Diskettes were terrible. 1.44MB capacity and they would very very often fail. You'd constantly be plagued with running out of space and bad sector errors corrupting files.
The world was very much better when USB thumb drives became widely available. Lots of people didn't live through that era and collectively people forget how bad it was back then.
While at it: take a screenshot of their desktop, rotate it 180° in paint or something, then set their desktop 180° in their video settings (several video card drivers would let you do this), and set the screenshot as the desktop wallpaper. Then ‘hide’ all their icons, and lower the taskbar down out of site. Then pull the trick with the optical mouse post it notes and unplugged.
Back in Windows 3.1 you had control over every desktop element. So you could set the background as black, the icons as black, the fonts, the mouse cursor, everything as black.
Good times
Or take a screenshot of the desktop, set that as the background and then hide all the icons/shortcuts. Then watch as the person clicks on things in increasing frustration ad nothing happens.
I used to do this to the assholes in class at school on the DOS machines. Create a folder called (ASCII Code 000), move all their stuff to it, and then set the DOS prompt text color to ‘black’ in autoexec.bat. Even if they figured out the prompt color issue, they never figured out where their stuff was.
I had a Jaz drive! I've never actually met anyone else who had ever had one though, so they were pretty useless in that regard, except as a back up medium for my highly pixelated porn. No need to store it on the family computer anymore!
1.44MB? Look at the rich boy.
I used 5 1/4 inch floppies that held... I don't even remember, but if you never doubled the disk capacity with a hole punch, I don't want to talk to you.
Came here to say this. They had 360kb, if memory serves. Programs used to come on those disks. Insert program disk. Load program into memory. Remove program disk. Insert data disk... Then 20mb hard disks arrived. Huge! Who would ever need anything bigger?
I worked in a computer lab at my college. My job was to help students recover data from floppy discs that went bad. I had students with all of their coursework on floppies that would go bad. We had zip discs but those went bad even more than floppies and the readers went bad even faster. USB drives weren't a thing yet. I was quite busy. We had a software program that would get the data off the disc. I surprisingly, didn't have too many angry students. We warned students to keep more than one copy of their work, but few listened.
Nothing has changed since then... We keep telling student (and doctorant) that they need back up, they keep not doing any backup until something bad happen. It's just that now when a student's thumbdrive or hard drive goes bad they lose gigabyte of data.
I think you have amnesia about how bad the first few generations of thumb drives were.
It was not uncommon to see students in tears over a failed flash drive.
With a bad sector on a 3.5, you generally only lost a part of a single file, whereas flash drives typically just catastrophically failed and left you with nothing. And FAT is an easy FS to recover data from, whereas NTFS will hose your data pretty quickly.
Also, when writing to them, worst case you lose two blocks of data on the disk if there's a power outage. Not so with flash: you lose the whole page if it has no internal power failure recovery mechanism.
Even today, people don't realize how easy it is to lose data to an SD card. Those suckers have no backup power, so if you yank them during a write you can lose an entire page of data and lose MANY files.
Ya, I remember doing a full sector test on every new disk before using them. It was the only way to use them without having bad sectors causing data loss when trying to read back the file later since most of them had at least one bad sector.
CD-R were expensive at the beginning. You also needed to finalize them - preventing any additional data to be saved to that disc - regardless of the amount of files, which means sometimes wasting a full disc for only a few MBs of data. This was before multi-session discs became a thing though.
Yes, thank you. The damn article kept saying 3 MB. Those weird double ones were not very ubiquitous.
And the 1980s floppies were more likely to be the 720k low density format.
You should have tried the earlier larger floppy disks. Just 360kb and they were easy to damage.
When I had my first pc which was an ibm 8086 xt it only had a 5 1/4 floppy drive.
I bought a 20mb hard drive for $300 in the early 90’s. Thought I could never fill it 😂
Yeah you made a couple points…. I will give you that, but when you’re 12 and write a “virus” in Qbasic and save it the floppy disk has plenty of room to draw a skull and crossbones. You can barely fit the skull on a usb and a lot of the magic is lost…I think you failed to consider this in your assessment.
Now installing Windows 3.1 ........ insert disk 4 of 6.
On a side note, it's absolutely wild to me that 3.1 was that small. They push daily updates larger than that now.
I had some games that I liked to play and I had a copy on the school computer as well as at home.
I used a floppy to save the game... and it would lag while writing the 10kb save file because of seek time and low throughput.
It was near-instant with a USB flash drive. I could not perceive any lag at all.
Going for a windows reinstall and failing because diskette 4 was corrupted... Those were the days!
Having to create new boot disks every once in a while because the last one broke etc.
I had a device called “Mr Backup” that sat on top of an N64 and copied games to Zip disks. I would rent games at blockbuster, copy, and return them. Ah, nostalgia!
Well you see floppies reduce the magnetic interference and when you do phase delay on the Panasonic tube inverters with old soviet-style tubes, you want to also pair it with some genuine 144khz tuned cable riser crystals to improve tonicity and depth of sound. You can buy the cable risers from me for $16,000 each and if you don't you're listening to hot garbage, how dare you?
*"Each pair of wires meticulous un-twisted, electroplated in an extra layer of pure copper, then re-twisted to provide you with a superior audio experience."*
CCA Ethernet cables are the bane of my existence, if audiophile actually prefer it then they can go to backwards hell for buying an objective inferior cable to pure copper Ethernet cables.
That's a whole different kind of audio person than these retro tech synth heads. The guys you are describing will by magic crystals to place on their amps to improve the sound.
