People who won't give up floppy disks | Hacker News Reader

People who won't give up floppy disks

bbc.com

64 pointshoppyhoppy286 comments

When this comes up, I always mention I like the convenience of diskettes and the fact they were rather cheap. I had no issues giving or mailing someone a diskette and never getting the media back.

CDs/DVDs are a PITA to write, plus most are write once. Plus you cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as a box of diskettes were. These days, with flash drives, I would want the media back.

Back then, documents would fit on 1 diskette, now documents created with office applications are at best multi-MB, some approaching 1 gig.

Yes there is email and things, but I know some lawyers who like to distribute documents on brand new physical media because for them, encryption is hard and their clients have no clue about encryption. So they buy flash drives for that these days.

Strange flashdrives are also a bit sketchy.

I know there were diskette-viruses, but you can straight up fry a computer with a flash drive that has been tampered with. USB in general doesn't really seem to be designed with security in mind.

> you can straight up fry a computer with a flash drive that has been tampered with. USB in general doesn't really seem to be designed with security in mind.

I don't think it's fair to claim USB is insecure because you can buy accessories that charge a capacitor bank over the 5V, and then feed that back to the computer.

That could be solved by using an isolated hub to host USB devices, like the Spectra 3022. Then again, if you have equipment that expensive, I hope you're not plugging random stuff into it...

I wonder if there's a market for USB hubs with breakers/fuses to protect against this. Probably only security researchers plugging in known-sketchy things though.

The thing is, adding an inline fuse doesn't guarantee that the host would be safe: if the fuse doesn't blow quick enough and lets enough current through, that's bad (plus, you'd have to add a fuse to P-, D+, D- and P+ just to be sure, not to mention USB3). The best option would probably be a complete isolation of the USB device from the host, with a hub that then transfers D- and D+ to the host without a direct electrical connection (while providing its own P- and P+). Think TOSlink, but for USB.

Galvanic USB isolators are a thing. Mostly for medical applications, but it's literally a chip you can buy off the shelf that provides total electrical isolation (with the addition of an isolated 5v supply).

There are digital isolator ICs, like ADUM3166 from Analog Devices, though like none of them are for USB 3.0+ Awful lot of isolation transformers in the IC diagram, so I'm sure that something like the transformers used for Ethernet could be reused to protect basically any USB ports from a USB killer attack, though they are awfully big for a smartphone

The industrial hubs I'm familar with use optoisolators to separate the host and attached devices, I think. Advantech has a USB-3 version (P/N USB-4630), but I can't speak to these personally.

Absolutley. In a hardware-development context, we use them to stop frying computers with broken devices. I've had good experience with the BB-UHR304 from Advantech. They're expensive and occasionally sacrificial, but cheaper than replacing an average pc / laptop. https://www.advantech.com/en/products/c9300564-0829-46eb-955...

You can either have a port where you can run trusted devices without hassle, or one where you can input untrusted data safely. You can't have the same port do both.

That's an inherent problem with universal ports that do a bit of everything as opposed to having distinct storage-oriented media. I don't know how you'd tamper with a diskette to brick a computer.

Ah, memories...

https://stickdeathgod.tripod.com/id23.html

My first Linux distro was about 50 diskettes ;)

Same! I think it was back in 1997 in college, and my dorm mate only had 4 floppies sitting around, and Slackware was around 50, so I kicked off the installation with the first couple of disks, and when I'd finish up with one I'd toss it across the hall to him, and he'd reimage it with the next in the sequence and toss it back. Pretty tedious, but it got the job done.

I'll never forget how foreign Slackware felt after having grown up on DOS. It wasn't long before I got used to it, though, and I never did go back. Great memories.

I had that but with a two mile walk round trip :(

I remember being blown away by Debian. It packed most common network card drivers, so that you needed just two diskettes to bootstrap the installation, and the rest was downloaded.

