When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like Sloppy Sokoban, Pong Wars, and Descender.
Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world.
Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgic.
On a more serious note, did you manage to make a living out of it and - either way - what made you stop?
Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em!
In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making original indie games for PC and launched http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s)
Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie, worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc.
I switched from building games in my own bespoke C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also curating cool unique indie game work I see at https://twitter.com/Doomlaser
btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give Descender a try, Name: test Registration #: SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034
Thanks for the detailed response, and glad it worked out for you - that's awesome. Tap Tap passed me by just because I didn't have a decent smartphone back then but looks like loads of fun (and I love Justice). Sounds like good times! Thanks for the serial - I'll give Descender a try with SheepShaver and see how I get on.
Sweet. I remember when X:Com UFO Defense had their copy protection codes stored in the .EXE not as unsigned integers but as ASCII text. Not difficult to set it to all 0000-0000 for every question, or just jump over the code that does the checking entirely. If one were devious in writing copy protection software, they would pass around an ever-changing cryptographically-signed state within the context of an event system that does (non-inlined) integrity checks all over the code base and explodes should any fail.
I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.
Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds.
Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.
I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combination of slow Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most users.
No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't be until considerably later that casually transferring files over the Internet would become feasible.
I remember, in 1999, my friends using a website called imacfloppy.com to transfer files to themselves via the internet. I suppose it was the dropbox of the day.
You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.
I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.
When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.
Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.
But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)
Yeah, the disposable nature of floppies was key; sure they were small, but if you lost one you didn't cry all night (unless it had your only copy of your thesis on it).
That wasn't really solved until the era of the "affordable" CD burner, so there was a moderately painful 1998-2001 or so era where you had to do some tricks often or trust someone with a relatively expensive piece of equipment.
Even in 2000 a burner was around $250 or more, but spending $15 or whatever on a ZIP disk was painful even then, if you weren't sure you'd get it back.
LaTeX and git work really well and you can push to somewhere remote as a backup (and will usually retain the ability to pick through the ref-logs if something goes wrong). LaTeX is super super popular in the academic world and it wouldn't be surprising for a thesis to be required to be submitted in LaTeX anyway.
Github has a word-by-word visual diff thing that would be really nice since usually you don't want to consider whitespace to be semantically significant in the context of a diff, eg word wrapping.
The business world likes to fret over every detail and I get it but a lot of powerpoint presentations/etc could really be done pretty simply with a latex template, and git checkin/merging/etc is sooo nice. Let alone chapter material or stuff that needs equations/figures, a bibliography manager, table of contents, etc. Super super nice for cross referencing, kind of like a generalized form of javadocs, and it does layout pretty well with some help, and it doesn't randomly spazz out and break borders etc.
Etckeeper is really nice for change tracking for your /etc folder too... love being able to look back and see if there's been any changes that might have broken stuff, get a log of package updates etc.
That's my recollection as well. I was in college around that time and my primary way of saving data to move between computers was a Zip drive disk (since all the computers in the labs had one), then a USB flash drive with maybe 32MB of space (worked fine when moving files between Macs - I don't think the PCs had USB ports at the time).
"Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the time.
The PC I purchased in late 1996 had USB 1.0 ports. USB 1.1 came out in 1998 around the same time as the iMac. The new PC I bought in fall 1998 had USB 1.1 ports. Most new PCs at that time were coming with USB ports. Maybe your school just had older PCs.
Schools have never been known for keeping up with the latest in computing hardware. The 90s were no exception.
Besides -- early on, a lot of PC makers put USB ports on the back of the computer, since that's where all the other ports were. It took some time for PC makers to realize that USB ports weren't just for permanently installed equipment like printers or modems, and to start redesigning cases or using drive bay breakouts to make the ports more accessible.
The 90s was a really weird time. One school that was ”richer” would have bought early Macs and still be using them, whereas a poorer school wouldn’t have been able to buy until the time of the iMac and handily defeat the older machines.
I remember when my school had its first full sized 'Computer Lab'. As a fifth grade, our class was given a scavenger hunt.. One of the questions was. What is the presidents dog name? As a power user I typed in whitehouse dot com.. This resulted in me showing all the people around me the landing page for well a pornish site, and then questioning the teacher about it when they finally came by.
From my group I was one of two people who had a Zip drive (the other guy had a Jazz™ drive too) and we usually dragged the parallel port drive along with the discs.
But that was just when things like IRC fileservs and Napster (1999) started to take off which was the main medium of "file sharing" at that point (for local transfers networking gear had dropped significantly, the iMac had ethernet built in, everyone had some sort of yumcha network setup - often sharing that 56k connection. 56kbps is 18 gigabytes a month, and the proliferation of "unlimited" internet was right around that time.
The final nail in the coffin was affordable CD-Rs. Once those started to proliferate (rip mix burn) you finally had disposable removable storage you could give people. Floppies were that, but zip and USB were not.
They weren't the first with gigabit Ethernet in a laptop as I recall, but they were fairly early, and that made a huge difference.
Having a decent router available also helped. I'm still pretty miffed at whoever axed the Airport group. I kept expecting it to come back. Or for the apple TV to sprout router functionality. Something.
The worst thing about it is that I now have to carry 3 pairs of shitty Bluetooth headphones instead of one good pair because switching connected devices is such a pain that this is literally much easier to live with. I hate it. Bring the headphone jack back.
AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition between devices is fantastic
Do note that using the microphone will degrade the playback and recording quality to rotary-phone-levels. For the sake of everyone in your Zoom call: please buy a $50 wired microphone if you're going to spend $150 on Airpods.
I did not know that, I'll have to check next time it comes up. To be clear, I use them as a backup, like when I'm traveling and didn't bring my normal headset.
It's specifically only an issue when your Airpods are being used for playback and recording. If you're simply listening to the meeting on your Airpods and using your Macbook microphone, you probably won't notice. Most people don't seem to set that up though, which leads to the cellphone-quality audio that people associate with wireless earbuds.
It's not an Apple issue. Works perfectly when you use a Mac + AirPods. The issue is when you try to use Windows. All bluetooth headphones I've tried (with microphones) sound horrible with Windows, if they work at all.
Airpods do not have better duplex audio on MacOS. The problem is that AAC cannot support high-quality recording and playback at 330kbps, so it has to degrade the quality of the recording stream to fit within the Bluetooth bandwidth. MacOS might default to using your laptop's microphone, but that's something you can also set up on Windows. Hell, it should be the default on Windows as long as you have AAC support installed - there's no reason a headset should be using SBC over Bluetooth unless the last version of Windows you used was XP.
I actually normally use my headphones through my phone, but I doubt ios is doing anything differently compared to macos.
The point isn't that there's only so much bandwidth for mic + headphones, the point is that the bluetooth stack on Windows just doesn't work. I tried connecting multiple bluetooth headphones (Airpods, Beats, Sony) to a new Windows 11 computer (Microsoft Surface). I only got one set paired and it defaulted to the headset profile immediately. It was horrible. The others never connected or the connection was unreliable.
The process was so bad, my son recently bought a set of wired headphones just to avoid the entire issue.
If you've never been in the Apple garden and used headphones + device, it's a night and day difference in experience.
I haven't used Windows in years, it's a pretty bad point-of-reference for me. However, I can say pretty confidently that iOS, Android and Linux all have more reliable Bluetooth stacks than MacOS. In fact, the stack on Linux is so good that I don't lust for Airpods at all. I just turn on my Sony XM4s and it automatically connects to all my devices. No muss, no fuss.
Oh, and neither MacOS or iOS support high-bitrate audio playback. They're not even on the same eschelon as Android or Linux, which support codecs like LDAC and APTx, with 3x the bandwidth of Apple's 330kbps AAC stream. Come to think of it, if Apple switched to APTx for their newer Airpods, they would have no problem recording and playing audio back at the same time.
All bluetooth devices do this on all platforms when you use both sound + microphone. It has to split the available bandwidth between the two.
My Sony headphones will go into "headset mode" on Windows and Mac and sounds horrible in both, just have to make sure no programs are trying to use the headphones' microphone and then you get full bandwidth for audio.
>That’s not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with one device and they are automatically paired with all of your devices and auto switch
And how do AirPods know whether I want to use them to take a conference call on my work laptop, listen to a YouTube video on the personal laptop, or watch a quick video my friend sent me on WhatsApp on my phone?
Do they have telepathic powers that I don't know of?
Oh, and will they prioritize the work phone call over an incoming call on my personal phone too, unless it's something really important?
Simple, if I am listening to a podcast and then I take a conference call on my computer, they automatically switch. If I am watching something on my iPad, and I answer a call on my iPhone, they automatically switch.
If I’m actively playing a video or listening to audio on my Mac, my iPhone, or my iPad and I put my AirPods in my ear, sound is automatically rerouted to my AirPods from the device.
If I’m watching a video on my iPad and then I click on a video on my iPhone, they switch.
My AppleTVs don’t automatically switch. An AppleTV is a shared experience most of the time.
But even if you turn automatic switching off, I still don’t have to pair my AirPods with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, two AppleTVs and my Mac individually. I can just click a drop down and they automatically show up on each device or any new device I use with my AppleID.
In all the pairs I own it's some arcane combination to enter pairing mode, and then have you tried adding BT headphones to windows when the same ones were paired in the past? You have to remove them first then go back into pairing mode again. It's more bullshit than I'm willing to deal with. With a jack you plug them in and they work.
If they are(or were) connected to my laptop and phone and both devices are nearby, then they will default to my phone. There is nothing I can do on my laptop to force them to connect there instead(and believe me I tried). I have to either remove them on my phone(pain) or enter pairing mode and re-pair them with the laptop(even greater pain).
Work phone, personal phone, work laptop, personal laptop, tablet, desktop.
Good luck pressing that button five dozen times to take the call on your work phone after using them with your desktop, only to find out that your glorious BT device only has 4 memory slots like a videogame from 1991, and unlinked your work phone when you used them with your tablet.
My Samsung Galaxy A22 has headphone jack (which gets used all the time), dual SIM, dedicated SD card slot, NFC, all day battery, and 5G support.
It came out this year — there are plenty of sane manufacturers releasing phones with features that people want out there.
Use cases for 3.5mm jack that Bluetooth can't handle:
* Never having to worry about headphones running out of charge
* Zero added latency - critical for music making apps (somewhat remediated with latest BT versions, but good luck finding latency specs on the box)
* Switching between devices instantly (work/personal laptop and phone) - especially not fun if you use more than 2 of them
The last issue is especially annoying. It's 2022, I should be able to pair my headphones instantly by tapping them to the device I want to pair them to, without screens and buttons. Accelerometers exist. Proximity sensors exist.
But noooo, apparently, UX is not a consideration in the design of this godforesaken protocol.
agreed. until bluetooth earphone batteries can go for a few days between recharging, and can quick charge in, say, 15 min or so, I'll keep my wired. I also have AirPod Pros, but I keep my Bose qc20 around and still find myself using them multiple times per month when the APP go low (never get more than around 3 hrs from them).
I only recently discovered why bluetooth isn't a particularly good option. I'd paired my good headphones with my phone, but all of a sudden wanted headphones for other devices, and having one set of earphones paired with multiple devices is a deeply flawed experience. First, you can only connect to one or two, second, mine kept telling me it was disconnecting and reconnecting to the other device while I was walking around listening to audio. That is extremely distracting.
I have my AirPods and my Beats Flex (better for traveling, if they fall out, they just end up around my neck) “paired” to six devices. If the auto switching is a problem, you can disable it and still have your AirPods paired to multiple devices
Unfortunately I have not jumped on the airPod bandwagon. I got into the Shure ecosystem and their solution doesn’t have many controls.
At some point overpriced audio equipment became a way to bribe myself to do adulting for things I really didn’t want to do, so while for most people the moral might be to stay in the Apple ecosystem, that advice isn’t great for me.
However at this point I’m one gen behind on their receivers so maybe those issues have already been fixed.
> Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world.
“The last person standing” is self-proclaimed, and even on quick search [0] there are other floppy disk makers, just not in the US and not answering magazine interviews. In particular Hitachi-Maxxel was outsourcing floppy disk to a chinese maker, and I’d expect that company to still be producing, but just not to the international market.
At least of the 3 examples on that webpage it seems like you made remakes of existing simple games (tetris, sokoban, pong) - did you try making new designs of your own and if not, why not?
Sure. In 2007 I started up a new label at http://doomlaser.com. Made a bunch of indie stuff as that scene was really starting to bloom. Helped build some big franchises like Tap Tap Revenge, the iOS game for The Hunger Games, alongside irreverent stuff like https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364, and personal stuff like https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits (a game named after the Mac's low-level graphics blitter). Still working in games to this day.
I just want to say that tap tap revenge was my favorite game as a kid and I have very fond memories of doing 2 player on the same ipod touch. "Gotta get the high score"
Thanks! I'm not sure why I was downvoted, maybe people thought I was being negative but I really did just ask because I wanted to know. Your stuff looks great!
I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr.
Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of them are fiddly. They are obnoxiously easy to loose.
There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds me of the tape trading days of the 80s:
"...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene, floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups typically had members whose sole “job” in the group was as a “trader” or “swapper” - we also wrote to each other. As a particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest friendships I formed during those years were with the other members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to each other with “Jiffy Junk” - little trinkets we’d collect and swap: Kinder surprise toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder what they’re all doing now.
As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I’d be interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when most communication is probably electronic in nature..."
and when people stopped telling stories around the fire, and instead people went to their rooms to read books... something was lost then too. and something gained.
My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies of the same files across different disks because odds are one of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to zip any files up as odds are you’d end up with a failed CRC.
I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing.
I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and Nintendo Famicom) that don’t work too.
I remember how my blood would run cold when you could hear the drive making that distinctive noise when it's re-reading the same sector over and over again because it's not reading right.