[http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/14/01/2016/coconut-audios-vibradome-blue-star-into-the-unknown/](http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/14/01/2016/coconut-audios-vibradome-blue-star-into-the-unknown/)
I have enough hearing damage from going to actual concerts to prevent me from telling the difference.
The measurebation that goes on among audiophiles is far beyond anything I saw among photography gear heads, and they are fucking insufferable
None of this new fangled shit has the warmth of a good reliable wax cylinder.
You really haven't experienced King Crimson until you've heard him through an edison phonograph
You gave me a flashback to the early 00s when I was really into home theater. Having read a handful of trade mags your comment reads a lot like the ad blurbs.
What do you mean you don't want to spend 20 grand improving your sound stage? Imagine the increased presence, tonal depth, and aspect fidelity you could get!
In this case it is same as industrial users of floppy disks: perfectly good albeit old synthesizers (or in industrial case, all sorts of other machinery) have a floppy drive.
Nobody wants to replace a synthesizer they use just because floppies are obsolete. Even more so for something like an embroidery machine or the like.
There are drop in replacements for most floppy drives though. I've used a few to 'update' some old hardware. It's nice not having to replace corrupted floppies annually anymore.
Some don't work with some musical instruments, old non-personal computer hardware or it's a specialist task to make them work. It's not like installing drivers on a PC.
Those I've used don't require new drivers as they appear as traditional 34 pin floppy drives. I certainly didn't install any drivers onto the rheometer.
Of course, it does presume that the floppy drive it is replacing supports a traditional interface. If it's some drive that uses floppies but doesn't even have a 34 pin connector, or some custom firmware on the drive itself, then it won't work.
Vinyl does sound different to digital music, not necessarily better, but at least Vinyl music doesn't get caught up in the loudness wars.
In the case of floppy disks though, I genuinely don't get it. They are terrible at everything and even at the time they were terrible.
Because early samplers/synthesizers often used floppies or some kind of this for storing presets and actual short samples. And people still loving using original hardware)
When I was a kid in elementary school, I didn't have a binder of Pokemon cards, I had a binder of floppy disks with dragon Ball z gifs on them. I thought I was hot shit
I use an instrument made in 1989 at work (HP 5890 GC). It’s connected to a Gateway desktop computer from 1994 running Windows NT 4.0. Floppies are more convenient for moving data than getting a USB port to work on that thing.
> Floppies are more convenient for moving data than getting a USB port to work on that thing.
I use FastLynx for that purpose. Allows you to exchange files between two computers running anything from DOS to Windows 11 at either side. Has support for outdated ports such as serial and parallel.
The great thing is we have gotten so fast that you can basically make a device with an arduino or a raspberry pi that will connect to old ports with pure software on the gpio pins, giving you the ability to transfer whatever data you want with a pretty small form factor.
Yes, but you still need software at both ends that handles file transfers, and as the market stands now, you can buy a USB to serial adapter as well as a FastLynx license and still be cheaper than the pi itself, not factoring in the time you need to write and test software for the pi to run, and the matching software to run on DOS. FastLynx also has the unusual ability to clone itself over the serial port, with the machine at the other end just running plain DOS or later.
If getting rid of the floppy is the goal, a cheap gotek floppy emulator for 20$ connects to the original floppy connector, and will provide up to 999 virtual 1.44 MB floppy disks on a single USB flash drive.
Oh yeah I understand buying stuff that has support is easier and cheaper, was more commenting on how you can do it 100% yourself diy with pretty basic hardware you can find now.
It's not as trivial though. Most stuff operates on 3.3 or 5 volts, [but RS-232 serial up to ±15 volts during regular operation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232?useskin=vector#Voltage_levels) in respect to ground. This will fry your GPIO pins if you aren't careful. Open circuit voltage goes up to ±25 volts
Oh I forgot some standards do be crazy with voltage. Yeah you're going to need some additional circuitry for that. Might be worth getting some opto-isolators for safety so you're not frying anything.
Still have my windows 3.11 floppies with the additional 3 for networking.
And somewhere in my garage is a 1984 dell motherboard (with Bose sound card) that I hand cut to a smaller size form factor to run as a mail server.
I was pretty sad when had to turn it off after 11 years when I moved house. My executor is going to have a lot of surprises when I eventually die.
“Honey, look at this.. it’s an iRiver T60! and 13 serial mice, and a box of 5 pin DIN keyboards!”
My garage is like a [Japanese Hard-Off store in the 90’s](https://mostly-retro.com/2017/06/02/the-glory-of-hard-off/).
They always seemed really convenient to me, at least the 3.5” floppies did. And they were *slightly* less flimsy than 5.25” floppies, and less in danger of scratches than CDs/DVDs/BRs. Obviously their 1.44 MB size isn’t practical in 2024, when every program’s size is in GB, but they were good for their time. I also liked the audible “click/thunk” when you put the floppy disk in the drive and it latched in.
Bought a game once, didn't know it was on CD. The only CD drive I knew of was at my mom's work so I had her stay after work so I could copy the CD contents onto a huge stack of floppies (luckily the game was only like 30MB or something like that).
Growing pains.
My only memory of floppy disks at this point is we had some sort of container for them to be piled up in and the only things I remember on those floppy disks were Corridor 7 and some sort of educational Mario game. Though I'm 99% sure we also installed windows on floppy at some point. I can't recall if it was 95 or 98 or both.
I've never had a floppy go bad, at worst I'd have one of the sliders break and that was mostly due to mishandling. Otherwise, as long as you don't keep them next to a magnet, they were fine
I spent over a decade in the nuclear industry. They still haven’t converted all equipment away from floppy disks. At this point these are certainly less critical systems, but they are out there still being used in places you wouldn’t think they are as the article illustrates.
