There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future.
I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.
I've had several hard drives fail over the years. They all signalled their impending doom by making interesting noises so I never lost any data. When my SSD fails I think I'm going to miss the noises.
I've worked with lots of (enterprisy) hard drives and SSDs. The hard drive failure rate was easily 10x the rate of the SSDs, but the SSDs basically never gave symptoms of impending doom. They just disappeared from the data channel. We did have one group of drives that gave symptoms... 50% of the batch dropped dead within 2 weeks of entering service, a good number failed over the time it took to get the rest of them replaced. And one drive that had very poor throughput for several minutes did show SMART metrics that it was reallocating sectors, but we took it as a sign of death and replaced it; I think it might have worked fine once it calmed down, but we'll never know.
Anecdata is interesting. Here's mine, I've recently had a spate of a few Dell system 3-5 years old getting progressively more sluggish. Quick tests don't turn up issues. When I'm given the time required I use the hard drive manufacturer's testing utility and do thorough testing at which point damaged sectors start to turn up, not too many but enough to cause seek issues or something. I use chkdsk to attempt to recover data and mark the problematic sectors and at least for a while the system are a bit better. Of course, as soon as possible replacements are needed.
Which is weird because the only microSD card I've ever had fail on me locked itself into write-protect mode, allowing me to get my data. I wonder why SSDs don't do the same.
They're supposed to, and I've heard anecdotes that they sometimes do, but it seems like many of the failures I've experienced were firmware failures (in some cases, upgrading firmware on remaining drives seemed to result in lower failure rates anyway). Firmware failures have no rules; spinner drives sometimes have them too, and they might disappear from the bus as well, although usually those will "just" disappear after a reboot, not in the middle of a request.
One day I rebooted my desktop and my C drive SSD was just gone. No warnings of any kind, great performance until it died.
I've always distrusted SSDs, and manufacturers continue to use lower quality controllers and flash, including sometimes changing a currently great drive to use cheaper components and sell it as the exact same device.
Meanwhile games load from my spinning rust within a minute, and SSDs never seem to actually improve that that much, because the code responsible for parsing and loading RAM seems to matter more.
Seriously though, until very recently you could hear dot matrix printers at most airline gates. They used them to print out manifests to hand to the crew right before the plane departs.
You should have heard my teleprinter. Hooked up to my Nascom-2 with the UART driving a transistor that in turn drove a reed relay for the 170 V (I think) signal. It was only five bit code so I had to write a driver for it.
The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?"
The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.
>"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?"
Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers.
But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would open the .doc assignment file in notepad as binary, delete some random data, then save it to floppy. It would be 2-5 days till the professor would get back to you saying "the floppy you gave me was corrupted, please resubmit your work ASAP" and that gave us enough time to finish it.
I may be a statistical anomaly, but although modern USB sticks are pretty reliable, I experienced an awful track record w.r.t. the ones from the 2000's-2010's.
What kind of crappy floppies were you using? In my experience, floppy disks were astoundingly reliable as long as they were handled correctly (and even when not), up until the late-90s when they became vestigial and manufacturing quality dropped. Back in the 8-bit micro days, they worked extremely well.
I remember my Z80 with TR-DOS and 5.25" floppy controller. We all dreaded that "Disk Error. Abort,Retry,Ignore?" message. That meant time to copy floppy again, and with just 48KB of RAM, there was a lot of floppy swaps to do this.
I literally never saw problems with floppies with the Apple ][ or other micros of the time, or even with MS-DOS, up until the 1.44 became king and then people started moving to CD-Rs and other things. At that point, the drives became cheap junk (there were large, noticeable differences in the internals between a late-90s floppy drive and an early-90s one: much bigger and nicer motors for instance) and the media was terrible.
It was a peculiarity of the 2G signal. While the frequency of the signal itself was high enough that it did not interfere with speakers, the channel was shared between phones using TDMA, in which the channel is divided in fixed-size slots, and a phone transmits in only one of these slots while remaining silent for the rest of them. It's the envelope of these transmissions (transmit for a while, stay silent for a while, repeat) which caused the interference with the speakers.
According to Wikipedia (if I understood it correctly), the interval between the start of one transmission and the next one is 4.615 ms, or 9.230 ms for half-rate, which corresponds to 217 Hz or 108 Hz (if I did the calculations right), well within audible range.
Newer cellular standards use CDMA or OFDMA instead of TDMA, so they do not have that same low-frequency on-off behavior.