A few years back I was doing some cleanup of old media. Checking to see what was on stuff and what I could toss. Of the hundreds of floppies, I had a file failure rate of about 5%. However, my CD/DVD failure rate was around 22% including factory stamped discs.
Now, true, a lot of the dud floppies had been filtered out back in the day. But I was shocked at how well they had faired over the long term vs optical media.
Archivers of that time had an interesting dilemma. If you are compressing a bunch of files, it's more effective to concatenate them all first and then process the resulting bundle - like .tar.gz etc - since compression algorithms can then deduplicate across file boundaries. But if you do that, damage to any part of the archive corrupts the whole thing, which is especially likely when splitting it across multiple floppies. So DOS archivers generally defaulted to compressing files first and then bundling the result. RAR was an interesting case in that it let the user decide on a case by case basis between regular and "solid" (pre-bundled) archives.
Not to mention they were integrated into the machine itself - picture 1-4 floppy disks fitting snuggly inside your PC right where they're supposed to go and where nothing else even could go, versus a handful of usb sticks of various shapes and sizes sticking out haphazardly like porcupine needles, some even pushing each other over because they're too thick, or connected by a jungle of wires, either way hooked up to a generic universal bus port that could be used for literally anything else and has no specific semantic meaning to your PC's software.
The “various shapes and sizes” is what offends my sensibilities about USB sticks. I kind of wish there was a single form factor for USB drives, purely for cosmetic reasons. Yes, I know that only the connector has to have a standard form, but it’s kind of ugly that every time I buy a USB stick, I’m subjected to the random wacky design taste of a random hardware company.
I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player, 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.
It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.
They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them.
They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.
yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and then iphone won for portability/convenience.
It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.
That's the story of Sony in general. They had great tech but their content division always forced the consumer electronics division to gimp that tech in random ways, which led to the tech failing on the market.
> sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr
... and praying that there is no read error.
That was my experience in this part of the world where the computer environments were not dust-free enough for floppies to be reliable. But yes, the nostalgia is still strong.
burning dvd/cds was fun. Figuring out how to burn a dvd that could run on a dvd player was fun. Now it's all just done via chromecast. Convenient and less wasteful, I have to admit.
Loads of companies tried back in the late 90's and through the very early 2000's. Zip disks, Jaz, Clik! All had the same problem, the drives needed to read them weren't found on every computer. The winners ended up being writable optical media and USB thumbdrives.
Personally, I wish someone would produce a consumer grade tape system, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that I can tell, but even the original stored about 140 MB (in 1992, that was a lot of data in the size of a floppy and a far sturdier package). It wasn't a ton of space, but you didn't have to worry about static, or malicious devices masquerading as HID, and it was certainly good enough that if magneto-optical drives had been continuously developed, we'd be looking at pretty reasonable capacities today.
Yes, much lower capacity per dollar than silicon, but if it were very sturdy (it was) and offered near-infinite rewriteability (it did), it could have had a market.
You can format a Hi-MD for data. It's very slow by modern standards, especially in random access, and the media is so rare and thus costly there's no point except for the sake of it - I only have one, and at $60 a pop I wouldn't have any except that the seller I bought my MZ-RH1 from forgot to check if a disc was in it before shipping. But it works.
A modern development of that technology would have greater capacity, sure, but I can't imagine how it would approach the low random-access latency of solid-state media.
They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240 "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo information on the medium in order to achieve tracking precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media) write more information in the same area. They were back-compatible with regular 3.5" floppies, but they were also slow, flaky, expensive, and introduced after Zip disks but not long enough before writable CD media, and so they failed to compete.
If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB, with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which in its default state would likely find this all very confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk" devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a disk, and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in their fully stock configuration. [1]
I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun.
[1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven forfend its hard drive ever fail, though...
Yeah even at the time there were magneto-optical disks[0], which I think got as high as around 9.1gb. I had a bunch ranging from 120-480mb, which was huge at the time. They are a bit thicker than a regular floppy, but nearly the same form factor. Awesome at the time for backups and of course very useful for print/publishing businesses that had to courier over huge 300dpi documents to print, stuff like that.
Wow. I totally had blocked those out of my memory.
I deployed a batch of desktops to an office with the drives and 1 disk each. We hoarded the disks of course.
I think I mostly just fidgeted with them at my desk since we just had a few machines that could use them.
They were more reliable than our external SATA CD burner (Smart & Friendly brand), though. That had its own table we wouldn’t touch while burning at 1x. It could 2x but the failure rate was too high and CDRs were still expensive. Zip drives were for peasants being mostly parallel or IDE. :)
I like that idea. While everyone here seems to comment and mention old competing formats, I imagine a new floppy disc-like device with an SSD inside, kinda like an HDD cartridge. Area-wise a 3,5" could easily house TBs worth of storage, and the "metal clip" of the floppy could house some kind of m2 interface when opened...
I do too :) I have game soundtracks in .midi format on floppies.
I play them on my regular hifi amplifier using a Roland SB-55 + SC-88. It's fun to pop in a floppy and listen to music that way.. But it's double density floppies and they are indeed getting annoying to get my hands on.. and also to write to, but I keep a dedicated machine around for that.
It's great to read that on HN. Every time I look at the HN background colour I think of the 1541 disk drive - I'm near certain its colour was either a conscious or unconscious influence.
You can put a label on a USB drive. Amazon also has holders to sell you. Contemplating doing something like that for my Steam collection. Would also like an actual dedicated Windows USB stick.
A few years ago, the last man standing in the punched paper tape business, "westnc.com", finally gave it up. There were still some numerically controlled machine tools running off paper tape. In 2019, NSA punched a crypto key into paper tape for the last time. As far as I can tell, nobody in the US still sells punched paper tape.
Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore old Teletype machines, including the kind that printed on 5/16" paper tape. I had a thousand rolls of such tape made up by a company in China, that being the minimum order, and I still sell some now and then to Teletype collectors.
I’m actually not sure where they source it from but my guess would be they just have an abundant stock of it given the abundance of everything else in the shop.
It’s black wax 5 hole paper tape and the controllers the use it are Allen Bradley, manufactured in early 80s I believe but I’d have to check dates.
We also have a few machines that read from magnetic tape so lots of old almost historical computer equipment, but still being used amazingly and making money.
Bar I worked at in the late 90s did all their checks and orders on these. Guy who worked there par tike worked dismantling mainframes and had tons of them. Cheaper than any other paper they could find.
Along similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups either.
That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.
Once my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.
Especially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.
ddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13
The secret for scratched CDs/DVDs I learned way too late in the game was that you can actually polish the clear plastic underside with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I restored sooo many optical discs this way. It really works!
Glad to hear I'm not the only one who routinely stabbed my computer! I used to keep a butter knife by my iMac to help eject CDs. I had the first slot-loading model and the rubber eject rollers they used seemed to lose their grip after a while.
I recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.
A friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...
Ah, but 8" floppies made better frisbees - personal experience :)
I used to work in the disk duplication industry, both at a copier (DisCopyLabs) and then later at the robot manufacturer, Mountain Computer, which was eventually bought by Nakamichi and combined with Trace, our competitor.
We used to be able to sail those suckers over the building on Wyatt Drive to the San Thomas Expressway... Next person to work on roof equipment probably had a curious experience, many discs that did not make it all the way likely scattered all over the roof.
The 8 inchers were a nightmre in some mechanisms (whichever ones Intel used in their MDS systems); slide 'em in too quickly and with a bit of passion (!?) and they'd catch on something, so if you weren't paying attention you'd fold them over and make a crease. Bye bye data!
True. I'd put it on the same level as connecting XLR cables. MiniDiscs (and to a lesser extent) UMDs were maybe the last examples of such satisfying mechanics.
We are moving towards a solid state future where no user interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual transmission and everything is wireless.
Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my toaster remains!
Modern computers are so silent that you have no idea whether they're working hard or it's just someone doing things on the UI thread that don't belong there.
You haven't lived until you installed an operating system from 38 floppy disks.
Slackware and OS/2 for example
My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2 Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you were dead in the water.
I installed Slackware in the fall of 1994. I only had about 10 blank floppies so I would go to the computer lab and download the "A" base system, then wipe those, go back to the computer lab, download and install the "AP" application set, and so on for the development tools, X Windows System, and more. It took most of the weekend but it was amazing having a Unix system on my Pentium 90.
I had a brand new IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM which was not supported yet. About 6 months later it was and I started ordering the multi CD set from Walnut Creek cdrom.com every 6 months or so to get new distributions.
I was actually able to dual-boot and install from hard disk when I installed slackware in .. August 95? But, zmodem on a 14.4k modem meant each download took 12-13 minutes, so it was an entire weekend of just walking around the house with a kitchen timer and kicking off a new 'disk' each time it buzzed.
I remember installing windows 95 from floppy disk. It was only 13 disks but with MSDOS it would go up to 16. Some drivers here and there, 20+ disk installation would take hours.
It's not less painful to install and set up an IRIX system with a couple dozen CDs.. (except that CDs didn't often fail to read). In fact it was so tiring that after the first couple of times I would always just copy the CDs to a disk on another computer and point the installation there, one directory at the time (fortunately SGI machines could NFS-mount filesystems from the monitor)
I remember helping out at school to install Lotus Smartsuite on a room full of PCs from floppies. The box was about 2 foot long. We had to relay them from one PC to the next so we could install them all roughly at the same time.
SCO Xenix was every bit as bad, and yes, I did the Slackware "download floppy images, make a stack of floppies, spend hours installing" dance as well. I remember being very relieved by the rise of CD-ROM and CD-R.
I've read an article about Japanese policeman that've lost a floppy disks with personal data of some Japanese men, it was a story from this January.
This data leak, due to obscurity and the volume was more of a joke in my country, than a serious news. I do however wonder, what it was back in the day? I've never heard of any large scale data leaks involving floppy disks, perhaps I'm too young.
At a previous job, I worked at a textbook wholesaler. The industry overall is dying. They were a small player, but they were outrageously profitable. They realize that the good times won't last and they'll never grow into a billion dollar company, but the party isn't over yet.
Sometimes it's better to be the last person selling stage coaches than the tenth person selling cars.
Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-drive with an IDE floppy drive interface. A quick Google search revealed that someone already builds this!
The most common/cheap solution is the Gotek floppy drive, easily found on Aliexpress or eBay, and with the FlashFloppy firmware [1] for expanding the capabilities of the hardware.
Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :)
Iomega’s stuff was also available in SCSI and USB (and possibly firewire) variants, but probably not on industrial machinery, and it’s hardly a prototypical floppy… we’re stretching definitions here
I worked for a network storage company that originally wanted to call themselves "Arraid" but discovered a small company already using that name, making replacement flash-based disk/floppy/tape drives for old mainframes and minis. Looks like they're still around in case you need something for your PDP-11!
We had an information system that we used in the 2008-2011 timeframe on our military deployments that only used 3.5" floppies for data offload. Since we wrote our enormously long post-mission reports during each actual mission and had no desire to spend hours following the mission re-writing them from scratch, the week prior to deployment was always filled with folks fanning out to every office supply store we could find in a desperate search for any remaining boxes of disks so we had a sufficient stock to use 2-3 disks per mission and allow for the inevitable disk failures/attrition. It was tough finding them then, can't imagine trying to find them now!
The money quote from the article - and it is so well put - is :
"Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me."
My floppy story is: In the late 90s 3.5" floppies were ubiquitous and the Zip disk was the new kid on the block. 5.25" was a thing of the past and I'd never ever seen a 8" floppy and I did not expect to see one either.
This was until I interned at a Siemens research lab where they still had 8" floppies. Why? Because the room-sized, several floors below ground housed electron microscopes used them.
There is a funny story that my Computer Science teacher used to tell. One day a friend called him saying his floppy drive was not working as expected. He went to check and found two floppy disk crushed inside the floppy drive. So my prof asked his friend why have pushed two floppy in the drive, broking everything. He answered: "computer said to insert disk 2, I have done something wrong?"
Floppy disks (or diskettes, as they are called in Spanish) were very important for my formation when I was a kid. I had a computer but I hadn't internet access at home (very expensive for my family), so I was going to the computer café two blocks away and I downloaded files into the diskette that then I was able to check at home. That's how I downloaded tutoriales (File > Save page as...) and a lot of stuff.
Things became better when I had 2 or 3 diskettes and I was able to download bigger files using Hacha, a free software to split large files. Of course, nothing was worse than arriving home and one of them failing.
As someone said in another comment, I miss the sound and the "physicality" of them. It reminds me of a time when you were offline by default, and you had to go online. Now it is, sadly, the other way around.
I remember actually exchanging floppy disks containing images (made in Paint, of course) with my friends via snail mail. It was the original version of Snapchat. Horrible latency.
About five or six years ago there was a single packet of 5.25 inch floppy discs for sale in the window of a strange shop near my office in London.
It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed to come in or go out.
I walked past the shop every lunchtime and grew increasingly obsessed with this box of discs, the first I'd seen for sale for maybe twenty years. Where had it come from? Why was it in the window? Who was going to buy it?
Eventually I decided that I'd have to buy them myself, just so I could stop thinking about it.
But the next time I walked past the shop, the discs were gone!
Funny, I did the same thing with a 5-pack of Zip disks a couple years ago. I ended up buying them though, for a couple bucks. Who else would have? I still have them sitting on my desk, keep telling myself I'll finish rebuilding the old tower PC I picked up at a thrift store, and I'll buy a Zip drive for it.
I used to have a Zip drive in my PC in high school -- I remember saving 3ds Max files to it when I was first learning to model. And Deadlock, a turn-based strategy game that came with some version of Windows, I copied it onto a Zip disk and distributed it to some friends. But as I remember they were too busy with Kingdom Under Fire and Brood War.
Ah, wandering shops.
