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>The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be.

pkzip spanning disks was a normal thing back then. I'm totally not showing my age by knowing that (and having used it a lot).

RAR was even better for multi-volume archives.

Among me and my peers we used arj.exe

It's been a long time, so maybe I'm misremembering things, but I seem to remember ARJ being the "cool" replacement for ZIP, but then when RAR came along, ARJ quickly died out.

LHA(lzh/lharc) was also a cool replacement at some point, especially since it was just one binary for both compressing and decompressing.

The switch didn't happen until 1995 when WinRAR came along, if memory serves. RAR was 1993 and ARJ was 1991.

Also I remember ARJ and PKZIP being used legitimately while I can't think of a single time I encountered a rar file in a non piracy context. Actually when I got my first job fixing up desktop computer in a large public institution the presence of winrar was a sure sign that I was better off airgaping the computer immediately, scanning with an offline antivirus and backing up noninfected user data and then reinstall, hoping I would not encounter child porn.

Eeeeeh I spent two decades pirating stuff ending with being a co-admin for one of the largest warez sites in Central Europe and I can tell you in all this we were clean. (Note this ended twenty years ago.) There was enough trouble with the law for just stealing software we didn't need the forces hunting for CP on us too.

Especially with par files for those pesky corrupt disks.

Oh yes, and in a set of 14 disks, it was always the last one which was corrupt.

Oof, I felt that. I recall reading, many years ago, some statistics on how CD-ROM discs filled to about 600-650 megs made them much more reliable than the ones pushed to theoretical maximums. This was about regular, retail data CDs, not (re)writables.

I have always felt the floppy was a great demonstrator of the concept: a 3.5 inch might be perfectly fine for everyday usage and storage, but the moment you're trying to carry some data in 1.44 meg [0] zip portions, you're bound to find out just how many defective discs you had the entire time.

[0]okay, it was 1.37 meg of data actually IIRC but still

> basically an enlarged 5.25" disk

Those 8 inch disks were not enlarged 5¼-inch disks. The 5¼-inch ones were shrunk 8 inch disks.

They were a fairly inconvenient form factor, the main benefit was the much reduced density, which made them super resistant to wear-and-tear. A lot of 8 inch floppies written in the 1980s still work just fine: last time I checked, BART used them.

I'm not sure they were ever commercially available in high density configurations.

> The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be.

Not Microsoft, they used 1.68MB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

Not me either, I used some utility whose name I've forgotten (might be fdformat as mentioned on that page) to get something like 1.74MB pretty reliably. I think I needed a driver loaded for it to work, but seem to remember either Windows 95 or 98 supporting it natively.

Sounds like DoubleSpace (later renamed to DriveSpace), which was built into MSDOS and early Windows versions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace

That was totally different. DoubleSpace made a virtual drive in a file and did software compression/decompression with a driver during writes and reads. It was a clone of Stacker, and both were slow as heck (but hard drives were only 40MB, so sometimes it was worth it).

FDFORMAT is probably the one you are thinking of

https://github.com/christoh/fdformat

> The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be.

Not the whole world. In the late 80's through early 90's the publishing industry used 44mb SyQuest disks to transport files.

>prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk)

The 3.5" disks were "floppy" too: you just had to take the actual disc out out of its rigid protective shell.

>Supposedly they only stored 1.2MB but I recall seeing 2.X MB models for sale at boeing surplus in the mid 1990s

I can't find anything about this on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats

There are some old drives that store 2 Mb per disk, but that's megabits, not megabytes. It seems the very largest 8" disks ever achieved was 1.2MB, exactly the same as the 5.25".

> Going in the other direction, prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk)

The “floppy disk” is named for the round mylar storage medium inside the square casing, which is both floppy and a disk in all the sizes they came in, not the square casing, which, while somewhat flexible in 8” and 5¼” sizes, is not really floppy, and absolutely not a disk, for any of them.

>not the square casing, which, while somewhat flexible in 8” and 5¼” sizes, is not really floppy, and absolutely not a disk, for any of them.

Not true. The square casing plus the circular thing inside was absolutely a "disk". But it was not a "disc". The thing inside was a "disc".

Depends where you're from. In American English, both are disks: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes

the 8" floppies predate the 5.25 ones (i.e. the original size when invented by IBM). 5.25 and then 3.5 came later.

When I was growing up, we had an old Z-80 (I think?) cpm machine that had a tiny crt and 8" floppy drives. We then had a TI-99/4a that used 5.25" and then a panasonic 8086 pc compat also with 5.25" From there we moved to a 386 with both a 5.25 and 3.5 drive, but that was it for the 5.25s

I still have some of the games from the 5.25 era on their original disks, though last time I glanced at both ebay and archive sites, there wasn't much value to keeping them as readily available, but hard to toss that element of my childhood.

> The whole world ran on 1.44mb

There were small pockets of Amiga users that could store 1.76mb on the same floppy disk due to a different type of hardware

That was possible on DOS with the standard hardware, just different formatting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fdformat#DOS_tool

I relied on it for years until CD writers became common and affordable.

Interesting I was not aware of that. I was told the reason was that in addition to a different format, the drive was more flexible so that it could adjust more dynamically. But it seems that you could store it more efficiently and get similar results on PC.

That said, I found a forum post that claimed an Amiga could store 1MB (1.1 in the comments) on a DD disk (standard size is 880k on Amiga, 720k on PC). So perhaps an HD disk could have been formatted to store over 2MB? I wouldn't be surprised if there were some drawbacks to this method that makes data corruption more probable.

Ref: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102630

HD 3.5" disks have a 2MB unformatted capacity, so I don't think anything could go over that. The Amiga drive was certainly more flexible (and some games used weird custom formats as a form of copy protection).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Amiga

Some info about different sectors, tracks, etc.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how..., https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...

>small pockets of Amiga users that could store 1.76mb

realy reaaally tiny fraction of Amigas userbase had access to HD floppy drive only ever shipping in ONE top of the line most expensive model 4000. It was a custom modified Chinon FZ357A spinning at half rpm, needed because Amiga could only handle 250Kbit/s data rate while standard HD floppy drive uses 500Kbit/s. Commodore being hugely mismanaged didnt invest anything in engineering, they lacked will and resources to update technology in its subsequent models. 1994 A4000T, the very last Amiga ever manufactured shipped with the very same Chip responsible for sound and Double Density floppy interfacing as the very first model 1000 from 1985.

> drive was more flexible

Stock Amiga FDD was standard and could be replaced with PC after little pinout modification. Controller on the other hand could be called software defined as it lacked any smarts. It could only decode/encode raw datastream to/from ram buffer whole track at a time. In contrast PC controllers target specific sectors.

Article about playing with stuffing more data on PC floppies https://www.os2museum.com/wp/floppy-capacity-math/