Well, TDD, which means the base station and the phones take turns transmitting on a single frequency, is still possible in 4G and 5G. How often the switch happens is configurable by the operator and in 4G can range from 1ms for phones and 4ms for base station, to 3 ms for phones and 2 ms for base station. So, just the directional switching shouldn't be the full story (and even though I used to work on base station radio software goes beyond my understanding. Too near the digital processing side, I guess :)
When we are on Teamspeak/Mumble with friends, we can always tell who will be receiving a text in the coming seconds; I assumed the headset wires were acting as an antenna and catching the SMS radio signal.
When I play electric guitar with a phone in my pocket I can still hear interference. Not as satisfying as in the GSM era, now it is just noise as opposed to a recognizable pattern.
I've fallen deeper and deeper into the nostalgia of retro computing YouTube channels. They're amazing (and make YouTube tolerable). They have all kinds of interesting devices and adapters to make SD cards appear as SCSI HDs for old Macs (or whatever), I think even floppies and such going as far back as the Apple II.
One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0].
Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein.
At around 1990 as a high school student I was working in a wholesale supermarket and in the office they had a microcomputer (IIRC a MicroVAX) which had audible database transactions. Every time one of the cashiers scanned an item, you could hear the hard disk move into place to write out the data. I found that endless fascinating for the same reason.
One of the earliest computers I worked on (ca. 1968) was an IBM 1130. Its disk drive (5MB, I think) used a voice coil. I'd set up a Fortran compile, then walk to the other end of the (smallish) building to get a coffee. There was a particular clunk kind of sound as the compiler started to write out the object file. When I heard that, it was time to go back to the machine room.
I liked the old floppies. They were great for backing up personal data. They were easy to write on and store in special trays.
I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one.
I'm surprised they don't make NFC Floppies that look exactly like a real floppy, but store a few MB you access with NFC. Since everything is mobile first it would be a really nice way to hand someone a PDF, although credit card size is more practical.
It's fast enough for a megabyte or two, and sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge.
I have not found any good way to keep track of flash either, aside from using fewer and larger ones so it's all in one place.
sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge.
Yeah, what the hell is with that? If I need to send files between phones I can use an app, but there's no telling when they'll stop developing it and it'll stop working. It's gotten to the point it's easer to copy a file onto my network drive and then recopy it to the destination device. When I'm away from home, though, I usually have to grab an actual USB cable.
> > sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge.
> Yeah, what the hell is with that?
Back in the early 2000s, we had IrDA which could easily transfer files from one device to another through OBEX. Not much later, we had the same OBEX but now on top of Bluetooth. We still have Bluetooth; it should be easy to send files between phones (and even computers) through OBEX. Last time I tried, however, it was a pain, failing more than half of the time. I gave up, and now use syncthing for that.
We have Nearby Share, which is awesome, but doesn't help much if the other person has an iPhone, or you've got a Windows/Linux.
I expect it might be solved in a few years, as long as no Apple products are involved, but for now we're still stuck taking pictures of each other's screens if we need something fast.
I miss old-school IM platforms. I could just see a family member online and say "Here's (link), do we want to go to this activity on the weekend", or "Here's the photo of the cat you wanted."
I suppose I could host a local IRC server on a RasPi or something, but that's way more convoluted.
Current IM platforms work just as well for that, aside from the fact people are starting to not like Facebook and half your friends might not have it. The main problem is if you don't have cell service and need to transfer a file, or if the file is on a machine without IM set up for some reason or another.
Minimalism is trendy, especially in recent times, but there's an argument to be made that there is irreplacable usability in something being Big and Chonk.
Chungus data mediums, connectors, etc. almost never go missing or break from simple daily use.
We had the same problem with floppies, yes you could write on them more easily. But we were still forced to have multiple of them stashed in draws, the same way we did with CD's.
Solution is to buy a portable SSD drive and be done with it.
The idea I just had would be write a number on them. Should be space for two or three digits. Then keep table with contents for each number.
Edit: I guess I haven’t used USB drive in while cause they don’t have place to write. Would have put label sticker on them, or printed label from machine.
I put each one in a tiny (2" x 3.75") reclosable plastic bag, and include a slip of paper with the details written on it. These bags are sold for use by people who do beading.
I keep the bagged flash drives in a small cardboard box.