Maybe 25 years ago I was walking the streets of Rome, as I had been doing for years on my days off. Maps were left behind years before - didn't need them. That day I was on the Tevere side of the Tiber (well, that would sound strange in Italian..), anyway, I suddenly came across a shop I had never seen before, or at least not noticed. In the window they displayed the most fantastic steam-punk coffee machine, with pipes going everywhere, but not that big either. I instantly wanted it. But it was a Sunday and the shop was closed so I decided to call it a day. It was just a short straight walk from the shop to a major intersection near the river, and then to a bridge and eventually to where I was going.
So I went back as soon as I could a few days later, walked to that intersection and up that road, about a hundred meters.. and the shop was not there. There was nothing on that corner. I thought I was losing my mind, or at least I had managed to mess up something.. after that I started out from every bridge on the Tiber, walked to the nearby major intersection, and up whatever street in the right direction. Nothing.
I continued my search for years after that whenever I came back to Rome, but I never found the shop. At that time I didn't really want to buy the coffee machine anymore, I just wanted to solve the mystery.
Obviously (if I think logically) there's a natural explanation, but it still comes back to me now and then, all these years later. Back when I read that Pratchett book in your link, which went into details about how a Wandering Shop behaves, I suffered major déjà vu!
I've used punch cards, paper tape, DECtapes, magtapes, cartridge tapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and Bluray disks.
I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance.
Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective.
Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too.
Today I use terabyte drives, and have a box of USB sticks. For inexplicable reasons, the terabyte drives USB sticks have no way to write on them. So I stick an Avery label on them and write on that.
Stashed away somewhere, I still have a couple of 8" floppy disks. The only time I ever used them was for a CS class that, for whatever reason, used IBM 9000s [0] running Xenix for coursework, and they were difficult to find even in 1986-87. The one and only place that had any was, naturally, Radio Shack, and they were Tandy-branded, no doubt intended for the TRS-80 Model II. Assuming bitrot hasn't set in, they likely still have Xenix filesystems on them.
> Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable.
I remember a little operation run out of Topeka, Kansas in the 80's called "Budget Bytes" that sold floppies with Macintosh shareware on them. I mean I could have downloaded some of the stuff over FTP from the university but you still needed a floppy to copy them on to.
So fun, poring over the news-print catalog of disks they had available, deciding which ones to order.
I assumed it was a Real Business™ at the time but in hindsight it was no doubt some entrepreneur copying floppies in his garage. I wish I had been as entrepreneurial at the time.
I'm actually reading a book about these shareware businesses. It was quite profitable selling them for 4$-7$ and they were popular. They would start as one person and occasionaly grow into huge operations involving hundreds of employees.
I'm still using floppy disks with my Yamaha PSR-630 workstation keyboard — you can arrange an entire song on that machine in no time. Plenty of highly acclaimed vintage music equipment — notably, Ensonique samplers — still use them too.
I got the floppy disks for my machine from Microsoft's supply room when I was an intern there in 2014. At the time, there were still some niche uses for floppies in the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., RAID drivers for Windows XP could only be loaded from a floppy on install, IIRC), but that was on the way out too — so I grabbed half a dozen disks from a pile.
Remarkably, they are still perfectly usable.
The major problem I have with them is that the floppy disk drive on the keyboard is slightly out of alignment. Which means that the only way to read the floopies is to use that specific disk drive.
I've been meaning to replace the drive for years, but never really got to it. I've also considered swapping it out for an SD card reader/USB drive (ones meant to replace floppy drives are readily available), but where's the charm in that?
I recently found an old backup 3.5" floppy from ≈1993 with some thesis material. I could read it without any problems on an old USB connected floppy drive (and as a bonus, compile the LaTeX with zero problems).
I was a bit surprised and had expected a bit of work.
One pretty amazing thing about floppy disks is that powerful full-featured software was written so efficiently so as to fit on them. WordStar fit on a single side of a 5.25" Floppy, IIRC Lotus 1-2-3 did as well.
Editorialization serves a valuable role of making writing better. IMO, language that is more inclusive is better than language that is less inclusive. Keeping needlessly gendered phrases around simply because they're a "set phrase" doesn't serve any compelling interest.
Language evolves. You can fight the ocean with a rake, or you can be supportive of changes that make language better for your friends and neighbors.
I have no problem with calling a waitress a server or whatever, but when I clicked on this title I did spend some time thinking about the lost euphoniousness and wondering whether there is a special masculine quality to "last man standing". It sounds like it might come from some knockdown game that women would not play. Google says boxing.
There is nothing generic in the sentence "last man standing". It's referring to one person, who is, in this case, a man.
The argument, which at least makes sense, is that a "Chairman", even if he's male, should be a "Chairperson" because the office is not male, and therefore the title shouldn't be gendered.
That just doesn't apply here. "A Chairperson" makes sense, "a last man standing" doesn't.
"Last person standing" is also something you could say, but the title didn't, and there is no cause to 'correct' it, because it isn't wrong.
1. This is the last man standing, but there are women still standing. In which case there are still persons providing this service and it is not newsworthy.
2. This is a legacy saying from a period where only men could be involved in business enterprises. There may have been women running such businesses, but they are not worthy of record.
If not 1, then the correct phrase is “last person standing”.
The issue is not whether the last person standing is male or female. The issue of “last X standing” is about all the Xs except the last one.
Honestly, I’d be fine just treating this (and similar) as skunked terms. Last man standing is gendered and old fashioned. Last person standing is clunky and weird.
“‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’”
What's funny, economically, about this guy is that his investment in floppy disks made roughly a 10x return!
"Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars."
Reminds me of when I was at a thrift store and these used paperbacks were being sold used for triple the cover price that they sold for new in the 1950s.
The books are probably just inflation. People think a dollar per book is cheap, now. But cover prices in the fifties for paperbacks look to be 25 to 50 cents. (Source: A quick google).
Books with actual increases in value won't be at a thrift store, typically.
The medium I miss the most are Mini-Discs — They really were the sweet-spot in combining digital (albeit lossy-ish) with a tactile, analog experience. The pinnacle of mixtapes.
I found "NIUB" (New In Unopened Box) floppies at home: 5"1/4 floppies, never used. I've got no idea: are they still as good as new even though they're something like 35 years old?
I found more than that: I found my "time capsule" C128 (safely stored for 30 years+, still working, non polluted by anything modern). I found a "copier" software (Fast Hack'Em II IIRC) still working and managed to use it to copy a still working copy of Commando (chiptune sountrack by Rob Hubbard, the god of SID music back in the days).
But I have no idea: are these NIUB floppies as good as new or do they decay as years passes by?
As themagician says.
Unless they're of a particularly notoriously bad brand.. I can't remember the name now but I'll recognize it when I see it. Can you see what brand it is?
Sometimes there are people that appear confused why you would do something yourself. "Just buy it" or "just use the cloud service". I think this quote sums up the situation perfectly.
'''
At one point we did a gigantic deal with a US payroll company for which we needed to copy hundreds of thousands of disks. We sent the work out to a third party who did the duplication for us. That was okay, but expensive, and it took a lot of time. The quality also wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be. So the next time we decided to do the floppy duplication in-house and we got our own equipment.
'''
I think he might have figured out the secret to happiness:
> "Me, I just like to get up in the morning, have people ask me questions, and try to solve problems. My business is a little bit of an adventure for me every day."
I work in the mentioned embroidery business and we have a decent collection of floppy disks and gear. roughly 300 disks with 40 in circulation being used. about 20 USB floppy drives for PC's and new machines to use disks still. its a handy medium for us. I have one of the local e-waste places collecting anything they get disk related for me , lot of cases which is ok , gotta keep the dust off of the disks so everyone's desk has one now .. we can switch to USB and we do use USB as well so its not like the end of the world when they finally go.
Splitting Big files with ARJ, recycling floppers from the magazines, downloading files over 56k computer room at school, putting them floppies, going back home to find out one is defect... That's how i installed my first Linux without any internet connection at home, a 6 months job!
I remember in college we were going back and forth between our dormitory and our computer lab with a bunch of FDs to copy the media files (mp3s and jpegs) we downloaded on the server overnight. Often one of the disk would have errors and had go back another time.
A few years back, at $work we found some old FDs with some interesting labels on them: "survey data 199x". It turns out there were some binary files from an ancient stats program and I spent a few days figuring out how to extract the data. Fun times
In the late 80s / early 90s, I had a home computer with 5.25” floppies. I remember at the mall around the holidays, Radio Shack would run a holiday animation on their Tandy computers to show them off. One in particular sticks out to me — an animation of a 3.5” “modern” floppy going into a shirt pocket and then an attempt at a 5.25” which resulted in a torn pocket, showing off the superior portability of the new, smaller disks. Does anyone else remember this?
I found some floppy disks in my house from when I was a kid last year. I plugged them into a reader I had and they still worked. I didn't need them so I sold them on eBay and someone bought them and the reader.
I remember laughing out loud the first time I handled an 8-inch floppy. The very definition of a FLOPPY disk. It was a little disturbing. I was already in the era of the 5.25" double-sided floppy back then.
How desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read the multi-megabyte documentation.
No, I’m not old enough to remember 8” floppies but I watched Adrian’s Digital Basement’s repair of the TRS model-2 including restoring the 8” floppy drive, connecting it to 24V, using a adapter to hook it up to a PC to make a boot disk. [0] Unfortunately once Adrian got the Model-2 working and booted to TRS DOS he didn’t test any other software on the machine. My experience with Tandy machines was playing Burger Time off a cartridge as a kid, no 8” floppies.
I was cleaning around a stack of DEC tapes at work a few weeks ago and found an 8 inch floppy. Having grown up with the 5 1/4" disks it was a bit surreal to hold the bigger one... almost felt like I'd shrunk a little!
The first laptop computer I used was a Bondwell 2 (running CP/M) which was one of the first to use a 3.5" floppy for storage. But I actually preferred the Epson PX-8 which had a micro cassette for storage instead of a floppy (too large). I wonder if there's still any market for micro-cassettes for digital storage anymore just as there is for floppies. (DAT was another tape storage format used in professional audio studio equipment but also used by some computers such as SGI.)
Part of the "joy/hell" of using floppies, the waiting to see if your data was ok. Example when you have ARJ/ZIP/RAR a 10+ disk "floppy collection" (pirate copy) of your favourite game from you friends from school.
You get home after school and dammit floppy number 7 has CRC error :/ sigh
It could take DAYS to copy a game, back then, between you friend forgetting for a day or two and having to redo big copies at least once :) All with the turnaround time of waiting one-school-day
The fact that this site keeps spawning eyes all over the place while you are inactive really creeped me out when I went back to the tab to continue reading after a while.
A few weeks ago I actually watched a video with this same gentleman. The video itself is from 6 years ago but it was insightful and some of you may prefer that medium.
I've read this here before, but will regurgitate it.
It's amazing that many software products still use the disc icon to represent saving. Many folks using computers now have never even seen one in person. To them it's the save icon, not a disc.
I still have some old hypercard stacks on floppy from third grade that I can't bear to throw away. Every time I come across the disks I remember how awesome it was to fire up the IIGS in computer lab and create the dumbest animations.
I have 2 boxes somewhere that I bought when Staples in the UK was closing down; they presumably found them right at the back of a shelf in the stores. 50p a box I think.
In the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), which I've kept.
About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate the folks who keep the door open to legacy technology. (…but meanwhile I'm still realllly curious what's on that disk!)
If it was HD then the data is probably gone. Or at least the floppy will have read issues. 720KB should do a bit better.
I have recovered data from a lot of old media, CCT tapes, floppies, 3.5" floppies - except that in practice it turned out that a) CCT ok. No problems. b) 8" floppies ok. No problems. c) 5.25" floppies (low density, high density) ok. No problems (except that for a while I didn't have a controller which could read a minority of them - they're FM, not MFM), d) 3.5" Not ok. All unreadable. All of them. And that was not due to the drive - I have lots of drives, including one I bought because it was calibrated. All of the media had been stored either in the same location or in a similar environment, but at this point I don't even bother trying those darn 3.5" floppies unless they're written recently. I'll just be a ton of read errors.
I've been buying from him for a decade plus for both my 8-bit Atari use and Win/DOS use, my last order was a couple of months ago - bought two of the used Dell drives and some more 3.5s from him.
The tiny storage and slow access time/speed are not something I'll miss. What I do miss is the security that they provided.
The serenity of having known good backups, that just work, is something that nobody under 50 is likely to ever experience. Because we had the ability to copy and write protect our software and data, we could easily make manage our security in a completely transparent manner.
You could take your little case of floppy disks and have your work environment up and running on any IBM compatible in no time flat.
A lot of musicians still use sequencers and synthesizers that save patches on floppies. (Over time people have been replacing them with floppy-to-usb-drive adapters)
What was also funny was "floppy grammar" (at least in my time and locale)
Whenever you gave someone x amount of floppies to copy something for you (prob a game)... the usual grammar/conversation was "you can just copy over it" yet no such thing exists, you can't in 999/1000 cases "copy-over something" you first have to delete/format it then copy.
That's just legacy of audiocassettes and VHS tapes, and later on, magnetic tape data storage used for popular home microcomputers. With those, you literally "copied over".
With floppies, you actually could do that as well, if you were copying floppies verbatim with e.g. DISKCOPY.
Yes, in the good ol' times I would have used a nifty little DOS program called Venus, that would simply copy the "whole disk" (a lot like dd but with a semi-graphical interface).
Of course the "real thing" was the Deluxe Option Board (some details about it and a bunch of the common copying utilities of the time here):
Copy II PC Option board, actual floppy notchers, and cleaning disks and diskettes are just some of the other floppy paraphernalia. Floppies have notoriously low reliability (unrecoverable reads) and painful transfer rates. ZIP disks were only slightly better. CDs and DVDs were far better and then USB thumb drives killed everything else with the then futuristic holy grail of solid state storage.
In 1990 I was the Exhibits Engineer at The Computer Museum in Boston (RIP). We were opening a new exhibit, the Walk-Through Computer, a giant, two-floor PC.
