The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk | Hacker News Reader

The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk

news.bbc.co.uk

35 pointsyread26 comments

"The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start. The term was a hangover from its precursor, the 5¼-inch floppy, which had a definite lack of rigidness about it."

I understand that this isn't immediately obvious to laypeople, but "floppy" refers to the data platter inside the diskette, which is, in fact, floppy.

Not too surprising that a news site glanced over this, but being the first one to mention it here makes me feel decidedly old.

Incidentally, I'd say my office goes through a box or two of floppies a week, mostly for use on those oh-so-expensive ancient oscilloscopes, curve tracers, and the like.

For several years, I've had an idea in the back of my head to buy a whole bunch of multicoloured floppies and use them as wall/mosaic tiles (and maybe even store its grid location on the floppy itself for extra art-factor). Never got around to it though. Maybe I should buy some while I still can.

Did the term "floppy" really come from the 5.25"? I seem to remember that the 8" disk drive was almost impossible to insert without a third hand as support.

I just had a look around the office and we still have a number of instruments (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and such) with disk drives. I'm pretty sure that no one uses them (the disk drives) because none of our laptops can read the disks.

No, it indeed came from the original 8" variety. I started in the microcomputer scene just as 5.25" floppies were thoroughly taking over the scene and heard stories about the 8" ones.

From Wikipedia and memory:

IBM does a 8" read only for loading firmware into mainframes in 1971.

Memorex and Shugart come out with R/W ones in the following 2 years.

Shugart comes out with the first 5.25" one in 1976, it has only a fraction of the capacity of 8" drives of that year or the following.

In 1978 5.25" drives start getting a respectable amount of memory (360KB on a side) and that's the end of the 8" form factor, no more new models come out.

As you note, the 8" disks are very big and cumbersome and I'm sure they and their mechanisms were a lot more expensive.

One of my college jobs was night operator for a bank which ran on a IBM S/36 (model 5360) and our backup was two magazines of 10 8in floppy disks in each. The 5360 had an auto loading mechanism and I could gauge how close the backup was to being done by the position of the magazine. Good times.

Replying to self. Lots of pictures here.

http://www.corestore.org/36.htm

Very cool, thanks for sharing that with us.

Love those old style straight stroke solenoid head actuators on the disks (Winchesters?). Brings back memories of '70s era CDC SMD disk pack drives.

Which would frequently blow their driving power transistors; I had a friend who'd pop the caps and reattach the leads, this was for a small student run computer center with no budget to speak of, using all sorts of surplus equipment, in this case the prototype Lisp Machine's disk drive with a prototype Xylogics 4 card wire wrap UNIBUS controller (Mylar sheets between the card to prevent shorts).

Um... if the IBM drives were read-only, how did they get the firmware onto the disks in the first place? :)

Floppies were writable media from the beginning. It's just that IBM didn't use them as portable media in their first implementation.

The last thing they wanted would be for customers to modify the firmware in the field ^_^. Plus they would be cheaper.

I suspect they had a few machines back in New York that would write official firmware releases, which field service would then keep in stock and deliver to sites as needed.

This was an incredibly poorly written/researched/technically inaccurate article. It is the epitome of "fluff".

"One might be tempted to think that, like the vinyl enthusiasts who insist music sounds "warmer" on a record, the floppy has its own fan club. But unlike the case of vinyl, a digital format of a floppy is no different than that found on your hard drive or USB stick."

Those would be the people who buy Monster HDMI cables.

To be fair, the mechanical characteristics of a record deck, the tone arm and the cartridge combined with the minor electronic process that decompresses the wave forms across different frequencies mean that a vinyl recording is bound to sound subtly different to a digital source even if both are created from the same original recording. If that is interpreted as "warmer" then one has to accept that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

The other reason, of course, is the Loudness Wars.

Older records were not mastered hot to stand out in juke boxes or on the radio, and thus had an actual dynamic range (instead of everything just being LOUD). Ultimately ended up being higher quality recordings for it, too. Only a few people ask for a high dynamic range nowadays (like Porcupine Tree). Everyone else gets mastered up to 11.

I have a synth that has a built in floppy drive. I'm thinking of two options. Either sell it and get something newer, or find a drop in replacement for the floppy drive.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists? eg a device that looks exactly like a floppy drive to the host, but has maybe an SD card slot and some way to switch between virtual disks on that filesystem?

Normal floppy drive has essentially an analog interface with almost all digital logic in FDC/on motherboard. So building something that translates it's interface to something more modern is not exactly trivial. I can imagine how to build device that stores low-level images of floppy disks, but that is probably not useful for any kind of data exchange (because there is no easy way to access these images without such device), also such images are bound to be significantly larger (i would expect 2x-3x) than usable capacity of floppy. Storing mountable images would involve relatively complex processing of floppy disk's modulation scheme and synchronization.

I haven't seen anything that does this, but it is well possible that such thing exists, but it is not going to be cheap.

EDIT: Few years ago I had built something like this (with large SRAM array for storage) as a demonstration of how floppy interface works. It kind of worked, but I abandoned this project before getting it to work reliably or documenting it.

I don't, but google does. http://jimwarholic.com/2009/04/fdd-floppy-disk-drive-emulato... They seem to be quite expensive, so unless you really must have a physical device with the right connector, you are better off buying a new computer.

Great. Thanks. These look like they would do the job.

I bought floppy disks recently for exactly the niche use they describe: a lighting console. Oddly enough, the console in question[0] was released in 2002 and was not a revision of an older product. There are also pins labeled "USB" on the motherboard, but they have nothing connected to them. Later, the manufacturer released a version that uses USB storage.

[0] http://www.compulite.com/index.php?page_id=25

I think people forget just how much data 1.44M is. Sure it's not enough for one photo or one song. It's a hell of a lot of plain text tho'. People still use 64k ISDN lines too.

A photo fits. You just need to crank up the compression, but it's bearable.

I guess I can comfortable read through 2 MiB of plain text--should be a few thousand pages of text.

If you compress your plain text (without loss) you can store even more.

My first HD was 5M, I thought I'll never fill this up :-)

I am actually having quite a hard time filling up my 250GiB hard disk. I mean, fill it up with stuff that's non-recoverable elsewhere, so e.g. videos don't count.

My ophthalmologist has a visual-field-test machine which, after it runs its battery of tests, gives the operator the option of storing the data on a 5 1/4" floppy. Because there are probably grasshoppers with longer lifespans than these storage media, they have to buy fresh disks from somewhere. Probably a specialty supplier that sells them at considerable markup.

The last time I used a floppy was in the spring of 2004. The only way to get G-Code to my university's CNC machine was via the 3.5. I'm not sure if the setup is still the same 6 years later.

Lots posted recently about the floppy and its demise:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/floppy?sort=by_date

I'd be willing to bet that plenty of these diskettes are being bought for students and classes by schools still maintaining older computers with no immediate USB functionality (concerns of the costs + problems associated with these could weigh in), or no suitable intranet structure available - think smaller low/intermediate elementary grade schools etc., using computers as tutoring equipment with educational software, rather than "leisure surfstations".

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