The Apple Pay bell sound is the most satisfying modern sound. It also makes use of the vibration motor to make it feel like an actual bell has been struck in your phone
I shoot on DVCAM tape a bit, and I have to say there are few things as mechanically satisfying as putting one of the full-size DVCAM tapes into the camera and hoisting it onto your shoulder.
...and the feeling of relief at the fact that, unlike a USB drive, it'll never turn into something else like a keyboard and perhaps do something malicious.
In a lab that I hung out in as a student... there was a wang semi compatible (it only had 512k of base ram rather than 640k) that linux was ported to (there was some fun with LILO if I recall correctly).
This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made.
The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.
The memories I have are more connected to the sound of the floppy drives on an Apple II, it was very special. It's probably connected to the fact that I was relatively young, and the feeling of using an active computer and software - but there was something special with the Apple II, I think I connected the stripes of colours with the sound somehow. But it was magic to listen to that sound while loading a floppy. Which is why the emulators don't really work for me..
There's something that reminds one a little of a knight stabbing a dragon with a sword when you're forced to yell "When I say stop I mean STOP, you son of a bitch!" and ram an extended paperclip into the manual eject hole.
All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names):
Gotek are awesome. I use one in an old 486 and it works really well as a floppy drive replacement. Especially with the FlashFloppy firmware replacement.
Yeah! A DX2 66Mhz, with a real mechanical hard drive, in a real beige case with a turbo button :D Some modern "amenities" I have are the gotek, and a CF Card to IDE adapter, so I can more easily copy files to it.
I use it mostly for Borland C++, but also Solitaire in Windows 3.1.
That’s awesome. Is it a vintage drive as well? I wonder about the failure points - CMOS battery meltdown, moving parts. If you can eliminate these, you can probably run that 486 for life.
I was imagining something like a cassette tape->line in adapter like used to be common go play your ipod through your car stereo. I.e. something that would emulate the actual disk, not the disk drive.
gotek is fine if your device uses FAT formatted floppies. If your device has a custom format, you need an HxC drive or HxC firmware fr a Gotek drive. Also, I have some devices that don't use standard 34 pin floppy connectors so I had to learn Kicad to build 26 to 34 pin adapters.
All of my floppy using devices are synthesizers or samplers, and keeping them around is not a matter of not being able to afford to upgrade, but rather than many of these devices have very unique sounds that aren't replicated by newer equipment.
> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation
Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as soon as a better one like usb storage became available and prominent.
Actually late floppies from the early 00s are terrible, but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible. I have a huge pile of floppies from 1988 to 1992 and they all work. Even HDD ones formatted as FDD, though it's not recommended, still work fine 30 years later.
I have a 1987 Apple //c with a bunch of 5.25" floppies of the same period and they all work just fine : games, UCSD Pascal, utilities, Mouse Desk...
That's my experience as well. The ones that fail are 3.5" HD floppies (1.44MB). Over on the ctech mailing list an old-timer expert explained that it's basically because the 3.5" HD floppies are just above the density limit the medium and technology can handle, which is why the 720KB DD floppies are fine (and 1.2MB 5.25" ones are also fine), but the HD ones fail.
I tried to recover all my floppies from the eighties and nineties, it went very well except for the 3.5" HD ones - couldn't recover a single one, whatever drives I used. From what I'm told the 8" ones should read fine too, we'll see.. I have many, and I have a drive, but I haven't got it set up yet.
Yes, it does happen, but in my experience they are much more reliable than most people seem to remember. I've had a few floppies that couldn't even be salvaged by a reformat (as mentioned in the article), but I also have many more original 3.5" floppies from the 90s that are still perfectly readable, and without errors (I know that as they contain data with checksums). "Utterly unrealiable" isn't doing them justice.
I remember picking up floppies from the stack of "ok to erase" ones, and having one not formatting being a common occurrence. Certainly we were using them quite a bit and it was a while back, but still, reliability was nowhere near a USB stick as long as you don't buy the cheapest ones
Let's go revisit some USB sticks that hasn't been touched in 10-20 years though. Flash memory can also get unreliable if you don't access it for a prolonged time. SSDs should be powered on regularly to keep the data alive.
Back when we started to use CDs for backups I was horrified when I found that in general those CDs started to become unreadable after only a year in storage. We never had any problems with original CDs (say, the tons of CDs that came with an SGI computer), but the consumer-type writable ones didn't last at all. I think the technology got better after some years, but I still wouldn't trust a writable CD or DVD to last. For flash, at least, they are actually spec'ed.. and they don't last. They can't. Every bit holds a charge.. which will dissipate, eventually.