Of course, it had a giant floppy drive, and at my suggestion they marked it as a 2.88MB drive (just to be ahead of the curve):
At a similar age I did a "science project" to see if the big floppies or the small one were better at reading data after being stuck to a fridge with a magnet for a month, and similar with sticking them in a freezer.
Yep, and temperature doesn't really have an effect on magnets (perhaps at very low or when the disk melts).
I do recall that most of the teachers and students thought it was "most surprising outcome" or something like that, from years of "if you put a magnet near your computer or disk it will eat the world" propaganda.
Old samplers/MIDI sequencers without SCSI interfaces do use floppy disks so I hoarded a hundred of them just in case (even though there is a system now that allows a floppy disk reader to be replaced by a USB thumb drive reader). They are getting quite expensive in Europe, not paying 5€ for a single HD disk...
Very happy to have not had to deal with a floppy that was done being able to be read in a very long time. I used to work at a campus computer lab and we would experience failures commonly while imaging machines. I do miss floppys but I am happy to see the extent that they are no longer critical.
Completely unrelated: I was impressed by this interview for being no-BS and interesting. It's such a rare occasion that I actually think to myself "ooh, I wonder if this site has more good articles like this."
Never heard of Eye on Design before, but glad it's on my radar, now (:
> How did your business initially come about?
>
> I started out as a tax lawyer in Washington, DC. I became involved with a software company in California that was doing unique tax calculations.
Ah, right, "unique tax calculations". I guess thats one of describing it. :)
floppydisk.com bought Athana a few years ago, and got the remainder of their stock. AFAIK Athana was one of the very last manufacturers of several media formats. I don't know if floppydisk.com ended up with any of their manufacturing capability, or if Athana even had any at the time of sale. Athana had stopped manufacturing at least some of their offerings (e.g. 5.25" hard sector) over a decade ago.
floppydisk.com didn't get them all though, we bought around 28,000 5.25" DSDD diskettes surplus:
I can't wait to bust out my collection of "PC Genius" floppy disks that I had growing up, and play them with my son in a few years. I haven't inserted a floppy disk in a reader in about 10-15 years, but secretly super excited to do it again!
He did claim "reformat", which tends to delete these viruses. Albeit to clarify you'd also need to clear the boot record, which is not something all DOS format tools would do.
Compare that to USB devices, which contain data that survives to all host-initiated methods of erasure and which may in fact not be storage devices at all; i.e. fake keyboard/mouse presses et al.
Michelangelo and similar viruses only activate when you boot from the disk it's on. Insert a disk with Michelangelo in a running system, then format the disk (make sure you overwrite the boot sector), all OK.
The operating systems of the time didn't have any autoplay functionality that could be exploited by viruses. I guess in theory viruses could have exploited things like buffer overflows in the OS code that reads the file allocation table or directories, but I've never heard of such a thing, and Michelangelo and similar boot viruses certainly were not that advanced.
Back in the 80's few machines had hard drives, and often only one floppy. So if you put your disk in the drive and fired up the machine then bang, you were infected.
Also, lots of machines with hard drives were configured to boot from floppy by default. Few floppies had working boot sectors, so most people never noticed. Until they put an infected disk into A:, turned on the computer and saw chaos ensue.
There were plenty of Macintosh viruses that spread this way, such as the WDEF/MDEF/CDEF families.
> Infects the Desktop file used by the Finder. … Spread through sharing disks, as every Mac disk includes a Desktop file. It is not necessary to run a program to spread this virus; simply mounting the disk is enough for it to infect the Desktop file of every disk mounted on the Mac.
Not at all. Autoplay is new to the win 95 shell. And the idea of "mounting" is absolutely alien to a DOS system which can't even tell when a disk is inserted or not on a device.
DOS' shell would run autoexec.bat when booting but only the one from the boot volume.
My local computer store sells 3.5 and 5.25 floppies. You can find them at the rear of the left side of the store on a shelf just above the one with the new in wrapper Zip disks.
Just be aware that the USB external drives are pre-coded for "PC" formats only, so you can't use those as a source for a generic floppy recover session. I.e. you can't expect to be able to ready anything from some other non-PC brand of computer.
I mean just the other way: say you have an old mainframe in production and you need to clone a floppy, clone it to a more modern medium then use an adaptor.
What coincidence, I just found some old floppy disks of mine, and bought a vintage HP drive as per this guide to connect to my modern machines. Hopefully it works:
I fondly recall when my friend became the first kid in our neighborhood to get cable internet instead of dialup. I biked over to his house with a backpack full of 3.5" floppies and spent hours filling them up with games.
It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk; same for the total download size of a fairly barebones website. Nostalgia!
When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like Sloppy Sokoban, Pong Wars, and Descender.
Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world.
Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...
> Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...
Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgic.
On a more serious note, did you manage to make a living out of it and - either way - what made you stop?
Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em!
In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making original indie games for PC and launched http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s)
Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie, worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc.
I switched from building games in my own bespoke C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also curating cool unique indie game work I see at https://twitter.com/Doomlaser
btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give Descender a try, Name: test Registration #: SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034
Thanks for the detailed response, and glad it worked out for you - that's awesome. Tap Tap passed me by just because I didn't have a decent smartphone back then but looks like loads of fun (and I love Justice). Sounds like good times! Thanks for the serial - I'll give Descender a try with SheepShaver and see how I get on.
Sweet. I remember when X:Com UFO Defense had their copy protection codes stored in the .EXE not as unsigned integers but as ASCII text. Not difficult to set it to all 0000-0000 for every question, or just jump over the code that does the checking entirely. If one were devious in writing copy protection software, they would pass around an ever-changing cryptographically-signed state within the context of an event system that does (non-inlined) integrity checks all over the code base and explodes should any fail.
Wow, haven't thought about tap tap revenge in a long time but loved it as a kid. Thanks for your work!
Your work made a positive impact on my life, much fun was had on my part thanks to your games :)
Tap tap revenge! I have a lot of fond memories of that game on a 1g iPod touch.
You’re responsible for a lot of fun in my childhood. Thanks for sharing!
I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21
I love that the top comment on this (from 9 years ago) is complaining about the new macbook air not having a CD drive.
I enjoyed both of these parent posts. I love this whole chain.
People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.
Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds.
Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.
I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combination of slow Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most users.
No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't be until considerably later that casually transferring files over the Internet would become feasible.
I remember, in 1999, my friends using a website called imacfloppy.com to transfer files to themselves via the internet. I suppose it was the dropbox of the day.
Depends on the use-case.
You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.
I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.
When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.
Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.
But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)
Yeah, the disposable nature of floppies was key; sure they were small, but if you lost one you didn't cry all night (unless it had your only copy of your thesis on it).
That wasn't really solved until the era of the "affordable" CD burner, so there was a moderately painful 1998-2001 or so era where you had to do some tricks often or trust someone with a relatively expensive piece of equipment.
Even in 2000 a burner was around $250 or more, but spending $15 or whatever on a ZIP disk was painful even then, if you weren't sure you'd get it back.
As a university IT student helper I had to recover 2 PhD thesis from a floppy and one from a USB stick that was thought to be better than a floppy.
The floppy drives at least yielded a jigsaw puzzle set of text they could piece back together. The USB drive at the time got nothing back.
I was always amazed at how someone so smart as to do a PhD could waste so much of their time by not having a second copy.
But here I am with a neglected backup system...
LaTeX and git work really well and you can push to somewhere remote as a backup (and will usually retain the ability to pick through the ref-logs if something goes wrong). LaTeX is super super popular in the academic world and it wouldn't be surprising for a thesis to be required to be submitted in LaTeX anyway.
Github has a word-by-word visual diff thing that would be really nice since usually you don't want to consider whitespace to be semantically significant in the context of a diff, eg word wrapping.
The business world likes to fret over every detail and I get it but a lot of powerpoint presentations/etc could really be done pretty simply with a latex template, and git checkin/merging/etc is sooo nice. Let alone chapter material or stuff that needs equations/figures, a bibliography manager, table of contents, etc. Super super nice for cross referencing, kind of like a generalized form of javadocs, and it does layout pretty well with some help, and it doesn't randomly spazz out and break borders etc.
Etckeeper is really nice for change tracking for your /etc folder too... love being able to look back and see if there's been any changes that might have broken stuff, get a log of package updates etc.
That's my recollection as well. I was in college around that time and my primary way of saving data to move between computers was a Zip drive disk (since all the computers in the labs had one), then a USB flash drive with maybe 32MB of space (worked fine when moving files between Macs - I don't think the PCs had USB ports at the time).
"Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the time.
The PC I purchased in late 1996 had USB 1.0 ports. USB 1.1 came out in 1998 around the same time as the iMac. The new PC I bought in fall 1998 had USB 1.1 ports. Most new PCs at that time were coming with USB ports. Maybe your school just had older PCs.
Schools have never been known for keeping up with the latest in computing hardware. The 90s were no exception.
Besides -- early on, a lot of PC makers put USB ports on the back of the computer, since that's where all the other ports were. It took some time for PC makers to realize that USB ports weren't just for permanently installed equipment like printers or modems, and to start redesigning cases or using drive bay breakouts to make the ports more accessible.
The 90s was a really weird time. One school that was ”richer” would have bought early Macs and still be using them, whereas a poorer school wouldn’t have been able to buy until the time of the iMac and handily defeat the older machines.
I remember when my school had its first full sized 'Computer Lab'. As a fifth grade, our class was given a scavenger hunt.. One of the questions was. What is the presidents dog name? As a power user I typed in whitehouse dot com.. This resulted in me showing all the people around me the landing page for well a pornish site, and then questioning the teacher about it when they finally came by.
From my group I was one of two people who had a Zip drive (the other guy had a Jazz™ drive too) and we usually dragged the parallel port drive along with the discs.
But that was just when things like IRC fileservs and Napster (1999) started to take off which was the main medium of "file sharing" at that point (for local transfers networking gear had dropped significantly, the iMac had ethernet built in, everyone had some sort of yumcha network setup - often sharing that 56k connection. 56kbps is 18 gigabytes a month, and the proliferation of "unlimited" internet was right around that time.
The final nail in the coffin was affordable CD-Rs. Once those started to proliferate (rip mix burn) you finally had disposable removable storage you could give people. Floppies were that, but zip and USB were not.
Pretty sure it was Jaz? Not Jazz
Yeah. My computer in 1998 had a 28.8k modem and my dad's machine had the fast 56k one.
Used floppies to transfer data to and from the fast computer until 2002 or 2003.
They weren't the first with gigabit Ethernet in a laptop as I recall, but they were fairly early, and that made a huge difference.
Having a decent router available also helped. I'm still pretty miffed at whoever axed the Airport group. I kept expecting it to come back. Or for the apple TV to sprout router functionality. Something.
The Mac G4 was the first desktop computer with gigabit ethernet as a standard. It was still pretty rare back then, even on servers and workstations.
Not quite the same but I hated the removal of the headphone jack.
I now own mostly Bluetooth headphones and use an adapter in the rare cases otherwise, I generally don't even notice that it isn't there.
I still hate the removal of the headphone jack. Bluetooth is overrated.
The worst thing about it is that I now have to carry 3 pairs of shitty Bluetooth headphones instead of one good pair because switching connected devices is such a pain that this is literally much easier to live with. I hate it. Bring the headphone jack back.
AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition between devices is fantastic
Is that just Apple devices or can you connect to non Apple products with AirPods as well?
Linux, windows, Mac all work. The mic works too (on windows at least), so they make a good backup if you don’t have a headset for a teams/etc call.
Do note that using the microphone will degrade the playback and recording quality to rotary-phone-levels. For the sake of everyone in your Zoom call: please buy a $50 wired microphone if you're going to spend $150 on Airpods.
I did not know that, I'll have to check next time it comes up. To be clear, I use them as a backup, like when I'm traveling and didn't bring my normal headset.
It's specifically only an issue when your Airpods are being used for playback and recording. If you're simply listening to the meeting on your Airpods and using your Macbook microphone, you probably won't notice. Most people don't seem to set that up though, which leads to the cellphone-quality audio that people associate with wireless earbuds.
Or apple could kindly add decent support for it.
It's not an Apple issue. Works perfectly when you use a Mac + AirPods. The issue is when you try to use Windows. All bluetooth headphones I've tried (with microphones) sound horrible with Windows, if they work at all.
The walled garden has a few advantages...
Airpods do not have better duplex audio on MacOS. The problem is that AAC cannot support high-quality recording and playback at 330kbps, so it has to degrade the quality of the recording stream to fit within the Bluetooth bandwidth. MacOS might default to using your laptop's microphone, but that's something you can also set up on Windows. Hell, it should be the default on Windows as long as you have AAC support installed - there's no reason a headset should be using SBC over Bluetooth unless the last version of Windows you used was XP.
I actually normally use my headphones through my phone, but I doubt ios is doing anything differently compared to macos.
The point isn't that there's only so much bandwidth for mic + headphones, the point is that the bluetooth stack on Windows just doesn't work. I tried connecting multiple bluetooth headphones (Airpods, Beats, Sony) to a new Windows 11 computer (Microsoft Surface). I only got one set paired and it defaulted to the headset profile immediately. It was horrible. The others never connected or the connection was unreliable.
The process was so bad, my son recently bought a set of wired headphones just to avoid the entire issue.
If you've never been in the Apple garden and used headphones + device, it's a night and day difference in experience.
I haven't used Windows in years, it's a pretty bad point-of-reference for me. However, I can say pretty confidently that iOS, Android and Linux all have more reliable Bluetooth stacks than MacOS. In fact, the stack on Linux is so good that I don't lust for Airpods at all. I just turn on my Sony XM4s and it automatically connects to all my devices. No muss, no fuss.
Oh, and neither MacOS or iOS support high-bitrate audio playback. They're not even on the same eschelon as Android or Linux, which support codecs like LDAC and APTx, with 3x the bandwidth of Apple's 330kbps AAC stream. Come to think of it, if Apple switched to APTx for their newer Airpods, they would have no problem recording and playing audio back at the same time.
