The Mysterious and Strange Origin of the Floppy Disk (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The Mysterious and Strange Origin of the Floppy Disk (2017)

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43 pointsspking20 comments

> It was easy to pirate, twist and damage. And there was a unique, unspeakable dread when you dropped a deck of punch cards—and watched them scatter across the floor completely out of order.

Two solutions to that.

Better than nothing: Was to draw diagonal lines across the top of the deck of cards with a sharpie.

Better: Later cards were given a sequence number and there were machines to check the sequence and also sort.

My dad said some of the old computer programmers would 'program' by collating pre punched card sequences.

> Later cards were given a sequence number

Card sorting (and arithmetic operations) predate computers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_record_equipment

> some of the old computer programmers would 'program' by collating pre punched card sequences.

This is the origin of the ‘compiler’, which originally was closer to what we now call a linker: it assembled (hah) a program from a library of pre-defined sub-programs.

Per the wikipedia entry[1] IBM secured the patent, quote,

> The Floppy Disk Drive Patent #3,678,481[11] was issued July 18, 1972 with named inventors Warren L. Dalziel, Jay. B. Nilson, and Donald L. Wartner.

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

Off-topic, but I wonder if there's a name for this kind of marketing, where a company will write useful and/or interesting articles that end up in search results or content aggregators.

I don't know if it's more effective than traditional advertising, but it's certainly more pleasant.

Content marketing.

Priceonomics turned it into their primary business.

Content marketing is the general term.

It can go both ways, given that the poorly-proofread copy rather turned me off.

Im glad you don't read my stuff then! No matter how many times I proofread a something there's always speling errors and random extra words.

I was at a computer/parts shop yesterday, and I asked about a floppy disk reader. They sell a usb one.

I have a handful of floppies remaining. I am sure I haven't looked at the contents in 15 years or more. I feel like checking them out, just in case of something interesting.

The shop, by chance, didn't have any in stock.

I don't know if I'll get one. If I haven't needed whatever is on them in this long, then maybe I don't really need it. But I am still curious.

If you're near Menlo Park, CA, you can borrow mine. I have one "just in case" but never use it. :-)

Thanks for the offer, but I appear to be about 35 hours away by car at the moment. :)

Nearly moved to Foster City about a year ago though! Missed opportunity to borrow yours, I guess.

Maybe another time. If you're anywhere near northern Sweden in the next few years then be sure to bring it with you, just in case.

I will do that! :-)

there's ebay of course https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m...

"At age 20, he attempted to shrink the size of a phonograph record and eliminate the scratchy quality of the sound. Two years later, he completed the project at Tokyo Imperial University’s Engineering School. The drive could be read with magnetic and light sensors, and he received a Japanese patent for the disk invention in 1952.

No matter how you look at it, that’s the definition of digitizing analog technology."

Sounds like it's still analog, like a Laserdisc.

That seems more like some of the early systems for movie sound recording. There's a whole history of clunky synchronized movie sound systems going back to 1918 or so. Optical tracks on film, synchronized disks, magnetic strips on photographic film, sprocket-fed film with a magnetic coat. The movie people needed to edit audio, which involved lots of cutting and pasting and specialized machinery.

IBM also had something called the Magnebelt, an endless belt of tape 4 inches wide used in dictating machines.

The article led to some surfing and a revelation ... I didn’t know the old Bernoulli Box was made by Iomega.

Obligatory floppotron music video playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNU8fSoY0vesEhVv1ErMB...

[2017]

Thanks! Updated.

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