This is because commercial optical disks and recordable optical disks are actually completely different storage mediums.
Commercial optical disks, as in the disks that you got when you bought games and movies and the like, are physically stamped. The data is recorded as physical pits that are stamped onto the disk from a master copy. That disk isn't degrading unless it suffers severe external physical damage.
By contrast, recordable optical disks write their data using inks and dyes that are burned by a recording drive's laser. These inks and dyes can and will degrade over time, eventually leading to data loss.
True in general but there are, as always, exceptions. Some more expensive recordable discs use really stable dyes and remain readable for a very long time. On the other hand, some commercially pressed discs also suffer from bit rot.
I have some mid-90s CD-based games that have become partially unreadable due to that. Some CD pressing facilities are known to have produced lots of discs at certain times that are now faulty.
Just like floppies got their bad reputation from the throw-away disks and drives which hit the market in the latter days of their era the same is true for writeable CDs and DVDs. I have tons of older Kodak Gold CD-Rs which are still perfectly readable after ~30 years. I bought these back then to use as archive medium - back when 650 MB still seemed like quite a lot of data - and can only conclude I made the right choice.
Yep, circa 1995 a "normal" hard disk was 300 to 500 MB, a whole disk image would fit on a CD, we had an external CDRW drive (yes, parallel interface), soon after 1 GB to 2.1 GB become common, and I remember making multiple "data" partitions around 650 MB in size because contents of one such partition would surely fit on a backup CD.
The CD's (media) in those times were surely more durable, but also the actual drives were much more robust.
I still have somewhere a (SCSI) CDRW drive using one of those "caddies" that can read at 1x that could sometimes read old CD's that more modern drives failed at (used to, it's a lot of time I don't use it).
If you bought floppy drives at the tail end of their run and disks at the tail end of their run, then yes. Everything was engineered good enough to work a couple times and that was it, because files were too big and 1.44mb wasn't enough; 2.88 was Japan only; people were moving on to zip drives or ls-120 drives (which were also quite good at reading 1.44 media), cd-rs sometimes, and usb mass storage (with drives that are now comically small... I think my first was 16 MB)
If you had equipment from say 1990 and blank disks from then too and a reason to keep it running, it likely still is. Although floppy disk emulators are probably a reasonable retrofit in most applications.
It goes both ways. Things at the tail end are also optimised for cost so extremely and they were valued so little by the users by then that the latest stuff is junk.
It ends up being that some manufacturers made good stuff and some made junk, but you don't know which until much later.
I have a batch of nos nameless 3.5" 720k I got from floppydisk.com that are basically all junk. Fail to even verify a format, or maybe succeeds once and then fails within 3 uses.
I have other even older, actually labelled as single sided 3.5", but made by Basf that just run and run and run.
In fact most 8" are even more reliable than any of the later versions because a lot of 8" machines spun the disks the entire time the machine was on. All day every day at work that disk is just grinding away... so they had to be good just to be usable at all.
2.88 was pushed by IBM with their PS/2 line that tried to push the clones out of the market and take over with their own, very expensive, and completely proprietary PC computers. They came with 2.88MB drives, but no one else adopted them, or most other technologies included in the PS/2 line. So the disks stayed expensive and uncommon, and went nowhere.
Yes, that's correct. Like some other things in PS/2 machines (such as the MCA bus), they weren't entirely closed to other vendors, and IBM was trying to push the 2.88s as the new floppy standard, but they never caught on like the other standards IBM pushed before then when IBM had more clout.
To be fair, a few years ago I bought 8" floppies for the Ohio Scientific system that had been in storage since the late 80s. One of the labels had a 1979 date on it.
I sent them to a guy who writes the emulator for that system and three out of four were totally readable.
It really came in handy though when I needed an extension on my homework. I would just intentionally corrupt the file, blame it on the floppy, and the teacher would give me an extra day to turn it in.
Newer floppies are unreliable. Older floppies of somewhat reputable brands are not nearly as bad as what people remember from the latter days of the floppy-era. They got their bad reputation from the deluge of throw-away bad quality disks and drives which hit the market around the dot.com boom.
I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful.
You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.
There are still a few places that sell new or new old stock tapes, including metal tapes, for much better prices than you can find ebay... check out tapeline.info for example. I got a metal tape from them a year or two ago at a reasonable price, but I'm not sure if they currently have any in stock.
There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!
The obsolete format I’ve most recently gotten into is VHS tape. Used decks go for $10 or $20 at our reuse center, you can buy prerecorded tapes for 50 cents. If a deck fails or a tape gets pulled you won’t feel so bad. Decks from 2000 or so are solidly better than they were in the 1980s, particularly they all support HiFi sound which is excellent. The quality is not so good as a DVD or Blu-Ray but a good movie on VHS is still a good movie.
Getting the best quality out of VHS is a rabbit hole I went down last year. There are a couple movies that I have that weren't released in any format besides VHS and I spent quite a lot of time trying to get the best quality digital copy I could. There are a dozen or so (mostly s-vhs jvc) models that have circuitry to stabilize the images and they start at $300 on ebay.
One was Norman's Awesome Experience (three people get sent back to Ancient Rome) and the other was a documentary Desmond Morris's The Human Animal which I eventually found a rip that claimed to be from DVD that was better than any that I managed (even though I haven't found the actual dvds for sale which makes me wonder if it was sourced from dvd)
Ah good point. Hadn't considered mods as a distro mechanism. I still have all the mods I made in the late 80s/90s - rendered them and uploaded to Soundcloud for the world to enjoy / laugh at ... a very resilient format!
> They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful.
IIRC, the last big customer for cassette tapes was prisoners in the prison system, so "new" tape players are universally garbage (because priority 1 is complying with prison regulations, priority 2 is being as cheap as possible, and priority 3 is having nice things in prison is a liability).
Any analog recording medium is 100% at the mercy of how much care went into the mechanics.
The tape head is essentially a stethoscope in direct physical contact whith every other part in the machine, and even the table it's sitting on and your house and the world.
Every part of it from the quality of the bearings or bushings, or lack of either just plastic parts rubbing directly on metal pins, the motor, gears, all of it is present in the physical motion of the tape, which is directly added to the signal you get out of the head.
It's like putting your ear on any machine, you can hear every single part inside the machine.
It can't be fixed by electronics In the same way that you can't unscramble an egg.
You can only fake improving it with filters that really just modify the signal even more. It may sound a "better" if one of the worst components is a big simple crude regular motor pulse or ac hum, and a filter can somewhat match that well enough to make it less noticeable, but the resulting output is even further deviated from the original signal.
Digital does not have this problem because a bit is a bit. A bit that barely registered and a bit that came from a strong signal are both the same bit once read, and even some amount of incorrect bits are repaired by math and redundant data.
And digital doesn't care how slow or fast the bits come. Any deviations from imaginary perfect media speed aren't turned into audio signal because the data is not being turned from physical aspects of the media directly into sound like a stethoscope, it's just a block of data that could arrive at any speed, and the audio is fabricated later by interpreting the data. The audio there is determined by the quality of the dac.
Reliable is just an ambiguous word in this context because it only means certain aspects are reliable. Just because reliable is usually equated with good doesn't mean it actually means good in all contexts.
For instance a direct drive mechanism (gears instead of belts) with few moving parts and sloppy tolerances on those few parts will be will be highly reliable, in that it will run every time and run forever. "sloppy tolerances" is usually a bad thing but it also means it never gets stuck. This is in general not just a tape drive. But it's garbage for this application because a tape drive isn't a rock saw.
To make any kind of analog signal handler, the mechanical parts need super close tolerances, which means they more easily stick from dust, oxidation, or dried out sticky lubes, and has fragile elements like rubber belts and rollers that all age poorly and even suffer from normal use like getting glazed, and even suffer from not getting used, like rollers forming dents where contacting parts rest for too long, belts taking on the shape of a pully, sticking to the pully, etc. Basically even though the better mechanisn is much more expensive and does the most important job better, one thing it's not is more reliable in the way that a hammer is reliable. It's delicate and needs lots of care and maintenence, and that is not the result of poor engineering or manufacturing or quality.
The motors are often knockoffs and the gears are cheap and mostly plastic which lead to sloppy fit which leads to playing at the wrong speed and variations in speed which They also often are only mono tape heads instead of stereo.
Check out techmoan and vwestlife on youtube as they have done better jobs than me of explaining the issues.
Using "better electronics" can't help you unless your idea of "better electronics" includes the actual tape mechanism being complained about. A few things are wrong with cheap mechanisms for playing cassette tapes e.g.:
The tape speed should be precisely calibrated and, as much as possible, unvarying, instead it wobbles all over the place and is just roughly dialed in. On average the mech might say run 2% fast, but then also vary moment by moment by 1%.