Walled garden? Ha!
All bluetooth devices do this on all platforms when you use both sound + microphone. It has to split the available bandwidth between the two.
My Sony headphones will go into "headset mode" on Windows and Mac and sounds horrible in both, just have to make sure no programs are trying to use the headphones' microphone and then you get full bandwidth for audio.
They work basically just as normal Bluetooth headphones on non-Apple gear. Really no benefit when it comes to switching devices when using it.
My Xiaomi Red Mi Pro has a headphone jack.
It is one of the reasons I got it.
That’s not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with one device and they are automatically paired with all of your devices and auto switch
>That’s not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with one device and they are automatically paired with all of your devices and auto switch
And how do AirPods know whether I want to use them to take a conference call on my work laptop, listen to a YouTube video on the personal laptop, or watch a quick video my friend sent me on WhatsApp on my phone?
Do they have telepathic powers that I don't know of?
Oh, and will they prioritize the work phone call over an incoming call on my personal phone too, unless it's something really important?
Simple, if I am listening to a podcast and then I take a conference call on my computer, they automatically switch. If I am watching something on my iPad, and I answer a call on my iPhone, they automatically switch.
If I’m actively playing a video or listening to audio on my Mac, my iPhone, or my iPad and I put my AirPods in my ear, sound is automatically rerouted to my AirPods from the device.
If I’m watching a video on my iPad and then I click on a video on my iPhone, they switch.
My AppleTVs don’t automatically switch. An AppleTV is a shared experience most of the time.
But even if you turn automatic switching off, I still don’t have to pair my AirPods with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, two AppleTVs and my Mac individually. I can just click a drop down and they automatically show up on each device or any new device I use with my AppleID.
As simple as hitting a button on any decent BT headset.
In all the pairs I own it's some arcane combination to enter pairing mode, and then have you tried adding BT headphones to windows when the same ones were paired in the past? You have to remove them first then go back into pairing mode again. It's more bullshit than I'm willing to deal with. With a jack you plug them in and they work.
You don't have to enter pairing mode if the device remembers previous pairings, which is not that strange.
If they are(or were) connected to my laptop and phone and both devices are nearby, then they will default to my phone. There is nothing I can do on my laptop to force them to connect there instead(and believe me I tried). I have to either remove them on my phone(pain) or enter pairing mode and re-pair them with the laptop(even greater pain).
Work phone, personal phone, work laptop, personal laptop, tablet, desktop.
Good luck pressing that button five dozen times to take the call on your work phone after using them with your desktop, only to find out that your glorious BT device only has 4 memory slots like a videogame from 1991, and unlinked your work phone when you used them with your tablet.
My Samsung Galaxy A22 has headphone jack (which gets used all the time), dual SIM, dedicated SD card slot, NFC, all day battery, and 5G support.
It came out this year — there are plenty of sane manufacturers releasing phones with features that people want out there.
Use cases for 3.5mm jack that Bluetooth can't handle:
* Never having to worry about headphones running out of charge
* Zero added latency - critical for music making apps (somewhat remediated with latest BT versions, but good luck finding latency specs on the box)
* Switching between devices instantly (work/personal laptop and phone) - especially not fun if you use more than 2 of them
The last issue is especially annoying. It's 2022, I should be able to pair my headphones instantly by tapping them to the device I want to pair them to, without screens and buttons. Accelerometers exist. Proximity sensors exist.
But noooo, apparently, UX is not a consideration in the design of this godforesaken protocol.
If you have an Android device as a “music making” device, you have much larger problems than BT.
It’s better. But still not great.
https://9to5google.com/2021/03/05/google-android-audio-laten...
agreed. until bluetooth earphone batteries can go for a few days between recharging, and can quick charge in, say, 15 min or so, I'll keep my wired. I also have AirPod Pros, but I keep my Bose qc20 around and still find myself using them multiple times per month when the APP go low (never get more than around 3 hrs from them).
I only recently discovered why bluetooth isn't a particularly good option. I'd paired my good headphones with my phone, but all of a sudden wanted headphones for other devices, and having one set of earphones paired with multiple devices is a deeply flawed experience. First, you can only connect to one or two, second, mine kept telling me it was disconnecting and reconnecting to the other device while I was walking around listening to audio. That is extremely distracting.
I have my AirPods and my Beats Flex (better for traveling, if they fall out, they just end up around my neck) “paired” to six devices. If the auto switching is a problem, you can disable it and still have your AirPods paired to multiple devices
Unfortunately I have not jumped on the airPod bandwagon. I got into the Shure ecosystem and their solution doesn’t have many controls.
At some point overpriced audio equipment became a way to bribe myself to do adulting for things I really didn’t want to do, so while for most people the moral might be to stay in the Apple ecosystem, that advice isn’t great for me.
However at this point I’m one gen behind on their receivers so maybe those issues have already been fixed.
Latency still sucks on non-Apple Bluetooth headphones
> Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world.
“The last person standing” is self-proclaimed, and even on quick search [0] there are other floppy disk makers, just not in the US and not answering magazine interviews. In particular Hitachi-Maxxel was outsourcing floppy disk to a chinese maker, and I’d expect that company to still be producing, but just not to the international market.
[0] https://www.indiamart.com/gagan-polymers/
I could buy 3.5" floppies in a Japanese supermarket just a few years ago. Heck, I could buy cassette tape as well.. and I did! :-)
Oh hey I remember playing Sloppy Sokoban.
Thanks for sharing!
At least of the 3 examples on that webpage it seems like you made remakes of existing simple games (tetris, sokoban, pong) - did you try making new designs of your own and if not, why not?
Sure. In 2007 I started up a new label at http://doomlaser.com. Made a bunch of indie stuff as that scene was really starting to bloom. Helped build some big franchises like Tap Tap Revenge, the iOS game for The Hunger Games, alongside irreverent stuff like https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364, and personal stuff like https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits (a game named after the Mac's low-level graphics blitter). Still working in games to this day.
I just want to say that tap tap revenge was my favorite game as a kid and I have very fond memories of doing 2 player on the same ipod touch. "Gotta get the high score"
Thanks! I'm not sure why I was downvoted, maybe people thought I was being negative but I really did just ask because I wanted to know. Your stuff looks great!
Oh damn, I used to love Tap Tap Revenge. In fact, I still keep an old iPhone around to play it and a few other games from back then.
I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr.
Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of them are fiddly. They are obnoxiously easy to loose.
I wrote about this a few years ago on my blog when I re-fitted my old Commodore Amiga with a floppy drive after years of using SD-card floppy emulators: http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/
There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds me of the tape trading days of the 80s:
"...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene, floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups typically had members whose sole “job” in the group was as a “trader” or “swapper” - we also wrote to each other. As a particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest friendships I formed during those years were with the other members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to each other with “Jiffy Junk” - little trinkets we’d collect and swap: Kinder surprise toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder what they’re all doing now.
As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I’d be interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when most communication is probably electronic in nature..."
and when people stopped telling stories around the fire, and instead people went to their rooms to read books... something was lost then too. and something gained.
My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies of the same files across different disks because odds are one of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to zip any files up as odds are you’d end up with a failed CRC.
I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing.
I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and Nintendo Famicom) that don’t work too.
I remember how my blood would run cold when you could hear the drive making that distinctive noise when it's re-reading the same sector over and over again because it's not reading right.
A few years back I was doing some cleanup of old media. Checking to see what was on stuff and what I could toss. Of the hundreds of floppies, I had a file failure rate of about 5%. However, my CD/DVD failure rate was around 22% including factory stamped discs.
Now, true, a lot of the dud floppies had been filtered out back in the day. But I was shocked at how well they had faired over the long term vs optical media.
Archivers of that time had an interesting dilemma. If you are compressing a bunch of files, it's more effective to concatenate them all first and then process the resulting bundle - like .tar.gz etc - since compression algorithms can then deduplicate across file boundaries. But if you do that, damage to any part of the archive corrupts the whole thing, which is especially likely when splitting it across multiple floppies. So DOS archivers generally defaulted to compressing files first and then bundling the result. RAR was an interesting case in that it let the user decide on a case by case basis between regular and "solid" (pre-bundled) archives.
I remember buying boxes of floppies hoping that I'd get one that would be error free.
Not to mention they were integrated into the machine itself - picture 1-4 floppy disks fitting snuggly inside your PC right where they're supposed to go and where nothing else even could go, versus a handful of usb sticks of various shapes and sizes sticking out haphazardly like porcupine needles, some even pushing each other over because they're too thick, or connected by a jungle of wires, either way hooked up to a generic universal bus port that could be used for literally anything else and has no specific semantic meaning to your PC's software.
The “various shapes and sizes” is what offends my sensibilities about USB sticks. I kind of wish there was a single form factor for USB drives, purely for cosmetic reasons. Yes, I know that only the connector has to have a standard form, but it’s kind of ugly that every time I buy a USB stick, I’m subjected to the random wacky design taste of a random hardware company.
I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player, 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.
It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.
They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them.
They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.
yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and then iphone won for portability/convenience.
It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.
That's the story of Sony in general. They had great tech but their content division always forced the consumer electronics division to gimp that tech in random ways, which led to the tech failing on the market.
> sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr
... and praying that there is no read error.
That was my experience in this part of the world where the computer environments were not dust-free enough for floppies to be reliable. But yes, the nostalgia is still strong.
burning dvd/cds was fun. Figuring out how to burn a dvd that could run on a dvd player was fun. Now it's all just done via chromecast. Convenient and less wasteful, I have to admit.
And the Germans had fun naming their software "Nero Burning ROM."
I used Nero for years and 'got' the joke about Nero and Burning, but totally missed the ROM/Rome/German spelling of Rome.
How did I miss that! Thanks for making the joke complete for me ;)
I never got that, it's amazing. Was a teen when I was using it and hadn't learned enough Roman history. Thanks.
22 years later I find out there's a joke behind the name. Thanks HN.
Nero was dope, then it started being bundled with CD and DVD drives and it became a monstrosity of useless features.
I remember that. :) And I remember buying a 1 Gigabyte hard disk for £1,000 ...
Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.
Loads of companies tried back in the late 90's and through the very early 2000's. Zip disks, Jaz, Clik! All had the same problem, the drives needed to read them weren't found on every computer. The winners ended up being writable optical media and USB thumbdrives.
Personally, I wish someone would produce a consumer grade tape system, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that I can tell, but even the original stored about 140 MB (in 1992, that was a lot of data in the size of a floppy and a far sturdier package). It wasn't a ton of space, but you didn't have to worry about static, or malicious devices masquerading as HID, and it was certainly good enough that if magneto-optical drives had been continuously developed, we'd be looking at pretty reasonable capacities today.
Yes, much lower capacity per dollar than silicon, but if it were very sturdy (it was) and offered near-infinite rewriteability (it did), it could have had a market.
You can format a Hi-MD for data. It's very slow by modern standards, especially in random access, and the media is so rare and thus costly there's no point except for the sake of it - I only have one, and at $60 a pop I wouldn't have any except that the seller I bought my MZ-RH1 from forgot to check if a disc was in it before shipping. But it works.
A modern development of that technology would have greater capacity, sure, but I can't imagine how it would approach the low random-access latency of solid-state media.
They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240 "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo information on the medium in order to achieve tracking precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media) write more information in the same area. They were back-compatible with regular 3.5" floppies, but they were also slow, flaky, expensive, and introduced after Zip disks but not long enough before writable CD media, and so they failed to compete.
If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB, with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which in its default state would likely find this all very confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk" devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a disk, and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in their fully stock configuration. [1]
I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun.
[1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven forfend its hard drive ever fail, though...
edits: correcting misrecalled SuperDisk technical details
LS-120 could also superformat a standard HD floppy to 30MB with the caveat that you had to write the whole disk in one pass.
Yeah even at the time there were magneto-optical disks[0], which I think got as high as around 9.1gb. I had a bunch ranging from 120-480mb, which was huge at the time. They are a bit thicker than a regular floppy, but nearly the same form factor. Awesome at the time for backups and of course very useful for print/publishing businesses that had to courier over huge 300dpi documents to print, stuff like that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
Wow. I totally had blocked those out of my memory.
I deployed a batch of desktops to an office with the drives and 1 disk each. We hoarded the disks of course.
I think I mostly just fidgeted with them at my desk since we just had a few machines that could use them.
They were more reliable than our external SATA CD burner (Smart & Friendly brand), though. That had its own table we wouldn’t touch while burning at 1x. It could 2x but the failure rate was too high and CDRs were still expensive. Zip drives were for peasants being mostly parallel or IDE. :)
I like that idea. While everyone here seems to comment and mention old competing formats, I imagine a new floppy disc-like device with an SSD inside, kinda like an HDD cartridge. Area-wise a 3,5" could easily house TBs worth of storage, and the "metal clip" of the floppy could house some kind of m2 interface when opened...
I miss the tingle felt in the elbow when inserting a floppy in Amiga 500.
Or who am I kidding, I still use my A500 so I can't really say I miss it.
You might be interested in this floppy disk upgrade using sd cards.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=8IZcP0oP0OU
That's neat!
Could make one of these https://i.pinimg.com/originals/94/2a/c3/942ac3e79c35b0e4d9e3...
I do too :) I have game soundtracks in .midi format on floppies. I play them on my regular hifi amplifier using a Roland SB-55 + SC-88. It's fun to pop in a floppy and listen to music that way.. But it's double density floppies and they are indeed getting annoying to get my hands on.. and also to write to, but I keep a dedicated machine around for that.
There's always the floppy thumbdrive
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive...
It's great to read that on HN. Every time I look at the HN background colour I think of the 1541 disk drive - I'm near certain its colour was either a conscious or unconscious influence.
You can put a label on a USB drive. Amazon also has holders to sell you. Contemplating doing something like that for my Steam collection. Would also like an actual dedicated Windows USB stick.
