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Comment by post_break | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have audio of the different sounds of drives he describes? Such a fascinating article.

I don't have audio recordings but 30 years later I can still hear the sound of my Apple ][ floppy drive re-homing itself, which was a scary sound.

The track-to-track sound he's describing was very pleasant though.

I remember that "grinding" sound, decades later! I haven't boot an Apple II since 1990...

Especially the sound it makes as it tries to read a disk with bad sectors. I can still hear that in my mind.

That was always a sad day, especially if you saved up two week of pocket money to buy that floppy.

There was a "Beagle Bros" software program that would alternatively turn left/right floppy drives on and it would sound like a train.. It would go faster and faster.

I remember running it and worrying I borked my mom's floppy drives. But thankfully it didn't.

I thought it was on "silicon salad" but I don't see it. Unless its "text train". Maybe it was online from Nibble magazine. https://archive.org/stream/Beagle_Bros-Silicon_Salad#page/n0...

Instead of having some kind of switch or sensor to know when the read head was at track 0, the stepper motor just banged the head repeatedly against the metal stop until it was sure things were in alignment. This was that "chukchukchukchuk" sound you heard.

I remember playing around with the delays in that routine to make the head move at different frequencies. With a little bit of playing around you could make the drive play music.

That scared the hell out of me when I was in 6th grade and first tried to format a disk. I thought I broke my computer.

With a little bit of playing around you could make the drive play music.

That's basically the same thing you had to do to make the Apple play music anyway -- do a LDA to a certain address with various timings to toggle the 1 bit speaker. Amazingly enough, you could do legible text to speech with it -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth

Absolutely true....although I'm not sure the Disk ][ head was meant to be vibrated at 400 Hz like a paper cone speaker was. =)

Also, you could find the sweet spot in step interval, making seeking super smooth and quiet. Oh, this was with a PC, Apple drives must have been optimally adjusted by default ;)

This was more about homing the head, not the stepper motor noise between tracks.

Yup, I still vividly recall the unnerving "RAT-tat-tat" of my Apple //c floppy drive though it has been over 25 years (gah!) since I last heard it.

This great video from 8-bit guy has sounds from Apple II drives and some other examples, together with various technical details and views of the drives insides:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHRc-QMoUE4

https://youtu.be/Dub4nraPLlQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WkGTeDqkdg

There are probably better ones but that should get you started and give you search terms.

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