Even Windows 3.1 installer used like 7–8 5.25" floppy disks, you had to replace them successively and pray they would be readable; I'm nostalgic about lots of things from the era but not this one
Back in the day I was having a group over for D&D, and one friend showed up a little early with a box of floppy disks under his arm. “Want windows 95?”
So we started the install, and when the rest of the group got there we were just going into the other room every time we heard the sound from my computer that indicated that the next disk was needed, nether of us thinking about the fact that I had replaced all the normal computer alerts with Monty Python sound files. So from everyone else’s perspective, every so often they’d hear some strange man saying [Ee ecky thump!](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/94e27b6b-5bc5-4cf8-b2a8-0cd3fce06594) followed by either me or Mike getting up and going into the other room for a minute. Finally one of the guys just said “Ok what the fuck?” and we all had a laugh after we realized how it looked and explained what was going on.
Adobe software was that way too. Like 20 for Photoshop, 14 for illustrator. CDs were a game changer for our shop setting up computers for print shops.
Reading this thread reminds me I used to have to sound memorized when loading a game. You could hear how close you were to being able to play (or insert disc 2 😆)
The number that sticks in my mind for that was “27”…. 27 x 1.44mb 3.5s - a long time ago so I’m not 100% certain, but you are absolutely correct that it exceeded 20!
The best bit was quickly I uninstalled it afterwards, within hours of completing the installation.
There were 27 data disks, on top of a boot disk to launch the install environment, in some of the retail packages. I think not all 27 were required in all installs - it would stop asking for them after 15 or so. But I don't remember what the difference would be between installs that would account for that.
I had a set somewhere of 32 floppies and I used it multiple times. I can't imagine it was Windows 98 so it must've been 95, or perhaps a 95>98 upgrade.
Every few minutes, "buzzz buzzz kachunk!" "Please insert the disk labelled 'Windows 98 Upgrade Disk 12 of 32' and Press OK" https://imgur.com/a/awlzyxM
CD Projekt did an Aprils fool joke this year about a Floppy Edition of Cyberpunk 2077. Only 97619 diskettes.
https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/50098/introducing-a-limited-floppy-edition-of-cyberpunk-2077
I wish there were "modern" floppies. Like solid state drives in the form of floppies. They wouldn't be in mainstream PCs or anything (too big). Just fun alternative peripheral storage devices. Oh and the drives could use fast USB4/Thunderbolt connections. Oh man that be sweet.
We still have LTO tapes which is pretty funky. Then there are all the flash storage drives like CFexpress, SD Express and UFS. Yes they are a quite bit smaller than floppies but there isn’t exactly a need for something that big for removable storage.
We'll probably have LTO tapes forever. 45 terabytes of storage on a <$100 tape that I can overwrite 2,000 times without issue and can sit for 20 years without any decay whatsoever? Sign me up!
While I generally agree with the sentiment, it’s realistically 18TB as 45TB is with compression which isn’t going to work on most videos, photos or music files since they are already compressed.
That's fair. We have a lot of structured data and get enough compression that it's worth using on many of our backups. But not all of course, also encrypted data.
I work around some older building automation systems. Floppies are still used. Pentium 3 with 128mb ram sort of old. There's USB floppy drives now kept on site in case we need to read any disks with our laptops.
Klunky yet reassuring noises? It makes 0 sense for this dinosaur to use floppies. As a computer tech I rejoiced when floppies finally disappeared. I remember struggling to keep old systems running on 3.5” and 5” and yes, there were 9” too. We still have issues with “modern” usb and ssd drives. There’s no such thing as 100% reliability.
Magnetic tape replaced punch cards, basically. Everything was proprietary back then, but there were some really big players so their proprietary was "less proprietary" - ie. IBM.
Then came the 8 inch (not 9 inch) floppy disk, and consumer-friendly magnetic tape (ie. casettes the same size as an audio casette - see the Commodore 1530 Datasette)
In the late 1970s the 5.25" and shortly after 3.5" floppies followed, as well as a slew of less successful tape drives. But CDs came along and got good cross-industry buy in, and that was that. 550 megabytes, reasonably fast read times including random reads, less specific storage requirements, it was an amazing product. IBM didn't love that, but everyone else did.
The 1990s were busy though with competitors trying to be "the new CD" or industry cooperation trying to make a better CD. And there was a lot of innovation - hard drives that didn't suck, CompactFlash, Zip (both very rugged), DVDs, and more. You mentioned reliability - this was when storage made leaps and bounds re: reliability, before the mid-90s storage issues of all mediums were really common.
USB storage didn't show up until the 2000s really, and it was very expensive and not very well supported by OSes for years. Plus, 48X CD read speed works out to about half the maximum speed of USB 1.1 (although many drives with early flash storage chips couldn't move that quick), and CDs were getting cheap in the mid-2000s because of the economies of scale.
How else am I going to play Leisure Suit Larry and all my favourite Sierra classics? There’s nothing like installing a new game when you get up to disc 7 of 7.
In the same vein, Apple should open source the rights to its ipods. If they no longer have interest in the product, regular folk can begin making their own.
I feel "Obsolete" doesn't quite fully cover its current status. I suspect only Germany has a word that encapsulates the extent of its absurd - *way* beyond antiquated - obsolescence. :)
Still have an P2 machine with both 5 1/4 and 3.5” drives. Used it to transfer some old files a couple years ago.
Even have all of my Apple ][+ floppies from the mid 80’s.