Agreed. I'd love a modern (ie. pcie card or usb) floppy controller so you could have a humble old 5,25" in your workstation just for fun...
A few years ago, the last man standing in the punched paper tape business, "westnc.com", finally gave it up. There were still some numerically controlled machine tools running off paper tape. In 2019, NSA punched a crypto key into paper tape for the last time. As far as I can tell, nobody in the US still sells punched paper tape.
Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore old Teletype machines, including the kind that printed on 5/16" paper tape. I had a thousand rolls of such tape made up by a company in China, that being the minimum order, and I still sell some now and then to Teletype collectors.
The machine shop I work at still runs machines that use 5 hole paper tape.
In fact there is a fixture in the shop we just finished on one of those machines that is for an aerospace customer of ours.
It’s very interesting to me and something I hadn’t seen before working at this shop.
It’s amazing what is still out there running.
> The machine shop I work at still runs machines that use 5 hole paper tape.
Where do you get blank tape? I know Teletype collectors who need a supplier.
I've never seen 5-hole tape CNC gear. Most is 8-hole.
I’m actually not sure where they source it from but my guess would be they just have an abundant stock of it given the abundance of everything else in the shop.
It’s black wax 5 hole paper tape and the controllers the use it are Allen Bradley, manufactured in early 80s I believe but I’d have to check dates.
We also have a few machines that read from magnetic tape so lots of old almost historical computer equipment, but still being used amazingly and making money.
I've got a couple boxes of 80-column punch cards ...
My mom has many boxes from her long career programming for mainframes. She uses them for todo lists... for herself now, not a computer.
Bar I worked at in the late 90s did all their checks and orders on these. Guy who worked there par tike worked dismantling mainframes and had tons of them. Cheaper than any other paper they could find.
Nice. Not the cheapest if bought from IBM is my understanding.
Or maybe she is the computer now.
Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.
And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.
The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.
It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made them less reliable.
After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where they are recorded initially, feels very natural.
That's still the wisdom.
The 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least 3 copies of your data on at least 2 storage media, and keep at least 1 copy offsite.
> The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies.
Still true.
Along similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups either.
That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.
I’d slightly amend the analogy into “an untested backup is akin to having a lottery ticket for your backups”. Maybe you win or maybe you don’t.
Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.
Once my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.
I didn't know the temperature mattered?
Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very bad quality.
nah, some just melted. It was on the front seat with no shadow in Israeli +40C degrees heat.
This, and the click of death coming from a Zip disk that meant 100MB of Something Important had just entered Valhalla.
Especially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.
ddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13
The secret for scratched CDs/DVDs I learned way too late in the game was that you can actually polish the clear plastic underside with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I restored sooo many optical discs this way. It really works!
At that moment, I took the knife next to the computer to insert gently the blade into the drive above the diskette. It worked most of the time :p.
Glad to hear I'm not the only one who routinely stabbed my computer! I used to keep a butter knife by my iMac to help eject CDs. I had the first slot-loading model and the rubber eject rollers they used seemed to lose their grip after a while.
Especially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.
I recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.
A friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...
First job I had was installing SCO off tapes and that was the year 2000
Thanks, that brought back a vivid memory I didn't even know was still knocking around my brain!
Or floppy #10 of Mark of the Unicorn’s DAW.
Nervous times they were!
Yeah, that, "Any second it will give up and shoot the disk back out" thought.
tik tik tik tik tik
That 'stutter-of-failure' :D
Abort, Retry, Fail?
With CP/M if you left the door open all your work was lost like tears in the rain.
The 5 1/4 disks, IMO, had a superior kinesthetic. A much more solid thunk sound when being inserted and a deeper tone while being read.
Enjoy, the sounds of floppies :D [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8
The ones that I remember had a locking lever which barely made any sound at all.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/8D9f1.jpg
Some of em were spring loaded to where if it got past halfway it'd snap shut all the way. Flicking one of those makes a good noise.
Ah, but 8" floppies made better frisbees - personal experience :)
I used to work in the disk duplication industry, both at a copier (DisCopyLabs) and then later at the robot manufacturer, Mountain Computer, which was eventually bought by Nakamichi and combined with Trace, our competitor.
We used to be able to sail those suckers over the building on Wyatt Drive to the San Thomas Expressway... Next person to work on roof equipment probably had a curious experience, many discs that did not make it all the way likely scattered all over the roof.
The seeking at 1:48[1] sounds like Hall and Oates[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8&t=108s
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY27wmTZwyg
The 8 inchers were a nightmre in some mechanisms (whichever ones Intel used in their MDS systems); slide 'em in too quickly and with a bit of passion (!?) and they'd catch on something, so if you weren't paying attention you'd fold them over and make a crease. Bye bye data!
True. I'd put it on the same level as connecting XLR cables. MiniDiscs (and to a lesser extent) UMDs were maybe the last examples of such satisfying mechanics.
We are moving towards a solid state future where no user interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual transmission and everything is wireless.
Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my toaster remains!
> Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible...
Ahem, cough, dial-up modem handshake.
That is all I have to say on the subject.
> In modern computing
Surely the floppy disk is not more modern than the modem? They started to die around the same time, if I recall.
Both are not modern. I don't think the original post was trying to imply that floppies are modern.
Agreed, I remember dial up using an AOL CD. And CDR was around the corner.
How about the constant fan noise when having ESET [0] installed on a Windows laptop then?
[0] if you don't have ESET at hand, I guess any "good" antivirus would do.
Bah - font kerning issue (keeming).
I've thought the same thing about those big power switches on AT and older motherboards/power supplies where you actually shut the power off.
Modern computers are so silent that you have no idea whether they're working hard or it's just someone doing things on the UI thread that don't belong there.
Maybe the pinging of a modem? You can tell from the tune how well it is doing!
Not even a modem handshake noise?
I wish my wifi had those. So I could know instantly if the connection is going to work or if I need to change spot.
For a second, I read 'wife' not 'wifi', and thought it was a lead in to marital harmony(or not).
I also really liked the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the 5.25 floppies.
You haven't lived until you installed an operating system from 38 floppy disks.
Slackware and OS/2 for example
My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2 Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you were dead in the water.
I installed Slackware in the fall of 1994. I only had about 10 blank floppies so I would go to the computer lab and download the "A" base system, then wipe those, go back to the computer lab, download and install the "AP" application set, and so on for the development tools, X Windows System, and more. It took most of the weekend but it was amazing having a Unix system on my Pentium 90.
I had a brand new IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM which was not supported yet. About 6 months later it was and I started ordering the multi CD set from Walnut Creek cdrom.com every 6 months or so to get new distributions.
I was actually able to dual-boot and install from hard disk when I installed slackware in .. August 95? But, zmodem on a 14.4k modem meant each download took 12-13 minutes, so it was an entire weekend of just walking around the house with a kitchen timer and kicking off a new 'disk' each time it buzzed.
My friend got Settlers 2 on CD for his birthday. My computer didn’t have a CD drive.
Solution? Copy the installed game from his computer onto 30 floppy disks. Carefully reconstruct the installation on my computer.
It worked.
I remember installing windows 95 from floppy disk. It was only 13 disks but with MSDOS it would go up to 16. Some drivers here and there, 20+ disk installation would take hours.
In the early 1990s you could get Linux distributions on floppy (if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive yet) -- I remember one that had over 30 disks.
It's not less painful to install and set up an IRIX system with a couple dozen CDs.. (except that CDs didn't often fail to read). In fact it was so tiring that after the first couple of times I would always just copy the CDs to a disk on another computer and point the installation there, one directory at the time (fortunately SGI machines could NFS-mount filesystems from the monitor)
Slackware yes, OS/2 Warp I had the good fortune to only get on CD.
But those Mac System 6 disks…
Bonus points for downloading all those slackware floppies over a 14.4 modem.
> hearing that disk drive kurchunking
That's the best onomatopoeia I've seen in a while, and it brings the feeling of instant dread
Windows 10 Floppy Install...
Please Insert Disk 1 of 4166
You'd probably only need a third of that if you opt to not install any of the .net/UWP stuff though.
I remember helping out at school to install Lotus Smartsuite on a room full of PCs from floppies. The box was about 2 foot long. We had to relay them from one PC to the next so we could install them all roughly at the same time.
SCO Xenix was every bit as bad, and yes, I did the Slackware "download floppy images, make a stack of floppies, spend hours installing" dance as well. I remember being very relieved by the rise of CD-ROM and CD-R.
Buffer overflows when burning CDs was a big pain too.
I am not sure if those early CD writers even had buffers - but they were so expensive back then, that I didnt have one.
There was "that one guy" who had it and was supplying pirated stuff for whole neighborhood.
ISTR a couple of boot floppies was enough to get the attached Wangtek drive spinning so you could bootstrap a DC600 tape and load from there.
I don't recall if this was an official implementation or something we cooked up.
Oh yes, and there was the floppy way too.
It was a great feeling when we were able to bootstrap a CDROM drive.
I installed SCO Unix from 96 floppy disks dozens of times.
Recent and related:
Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32663995 - Aug 2022 (130 comments)
Less recent and related:
Ask HN: Why is there still a market for floppy disks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31658880 - June 2022 (12 comments)
Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064316 - Nov 2021 (12 comments)
I've read an article about Japanese policeman that've lost a floppy disks with personal data of some Japanese men, it was a story from this January.
This data leak, due to obscurity and the volume was more of a joke in my country, than a serious news. I do however wonder, what it was back in the day? I've never heard of any large scale data leaks involving floppy disks, perhaps I'm too young.
At a previous job, I worked at a textbook wholesaler. The industry overall is dying. They were a small player, but they were outrageously profitable. They realize that the good times won't last and they'll never grow into a billion dollar company, but the party isn't over yet.
Sometimes it's better to be the last person selling stage coaches than the tenth person selling cars.
In the money quote, he puts it quite eloquently:
Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-drive with an IDE floppy drive interface. A quick Google search revealed that someone already builds this!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwL65rtjuBQ
The most common/cheap solution is the Gotek floppy drive, easily found on Aliexpress or eBay, and with the FlashFloppy firmware [1] for expanding the capabilities of the hardware.
Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :)
[1] https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
> Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :)
Well, LS-120 were available in ATAPI, which is at least IDE adjacent, if you don't want to call it IDE.
Iomega’s stuff was also available in SCSI and USB (and possibly firewire) variants, but probably not on industrial machinery, and it’s hardly a prototypical floppy… we’re stretching definitions here
There is the "Woz" file format for the apple2 (and others). It takes a disk image (flux?) and makes the file bootable in some emulators.
https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/
the images it creates are sometimes stunning and interesting depending on copy protection.
https://archive.org/details/ApplesauceImages/Age%20of%20Adve...
You can get floppy emulators on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.ca/Emulator-SFR1M44-U100-Install-Industri...
I worked for a network storage company that originally wanted to call themselves "Arraid" but discovered a small company already using that name, making replacement flash-based disk/floppy/tape drives for old mainframes and minis. Looks like they're still around in case you need something for your PDP-11!
https://www.arraid.com/
Yeah, this kind of thing is not exactly uncommon in the retrocomputing scene, though it's often an SD card rather than a USB drive.
We had an information system that we used in the 2008-2011 timeframe on our military deployments that only used 3.5" floppies for data offload. Since we wrote our enormously long post-mission reports during each actual mission and had no desire to spend hours following the mission re-writing them from scratch, the week prior to deployment was always filled with folks fanning out to every office supply store we could find in a desperate search for any remaining boxes of disks so we had a sufficient stock to use 2-3 disks per mission and allow for the inevitable disk failures/attrition. It was tough finding them then, can't imagine trying to find them now!
The money quote from the article - and it is so well put - is :
"Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me."
My floppy story is: In the late 90s 3.5" floppies were ubiquitous and the Zip disk was the new kid on the block. 5.25" was a thing of the past and I'd never ever seen a 8" floppy and I did not expect to see one either.
This was until I interned at a Siemens research lab where they still had 8" floppies. Why? Because the room-sized, several floors below ground housed electron microscopes used them.
Let’s not give the nuclear weapons silos any ideas (I think they just got off 5.25”)
In a no doubt soon to be discovered manuscript of Journey to the Center of the Earth maybe 16” floppies will be mentioned.
I’m a bit surprised he doesn’t deal in Zip drive disks as well.
There is a funny story that my Computer Science teacher used to tell. One day a friend called him saying his floppy drive was not working as expected. He went to check and found two floppy disk crushed inside the floppy drive. So my prof asked his friend why have pushed two floppy in the drive, broking everything. He answered: "computer said to insert disk 2, I have done something wrong?"
Floppy disks (or diskettes, as they are called in Spanish) were very important for my formation when I was a kid. I had a computer but I hadn't internet access at home (very expensive for my family), so I was going to the computer café two blocks away and I downloaded files into the diskette that then I was able to check at home. That's how I downloaded tutoriales (File > Save page as...) and a lot of stuff.
Things became better when I had 2 or 3 diskettes and I was able to download bigger files using Hacha, a free software to split large files. Of course, nothing was worse than arriving home and one of them failing.
As someone said in another comment, I miss the sound and the "physicality" of them. It reminds me of a time when you were offline by default, and you had to go online. Now it is, sadly, the other way around.
I remember actually exchanging floppy disks containing images (made in Paint, of course) with my friends via snail mail. It was the original version of Snapchat. Horrible latency.
Were some of them also, hrm, explicit in nature?
Lol, no, I was way too young then! They were probably pictures of Power Rangers or Super Mario I drew, lmao.
By the time I was of that age, we had the wonders of dial up internet and semi-scrambled adult TV channels.
:')
For what it's worth, BBS porn was a thing, as was sharing it on floppies.
Same story. I guess it's pretty common.
What's odd is I used DD floppies, not HD floppies, because my only computer at home was an Amiga.
About five or six years ago there was a single packet of 5.25 inch floppy discs for sale in the window of a strange shop near my office in London.
