Floppydisk.com – Recycle 3.5“ Floppy Disks | Hacker News Reader

Floppydisk.com – Recycle 3.5“ Floppy Disks

floppydisk.com

In 2014, I sold about 3k PC shareware 3.5" floppy disks to this guy. He had a working floppy duplicating and labeling machine that was mesmerizing to watch.

I transferred the contents of several hundred of these before succumbing to fatigue:

https://archive.org/details/frostbyte_1980s_DOS_collection

I also had acquired about 7k 5.25" floppies from the same shareware guy I got the 3.5" disks from, but sadly those were all bad. It appeared he had stored them outside.

I'll never forget my little Toyota truck so laden with thousands of floppies disks that it was almost fishtailing down the 5 freeway, nor will I forgot seeing in my rear view mirror several 5.25" take flight and wave goodbye.

How long does it take to transfer 1 disk? I definitely understand the tedium you must have felt...but was it just all in one burst or a couple days or did you give up after a month or two?

I do regret not transferring them all, but it was a chaotic time during which we moved to another state. In the shuffle, I lost track of what I transferred and didn't have the will to start over.

I've yet to have any nightmares about software I may have made go extinct, but I may now...

It takes about 1:40. I just measured ;)

https://youtu.be/Q3dK-Fgw1Yo

You're magnificent. Thanks :)

That was nice and calming. :)

Why is head 1 faster than head 0?

Awesome, thanks!

I was at a tech event and I realized the 20-something I was chatting with didn't know what a floppy disk was. I had to explain it to him and he only got it when I finally showed him images on Google and he sort of got the concept.

He was a software engineer and he had literally never heard of floppy disks!

I'm 41 and I felt so old...

I used to explain what they are by starting with "imagine a hard drive where the platters were removable" and now people ask "what's a hard drive?"

It's like that post on the PC gaming subreddit where someone was unironically asking about what interface was on a pictured hard drive ... it was IDE.

Most people now never saw the innards of their computers (or phones) and also, everything is always "on", so there's less distinction between RAM and disk.

There's definitely a threshold point for knowing about them. I just turned 30, and in practice, I never used them. (But I just missed them)

About the time I got to the point in school of needing to send documents (mid-00s), flash drives had come down in price that everyone had them, and by 11th grade, even we had school emails.

The majority of my use of them was that I cut my computing/networking/programming teeth on all the 90's and early 00's computer hardware that my dad had hanging around. I had piles of floppies and no flash drive so I made do with what I had available.

This brings back memories. I‘m 32 now and back in the day, we were trading GameBoy roms on floppies because there was nothing else we could use. Essentially we were using them like USB sticks.

good ol' sneakernet.

I still do that from time to time. Not everyone has fast upload (compared to modern file sizes), so sometimes driving somewhere to pick up a flash drive or SSD (or mailing it) is faster than sending it over the internet...

I have symmetric gigabit, but my buddy in Fresno sure doesn't.

The first time I learned how to do a multi-part tar archive was to split my backup across multiple floppies...

Heh, I know a guy who wrote a shell script to do multipart tar backups to floppy using a low-end disk duplicator, which was an external 3.5" standard PC drive, and a serial interface to tell it "load next disk."

Wait, could the changer swap disks automatically? That's super neat! I saw one a data tape changer once and I've always been fascinated by the mechanical aspects of computer equipment in the past.

(on a side note, I am one of my only friends who actually enjoys going to the computer history museum. I just wish I could interact with the old machines. I wish there was a "come learn a bit of cobol, fortran, or <<machine specific assembly>> and write a small program for our 1401" option available.)

Yeah, it was a single-drive duplicator, and you loaded a stack of 3.5" diskettes in. You could command it to load a diskette and eject a diskette, and I think he'd said there was an "out of diskettes" indication.

The floppy drive itself was a regular old PC drive, 34-pin interface, just mounted in a machine on a long cable vs. inside the PC case.

Bigger, fancier duplicators have multiple drives and write in parallel, but due to the cheaper configuration of this single-drive duplicator, it was possible to use it like a tape library. Mostly this was for fun, I'm sure he had tape drives on which to save his backups!

I once posted on reddit/TIL something about CD-Roms and the thread got deleted because CD-R was an unknown term or something...

When my daughter did a poster charting storage capacity of computer media, I got out a variety of things so that she could draw at scale the media (from memory, 5.25" floppy, 3.5" floppy, Zip disk, Compact Flash, and SD Card).

I gave her a 5.25" floppy to take in and show as part of her presentation -- her _teacher_ asked if she could keep it since she had never seen one.

Article about floppydisk.com with photos and interview with the business owner https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...

Great article, thanks

I have memory of seeing what I swore was an 11” floppy. I just did a quick internet search and the interwebs are saying that 8” were the biggest?

Anyone else know of an 11”?

I started as a kid in the early PC days. So 5 1/4” was common, 3.5” was new, and you’d see the occasional 8” on a TRS-80 or what not and you’d chuckle but not think much of it. But I remember finding this 11” somewhere and thinking ‘oh my god, that’s a lot if surface area for 170kb.’ I tried to keep it along with some 8” but it apparently is no where to be found after 7-8 moves since.