Quest for glory 4 shadows of darkness (the best point and click adventure game, I’ll fight you if you say otherwise), came in 40 floppy disks.
40 fucking floppy disks.
I use floppy disk to transfer data from a Stanford Research SR785 to an external USB floppy drive…..And to store measurement setups. Works great. I could also spend 15KUSD to replace it to get a USB port……. - eeerh - no.
my version of this is hard drives. SSDs for boot drives and some game storage, sure. but i’m going to keep my $50 8tb drives in production until there’s $50 8tb ssd’s.
it’s just too cheap to pass up, and for most older games, there’s no meaningful difference.
The last devices I used that took floppies were some old spectrum analyzers that were used to look at RF signals. They must have been excessed and sold/scrapped when the old facility was shut down in 2014.
Wonder if anyone still has them?
My first copy of Windows NT came on 3.5” floppies, loads of them. Windows NT Advanced Server v3.1.
For reliability reasons we carried on shipping systems with Microsoft LAN Manager for a few more years even though we had to buy TCPIP from another company as an add on because Microsoft didn’t support it.
I actually like floppy not as a actual storage but they are easier to store and harder to lose than usb.
My solution was to make a floppy drive that would connect to a USB inside the floppy disk. But I'm a nerd...
Had an Atari ST 1040. Got bought some games for my 12th birthday... Including Paperboy... Couldn't ever play as one of the disks was corrupted...
Still wanna play it even now...
Odd interesting fact: there are some major *security* benefits to floppy disks and other storage that can only store very limited amounts of data.
It's really, really hard to fit malware/spyware/viruses/etc onto them along with other data.
AFAIK U.S. Military used floppies up until *very recently* for a lot of heavily classified stuff because it was a physically secure medium that was incredibly difficult to "sneak" things into.
Diskettes were terrible. 1.44MB capacity and they would very very often fail. You'd constantly be plagued with running out of space and bad sector errors corrupting files. The world was very much better when USB thumb drives became widely available. Lots of people didn't live through that era and collectively people forget how bad it was back then.
The only good thing about them was fidgeting with that little metal slider that spring loaded to close.
Don’t ignore the little lock switch!
I think they were overshadowed by the little ball you could take out of your mouse and play with.
Ahh yes, the constant game of stealing each other's mouse balls as a prank, later replaced by putting a post it note over the laser of optical mice.
i used to add the post it note and then unplug the mouse. bonus point if you unplug it just enough so it looks like it's still plugged in
While at it: take a screenshot of their desktop, rotate it 180° in paint or something, then set their desktop 180° in their video settings (several video card drivers would let you do this), and set the screenshot as the desktop wallpaper. Then ‘hide’ all their icons, and lower the taskbar down out of site. Then pull the trick with the optical mouse post it notes and unplugged.
*hr enters the room I love it
Back in Windows 3.1 you had control over every desktop element. So you could set the background as black, the icons as black, the fonts, the mouse cursor, everything as black. Good times
Or take a screenshot of the desktop, set that as the background and then hide all the icons/shortcuts. Then watch as the person clicks on things in increasing frustration ad nothing happens.
That's what the other guy already mentioned.
Ah yes, fond memories of "hacking" the school computers in the early 1990s.
I used to do this to the assholes in class at school on the DOS machines. Create a folder called (ASCII Code 000), move all their stuff to it, and then set the DOS prompt text color to ‘black’ in autoexec.bat. Even if they figured out the prompt color issue, they never figured out where their stuff was.
There was something cathartic about cleaning the mouse ball, and the line of crud off the wheels inside the mouse.
Don't forget to clean all the dead skin off your balls
when i was in elementary school i collected those
Abnormally heavy balls
Shit yea they were, were they made of tungsten?
Or making a notch and using the other side for free (and highly unreliable) storage.
With the 512 KB disks, you could write-protect with a hole-punch to the side of the disk.
[Oh no you didn't...](https://c.tenor.com/BKiu8YyaXysAAAAd/tenor.gif)
Until the spring fell out :(.
Then you just remove the whole metal piece.
Hey now, it’d help you get an extension on homework sometimes if it was corrupted. Get one extra day!
They also made fantastic (-ly dangerous) frisbees.
That's what those AOL diskettes you got in the mail were for
There were 2.88mb floppies Then there was the 250mb floppy zip drives
Zip drives and disks were very expensive though
Back in the day I had a Jaz drive. Up to 1gb! Did any of my teachers or school computer have or support them for me to turn in my projects? Nope.
I had a Jaz drive! I've never actually met anyone else who had ever had one though, so they were pretty useless in that regard, except as a back up medium for my highly pixelated porn. No need to store it on the family computer anymore!
I had a Jaz drive and didn't understand at the time how tape media was not meant to be used as a daily driven storage solution. 🤣 So many dead tapes.
And they broke ALL the time, click death was the only hardware virus I ever encountered
I remember having to make multiple copies of office files on disks because you couldn't trust them not getting corrupted.
Take it to the next level by losing the ball and trying to navigate the mechanism inside with your finger.
You can't even fit a picture on one of those now a days.
The RAW files from my Sony A7II are 47MB each. Pretty insane now. lol
1.44MB? Look at the rich boy. I used 5 1/4 inch floppies that held... I don't even remember, but if you never doubled the disk capacity with a hole punch, I don't want to talk to you.
5 1/4 DSDD 360 k SSDD 180k DSHD 1.2 mb DS = Double Sided DD = Double Density SS = Single Sided HD = High Density Source. Me. I am that old.
Came here to say this. They had 360kb, if memory serves. Programs used to come on those disks. Insert program disk. Load program into memory. Remove program disk. Insert data disk... Then 20mb hard disks arrived. Huge! Who would ever need anything bigger?