It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed to come in or go out.
I walked past the shop every lunchtime and grew increasingly obsessed with this box of discs, the first I'd seen for sale for maybe twenty years. Where had it come from? Why was it in the window? Who was going to buy it?
Eventually I decided that I'd have to buy them myself, just so I could stop thinking about it.
But the next time I walked past the shop, the discs were gone!
Funny, I did the same thing with a 5-pack of Zip disks a couple years ago. I ended up buying them though, for a couple bucks. Who else would have? I still have them sitting on my desk, keep telling myself I'll finish rebuilding the old tower PC I picked up at a thrift store, and I'll buy a Zip drive for it.
I used to have a Zip drive in my PC in high school -- I remember saving 3ds Max files to it when I was first learning to model. And Deadlock, a turn-based strategy game that came with some version of Windows, I copied it onto a Zip disk and distributed it to some friends. But as I remember they were too busy with Kingdom Under Fire and Brood War.
Sounds like https://wiki.lspace.org/Wandering_Shop
Ah, wandering shops. Maybe 25 years ago I was walking the streets of Rome, as I had been doing for years on my days off. Maps were left behind years before - didn't need them. That day I was on the Tevere side of the Tiber (well, that would sound strange in Italian..), anyway, I suddenly came across a shop I had never seen before, or at least not noticed. In the window they displayed the most fantastic steam-punk coffee machine, with pipes going everywhere, but not that big either. I instantly wanted it. But it was a Sunday and the shop was closed so I decided to call it a day. It was just a short straight walk from the shop to a major intersection near the river, and then to a bridge and eventually to where I was going.
So I went back as soon as I could a few days later, walked to that intersection and up that road, about a hundred meters.. and the shop was not there. There was nothing on that corner. I thought I was losing my mind, or at least I had managed to mess up something.. after that I started out from every bridge on the Tiber, walked to the nearby major intersection, and up whatever street in the right direction. Nothing.
I continued my search for years after that whenever I came back to Rome, but I never found the shop. At that time I didn't really want to buy the coffee machine anymore, I just wanted to solve the mystery.
Obviously (if I think logically) there's a natural explanation, but it still comes back to me now and then, all these years later. Back when I read that Pratchett book in your link, which went into details about how a Wandering Shop behaves, I suffered major déjà vu!
oh sure, The Shop in Go By Street http://fullonlinebook.com/poems/a-shop-in-go-by-street/ftpz....
Strange Stories fodder
I've used punch cards, paper tape, DECtapes, magtapes, cartridge tapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and Bluray disks.
I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance.
Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective.
Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too.
Today I use terabyte drives, and have a box of USB sticks. For inexplicable reasons, the terabyte drives USB sticks have no way to write on them. So I stick an Avery label on them and write on that.
I've been collecting photos of them all:
https://www.fileformat.info/media/a.htm
You need to add some mainframe and minicomputer media, like DECtape, etc.
Nice to meet another data hoarder :-)
I'm nostalgic about them but I don't want to use them due to the lack of reliability. If they were reliable, I'd love to use them.
Stashed away somewhere, I still have a couple of 8" floppy disks. The only time I ever used them was for a CS class that, for whatever reason, used IBM 9000s [0] running Xenix for coursework, and they were difficult to find even in 1986-87. The one and only place that had any was, naturally, Radio Shack, and they were Tandy-branded, no doubt intended for the TRS-80 Model II. Assuming bitrot hasn't set in, they likely still have Xenix filesystems on them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000
Earliest capture of this guy's original site:
https://web.archive.org/web/19980623131044/http://www.diskdu...
Earliest capture of his site on floppydisks.com:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030330102403/http://floppydisk...
Floppy duplication prices from these pages:
June '98: $0.59 @ 500
March '03: $0.39 @ 500
> Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable.
I remember a little operation run out of Topeka, Kansas in the 80's called "Budget Bytes" that sold floppies with Macintosh shareware on them. I mean I could have downloaded some of the stuff over FTP from the university but you still needed a floppy to copy them on to.
So fun, poring over the news-print catalog of disks they had available, deciding which ones to order.
I assumed it was a Real Business™ at the time but in hindsight it was no doubt some entrepreneur copying floppies in his garage. I wish I had been as entrepreneurial at the time.
I'm actually reading a book about these shareware businesses. It was quite profitable selling them for 4$-7$ and they were popular. They would start as one person and occasionaly grow into huge operations involving hundreds of employees.
What's the book?
Shareware Heroes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61272567-shareware-heroe...
Oh yeah, Richard Moss. Nice guy.
That's me. Hi John! Lovely to run into you here. You still at Apple?
I'd be happy to email you a PDF copy of the new book if you're interested.
No, I retired last Fall. Keeping busy here: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt
Sure, send me a PDF!
I'm still using floppy disks with my Yamaha PSR-630 workstation keyboard — you can arrange an entire song on that machine in no time. Plenty of highly acclaimed vintage music equipment — notably, Ensonique samplers — still use them too.
I got the floppy disks for my machine from Microsoft's supply room when I was an intern there in 2014. At the time, there were still some niche uses for floppies in the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., RAID drivers for Windows XP could only be loaded from a floppy on install, IIRC), but that was on the way out too — so I grabbed half a dozen disks from a pile.
Remarkably, they are still perfectly usable.
The major problem I have with them is that the floppy disk drive on the keyboard is slightly out of alignment. Which means that the only way to read the floopies is to use that specific disk drive.
I've been meaning to replace the drive for years, but never really got to it. I've also considered swapping it out for an SD card reader/USB drive (ones meant to replace floppy drives are readily available), but where's the charm in that?
I recently found an old backup 3.5" floppy from ≈1993 with some thesis material. I could read it without any problems on an old USB connected floppy drive (and as a bonus, compile the LaTeX with zero problems).
I was a bit surprised and had expected a bit of work.
One pretty amazing thing about floppy disks is that powerful full-featured software was written so efficiently so as to fit on them. WordStar fit on a single side of a 5.25" Floppy, IIRC Lotus 1-2-3 did as well.
From the first sentence of TFA:
> Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.”
Why editorialize they HN title? He’s a guy! And “last man standing” is a set phrase. “Last person standing” is not.
>“Last person standing” is not.
Was not.
I had no problem reading the title, and didn't even notice anything unusual about it until reading this comment.
Language changes. Complaining about it won't change it back.
It’s about 1/30 as common according to google. And hilariously, this very article is the second hit on google for the phrase.
Yeah, language changes. Organically. Not because of silly, clunky usage like this.
And who is the arbiter of language that decides which usage is silly and clunky?
Usage is usage. What is clunky and silly is complaining against language that is perfectly clear and understandable, whatever words it uses.
I guess the people who prefer the original by a factor of 30-1 are the arbiters.
That's some circular logic right here, mate.
Editorialization serves a valuable role of making writing better. IMO, language that is more inclusive is better than language that is less inclusive. Keeping needlessly gendered phrases around simply because they're a "set phrase" doesn't serve any compelling interest.
Language evolves. You can fight the ocean with a rake, or you can be supportive of changes that make language better for your friends and neighbors.
I have no problem with calling a waitress a server or whatever, but when I clicked on this title I did spend some time thinking about the lost euphoniousness and wondering whether there is a special masculine quality to "last man standing". It sounds like it might come from some knockdown game that women would not play. Google says boxing.
There is nothing generic in the sentence "last man standing". It's referring to one person, who is, in this case, a man.
The argument, which at least makes sense, is that a "Chairman", even if he's male, should be a "Chairperson" because the office is not male, and therefore the title shouldn't be gendered.
That just doesn't apply here. "A Chairperson" makes sense, "a last man standing" doesn't.
"Last person standing" is also something you could say, but the title didn't, and there is no cause to 'correct' it, because it isn't wrong.
In what way is this better? We’re referring to a specific man. It’s ok to call him a man.
Over-inclusivity serves no purpose in this situation. It makes the language clunky and needlessly unspecific.
Does it mean:
1. This is the last man standing, but there are women still standing. In which case there are still persons providing this service and it is not newsworthy.
2. This is a legacy saying from a period where only men could be involved in business enterprises. There may have been women running such businesses, but they are not worthy of record.
If not 1, then the correct phrase is “last person standing”.
The issue is not whether the last person standing is male or female. The issue of “last X standing” is about all the Xs except the last one.
Honestly, I’d be fine just treating this (and similar) as skunked terms. Last man standing is gendered and old fashioned. Last person standing is clunky and weird.
Just find a different way of expressing the idea.
Last one standing.
> IMO, language that is more inclusive is better than language that is less inclusive.
Why say person then? Are you anti-other mammals? Not very inclusive is it!
'more inclusive' is not always better, because it's less specific and less exact.
“‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’”
Language has idioms and phrases, and over time these connect generations.
What's funny, economically, about this guy is that his investment in floppy disks made roughly a 10x return!
"Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars."
Reminds me of when I was at a thrift store and these used paperbacks were being sold used for triple the cover price that they sold for new in the 1950s.
The books are probably just inflation. People think a dollar per book is cheap, now. But cover prices in the fifties for paperbacks look to be 25 to 50 cents. (Source: A quick google).
Books with actual increases in value won't be at a thrift store, typically.
The medium I miss the most are Mini-Discs — They really were the sweet-spot in combining digital (albeit lossy-ish) with a tactile, analog experience. The pinnacle of mixtapes.
What I really miss about them is the recording technology and case meant they're really good for long-term storage.
I found "NIUB" (New In Unopened Box) floppies at home: 5"1/4 floppies, never used. I've got no idea: are they still as good as new even though they're something like 35 years old?
I found more than that: I found my "time capsule" C128 (safely stored for 30 years+, still working, non polluted by anything modern). I found a "copier" software (Fast Hack'Em II IIRC) still working and managed to use it to copy a still working copy of Commando (chiptune sountrack by Rob Hubbard, the god of SID music back in the days).
But I have no idea: are these NIUB floppies as good as new or do they decay as years passes by?
Completely depends on the make/model/manufacture date.
Older floppies are actually much better made than newer ones. Disks from 1994 or earlier tend to be better than those made after.
Many floppies are good for 30+ years.
As themagician says. Unless they're of a particularly notoriously bad brand.. I can't remember the name now but I'll recognize it when I see it. Can you see what brand it is?
Sometimes there are people that appear confused why you would do something yourself. "Just buy it" or "just use the cloud service". I think this quote sums up the situation perfectly.
''' At one point we did a gigantic deal with a US payroll company for which we needed to copy hundreds of thousands of disks. We sent the work out to a third party who did the duplication for us. That was okay, but expensive, and it took a lot of time. The quality also wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be. So the next time we decided to do the floppy duplication in-house and we got our own equipment. '''
I think he might have figured out the secret to happiness:
> "Me, I just like to get up in the morning, have people ask me questions, and try to solve problems. My business is a little bit of an adventure for me every day."
I work in the mentioned embroidery business and we have a decent collection of floppy disks and gear. roughly 300 disks with 40 in circulation being used. about 20 USB floppy drives for PC's and new machines to use disks still. its a handy medium for us. I have one of the local e-waste places collecting anything they get disk related for me , lot of cases which is ok , gotta keep the dust off of the disks so everyone's desk has one now .. we can switch to USB and we do use USB as well so its not like the end of the world when they finally go.
Splitting Big files with ARJ, recycling floppers from the magazines, downloading files over 56k computer room at school, putting them floppies, going back home to find out one is defect... That's how i installed my first Linux without any internet connection at home, a 6 months job!
ARJ... Now that is a blast from the past! Thank you. :)
I remember in college we were going back and forth between our dormitory and our computer lab with a bunch of FDs to copy the media files (mp3s and jpegs) we downloaded on the server overnight. Often one of the disk would have errors and had go back another time.
A few years back, at $work we found some old FDs with some interesting labels on them: "survey data 199x". It turns out there were some binary files from an ancient stats program and I spent a few days figuring out how to extract the data. Fun times
Great interview; really enjoyed this.
In the late 80s / early 90s, I had a home computer with 5.25” floppies. I remember at the mall around the holidays, Radio Shack would run a holiday animation on their Tandy computers to show them off. One in particular sticks out to me — an animation of a 3.5” “modern” floppy going into a shirt pocket and then an attempt at a 5.25” which resulted in a torn pocket, showing off the superior portability of the new, smaller disks. Does anyone else remember this?
Is it just me, or are there are a lot of these stories from that generation along the lines of
* I was doing this thing somewhat successfully
* Then someone asked me to jump into this software thing even if I had zero experience.
* Then we did X, Y and Z...
It seems rarer these days?
I found some floppy disks in my house from when I was a kid last year. I plugged them into a reader I had and they still worked. I didn't need them so I sold them on eBay and someone bought them and the reader.
“You won’t forget your assignment if you tack it onto the fridge with a magnet.”
Pro tip: floppy disks are extremely useful to observe solar eclipses. Still keep a box with a few floppies in my desk for this very purpose.
Anyone else old enough to remember the 8 inch floppies on TRS-80 Model II?
Heh how far we've come, it's incredible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II
I remember laughing out loud the first time I handled an 8-inch floppy. The very definition of a FLOPPY disk. It was a little disturbing. I was already in the era of the 5.25" double-sided floppy back then.
How desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read the multi-megabyte documentation.
No, I’m not old enough to remember 8” floppies but I watched Adrian’s Digital Basement’s repair of the TRS model-2 including restoring the 8” floppy drive, connecting it to 24V, using a adapter to hook it up to a PC to make a boot disk. [0] Unfortunately once Adrian got the Model-2 working and booted to TRS DOS he didn’t test any other software on the machine. My experience with Tandy machines was playing Burger Time off a cartridge as a kid, no 8” floppies.
[0] https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs
I was cleaning around a stack of DEC tapes at work a few weeks ago and found an 8 inch floppy. Having grown up with the 5 1/4" disks it was a bit surreal to hold the bigger one... almost felt like I'd shrunk a little!