I've never heard of it, but coincidentally (maybe?) 8" on the diagonal is ~11"

Edit: Or its a Videodisc, they were 10-12", and in a cassette -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodisc

There were floppy-like things very very old for ancient mainframes that may have been entirely custom; but those more often had reel-to-reel tapes.

There were removable hard drive platters but those weren't "floppy"

Noooooo!

Give them to your friendly retrogeek nearby. They'll be extremely happy and grateful, especially if it's one of the weird formats (3", 8", MD, Zip, Syquest, tape...)

I second that. A colleague recently retired and gave me a box of 3.5"s.

I've got a handful of LS120 disks and their storage cases I got from my parents that are certain to have personal data on them but I haven't ever seen an LS120 drive in person...

It'd be neat if they had an optional "donate to archive" option which would let textfiles.com attempt to recover any non-personal software/resources from the past (as he wrote in 2011 it's nearly too late to recover anything from the heyday of floppies, but to send to him if possible - http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3191)

To be precise, he's talking about 5.25" floppies, not 3.5" floppies. The latter are more durable. But either way it's a good idea to get your data off them!

I may have been lucky, but I still have had good results reading old 360 kB floppies. It was maybe 5 years ago since I tried, and maybe 10 since I made a major attempt to copy all/most of them, so perhaps they have degraded more recently. Bought a Kryoflux a few years ago and hopefully I will get around to use it on the more interesting floppies before it is too late.

But the newer 1.2 MB 5.25" floppies are a pain. Apparently they can be very difficult to read on a drive that is not similar enough to the one they were written on and with correct calibration. I have a bunch I could not read at all, and a few that I only managed to get the file lists from. Only a few could be fully read. A bit sad as several of those from ~1990 contain source code I wrote and have not found any other copies of.

If anyone in the UK wants a few, I think I might have a box at the back of a cupboard. Mostly with things like DOS 6.x and Windows 3.x on. No idea what condition they'll be in after all this time since I last used a floppy drive, but they've always been stored in cool dry places for the most part.

I wouldn't mind buying those from you. I've got a delivery address in the UK... Deal?

I can't see the larger stash I thought I had of official Windows and DOS disks, they might have been passed on or chucked at some point (or are hiding somewhere in a deep pile of boxes!). I did find a stack of 35 hand-labelled which according to the labels contain things like Doom, AfterDark, and such. Happy to post them if you want to pay P&P, or drop them off for nothing if you are in York. Drop me a message (email address in profile) if interested.

Yeah but we got the hookup on 5.25" DSDD:

http://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/images/truckload.jpg

I'm currently looking for 3.5's for a coding competition that only allows code to fit inside a floppy. Unfortunately they don't send to my radically extreme location.

I get mine off eBay with varying success rates. It really is hit or miss. I suggest sticking with the ones that have a metal slide on them rather than the later, cheaper, plastic slides which tend to disintegrate over time.

Out of curiosity why are you buying old ones from eBay rather than new production?

AFAIK, there is no new production. Everything listed as "new" is New Old Stock, which is what I get.

Verbatim and TDK and probably a few other still manufacture 3.5 inchers you can buy new stock on Amazon and other retailers globally.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-87410-MF2HD-Inch-MBDiskett...

What?! This goes against everything I believed.

Neither Verbatim nor TDK's website have any current mention of floppy discs. I would assume the listings on Amazon are old stock manufactured 10+ years ago.

IBM say Sony were last to manufacture them, and production ended in March 2011: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/floppy/tr...

Although this article says Sony only had a 70% market share when they stopped production: https://www.cnet.com/deals/sandisks-extreme-pro-2tb-ssd-is-b...

Looks like Verbatim produced them at least until late 2015

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/from-floppy-disks-to-beta...

I’ve seen a TDK pack from Japan with a date code of 2018.

You could get Floppies form Maplin in store in the UK until they went under 5 years ago.

There is still plenty of “fresh” stock out there that seems to be under a decade old, and I’m sure they are still produced in small batches for critical systems and well the Japanese government.

Do people still use Zip disks? I've got a dozen of those.

looks like floppydisk.com doesn't even recycle those,

"SORRY WE NO LONGER RECYCLE 5.25 DISKS OR ZIP DISKS."

I literally got a new mobo and decided to put some of my old drives in the box for fun. One of them was a 250MB zip drive. Unfortunately, I only have one zip disk, but it might be fun if it works (I did not get to it yet, still trying to get my SCSI tape drive up).

I'm sure someone somewhere is using them, wipe the ones you have and they'll probably sell on eBay.

How hard is it to start manufacturing of brand new floppy disks?

He says it's not trivial. You have the injection molded shell, the sheet metal cover, the spring, the stamped hub, the little pads, glue, the write-protect switch, the plastic disc and the oxide layer that has to be formulated and applied correctly, for a niche product for machines that themselves are becoming obsolete.

The earlier floppies were probably easier to make, because they just had folded commodity plastic shells, pads, glue and the disc with its oxide. No special hub or fancy case.

It would be painfully easy if it was something that had a market.

The problem is the market for it is so small that it's not worth even keeping the existing equipment running.

Wait, does this mean my 5.25" disks are trash!?

Interesting, I will need to contact them :)

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