Comment by blihp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blihp | Hacker News Reader

You vastly underestimate the production gap between those two drive types. There were likely at least a couple of orders of magnitude more 3.5" drives in use in their time than 5.25" drives were in theirs. I remember my last 5.25" drive costing ~2x more than a 3.5" drive in the mid-90's. Also, widespread 5.25" drive usage ended 10-15 years before 3.5" drives were superseded by flash.

3.5" was also the last widely used removable magnetic disc and used by virtually everyone for a time for backups, in all kinds of industrial devices etc the way microSD cards are today. Sure, there were Zip disks etc. but those were typically add-on devices and had a degree of compatibility issues vs 3.5" drives which were standard equipment for well over a decade whether you wanted them or not. So the majority of computer users from that era (as well as any still in service equipment) are most likely to still have, and possibly need replacements for, 3.5" drives since they most likely switched over long ago and have been a rapidly dwindling replacement market vs 5.25" which was pretty much dead by the early 90's.

I'd go as far as to say that 3.5" floppy's were much more widespread than for instance usb sticks are today and in numbers that has no comparable to this age(thankfully). The world basically ran on it until windows 95 came on a CDROM (also distributed on 13 floppys) and with it the multimedia age as they called it, but still it took a good decade before it was mostly CD/DVD's..

I grew up in the CD era but I still had to use floppy disks for things like school assignments, because disks were far worse for that - burned once, disk lost. Rewritable disks were more expensive, failed like crazy and took a lot of time to burn anyway.

I remember that time as particularly annoying. It was a God send to see usb sticks become mainstream, and since everyone had mp3 players on them it meant that you were always carrying a USB stick with you (except for the poor souls that had ipods, who couldn't treat the storage as a folder for random files and had to use iTunes instead ).

You definitely could do that to my recollection, I remember doing so to ferry files around.

Here's an apple support doc showing how:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544

This was not a viable option pre 6th gen.

It was if you ran ipodlinux instead of the stock OS!

I had forgotten about this, thanks for the reminder :)

From firsthand experience? I think my 2003 iPod w/ Dock Connector can still boot to Disk Mode.

Believe it or not, my win95 copy came with both 3.5 floppy disks and a cd. my computer that time had a cdrom but I tried to install it with floppy disks, and failed miserably around the thirties or something. At that time there was a joke why MS named it win95 not something else.

Are you sure you aren’t thinking about Office? The last version came on 55 floppies

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archiv...

Can confirm the OS did as well (win 95). It was a hard install on my notebook which lacked a cd drive. So many floppies.

Same here, floppies and failures!

I ended up taking the notebook (a Dell Latitude with 810MB of hard disk) to a friends where we managed to install from a network mounted CD via the parallel port IIRC.

I bought a version of Novell Unixware back in the early 1990s that had even more floppies, 63 of 'em, IIRC.

I tried to short-circuit that long-winded installation by putting the last 50 or so on to a QIC tape-cassette. Most of the time that worked, sometimes it didn't.

It definitely came packaged this way in Australia. I can confirm OP's story.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1995-Microsoft-Windows-Upgrade-for-...

I have not so great memories of constantly reinstalling windows via floppy.

Swapping disks getS old quick

If it was a retail copy of W95 with both the 3.5" disks and a CD-ROM, it also included a little receipt you could mail in to Microsoft so you could swap your 3.5" disks for 1.2 MB 5.25" ones. Just in case you were insane enough to try and install it on a machine only with 5.25" drives.

And people with 8" floppy drives were just out of luck.

While the average computer user may have had, say, 40 floppy disks, and today's users have maybe two USB sticks on average, the sheer number of users has probably risen enough to overcome that difference.

Wow. Zip Disk really takes me back.

A highlight of my childhood was sneaking a pirated copy of Doom 2 on a zip disk and secret installing it on a school computer. That game was like four 3.5" disks otherwise, not easy to conceal.

My ex-main server has ZIP, JAZ and DAT all on the front panel.

It actually saddens me to have 5 1/4 bays on my computer that are completely unused nowadays. There's not even any point having a dvd burner anymore.

You can use one of the panels to mount a 12v cigarette lighter from an auto parts store.

https://www.autozone.com/lighters/universal-cigarette-lighte...

My desktop has a 2 5-1/4 bays ... one has a DVD R/W and the other has a 16-function SD, compact-flash ... interface.

DAT! I'd pretty much forgotten them-- in my first post-college job I had to manage a backup system that used them, swapping them each night before I went home. It really hammered home the importance of backups when someone completely hosed a database and I had to restore things.

As someone who didn’t grow up with floppy disks, why were floppy drives topping out at a few megabytes, but Zip drives managed a hundred in the same size? It’s quite a jump in capacity.

Advancement in technology, just like a CD tops out at 650 MB but a Blu-ray disc can store 50 GB on the same-sized plastic disc.

Better/more fine control of the read-write heads leading to more dense information storage. Floppy discs used a stepper motor, Zip drives used something more like a modern hard disc actuator, see https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-actuator

This is mostly it. The floating head, plus the much smaller head size is what allows a more dense packing of tracks per inch on the disk. It's almost like having a mini HD where the platter is removable.

platter is removable

I remember repairing discs by swapping to the shell of a new one when something like the mini spring broke.

Hah, fair enough. I suppose I should have said "designed to be removable." :)

I had SyQuest 105MB and then later iomega Zip drives. The SyQuest cartridges had a translucent shell and it was a shiny metallic HDD platter in there while. When you put in a platter you got a whole sound of the HDD whir to spin up and then clackity-clack when the heads loaded and started moving around. Always a little tension until the drive mounted.

I think the Zip used more of a brown plastic type of disk. The loading was more of a low chunck-chunck sound.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology

Basically just technology improving over time. Just looking at wikipedia, 5.25" was introduced in 1976 not clear at what capacity but it fairly early on settled into 360KB. The 3.5" was introduced in 1982 at 720KB with 1.44MB broadly used by late 1980's. The Zip drive was introduced in late 1994 with 100MB capacity and was later expanded up to 750MB. But by that time CD-ROM technology with its cheaper media and less proprietary nature was very much replacing the magnetic based portable storage media.

If your definition of "floppy" is just the form-factor than 3.5" floppies topped out around 240MB[1]. If you mean the actual magnetic media (not flopptical[2]) then the same drives could format a standard double-sided high-density 3.5" floppy to 32MB, which is only an 8x difference.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

2: The technical reason why these disks could have higher density was due to being able to use optical elements as a servo-mechanism, rather than just using dead-reckoning like a floppy would. This required the disk to be printed with marks that had high contrast in the infrared range.

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