The first laptop computer I used was a Bondwell 2 (running CP/M) which was one of the first to use a 3.5" floppy for storage. But I actually preferred the Epson PX-8 which had a micro cassette for storage instead of a floppy (too large). I wonder if there's still any market for micro-cassettes for digital storage anymore just as there is for floppies. (DAT was another tape storage format used in professional audio studio equipment but also used by some computers such as SGI.)
Part of the "joy/hell" of using floppies, the waiting to see if your data was ok. Example when you have ARJ/ZIP/RAR a 10+ disk "floppy collection" (pirate copy) of your favourite game from you friends from school.
You get home after school and dammit floppy number 7 has CRC error :/ sigh
It could take DAYS to copy a game, back then, between you friend forgetting for a day or two and having to redo big copies at least once :) All with the turnaround time of waiting one-school-day
#GoodTimes :)
The pirate copy of Dark Forces took ~41 disk. It was rather had to make it fit in a 120 MB hard drive...
The fact that this site keeps spawning eyes all over the place while you are inactive really creeped me out when I went back to the tab to continue reading after a while.
What a great interview! It's unusual that you read a business interview and find it this charming and interesting. I like the guy already.
«I once got a request from the Netherlands for half a million floppy disks»
I want to know (1) who are they, and (2) why do they need them?
A few weeks ago I actually watched a video with this same gentleman. The video itself is from 6 years ago but it was insightful and some of you may prefer that medium.
Link: https://youtu.be/z9tENHe19gk
I've read this here before, but will regurgitate it.
It's amazing that many software products still use the disc icon to represent saving. Many folks using computers now have never even seen one in person. To them it's the save icon, not a disc.
I still have some old hypercard stacks on floppy from third grade that I can't bear to throw away. Every time I come across the disks I remember how awesome it was to fire up the IIGS in computer lab and create the dumbest animations.
And by coincidence, an unopened, branded box of 10 x DS/HD 3.5" floppy disks arrived in the post for me today.
They will be used with a couple of Z80 systems I have constructed - when I build a floppy controller board!
I prob have 2 boxes, shrink wrapping intact... in my storage closet.
I have 2 boxes somewhere that I bought when Staples in the UK was closing down; they presumably found them right at the back of a shelf in the stores. 50p a box I think.
...oh and I dumped this lot a while back:
https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...
In the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), which I've kept.
About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate the folks who keep the door open to legacy technology. (…but meanwhile I'm still realllly curious what's on that disk!)
If it was HD then the data is probably gone. Or at least the floppy will have read issues. 720KB should do a bit better.
I have recovered data from a lot of old media, CCT tapes, floppies, 3.5" floppies - except that in practice it turned out that a) CCT ok. No problems. b) 8" floppies ok. No problems. c) 5.25" floppies (low density, high density) ok. No problems (except that for a while I didn't have a controller which could read a minority of them - they're FM, not MFM), d) 3.5" Not ok. All unreadable. All of them. And that was not due to the drive - I have lots of drives, including one I bought because it was calibrated. All of the media had been stored either in the same location or in a similar environment, but at this point I don't even bother trying those darn 3.5" floppies unless they're written recently. I'll just be a ton of read errors.
Get out a microscope and notepad and write down those bits
I've been buying from him for a decade plus for both my 8-bit Atari use and Win/DOS use, my last order was a couple of months ago - bought two of the used Dell drives and some more 3.5s from him.
The tiny storage and slow access time/speed are not something I'll miss. What I do miss is the security that they provided.
The serenity of having known good backups, that just work, is something that nobody under 50 is likely to ever experience. Because we had the ability to copy and write protect our software and data, we could easily make manage our security in a completely transparent manner.
You could take your little case of floppy disks and have your work environment up and running on any IBM compatible in no time flat.
> that just work
Eh. The reliability wasn't really great. We never knew if our data was still there.
“Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics.”
Well, I hope they don’t run out of space, or have a bad sector…
A lot of musicians still use sequencers and synthesizers that save patches on floppies. (Over time people have been replacing them with floppy-to-usb-drive adapters)
What was also funny was "floppy grammar" (at least in my time and locale)
Whenever you gave someone x amount of floppies to copy something for you (prob a game)... the usual grammar/conversation was "you can just copy over it" yet no such thing exists, you can't in 999/1000 cases "copy-over something" you first have to delete/format it then copy.
Always thought it was 'funny/weird' :)
That's just legacy of audiocassettes and VHS tapes, and later on, magnetic tape data storage used for popular home microcomputers. With those, you literally "copied over".
With floppies, you actually could do that as well, if you were copying floppies verbatim with e.g. DISKCOPY.
Yes, in the good ol' times I would have used a nifty little DOS program called Venus, that would simply copy the "whole disk" (a lot like dd but with a semi-graphical interface).
Of course the "real thing" was the Deluxe Option Board (some details about it and a bunch of the common copying utilities of the time here):
http://retro.icequake.net/dob/
For once, an article more interesting than the HN comments!
Copy II PC Option board, actual floppy notchers, and cleaning disks and diskettes are just some of the other floppy paraphernalia. Floppies have notoriously low reliability (unrecoverable reads) and painful transfer rates. ZIP disks were only slightly better. CDs and DVDs were far better and then USB thumb drives killed everything else with the then futuristic holy grail of solid state storage.
I have some old 5.25" floppies backed up with FastBack. If I can get the data transferred, anybody know how to decode the backup compression?
In 1990 I was the Exhibits Engineer at The Computer Museum in Boston (RIP). We were opening a new exhibit, the Walk-Through Computer, a giant, two-floor PC.
Of course, it had a giant floppy drive, and at my suggestion they marked it as a 2.88MB drive (just to be ahead of the curve):
https://youtu.be/CoxQLJkLq1c?t=407
That was an unexpected blast from the past, since I wrote the software he's talking about at his first software company.
11 years old me was afraid about putting some liquid paper on a floppy disk label to write my name could damage the computer.
At a similar age I did a "science project" to see if the big floppies or the small one were better at reading data after being stuck to a fridge with a magnet for a month, and similar with sticking them in a freezer.
Every single disk had zero errors.
You need a moving magnetic field to destroy the data unless you have a very very strong magnetic.
Yep, and temperature doesn't really have an effect on magnets (perhaps at very low or when the disk melts).
I do recall that most of the teachers and students thought it was "most surprising outcome" or something like that, from years of "if you put a magnet near your computer or disk it will eat the world" propaganda.
Old samplers/MIDI sequencers without SCSI interfaces do use floppy disks so I hoarded a hundred of them just in case (even though there is a system now that allows a floppy disk reader to be replaced by a USB thumb drive reader). They are getting quite expensive in Europe, not paying 5€ for a single HD disk...
As a person born in '95 I still remember floppy disks, it was probably the very first 'computer' thing that I've broken.
Heck, I still should have a pile of those stashed in the basement, maybe it's a good time to plug the reader to my PC, and dig through those?
This article was really well written, good reading!
Very happy to have not had to deal with a floppy that was done being able to be read in a very long time. I used to work at a campus computer lab and we would experience failures commonly while imaging machines. I do miss floppys but I am happy to see the extent that they are no longer critical.
For those interested, the authors organise a two day festival / book launch 16+17 Sept in Rotterdam, The Netherlands[0].
[0] https://v2.nl/events/floppy-totaal-floppy-disk-fever
Completely unrelated: I was impressed by this interview for being no-BS and interesting. It's such a rare occasion that I actually think to myself "ooh, I wonder if this site has more good articles like this."
Never heard of Eye on Design before, but glad it's on my radar, now (:
> How did your business initially come about? > > I started out as a tax lawyer in Washington, DC. I became involved with a software company in California that was doing unique tax calculations.
Ah, right, "unique tax calculations". I guess thats one of describing it. :)
floppydisk.com bought Athana a few years ago, and got the remainder of their stock. AFAIK Athana was one of the very last manufacturers of several media formats. I don't know if floppydisk.com ended up with any of their manufacturing capability, or if Athana even had any at the time of sale. Athana had stopped manufacturing at least some of their offerings (e.g. 5.25" hard sector) over a decade ago.
floppydisk.com didn't get them all though, we bought around 28,000 5.25" DSDD diskettes surplus:
https://i.imgur.com/f5jM4mO.jpg
The above pictured lot is where the diskettes for the boxed releases of Nox Archaist and Burger Becky's game came from.
I can't wait to bust out my collection of "PC Genius" floppy disks that I had growing up, and play them with my son in a few years. I haven't inserted a floppy disk in a reader in about 10-15 years, but secretly super excited to do it again!
One advantage of floppy disks, is that you could safely take a random disk, reformat it and reuse it.
Now, however, if you insert a random USB drive into your computer, you run a high risk that your computer will be pwned.
Not true! Floppies had viruses too. Even back in the 80's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)
He did claim "reformat", which tends to delete these viruses. Albeit to clarify you'd also need to clear the boot record, which is not something all DOS format tools would do.
Compare that to USB devices, which contain data that survives to all host-initiated methods of erasure and which may in fact not be storage devices at all; i.e. fake keyboard/mouse presses et al.
I think parent refers to the fact that if you insert a floppy disk and reformat it without running anything on it, it's safe.
This is not true for USB drives, as USB controllers can be programmed to re-insert a virus or fry the system at any time in the future.
Not true for floppies, either. To reformat the boot sector, include the /S switch.
FORMAT /S
Yeah, but they would not autorun anything. If you forgot them inserted and rebooted, however...
Michelangelo and similar viruses only activate when you boot from the disk it's on. Insert a disk with Michelangelo in a running system, then format the disk (make sure you overwrite the boot sector), all OK.
The operating systems of the time didn't have any autoplay functionality that could be exploited by viruses. I guess in theory viruses could have exploited things like buffer overflows in the OS code that reads the file allocation table or directories, but I've never heard of such a thing, and Michelangelo and similar boot viruses certainly were not that advanced.
Back in the 80's few machines had hard drives, and often only one floppy. So if you put your disk in the drive and fired up the machine then bang, you were infected.
Also, lots of machines with hard drives were configured to boot from floppy by default. Few floppies had working boot sectors, so most people never noticed. Until they put an infected disk into A:, turned on the computer and saw chaos ensue.
Yes, that's right, that's why I said to insert it in a running system.
There were plenty of Macintosh viruses that spread this way, such as the WDEF/MDEF/CDEF families.
> Infects the Desktop file used by the Finder. … Spread through sharing disks, as every Mac disk includes a Desktop file. It is not necessary to run a program to spread this virus; simply mounting the disk is enough for it to infect the Desktop file of every disk mounted on the Mac.
https://lowendmac.com/2015/classic-mac-os-viruses/
Autoplay is as at least as old as Windows 3.1. A file called "autoexec.bat" would be executed on mounting, IIRC (not a Windows-person myself).
Not at all. Autoplay is new to the win 95 shell. And the idea of "mounting" is absolutely alien to a DOS system which can't even tell when a disk is inserted or not on a device.
DOS' shell would run autoexec.bat when booting but only the one from the boot volume.
That's autorun.inf, not autoexec.bat.
I recall a few on my c64, back in the early 80s for sure.
That was the first thing that came to mind.
Maybe there would be a market for a "data USB port" which would filter away all other kinds of USB devices than storage devices.
Or you can just plug an SD card reader into the USB port, and then swapping cards works exactly like swapping floppies.
My local computer store sells 3.5 and 5.25 floppies. You can find them at the rear of the left side of the store on a shelf just above the one with the new in wrapper Zip disks.
ZIP drive was the bomb. I don't recall what it was, but there was a Gateway or something (maybe) with a built-in ZIP drive. The future, man.
At least until you heard the click of death, that is!
He says "recycle". Does that mean he disposes of them in a responsible manner. or that he resells them as "nearly new"?
I enjoyed reading this article. It's amazing to think about the number of machines in the industry that need on floppy disks :)
How about a floppy to USB/flash/SSD adapter. Do we need to make the physical thing still?
3.5" external usb drives are easy to find on amazon, etc. If anyone knows of a 5.25 (5 1/4) external usb drive, please tell me!
I still have thousands of old 5.25 floppies. I've transferred or tossed most of the 3.5, since I was able to get a drive for that.
Just be aware that the USB external drives are pre-coded for "PC" formats only, so you can't use those as a source for a generic floppy recover session. I.e. you can't expect to be able to ready anything from some other non-PC brand of computer.
I mean just the other way: say you have an old mainframe in production and you need to clone a floppy, clone it to a more modern medium then use an adaptor.
What coincidence, I just found some old floppy disks of mine, and bought a vintage HP drive as per this guide to connect to my modern machines. Hopefully it works:
https://www.howtogeek.com/669331/how-to-read-a-floppy-disk-o...
I have not used a floppy in maybe 20 years but this is awesome. More power to him!
The first time I installed Linux was from 4 (yes really) 3.5" floppies.
None of the disks he sells are the 5.25” floppy ones.
In the article he says he has all manor of disks available if you contact them.
They're there, you just have move your mouse pointer to the red "FLOPPY DISKS" at the left, and you see more options, the first one '5.25" & 8" DISKS'
Keep at least one for Tomsrtbt!
I fondly recall when my friend became the first kid in our neighborhood to get cable internet instead of dialup. I biked over to his house with a backpack full of 3.5" floppies and spent hours filling them up with games.
It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk; same for the total download size of a fairly barebones website. Nostalgia!
> It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk
… and the full decompressed version of that image might not have fit into your computer's memory at that time, either.
For quite a while, floppy disks exceeded the system memory by at least one order of magnitude.
It will fit if you use a Sony Mavica with the floppy drive built in.
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I get nothing but a little eye in the center of the screen, blinking. It is cute but does not contain the promised information.
Reloading with the adblockers off gets the story. I hate this world.
I use ublock origin on firefox and I could read the story?
I have adblocking on all the time and it looks fine to me.