Of course, QNX was even more impressive, packing the os, windowing system, network and modem drivers, and a web browser on one single diskette. Amazing.

mine was tomsrtbt[1]. 1 diskette.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt

MicroSD cards would fit that definition today: cheap, lightweight, writeable and somewhat reliable.

Not that cheap, almost no computer has an exposed port for it, and way too lightweight for that use.

But yes, it's the closest we have.

> Yes there is email

It may very well not be. Email is iffy for people that share the same domain, and completely useless for sharing stuff with random people.

That one democratic tool is already completely tamed out, and presents no risk for our corporate overloads anymore.

YOu can't make that comment without justification!

Email for sharing documents just works for me and the vast majority of the business and IT world. Frankly, I don't agree with you.

> Plus you cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as a box of diskettes were.

Actually, that's close. On AliExpress, you can get 10 1GB USB sticks for about $15. Adjusted for inflation, that's about how much a box of 10 cheap 1.44MB floppies cost in 1990. It became a bit cheaper in the late 90s, but that's about the time CD-R took over for the purpose of handing out stuff.

Of course, these cheap USB sticks are not the most reliable by far, but neither were diskettes, at least for the cheap ones, they were absolutely terrible in that regard.

I was surprised the story claimed that 3.5" disks weren't "floppy", just based on their external shell.

EDIT: Back when they were in common use, I remember that computer people generally called them "3.5 inch floppy disks", and non-computer called them "hard disks". Which caused some initial confusion because computer people meant something else by "hard disk".

It looks like there's still some debate about the ambiguity of the terms: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335352/what-s-so...

Well, 5 1/4" disks were floppy on the inside & outside, so compared with them, 3.5" disks weren't floppy.

To me, at least, the name 'floppy disk' already felt like an anachronism, even in the heyday of 3.5" disks.

I don't think they were as long-lived as their brethren, but can't forget about the extra floppy 8-inchers!

I found one of those in a folder at work a few months ago and was surprised how extra-floppy it was. I grew up with mostly 3 1/2” diskettes and some 5 1/4” disks, so the "floppy" name always seemed like a bit of a stretch. Seeing an 8" disk really made more sense why they called it that.

(Eight inches was a really clever size for storage in a paper-based office environment... It fits just right in a spot meant for a sheet of letter or A4!)

A South African colleague of mine reasoned that if 5.25" disks were "floppies", then the 3.5" ones must be "stiffies". Somehow this never caught on at work.

Hey, my stiffies' average size.

Here in Finland the terms for 3.5" floppies is "korppu", a type of hard biscuit, do distinguish them from "lerppu" "floppy", which refers to the older 5 1/4" discs that actually flopped around.

What's the word for "hard disk"?

Current day term is "kovalevy", literally just "hard disk" or "hard sheet". Sheet as in sheet of decently thick metal plate or marble counter top.

They aren't floppy. They're just called that because old disks really were floppy and the name stuck.

If you open one, you'll see that the disk is floppy. As floppy as the larger versions of it.

I know but the whole thing isn't floppy. The earlier ones were called floppy disks because the whole thing was floppy, including the case. You could literally bend them.

If you are going that way, the whole thing isn't a disk either. And it wasn't a disk on the previous model either.

Hard disks on the other hand, had hard disks. While the whole thing was way more rigid than a 3 1/2 floppy, and hasn't been a disk since they started selling it.

Floppy square. I still have some old floppy squares in a closet somewhere.

The only person I ever heard call them "hard disks" was as a joke in a cartoon[1]. Non-computer people I knew called them stuff like "little floppies" to distinguish them from the big 5 1/4" ones. Windows used "floppy" for both in the file manager.

