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..."
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.
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.
They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.
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.
... 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.
How did I miss that! Thanks for making the joke complete for me ;)
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
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.
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.
Personally, I wish someone would produce a consumer grade tape system, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
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. :)
Or who am I kidding, I still use my A500 so I can't really say I miss it.
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive...