Floppy Disk Museum on a Bootable Floppy serving from a 286 PC
floppy.museum
floppy.museum
The HTTPD software is https://www.brutman.com/mTCP/mTCP_HTTPServ.html. "Up to 8 simultaneous requests can be serviced; an additional 8 requests can be queued." The status page http://floppy.museum/status.htm is (under HN load :) consistently reporting 8 live connections.
I'd guess there's one HTTPD running and DESQview lets someone use/admin/etc the system without shutting the HTTPD down.
I mean, no one ever called it a “mini floppy”. I never heard that term until I visited this website, and I spent more than a decade using 5.25” floppies. I realize they are smaller than 8” floppies, but they were still called floppies.
"The latest news from Silicon Valley, now confirmed from its source, is the Shugart Associates Minifloppy ["minifloppy" is a Shugart trademark] disk drive for small systems."
This is about the new 5 1/4" floppies. I see the term used as late as in the Byte issue about the IBM PC in 1982, and possibly later. It wasn't before the 3.5" floppy arrived that the term completely fell out of use about the 5 1/4" floppy.
(Edit: Reworded slightly)
It lived on even longer in marketing and packaging. The image below is of a pack of HD 5,25" disks -- judging by the overall design of it I would wager it's from the very late 80s or early 90s. Still Mini Floppy Disks.
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/H881c0843bd37476aa487619ee0ad8c79...
It does call itself MD2-HD which is the abbreviation for Mini Disk, 2 sided, High Density. Mini disk here means 5.25".
3.5" disks were MF "Micro Floppy", as in MF2-DD or MF2-HD.
I guess it depends on which audience or circles you ran in. I'll admit to have not gotten into computing until 1981, and then as a teen, but in that time, at that place (US, South), in my audience... literally no one used the term "minifloppy".
And by "3.5" floppy arrived..." I'm using the phrase to mean in use by something the consumer might see and be able to buy; not "invented". I had an original 1984 Mac hot off the shelf as soon as it was available, and that's the "arrived" point for me.
And yes, people in general wouldn't use the term "minifloppy" in normal conversation (except, possibly, old-timers mostly used to "real" floppies, the 8" ones. But even I wouldn't, even though I - just barely - started using computers and floppies before the invention of 5 1/4" drives), you wouldn't say "Please hand me the minifloppy". Just ".. the floppy". You don't use a long term when a short will do.
But, as einr said, it lived on for longer in marketing and packaging.
This matches my experience, too. East Coast USA late 70s and early 80s. We called them disks, diskettes, and floppies. i didn't know anyone with the 8" variety, and 3.5" came later.
I never used an 8", but I have seen one firsthand. Friend of mine from high school had one as his father had some sort of older machine at home that used them. It looked (to me) comically large.
3.5 models were called "stiffy/stiffies" because they were, you know, stiffer than floppies.
80s and 90s South Africa.
It may not be the colloquial name but it surely was used. And of course only knowing 5.25s and 3.5s, it sure looked weird that the bigger one was called "mini".
The site seems responsive, even though HN must be generating a fair bit of traffic. It's quite impressive what that little machine is doing.
I had a ZX81, with 1k of memory. After university I went to work as an accountant. So, mid- to late- 80's. The firm was going all techie, and some of the accountants were issued laptops. I was astounded to learn that the laptop contained the required software and was capable of storing the client's data.
It gives me inspiration to keep pressing ahead with my RP2040 retro-computer.
Little update: in the early 90's I started my PhD and did a little computer lab assistance work. One class was a bunch of nurse trainees. Floppies were ideal for storing their work on. They also made great coffee mats. I suggested that perhaps the floppies should be treated with a bit more love and care than that. Privately I mused what would happen if I fell ill, I jokingly wondered what treatment I would receive if I were a patient. The operation was a failure, but on the upside, he makes a great doorstop.
Yes it’s pretty minimal but things like it remind us just how wasteful so much of modern software is. A great deal of our bloat has reasonable explanations like a lot more data, lots more features, high DPI displays, etc but much of it is just lazy programming and too many layers of abstraction.
1 MHz ;)
I'm pretty sure it's MB.
Fun anecdote, in the 80s, after watching top films like "American Ninja 1" or "American Ninja 2", we found out 3.5" floppies make for great Shurikens.
Still, would be interesting to see a photo of those 5.25" Windows 95 disks.
(https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/rtm has three dumps of 5.25" 1.2 MB disks.)
> Chips&Technologies 82C235 "SCAT"
> (single-chip successor of NEAT)
Incidentally, i find it interesting how it's slowing down (not the server - still happily chugging around), but the propagation of news/memes/links.
Server with a 286 and running off a fucking floppy: "Hold my beer."
So can serving static pages from RAM.
I would have expected HN to take it down, though. So .. wow.
Especially if you realize that the 5.25" is just a "floppy floppy"
Only when I grew up and my juvenile sense of humour matured did I appreciate the hilarity of this naming convention.
https://www.amazon.com/floppy-drive-usb-adapter/s?k=floppy+d...
When is the last time you used one of these formats?
SD cards seem alive and well, although usually micro these days.
The internet connection of course, they can't help you with.
The odd thing about high capacity SD cards in general is that they are generally used as fixed storage. I have a 256 GB card that I put into a 11" laptop when I bought it and I haven't seen it since. I haven't used a CF or SD card like a floppy since storage hit 4 GB.
I agree that I spoke too hastily about optical media. Even modern gaming consoles have optical drives.
If you were a still or video photographer, you would likely be using CF or SD cards like floppies every day still.
(Some of this has been changing with WiFi capable cameras and video cameras with USB-C ports for SSD's etc but SD cards are still very much A Thing for photographers)
http://floppy.museum/status.htm
Does not reflect ICMP updates after refresh.
But it seems more likely traffic is being forwarded or even rewritten at Layer 4. I don't think running something like HAProxy in non-caching mode would invalidate the website's claims. Even an IP forwarding solution (eg a GRE tunnel) might have http://shouldiblockicmp.com/ issues.
http://floppy.museum/status.htm
am I missing something here, a counter is a counter. Unless the site is cached with a CDN which is... a CDN in front of an sx286 PC.
Could do the same thing with a VIC20, or an AM crystal radio for that matter.
I'll add NAT for ICMP echo requests though. Maybe with rate limiting, we'll see how it goes.