1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnLBNS9jDw&t=1m8s

For legacy hardware (synths, samplers) there are not many options when the company who produced them is out of business like E-mu or Ensoniq. I have 2 of these old keyboards and now I am trying to replace the floppy und SCSI drives with something more modern. For floppys there is the Gotek FlashFloppy which replaces the floppy drive with a USB adapter. But it is a mess to install it. Also it does not work with all legacy synths. For SCSI there exists the RaSCSI solution which is a Raspi nano or pico which emulates a SCSI drive.

https://studio-services.de/produkt/gotek-flashfloppy-extra-g...

https://studio-services.de/produkt/zuluscsi-rp2040-mini/

Someone put a floppy icon on our intranet not long ago. I looked at it and sensed it was wrong. It was a bottom-side view and the dented corner was on the right.

It's become an abstract symbol. Young people don't ever see the real thing.

A probably fake anecdote is a young person saw a disk and asked, "Why do you have a 3D printed save button?" I did have someone refer to a CD drive tray as a cup holder once though.

Free_Cupholder.exe

Many many years ago I read an observation that men tend to keep unchanged into their later years the hairstyle that they happened to have in the period of the lives when their were the happiest.

I think that probably applies to things other than hairstyle, like storage media :-)

I have tried to analyze about myself in which aspects of life I'm doing the same thing. It's not true for hair/clothing styles or tech. But surely I'm not so unique that I'm immune to this effect? I wonder if this phenomenon can also manifest in more subtle ways, e.g. you keep the slang from the time when you were the happiest, or the ideology, or etc. Might be true about music, I seemed to have stopped evolving in my music taste unless when I put in deliberate effort (which I rarely do, because I don't think it's something worth optimizing form).

Perhaps this explains why I have a collection of over 10 CRT television sets squirrelled away in the various corners of my house…yes, I know it’s a sickness.

Zip drives FTW

Click. Click. Click.

Nothing bets a hardrive wrapped in a blanket, in case you accidentally hit or drop the bag you put it in. This is how we did in my university, in late 1990s.

Jazz drives FTL

Literally threw one against a wall to destroy it and never get tempted to use one ever again.

Went back to a 150Mb QIC tape drive for a while thanks to Jazz.

The stuff of nightmares.

Jaz was really that bad? I've been pondering buying a scsi one for my retro PC.

minidisk or superdisk ftw

Look up the Jaz drive click of death. It was in a class of its own.

I knew Zip has them, but I've only ever seen 2 or 3 Jaz drives, and they were working fine in the late 90s... Shame really, CF to IDE and bluescsi don't work on every PC.

i only used a zip drive once or twice. obviously that was decades ago, but in my head they are still the height of computing luxury.

Until the click of death. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

I'm more in favour of MiniDisc. Compact enough, large enough for storage but Sony screwed up with DRM requiring a Sonic Stage, eurk.

I miss the predictability of floppy disks. Assuming it was manufactured correctly, a floppy disk would always act like every other floppy disk. You could look at it and see everything there was to see. It didn't have firmware with mysterious origins and capabilities. If you bought a floppy disk from a reputable manufacturer and it failed, it was usually your own fault. Modern flash drives fail for inscrutable reasons, and that makes them more stressful to work with.

i remember differently you buy 1.2 and accodentally stick in a 360 or was it vice versa… and things dint work right. Diff drives had diff head widths. Also apple vs commodore vs pc vs mac. Then there was dust and untecoverable read errors

I remember floppy disks failing, but mostly things like free AOL trial disks I repurposed by covering the write protect hole. I assume those were the cheapest they could find. The major brand name ones generally worked reliably.

Floppy disks were anything but predictable.

My mom was at a public office where they would get data on floppy disks, and read issues were super common and reliability was really hit or miss, data corruption, sector errors, you name it.

Abort, Retry, Ignore?

"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk?"

Modern flash drives are at least an order of magnitude more reliable than floppy disks were. This is just rose-tinted nostalgia.

> Modern flash drives are at least an order of magnitude more reliable than floppy disks were.

I don't know if that is true. I have 5.25" floppies from ca.1990 that were readable as of just a couple years ago, so about 30 years.

You're saying flash drives are readable for at least 300 years? I don't know but I doubt that.

(The floppies might still be readable today, I just haven't tried. The content is now archived in a zfs pool.)