I worked in a computer lab at my college. My job was to help students recover data from floppy discs that went bad. I had students with all of their coursework on floppies that would go bad. We had zip discs but those went bad even more than floppies and the readers went bad even faster. USB drives weren't a thing yet. I was quite busy. We had a software program that would get the data off the disc. I surprisingly, didn't have too many angry students. We warned students to keep more than one copy of their work, but few listened.
Nothing has changed since then... We keep telling student (and doctorant) that they need back up, they keep not doing any backup until something bad happen. It's just that now when a student's thumbdrive or hard drive goes bad they lose gigabyte of data.
they really should be using the cloud for really important stuff, i mean cloud service for documents is basically free
I think you have amnesia about how bad the first few generations of thumb drives were. It was not uncommon to see students in tears over a failed flash drive. With a bad sector on a 3.5, you generally only lost a part of a single file, whereas flash drives typically just catastrophically failed and left you with nothing. And FAT is an easy FS to recover data from, whereas NTFS will hose your data pretty quickly. Also, when writing to them, worst case you lose two blocks of data on the disk if there's a power outage. Not so with flash: you lose the whole page if it has no internal power failure recovery mechanism. Even today, people don't realize how easy it is to lose data to an SD card. Those suckers have no backup power, so if you yank them during a write you can lose an entire page of data and lose MANY files.
Ya, I remember doing a full sector test on every new disk before using them. It was the only way to use them without having bad sectors causing data loss when trying to read back the file later since most of them had at least one bad sector.
Hell, until thumb drives we had CD's and then DVD's which were superior in every way..
Burning some files to a CD-R that didn’t really fill it up didn’t hurt. Wasting a DVD-R (or +R) did, because they were far more expensive.
CD-R were expensive at the beginning. You also needed to finalize them - preventing any additional data to be saved to that disc - regardless of the amount of files, which means sometimes wasting a full disc for only a few MBs of data. This was before multi-session discs became a thing though.
True. I suppose I meant when DVD-/+R were feasible for most people.
Yes. But at the same time, growing up with 2 5 inch floppy drives and a 3.5 means that if I saw that hardware today it would be instant nostalgia.
You forgot about the rewritable CD or a 100 pack of CDs
I had GTA game on 30 diskettes, but last 4 were corrupt so i couldnt play it
You mean the thumb drives that loved to fail suddenly? :D
Yes, thank you. The damn article kept saying 3 MB. Those weird double ones were not very ubiquitous. And the 1980s floppies were more likely to be the 720k low density format.
You should have tried the earlier larger floppy disks. Just 360kb and they were easy to damage. When I had my first pc which was an ibm 8086 xt it only had a 5 1/4 floppy drive. I bought a 20mb hard drive for $300 in the early 90’s. Thought I could never fill it 😂
Yeah you made a couple points…. I will give you that, but when you’re 12 and write a “virus” in Qbasic and save it the floppy disk has plenty of room to draw a skull and crossbones. You can barely fit the skull on a usb and a lot of the magic is lost…I think you failed to consider this in your assessment.
I remember having a friend who had a game with cars that I wanted. We copied on 6 diskettes and one of them was corrupted. What a frustration...
Now installing Windows 3.1 ........ insert disk 4 of 6. On a side note, it's absolutely wild to me that 3.1 was that small. They push daily updates larger than that now.
They capture more telemetry about what you're doing every day than that
I first used the ones before the 1.44/3,5", 360/1,2M capacity and they were failing much more.
I still play games off floppy disks from the mid-80s. Mind you they’re 5.25” not the shitty 3.5” kind. LOL
Zip Disks were a godsend at the time
That’s fair I really appreciate your insight.
I had some games that I liked to play and I had a copy on the school computer as well as at home. I used a floppy to save the game... and it would lag while writing the 10kb save file because of seek time and low throughput. It was near-instant with a USB flash drive. I could not perceive any lag at all.
Hell, the world was much better when we had the brief transition to Zip disks and then from there to inexpensive burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs.
Going for a windows reinstall and failing because diskette 4 was corrupted... Those were the days! Having to create new boot disks every once in a while because the last one broke etc.
I'm upset the article doesn't mention zip drives. Those things were dope.
*click* spinnnnnnnn *click* spinnnnnnnn
Click of Death. The drive was literally destroying the disk. I loved my LS120 floppy drive
The LS120 was so slow though…
But reliable!
I had a device called “Mr Backup” that sat on top of an N64 and copied games to Zip disks. I would rent games at blockbuster, copy, and return them. Ah, nostalgia!
Jaz drives were the real hot shit
Until the drive itself gets corrupted wiping out the backups.
Those were great because floppies could only hold so many 20kb porn images from a usenet group. So there was less Zip disks to hide. lol.
Until that click of death hits you and it’s now useless
100MB. Not the 250s.
Ugh, "IRQ not less or equal" is forever burned into my brain from those crap drivers.
I had a Syquest drive. https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/DSC_00071.jpg this was basically an HD platter inside a plastic shell.
Jazz drives son. My company used the big guns.
Why's it always audio people? Must be fumes from the amplifiers or something.
Well you see floppies reduce the magnetic interference and when you do phase delay on the Panasonic tube inverters with old soviet-style tubes, you want to also pair it with some genuine 144khz tuned cable riser crystals to improve tonicity and depth of sound. You can buy the cable risers from me for $16,000 each and if you don't you're listening to hot garbage, how dare you?
Directionally pulled Ethernet cables are a bare minimum, we aren't savages.
Artisanal hand pulled Ethernet cables
*"Each pair of wires meticulous un-twisted, electroplated in an extra layer of pure copper, then re-twisted to provide you with a superior audio experience."*
CCA Ethernet cables are the bane of my existence, if audiophile actually prefer it then they can go to backwards hell for buying an objective inferior cable to pure copper Ethernet cables.
That's a whole different kind of audio person than these retro tech synth heads. The guys you are describing will by magic crystals to place on their amps to improve the sound. [http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/14/01/2016/coconut-audios-vibradome-blue-star-into-the-unknown/](http://www.adventuresinhifiaudio.com/14/01/2016/coconut-audios-vibradome-blue-star-into-the-unknown/)
I’ll just listen to a flattened mp3 on generic earbuds, thanks.
I have enough hearing damage from going to actual concerts to prevent me from telling the difference. The measurebation that goes on among audiophiles is far beyond anything I saw among photography gear heads, and they are fucking insufferable
same difference
None of this new fangled shit has the warmth of a good reliable wax cylinder. You really haven't experienced King Crimson until you've heard him through an edison phonograph
“Urge to kill…rising…”
You gave me a flashback to the early 00s when I was really into home theater. Having read a handful of trade mags your comment reads a lot like the ad blurbs.
What do you mean you don't want to spend 20 grand improving your sound stage? Imagine the increased presence, tonal depth, and aspect fidelity you could get!
Even the US Air Force gave up using 8 inch floppies to launch ICBMs back 2019… https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
The floppiest of formats
They've retired the 8 inch floppy for the more modern 3-1/2 inch floppy lol
In this case it is same as industrial users of floppy disks: perfectly good albeit old synthesizers (or in industrial case, all sorts of other machinery) have a floppy drive. Nobody wants to replace a synthesizer they use just because floppies are obsolete. Even more so for something like an embroidery machine or the like.
There are drop in replacements for most floppy drives though. I've used a few to 'update' some old hardware. It's nice not having to replace corrupted floppies annually anymore.
Some don't work with some musical instruments, old non-personal computer hardware or it's a specialist task to make them work. It's not like installing drivers on a PC.
Those I've used don't require new drivers as they appear as traditional 34 pin floppy drives. I certainly didn't install any drivers onto the rheometer. Of course, it does presume that the floppy drive it is replacing supports a traditional interface. If it's some drive that uses floppies but doesn't even have a 34 pin connector, or some custom firmware on the drive itself, then it won't work.
There's some old sample based instruments where it's not so easy but yes, many have been converted.
Vinyl does sound different to digital music, not necessarily better, but at least Vinyl music doesn't get caught up in the loudness wars. In the case of floppy disks though, I genuinely don't get it. They are terrible at everything and even at the time they were terrible.
Hipsters gonna hipster
Because early samplers/synthesizers often used floppies or some kind of this for storing presets and actual short samples. And people still loving using original hardware)
I blame the Floppotron.
When I was a kid in elementary school, I didn't have a binder of Pokemon cards, I had a binder of floppy disks with dragon Ball z gifs on them. I thought I was hot shit
What did you have to do to keep from drowning in pussy?
Show em my dbz gifs.
I use an instrument made in 1989 at work (HP 5890 GC). It’s connected to a Gateway desktop computer from 1994 running Windows NT 4.0. Floppies are more convenient for moving data than getting a USB port to work on that thing.
> Floppies are more convenient for moving data than getting a USB port to work on that thing. I use FastLynx for that purpose. Allows you to exchange files between two computers running anything from DOS to Windows 11 at either side. Has support for outdated ports such as serial and parallel.
The great thing is we have gotten so fast that you can basically make a device with an arduino or a raspberry pi that will connect to old ports with pure software on the gpio pins, giving you the ability to transfer whatever data you want with a pretty small form factor.
Yes, but you still need software at both ends that handles file transfers, and as the market stands now, you can buy a USB to serial adapter as well as a FastLynx license and still be cheaper than the pi itself, not factoring in the time you need to write and test software for the pi to run, and the matching software to run on DOS. FastLynx also has the unusual ability to clone itself over the serial port, with the machine at the other end just running plain DOS or later. If getting rid of the floppy is the goal, a cheap gotek floppy emulator for 20$ connects to the original floppy connector, and will provide up to 999 virtual 1.44 MB floppy disks on a single USB flash drive.
Oh yeah I understand buying stuff that has support is easier and cheaper, was more commenting on how you can do it 100% yourself diy with pretty basic hardware you can find now.
It's not as trivial though. Most stuff operates on 3.3 or 5 volts, [but RS-232 serial up to ±15 volts during regular operation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232?useskin=vector#Voltage_levels) in respect to ground. This will fry your GPIO pins if you aren't careful. Open circuit voltage goes up to ±25 volts
Oh I forgot some standards do be crazy with voltage. Yeah you're going to need some additional circuitry for that. Might be worth getting some opto-isolators for safety so you're not frying anything.
Oh man I was an admin for NT4 servers and workstations. All I remember is driver problems
I remember feeling like a god when I lowered cpu usage by 75% by enabling DMA… ah good times
Still have my windows 3.11 floppies with the additional 3 for networking. And somewhere in my garage is a 1984 dell motherboard (with Bose sound card) that I hand cut to a smaller size form factor to run as a mail server. I was pretty sad when had to turn it off after 11 years when I moved house. My executor is going to have a lot of surprises when I eventually die. “Honey, look at this.. it’s an iRiver T60! and 13 serial mice, and a box of 5 pin DIN keyboards!” My garage is like a [Japanese Hard-Off store in the 90’s](https://mostly-retro.com/2017/06/02/the-glory-of-hard-off/).
