Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
The rigid floppy was invented in Hungary in 1973, patented in 1974 but only in Hungary and Sony have stolen the idea.
Sony released their version in 1981.
The Japanese visited Járosi for the prototype many times and made a gazillion photos. There's zero doubt where the idea came from. As far as I am aware, Sony have officially recognized the idea came from Járosi and Járosi have acknowledged Sony's actual drive has improved on his.
Not the same could be said about CD though. CDs that were pressed are still ok, not so much for burned CD-R. Most of them are full or errors when reading it.
David Rosenthal tests this periodically. Most recently he tested in August. Notice the first sentence of the quote: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat...
> The drives I use from ASUS and LG report read errors from the CDs but verify the MD5s correctly. I didn't notice them reporting any read errors from the DVDs. An off-brand drive fails to read the CDs, but read one of the older DVDs with no read errors.
> Surprisingly, with no special storage precautions, generic low-cost media, and consumer drives, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 19 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 17 years old. Your mileage may vary. Tune in again next year for another episode.
> Last year I found a NetBSD1.2 CD dating from October 1996 whose cksum(1) checksums all verified correctly despite a few read errors. That CD was still delivering good data after nearly 26 years, but this year a couple of the checksums failed.
- a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001
- my own collection of stuff downloaded or backed up around 2003-2004; most of it on Verbatim DVDs, but some on CD-R or CD-RW (likely also from Verbatim)
I had very few read errors, and it was impressive especially considering it's more than 50 CDs and that I never payed too much attention to how they were stored. Most of the computer magazine CDs were stored directly in a "cardboard sleeve", not even one of those plastic/paper ones...
Please upload these disc images to Internet Archive if not included already, so that they can be preserved for the future. Downloads which used to be publicly available might be worthwhile too, but it could be more of a challenge to sort these out.
Well, that, and to relive those years, find the games included in those magazines and finally play them on a Voodoo 2 instead of a poor S3 Virge…
Someone had uploaded a cover CD from 1994 recently and I was able to download my first piece of commercial software :)
I still have lots of those as well from the early 90s! Mostly PC Gamer ( UK ) and some other computer magazine. I need to find a weekend and archive those.
But a little sad as more than half of my CD-Rs have problems. May be I need to get a new external DVD reader just to test it out again see so many people have no problems with their CDs.
I don't know about later ones, but early CD-R easily failed after less than a year back when I tried to use them as backup media. I quickly abandoned the idea of using them as backup.
It was never about the outer casing for any of them.
There were probably some times and places where local common usage made a distinction between some of the forms then in use by using the two terms differently, though.
However, considering you have to build your own custom Arduino board or be on the waiting list to buy one, it's a bit more complicated than "Just buy a simple USB floppy drive for 15 bucks online".
There are two popular USB floppy drive controllers for archiving Amiga disks: KryoFlux and Greaseweazle. You need a standard disk reader to use along (not a USB one).
The KryoFlux is a bit more expensive but can create complete archival level images (called KryoFlux stream). Otherwise both devices will produce floppy images (ADF) that can be used in any Amiga emulator or written back to floppy to use on a real Amiga.
Here's an overview of the available tools, some of them are pretty old, you can't go wrong with the two I listed above: https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118
You can easily convert to other formats with the HxC Floppy Software.
For the Amiga you have some really good options, I would personally recommend getting a standard PC 3.5in drive and a GreaseWeazle floppy controller which adapts it to USB with extreme low level control for reading disks.
This will also allow the WinUAE Amiga emulator to directly read the disks in the drive!
Note that while GreaseWeazle is an awesome project, I have had more luck reading floppies with the actual Amiga.
I suspect it would help to use a DD FDD like the one the Amiga has rather than an HD one.
The focus was more on how the Sony drive became the standard and less about all the competing formats. The CFD was the only serious competition and, in the US at least, it never reached the levels of putting up a fight like the ZipDisk vs. SuperDisk or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.
The Amstrad was the only system OEM I found that really used it, so while it did have some market it definitely wasn't wide spread to other systems like the BBC Micro, Acorn, or (Proper) Sinlcairs.
There were eventually "Zip disks" with 100 megabytes, but I think those were proprietary Iomega products and rather expensive, so normal PCs didn support them by default. Only when CD recorders became common, there was a replacement for floppy disks. But even these were suboptimal. They required cumbersome special software just to "burn" your CDs, since Windows didn't support them natively for several years. Moreover, it wasn't a format you could arbitrarily read and write data on. So it wasn't possible to just edit a file and save the changes, like on a floppy disk.
And of course USB sticks often weren't a good solution either, since you wouldn't simply give your expensive thumbstick completely away without having to expect it back.
Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments. To send and receive data, the smaller value of the sender/receiver was the bottleneck. (I think even today, Gmail only supports something like 50 megabytes.)
Much later there was the so-called DVD-RAM, which worked similar to a floppy disk (arbitrary read/write), but it wasn't really a "DVD" -- normal DVD drives couldn't read it. So again no standard PCs supported it. I think it was also not exactly cheap, no doubt due to its unnecessarily large capacity of over 4 GB.
Eventually the problem of exchanging files was solved again, after having been temporarily solved in the 80s with the 3.5 inch floppy. The solution today is uploading files to a free cloud provider like Google Drive, sharing the link, and deleting the file afterwards. It only took a few decades.
The real problem was the cost - the real key to floppies is you didn't care if you got it back (at the time people used them, very early on they were more pricey). So CDs did eventually replace them for sneakernet, and USB sticks have finally become cheap enough to be disposable.
What I think might be a bigger shame is that some version of FD32MB (maybe less dense and less slow) did not arrive earlier and as an industry standard. In 2001 it was far too late for it. Here is an article announcing the FD32MB technology: https://www.theregister.com/2000/10/23/32mb_on_a_humble_flop.... The Wikipedia page for the Superdisk also mentions it. Might it have had a chance if it had launched with the SuperDisk LS-120 in 1997? I am not sure. (And how would the reliability have been with mass adoption? Worse than 1.44 MB floppies'? Maybe it was for the better.)
LANs themselves had also come down in costs so even ad-hoc computers near each other often had Ethernet or similar, so the demand never really picked up.
Those who needed big transfers offsite used Zip (or Jaz, those things died like flies) until CD-Rs became cheap enough.
And then Apple killed it all.
Pretty much every ISP provided an email address for each account. Some email clients supported the MIME multipart/partial subtype which allowed for large attachments to be split up amongst multiple emails.