn't possible to just edit a file and save the changes, like on a floppy disk.

And of course USB sticks often weren't a good solution either, since you wouldn't simply give your expensive thumbstick completely away without having to expect it back.

Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments. To send and receive data, the smaller value of the sender/receiver was the bottleneck. (I think even today, Gmail only supports something like 50 megabytes.)

Much later there was the so-called DVD-RAM, which worked similar to a floppy disk (arbitrary read/write), but it wasn't really a "DVD" -- normal DVD drives couldn't read it. So again no standard PCs supported it. I think it was also not exactly cheap, no doubt due to its unnecessarily large capacity of over 4 GB.

Eventually the problem of exchanging files was solved again, after having been temporarily solved in the 80s with the 3.5 inch floppy. The solution today is uploading files to a free cloud provider like Google Drive, sharing the link, and deleting the file afterwards. It only took a few decades.

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#36

Post by yodsanklai »

tymscar wrote: post #24
yodsanklai wrote: post #23

Suppose I pick my 30+ year old Amiga floppies from the basement. Any chance that there are still readable? what would be the simplest way to copy the content on a modern storage so I could inspect them on an emulator.

Just buy a simple USB floppy drive for 15 bucks online. You can even connect it straight to the VM if you feel like it.

Crazy to think that a floppy drive used to be a big expense back then. Well, at least for my family. Now you can get a big mac meal for the price of a floppy drive.

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#37

Post by tiltowait »

yodsanklai wrote: post #23

Suppose I pick my 30+ year old Amiga floppies from the basement. Any chance that there are still readable? what would be the simplest way to copy the content on a modern storage so I could inspect them on an emulator.

I can't speak to the Amiga, but my dad recently went through a box of 3.5s from the 90s, and they were all perfectly readable. I've got some 5.25s my C64 can read just fine, too (I could even play HHGttG if I wanted to wait a minute per command to learn I died an hour ago without realizing it).

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#38

Post by ksec »

gattilorenz wrote: post #9
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not so much for burned CD-R. Most of them are full or errors when reading it. David Rosenthal tests this periodically. Most recently he tested in August. Notice the first sentence of the quote: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat... > The drives I use from ASUS and LG report read errors from the CDs but verify the MD5s correctly. I didn't notice them reporting any read errors from the DVDs.…

That's my experience as well. I recently imaged - a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 - my own collection of stuff downloaded or backed up around 2003-2004; most of it on Verbatim DVDs, but some on CD-R or CD-RW (likely also from Verbatim) I had very few read errors, and it was impressive especially considering it's more than 50 CDs and that I never payed too much attention to how they…

>- a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001

I still have lots of those as well from the early 90s! Mostly PC Gamer ( UK ) and some other computer magazine. I need to find a weekend and archive those.

But a little sad as more than half of my CD-Rs have problems. May be I need to get a new external DVD reader just to test it out again see so many people have no problems with their CDs.

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#39

Post by bombcar »

cubefox wrote: post #35

This format was great initially, but it was hopelessly undersized after around ten years. It was a shame there was never a proper successor. The 1.44 MB double density were simply too little after many years, it wasn't even enough for a single DOC file with a few images. This created the situation where for a long time, it was a major pain to exchange small-to-medium sized files. A successor format with 10 to 50 MB c…

There was the SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk which saw some popularity in Asia.

The real problem was the cost - the real key to floppies is you didn't care if you got it back (at the time people used them, very early on they were more pricey). So CDs did eventually replace them for sneakernet, and USB sticks have finally become cheap enough to be disposable.

Re: Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

#40

Post by gattilorenz »

ksec wrote: post #38
gattilorenz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my experience as well. I recently imaged - a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 - my own collection of stuff downloaded or backed up around 2003-2004; most of it on Verbatim DVDs, but some on CD-R or CD-RW (likely also from Verbatim) I had very few read errors, and it was impressive especially considering it's more than 50 CDs and that I never payed too much attention to how they…

>- a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 I still have lots of those as well from the early 90s! Mostly PC Gamer ( UK ) and some other computer magazine. I need to find a weekend and archive those. But a little sad as more than half of my CD-Rs have problems. May be I need to get a new external DVD reader just to test it out again see so many people have no problems with their CDs.

Yes, try using a more recent drive. Especially laptop drives are particularly prone to issues, in my experience.
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