The right way to enable recording is to add an electromagnet, which can randomise the magnetic alignment of the particles on the tape the tape just before it is rewritten, but that costs money so the cheap option is a permanent magnet, moved near the tape when needed, this aligns everything, so it kinda works but it's much noisier (in terms of the recording)
Reliable in the "it moves when you ask for movment" sense, but not reliable in the sense of "actually moves in a smooth, constant speed when asked for movment".
I still have a sheet of the write-protect tabs for 5.25" floppies that I, for some unknown reason, refuse to throw away. I have one flash drive that I stuck a tab on ages ago for giggles (I didn't want to lose the contents until I got it replicated), and it still makes me smile.
I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.
Why should old things always die if there is a demand and they are working fine for intended purposes? Let there be a cottage industry selling a single new floppy disk to upgrade flight software for $999, beats buying a new airplane. If we lost ability to make previously commonplace objects in limited quantity when needed, that's not good for our economy, environment or preserving entire cultural legacy of our civilization. Resurgence of vinyl is a great example of what can be accomplished in consumer space. Making floppies available as long as expensive machine need these could do same for enterprise.
The real question is, do shareholders see it as an advantage or profitable??
Isn't that the final question for every industry?
We can't even have good things that are relevant today because of unlimited growth expectations.
One of the things I wonder about in retrospect is why floppy drives remained at a static level of ability for the most part. I mean I know there were the LS120 and such things, but why wasn't there a manufacturer just pushing the tech a bit further? Like why not have a drive made with additional precision and capable of squeezing 3 MB into a floppy?
Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?
From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over.
We had CD burners in every computer. Floppy disks were too unreliable compared to CDs and files were already too large. We had external hard disks and pen drives in the late 90s when USB was released. That was the end of floppy disks for backups.
So, to answer your question, no time to do it. Every manufacturer was probably working on the next big technology and not on incrementally perfecting the floppy disk.
Yeah, but I recall that in the CD era, there were attempts to push the envelope.
Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the normal end on standard CDs, because people figured that you can squeeze things a bit tighter and cut the corners a bit more here and there, and with the right drives that worked.
I'm wondering why they didn't do that with floppy drives. It was definitely a thing on the software side with special formatting programs, but I don't recall it being a thing on the hardware side. Not in the sense of having new official upgrades like 2.88 MB, but drives advertising that they were made 20% better than the official spec and could squeeze more into each standard floppy.
Most floppy drives were like that. I mostly formatted my nominally 1.44MB disks to 1.72MB (the "unformatted capacity" is 2MB). It worked so reliably on different drives that Microsoft distributed software on disks formatted this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format (it says there that they were harder to copy, but that's not my experience, and MS operating systems supported them directly from about the mid 1990s).
You having a fancy drive that could write more data isn't super useful unless other drives are likely to be able to read it. Looks like there was some softwarw [1] to jam more data onto disks, and Microsoft used an advanced format for software distribution on floppies as well.
I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the 80/90 minute cds came several years later.
"Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?"
For floppies: Yes. It wouldn't help to use better precision. The medium itself can't handle that kind of density. 3.5" floppy drives actually went over the limit with 1.44MB ones - they fail when kept in storage for some years. Much much more than 720KB floppies.
I think they were limited by the medium. If there was more capacity, we would have seen bigger sizes. Instead, they jumped to LS120 (SuperDisk) and Zip Disk.
I think tracking was problem, hence the optical tracking SuperDisk. Zip drive was more like hard drive, with rigid platter and cover.
There were extra-high density floppy disks which held 2.88 MB. However, as with the change from double density to high density, it required a different magnetic coating on the media to work (reliably).
> Following the rodeo incident, Necaise decided to finally upgrade, but not to an entirely new machine—just to a floppy-to-USB emulator. These devices cost around $275 each...
That's odd. Gotek and similar emulators should be available for a tenth of that price. There are several variations though, so it smells to me like someone is reselling a Gotek "guaranteed to work" with a specific type of machine with a large markup.
Odd indeed. As far as I know the Gotek was invented exactly for use by embroidery machines, and the ads are everywhere. I tried entering "embroidery floppy emulator" into Google and an Amazon link for a $38 Gotek came up first (and, as we know, we can get it cheaper than that).
