

The mystery of the mega-selling floppy disk - yread
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8646699.stm

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Arubis
"The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big -
has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start. The term was a hangover
from its precursor, the 5¼-inch floppy, which had a definite lack of rigidness
about it."

I understand that this isn't immediately obvious to laypeople, but "floppy"
refers to the data platter inside the diskette, which is, in fact, floppy.

Not too surprising that a news site glanced over this, but being the first one
to mention it here makes me feel decidedly old.

Incidentally, I'd say my office goes through a box or two of floppies a week,
mostly for use on those oh-so-expensive ancient oscilloscopes, curve tracers,
and the like.

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binarymax
For several years, I've had an idea in the back of my head to buy a whole
bunch of multicoloured floppies and use them as wall/mosaic tiles (and maybe
even store its grid location on the floppy itself for extra art-factor). Never
got around to it though. Maybe I should buy some while I still can.

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husted
Did the term "floppy" really come from the 5.25"? I seem to remember that the
8" disk drive was almost impossible to insert without a third hand as support.

I just had a look around the office and we still have a number of instruments
(oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and such) with disk drives. I'm pretty sure
that no one uses them (the disk drives) because none of our laptops can read
the disks.

~~~
hga
No, it indeed came from the original 8" variety. I started in the
microcomputer scene just as 5.25" floppies were thoroughly taking over the
scene and heard stories about the 8" ones.

From Wikipedia and memory:

IBM does a 8" read only for loading firmware into mainframes in 1971.

Memorex and Shugart come out with R/W ones in the following 2 years.

Shugart comes out with the first 5.25" one in 1976, it has only a fraction of
the capacity of 8" drives of that year or the following.

In 1978 5.25" drives start getting a respectable amount of memory (360KB on a
side) and that's the end of the 8" form factor, no more new models come out.

As you note, the 8" disks are very big and cumbersome and I'm sure they and
their mechanisms were a lot more expensive.

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bockris
One of my college jobs was night operator for a bank which ran on a IBM S/36
(model 5360) and our backup was two magazines of 10 8in floppy disks in each.
The 5360 had an auto loading mechanism and I could gauge how close the backup
was to being done by the position of the magazine. Good times.

~~~
bockris
Replying to self. Lots of pictures here.

<http://www.corestore.org/36.htm>

~~~
hga
Very cool, thanks for sharing that with us.

Love those old style straight stroke solenoid head actuators on the disks
(Winchesters?). Brings back memories of '70s era CDC SMD disk pack drives.

Which would frequently blow their driving power transistors; I had a friend
who'd pop the caps and reattach the leads, this was for a small student run
computer center with no budget to speak of, using all sorts of surplus
equipment, in this case the prototype Lisp Machine's disk drive with a
prototype Xylogics 4 card wire wrap UNIBUS controller (Mylar sheets between
the card to prevent shorts).

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njharman
This was an incredibly poorly written/researched/technically inaccurate
article. It is the epitome of "fluff".

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mrcharles
"One might be tempted to think that, like the vinyl enthusiasts who insist
music sounds "warmer" on a record, the floppy has its own fan club. But unlike
the case of vinyl, a digital format of a floppy is no different than that
found on your hard drive or USB stick."

Those would be the people who buy Monster HDMI cables.

~~~
bdfh42
To be fair, the mechanical characteristics of a record deck, the tone arm and
the cartridge combined with the minor electronic process that decompresses the
wave forms across different frequencies mean that a vinyl recording is bound
to sound subtly different to a digital source even if both are created from
the same original recording. If that is interpreted as "warmer" then one has
to accept that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

~~~
warfangle
The other reason, of course, is the Loudness Wars.

Older records were not mastered hot to stand out in juke boxes or on the
radio, and thus had an actual dynamic range (instead of everything just being
LOUD). Ultimately ended up being higher quality recordings for it, too. Only a
few people ask for a high dynamic range nowadays (like Porcupine Tree).
Everyone else gets mastered up to 11.

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axod
I have a synth that has a built in floppy drive. I'm thinking of two options.
Either sell it and get something newer, or find a drop in replacement for the
floppy drive.

Does anyone know if such a thing exists? eg a device that looks exactly like a
floppy drive to the host, but has maybe an SD card slot and some way to switch
between virtual disks on that filesystem?

~~~
fhars
I don't, but google does. [http://jimwarholic.com/2009/04/fdd-floppy-disk-
drive-emulato...](http://jimwarholic.com/2009/04/fdd-floppy-disk-drive-
emulators.php) They seem to be quite expensive, so unless you really must have
a physical device with the right connector, you are better off buying a new
computer.

~~~
axod
Great. Thanks. These look like they would do the job.

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Zak
I bought floppy disks recently for exactly the niche use they describe: a
lighting console. Oddly enough, the console in question[0] was released in
2002 and was not a revision of an older product. There are also pins labeled
"USB" on the motherboard, but they have nothing connected to them. Later, the
manufacturer released a version that uses USB storage.

[0] <http://www.compulite.com/index.php?page_id=25>

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gaius
I think people forget just how much data 1.44M is. Sure it's not enough for
one photo or one song. It's a hell of a lot of plain text tho'. People still
use 64k ISDN lines too.

~~~
eru
A photo fits. You just need to crank up the compression, but it's bearable.

I guess I can comfortable read through 2 MiB of plain text--should be a few
thousand pages of text.

If you compress your plain text (without loss) you can store even more.

~~~
gaius
My first HD was 5M, I thought I'll _never_ fill this up :-)

~~~
eru
I am actually having quite a hard time filling up my 250GiB hard disk. I mean,
fill it up with stuff that's non-recoverable elsewhere, so e.g. videos don't
count.

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bitwize
My ophthalmologist has a visual-field-test machine which, after it runs its
battery of tests, gives the operator the option of storing the data on a _5
1/4" floppy_. Because there are probably grasshoppers with longer lifespans
than these storage media, they have to buy fresh disks from somewhere.
Probably a specialty supplier that sells them at considerable markup.

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blang
The last time I used a floppy was in the spring of 2004. The only way to get
G-Code to my university's CNC machine was via the 3.5. I'm not sure if the
setup is still the same 6 years later.

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RiderOfGiraffes
Lots posted recently about the floppy and its demise:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/floppy?sort=by_date>

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hackermom
I'd be willing to bet that plenty of these diskettes are being bought for
students and classes by schools still maintaining older computers with no
immediate USB functionality (concerns of the costs + problems associated with
these could weigh in), or no suitable intranet structure available - think
smaller low/intermediate elementary grade schools etc., using computers as
tutoring equipment with educational software, rather than "leisure
surfstations".