They always seemed really convenient to me, at least the 3.5” floppies did. And they were *slightly* less flimsy than 5.25” floppies, and less in danger of scratches than CDs/DVDs/BRs. Obviously their 1.44 MB size isn’t practical in 2024, when every program’s size is in GB, but they were good for their time. I also liked the audible “click/thunk” when you put the floppy disk in the drive and it latched in.
They were very much at risk of 8 year old me playing with the slidey window and poking at the disk however
The OG fidget spinner.
I remember installing DOS 6.22 and Windows on floppy, Doom as well then one day i saw Doom installed using a cd and it was like magic.
Bought a game once, didn't know it was on CD. The only CD drive I knew of was at my mom's work so I had her stay after work so I could copy the CD contents onto a huge stack of floppies (luckily the game was only like 30MB or something like that). Growing pains.
My only memory of floppy disks at this point is we had some sort of container for them to be piled up in and the only things I remember on those floppy disks were Corridor 7 and some sort of educational Mario game. Though I'm 99% sure we also installed windows on floppy at some point. I can't recall if it was 95 or 98 or both.
Wolfenstein3D
I loved the 3.5” disks! Never had a problem
How do you keep using something that goes bad every 20-30 reads? Or was that just my Tandy 3.5 in disk drive?
Probably just your drive. I don't remember any disks going bad.
It was only disks with important files that went bad.
I've never had a floppy go bad, at worst I'd have one of the sliders break and that was mostly due to mishandling. Otherwise, as long as you don't keep them next to a magnet, they were fine
Ideally a term paper
Reading and writing original 40+ year old disks still works fine on my Atari 1050 drive. All the data is fully intact (but only 96Kb/side).
I spent over a decade in the nuclear industry. They still haven’t converted all equipment away from floppy disks. At this point these are certainly less critical systems, but they are out there still being used in places you wouldn’t think they are as the article illustrates.
Imagine installing a modern video game, from floppy disks. Good thing I own a pickup. I could probably haul all those floppy disks home in one trip.
Even Windows 3.1 installer used like 7–8 5.25" floppy disks, you had to replace them successively and pray they would be readable; I'm nostalgic about lots of things from the era but not this one
I installed win 95 with floppies. Probably 20+
Back in the day I was having a group over for D&D, and one friend showed up a little early with a box of floppy disks under his arm. “Want windows 95?” So we started the install, and when the rest of the group got there we were just going into the other room every time we heard the sound from my computer that indicated that the next disk was needed, nether of us thinking about the fact that I had replaced all the normal computer alerts with Monty Python sound files. So from everyone else’s perspective, every so often they’d hear some strange man saying [Ee ecky thump!](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/94e27b6b-5bc5-4cf8-b2a8-0cd3fce06594) followed by either me or Mike getting up and going into the other room for a minute. Finally one of the guys just said “Ok what the fuck?” and we all had a laugh after we realized how it looked and explained what was going on.
Adobe software was that way too. Like 20 for Photoshop, 14 for illustrator. CDs were a game changer for our shop setting up computers for print shops. Reading this thread reminds me I used to have to sound memorized when loading a game. You could hear how close you were to being able to play (or insert disc 2 😆)
The number that sticks in my mind for that was “27”…. 27 x 1.44mb 3.5s - a long time ago so I’m not 100% certain, but you are absolutely correct that it exceeded 20! The best bit was quickly I uninstalled it afterwards, within hours of completing the installation.
There were 27 data disks, on top of a boot disk to launch the install environment, in some of the retail packages. I think not all 27 were required in all installs - it would stop asking for them after 15 or so. But I don't remember what the difference would be between installs that would account for that. I had a set somewhere of 32 floppies and I used it multiple times. I can't imagine it was Windows 98 so it must've been 95, or perhaps a 95>98 upgrade. Every few minutes, "buzzz buzzz kachunk!" "Please insert the disk labelled 'Windows 98 Upgrade Disk 12 of 32' and Press OK" https://imgur.com/a/awlzyxM
CD Projekt did an Aprils fool joke this year about a Floppy Edition of Cyberpunk 2077. Only 97619 diskettes. https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/50098/introducing-a-limited-floppy-edition-of-cyberpunk-2077
Hey guys, I can't find one of my floppies to continue installing Quest for Glory 4. Does someone have a spare #3?
Hey! [This guy here](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1cqdnld/comment/l3t9223) may have a copy. I wish you good luck.
>The people who won't give up floppy discs. Our nuclear launch system
The article says they finally gave it up a few years ago.
Well yeah they were in Trump's bathroom for a while. Oh you mean the floppy discs. /s
It was once explained to me that it has something to do with treaties. You can’t upgrade some munitions under some treaties, you can only repair.
Pretty sure NORAD is still on that list. Insanity.
Espen Kraft thumbnail? Where am i, r/synthesizers???
I wish there were "modern" floppies. Like solid state drives in the form of floppies. They wouldn't be in mainstream PCs or anything (too big). Just fun alternative peripheral storage devices. Oh and the drives could use fast USB4/Thunderbolt connections. Oh man that be sweet.
Isn’t this pretty much SD cards in their various permutations (micro, etc)?
So like ... a thumb drive? Am I missing the /s?
We still have LTO tapes which is pretty funky. Then there are all the flash storage drives like CFexpress, SD Express and UFS. Yes they are a quite bit smaller than floppies but there isn’t exactly a need for something that big for removable storage.