But of course a few lines below there's a "floppyusbemulator.com" page with a $250 "Nalbantov" drive (which are sold for $175 elsewhere, and there are probably other variantes).
I can confirm, the first time I saw one of them (many years ago, I believe probably 15 years ago, maybe more) it was in the workshop of someone who provided assistance/repair to sewing machines (and embroidery machines), from what I can remember at the time floppies and floppy drives were still in use and it was intended as an upgrade as it had less issues with dust and was more convenient to have many (up to 100) "floppy" images available.
Besides the (now common) Gotek, there are every kind of emulators/replacements for industrial machines, like, besides embroidery, CNC's, some early robots, etc., here is a site dedicated to them:
Happens in the SCSI emulator market as well - there is a company massively marking up SCSI emulators and praying on naive musicians. Which is fair enough given they set them up before sending them out, but it still irks my sense of fairness
> Davit Niazashvili, a maintenance manager at Geosky, a cargo airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia, still uses floppy disks to apply critical updates to two 36-year-old 747-200s, which were originally delivered to British Airways in 1987:
GeoSky frequently lets youtubers film in the cockpit of their 747-200's. If you are a fan of the classic 747 steam gauge cockpits, these videos are priceless. Some examples:
To still be able to read/write floppies proper with modern computers, handling custom formats, the excellent GreaseWeazle, also Keir Fraser's: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
I had a weird dream last night that my M1 MacBook Pro had a 5 1/4” floppy drive still. No idea why or what brought that on but to wake up and read this was refreshing :)
Is there a company that refurbished floppy disks? I've got maybe 50 of them and wouldn't mind giving them to some rodeo, or company that still needs them.
I tend to keep pretty much everything, at least for a while. I'd call myself a "hoarder", but really, I have a fairly decent system for categorization and storage, and clean everything out every couple of years and sell a lot of it online.
I have a storage tote full of floppy disks - there have to be hundreds of them in there, though I've not counted. I think I'll go grab that box tonight and see if I can't sell them on eBay or something.
I recently saw the Sony MSAC-FD2MA. It's a memory stick to floppy adapter. I assume an SD to memory stick adapter would work with it. I'm curious how it works internally. How does it interface with the read/write head? How does it map logical data (files, FS) to sectors and tracks? Or if it doesn't, how does it even map a flat image file? Floppies can be formatted all sorts of ways.
It uses the magnetic head of the floppy drive for IO. Devices like that don't function without the correct driver and are thus unsuitable for embedded devices.
Smaller (≤16GB) MicroSD cards cost a few Euros, perhaps less than that in bulk. They are not quite as cheap as floppies were at some point. And not every device accepts them. There are also some very cheap USB sticks, though they usually come with older USB type A.
My Akai S1000 sampler from the late 80s still has it's floppy drive, which I occasionally still use even though it has a modern SD-card based emulated SCSI hard disk as well. I could change the floppy to a Gotek USB drive, but I'm not interested
I love using it. It triggers so many happy teen memories from my BBC B and Amiga!
I'm going to ramp up my floppy hoarding now. Years ago I started hoarding Type II and Type IV cassette tapes, and I've 10x'd my investment on those easy. I don't have to even do anything and they just keep going up in value.
That Florian guy they quoted sounds like a real dick, too.
Fun fact, the disk material of a floppy disk is a really good poorman IR filter, I had a lot of fun building a janky wiimote clone for my kids to play with, using a makeshift IR filter from floppy disks?
lol to the guy accusing floppy disks of being "plastic waste." As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were.
On a more serious note, wouldn't most of these machines be well served by floppy disk emulators? Or is the barrier to entry there the modicum of technical know-how needed to interface with those properly.
> As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were.
For floppy-sized pieces of data, a typical SSD will afford you literally several billions of write cycles [0] until the media fails.
In comparison, a floppy disk manufactured in the 00s is going to fail after five write cycles. I can see how one would call that plastic waste.
[0]: assuming SSD write lifetimes in the ballpark of single-digits PBW (petabytes written), which is a realistic value in 2023.
I read the article and it sounds like the floppy disk is dying and will die very soon. What a clickbait headline, but that's what to expect from Wired.
I have recently seen some weird icons which I couldn't understand at first, in some software.. turned out it tried to depict a USB thumb drive, and meant "save". So someone, at least, is trying to replace the floppy disk icon. If that's an actual improvement I'm not so sure about.
