Back to the Floppy (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Back to the Floppy (2019)

markround.com

46 pointsdoener23 comments

Until about the year 1993, 3.5" disks were very reliable if you didn't abuse them.

Around the early days of windows 3.11, someone figured out how to make cheaper 3.5" disks and putting data on off-brand disks became a gamble.

Enticed by the low price, I bought several boxes of ten floppy disks that had plastic shutters instead of metal. A few from each box of ten had bad sectors from new.

I end up trying to only use TDK disks, though later in the 1990s it seemed to me that the quality of new 3.5" floppy drives went down as well.

There were those double high density disks that never quite caught on, but one fun thing was having the double hd drive (2.8M) and doing anything that would write to an existing 'regular' (1.4M) floppy -- the drive would write narrower tracks than the existing data, and then when you went to read that sector back, the head would pick up both the new narrow track and the adjacent remainder of the wider track, hilarity ensuing. This led to a certain amount of cursing cheap floppies that weren't really to blame.

And in the meantime we were drilling cheap 720k floppies. Strangely never had an issue with these.

For some reason, 5.25" floppies always never failed me. But 3.5" floppies had always been a source of problems.

I remember I bought a box of floppies in the early 2000s. From that box, I don't think I got a single disk that had zero bad sectors. At that point, I moved to thumb drives, CD-R's, or email for my data transfer needs.

that sounds right to me.. worked universit help desk in the late 90s. wow, the number of distressed people who kept their only copy of their thesis on this one floppy drive that no longer works. some harsh lessons in backups ...

That’s exactly my experience. I have plenty of (mostly TDK) floppies from the late 80’s that have my, ahem, backup copies of Amiga games and the vast majority of them just keep on working. Many of the cheaper ones I used after I graduated in ‘94 don’t work.

Even when using a FlashFloppy on a real computer (Amiga), it still feels better. You know where your data are. You know how and when it's being accessed.

Also, it's interesting how an Amiga can boot off of a floppy faster than most modern computers can boot from an SSD. Floppies required people to be deliberate about loading files. It's a lesson I think most of us have forgotten now that a web browser can be a few hundred megabytes on disk.

For the fun of it, not long ago I loaded all the DMF (1680K) floppy images for Windows 98 onto a USB stick for a FlashFloppy, booted the boot disk in PC-Task on an Amiga 3000 (with original m68030), then proceeded to install Windows 98. It's amazing that a modern device can emulate a floppy drive, that the Amiga could read the emulated floppy whatever the data rate (Amigas can't do HD floppy data rates, so Amigas cheated by using drives that could run at half the RPM), and could even support the 21 sectors per track that Windows 98 DMF disks use. Of course, it can be done with real floppy disks, too.

Floppies are cool :)

Yeah, you really know where your data is. I have fond memories of saving documents to a floppy, walking to the library to print only to find an empty floppy disk. Going back home, formatting it, saving again, doublechecking in a friends drive, still there. Going back to library, empty floppy. Going back home, floppy disk still empty. Had this happening several times with different floppies. Friends had the same problem. Write-lock didn't help a thing. It was less than 50% chance it would actually work. But it did work now and then.

That sounds like an MS-DOS problem. Some systems didn't properly detect disk changes, so if lots of buffers were configured, the system would just keep reading the same data out of memory.

If your system is fine, and your data is on the floppy according to your friend's system, too, then the issue was most likely the library's system. That's not a floppy issue ;)

The problem was that the floppy was empty after the library computer touched it :-)

Oh, and I had enough problems with floppies loosing data too. Especially the newer disks, the older ones were better but the new packages I could throw 10-20% of the floppies.

Or... when you finally get to the part of the game that requires you to insert disk 7 of 7. And then you discover disk 7 is bad.

Either your machine or the machine at the library had bad head alignment. :/

There is no good replacement for just giving out floppies without worrying about cost to this day. 8GB SD cards, a practical size to give out applications, photos or videos, are about $6 each, so giving one to everyone in your class is a non-trivial expense. DVDs are too fragile and many don't have an optical drive at home these days. Online hosting requires remembering the URL and then an extra download step.

This is a real problem that doesn't get talked about much...

When I was in college, programming assignments were turned in with a code listing and a 3.5" floppy disk shoved in a paper folder.

Kids these days just push to a code repo and call it good - they'll never know the joy of seeing "unreadable disk" scrawled in red on their code listing when they get their assignment back.

The standard is a printed QR code with a link. This is how I see digital stuff get bundled with stuff I buy.

Burn onto CD-R and then print a logo with a URL [or QR code, pointing to URL of CD contents]?

I recently started burning CD's again for my car's 6-disc changer... it's comforting having variety, but structured/patterned (I also use Pandora's random stations music service).