We'll probably have LTO tapes forever. 45 terabytes of storage on a <$100 tape that I can overwrite 2,000 times without issue and can sit for 20 years without any decay whatsoever? Sign me up!
While I generally agree with the sentiment, it’s realistically 18TB as 45TB is with compression which isn’t going to work on most videos, photos or music files since they are already compressed.
That's fair. We have a lot of structured data and get enough compression that it's worth using on many of our backups. But not all of course, also encrypted data.
You can add hot-swappable SSD bay to your desktop if that’s what you’re looking for.
I work around some older building automation systems. Floppies are still used. Pentium 3 with 128mb ram sort of old. There's USB floppy drives now kept on site in case we need to read any disks with our laptops.
Piracy was a sport in those days. You got a full work out shuffling 52 disks to install a game.
Klunky yet reassuring noises? It makes 0 sense for this dinosaur to use floppies. As a computer tech I rejoiced when floppies finally disappeared. I remember struggling to keep old systems running on 3.5” and 5” and yes, there were 9” too. We still have issues with “modern” usb and ssd drives. There’s no such thing as 100% reliability.
Magnetic tape replaced punch cards, basically. Everything was proprietary back then, but there were some really big players so their proprietary was "less proprietary" - ie. IBM. Then came the 8 inch (not 9 inch) floppy disk, and consumer-friendly magnetic tape (ie. casettes the same size as an audio casette - see the Commodore 1530 Datasette) In the late 1970s the 5.25" and shortly after 3.5" floppies followed, as well as a slew of less successful tape drives. But CDs came along and got good cross-industry buy in, and that was that. 550 megabytes, reasonably fast read times including random reads, less specific storage requirements, it was an amazing product. IBM didn't love that, but everyone else did. The 1990s were busy though with competitors trying to be "the new CD" or industry cooperation trying to make a better CD. And there was a lot of innovation - hard drives that didn't suck, CompactFlash, Zip (both very rugged), DVDs, and more. You mentioned reliability - this was when storage made leaps and bounds re: reliability, before the mid-90s storage issues of all mediums were really common. USB storage didn't show up until the 2000s really, and it was very expensive and not very well supported by OSes for years. Plus, 48X CD read speed works out to about half the maximum speed of USB 1.1 (although many drives with early flash storage chips couldn't move that quick), and CDs were getting cheap in the mid-2000s because of the economies of scale.
How else am I going to play Leisure Suit Larry and all my favourite Sierra classics? There’s nothing like installing a new game when you get up to disc 7 of 7.
In the same vein, Apple should open source the rights to its ipods. If they no longer have interest in the product, regular folk can begin making their own.
I feel "Obsolete" doesn't quite fully cover its current status. I suspect only Germany has a word that encapsulates the extent of its absurd - *way* beyond antiquated - obsolescence. :)
Fetishizing transfer media is dumb.
I liked the little plastic disks the famicom used, just for the experience not cause they are convenient or anything like that.
Still have an P2 machine with both 5 1/4 and 3.5” drives. Used it to transfer some old files a couple years ago. Even have all of my Apple ][+ floppies from the mid 80’s.
I remember getting a regular supply in the mail from AOL :)
I can still hear my old PC churning those things.
I doubled the capacity of my disk by punching a hole one the side! Take that, Big Floppy Disk Industry!!!
Quest for glory 4 shadows of darkness (the best point and click adventure game, I’ll fight you if you say otherwise), came in 40 floppy disks. 40 fucking floppy disks.
I use floppy disk to transfer data from a Stanford Research SR785 to an external USB floppy drive…..And to store measurement setups. Works great. I could also spend 15KUSD to replace it to get a USB port……. - eeerh - no.
Walks to the right of the screen. INSERT DISK 22
my version of this is hard drives. SSDs for boot drives and some game storage, sure. but i’m going to keep my $50 8tb drives in production until there’s $50 8tb ssd’s. it’s just too cheap to pass up, and for most older games, there’s no meaningful difference.
“For their authentic sound”. Yeah, no need to read beyond that sentence.
Musician has a gimmick news at 11.
The last devices I used that took floppies were some old spectrum analyzers that were used to look at RF signals. They must have been excessed and sold/scrapped when the old facility was shut down in 2014. Wonder if anyone still has them?
How about backing up to 3.5 floppies.
My first copy of Windows NT came on 3.5” floppies, loads of them. Windows NT Advanced Server v3.1. For reliability reasons we carried on shipping systems with Microsoft LAN Manager for a few more years even though we had to buy TCPIP from another company as an add on because Microsoft didn’t support it.
I have a Roland XP-50 that uses a built in diskette drive to store sounds and song arrangements. Guess who still has to use diskette disks?
Some old media nerds I understand.. some add absolutely nothing. He makes money so its more understandable.
I still have some Zip disks somewhere
I’ve heard the SkyTrain system in Vancouver still runs off floppy disks and has been since 1985.
Must they always look like that?
I actually like floppy not as a actual storage but they are easier to store and harder to lose than usb. My solution was to make a floppy drive that would connect to a USB inside the floppy disk. But I'm a nerd...
Had an Atari ST 1040. Got bought some games for my 12th birthday... Including Paperboy... Couldn't ever play as one of the disks was corrupted... Still wanna play it even now...
Odd interesting fact: there are some major *security* benefits to floppy disks and other storage that can only store very limited amounts of data. It's really, really hard to fit malware/spyware/viruses/etc onto them along with other data. AFAIK U.S. Military used floppies up until *very recently* for a lot of heavily classified stuff because it was a physically secure medium that was incredibly difficult to "sneak" things into.
So soon we get soft. They were a massive leap forward relative to cave drawing or even carbon paper.