The flash drives give an interesting sense of reliability since the controller will keep freshening and error correcting. I havent dared to leave one unplugged for a few years with data I wanted.

No I mean short term reliability (like less than a decade).

I treated floppies fine and they were a constant pain. They give a nostalgic pang, but I'm very glad to see the back of them in actual use.

I got so fed up with how unreliable floppy disks were in Middle School and High School, that I started using the 1999 equivalent of Dropbox. Before I left for school, I'd start an FTP upload of the document(s) I needed to my ISPs 20 MB free web space, it would finish and automatically disconnect from the 56k dialup, and then at school I'd download it on the school's 128K ISDN connection.

Maybe I've been exceptionally lucky, but I've never had a USB drive fail or act oddly. The only data-loss flash media failures I've had were microSD cards in Android phones, and an early SATA SSD.

People might remember the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input, that you could use to play music from other sources on a tape-only car stereo.Does something similar exist for legacy floppy drives? Like a fake floppy with a micro SD card slotted in.

Packing it into an actual diskette might be challenging - I guess you'd need to read an encoder on the rotation. Perhaps if you had some legacy musical or scientific instrument with a tape drive you'd be better swapping out the whole drive with something that presented as a floppy drive to the device?

> Packing it into an actual diskette might be challenging - I guess you'd need to read an encoder on the rotation.

Wasn't the rotational speed more or less fixed?

I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath but it required a device driver.

> the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input

It was called a “cassette adapter” (for anyone interested in looking it up).

A device like this exists for Apple II floppy emulation. I've not seen one for PCs, and modeling it as a floppy would have significant downsides to the alternative, just modeling it as a removable (hard) drive

Just think of them as tangible icons for the items they contain.

Not so adherent to the article topic but more related to the title: I suspect a large number of people is incapable to evolve, no matter what. They have learnt something and they want to keep that for their entire life, no matter if it's good or not, no matter if better options are available or not.

This is a damn issue because it means we need to squeeze many out of the society anytime we want to evolve.

The issue is less 'evolving', than the fact that humans are terrible, some posit wholly incapable, of UNlearning things. Learning new things is easy within our established models, but outside a reality-translation device, transgressing things we "know", is still subconscuiously verboten to even the most open-minded of us.

Aren't they exaggerating a bit? You can go to Amazon and buy 3.5'' floppy 10 packs, and a USB UFI drive...

There is a lot of options too, for both drives and disk packs, and inexpensive. I wonder who is using them mostly.

Like the musician in the story, I have many synthesizers with floppy drives. I love the synth, but not the floppies. I keep floppies around because I have to in order to keep the synth operable, but I am slowly changing the floppies out of floppy emulators. At $100 a pop it’s slow going.

Many of that era might do better with sysex dumps for most of the things floppies do. Still kinda slow but no media to futz with.

It's probably more nostalga than anythng but I do sometimes miss the sound of floppy drives and hard drives. With modern computers there is usually no disk activity indicators and silent drives.

I was working on restoring an old Amiga 500 recenty and the sound of a game booting off disk is so satisfying.

The FS-UAE emulator (https://fs-uae.net/) emits the familiar grinding floppy disk sounds of Amigas, if you need a hit without getting the old hardware out :-)

I was surprised by the sounds while trying "Little Computer People" for a nostalgia trip after reading "Hacking Little Computer People on the Amiga" (http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/hacking-little-computer-people-o...) last summer.

Of interest:

a book interviewing more of these "people who won't give up":

Floppy Disk Fever, 2022.

https://www.onomatopee.net/product/floppy-disk-fever/

Let's not forget the floppotron:

https://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

If it works, don't fix it

Give me petabyte sized floppies, they were peak user experience. Microsd is too easy to lose.

NVMe SSDs in USB enclosures is probably what you’re looking for. I assume tool-less enclosures exist if you don’t want to buy multiple.

Headline: these people who use floppy disks are obsolete but not gone.

Does BART still use them?

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