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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Who else remembers using the square punch to put a hole in those 3 1/2" AOL disks to reformat them as HD?

My aunt did one better: she used a scissors to reformat a 5.25" disk as a 3.5" one. (Lesson learned: be excessively cautious when giving instructions.)

... so you've been doing this your entire life, eh? Guess that's why you're good at explaining thing to the technically non-inclined.

OT: You are just the second person I've ever heard say "a scissors" (with an article). Is this a regional thing (like waiting "on line" vs. "in line")?

I am not a good person to take Engrish usage advice from. Honestly don't know why I omitted "a pair of" there.

Yep, or vice versa, put a bit of tape over the hole to make disks writable that weren't intended to be. Good times!

USB drives could use such a feature.

write-lock: prevent it from beint written (and acquiring viruses)

read-lock: prevent it from being read (and passing viruses), only showing the free space and being able to write only in the free space

I have several USB drives with at least the former feature.

I have a USB stick with a write-protect switch. Unfortunately, the switch has broken. Now the drive will contain 128MB of obsolete early-00s data until the bits diffuse away.

SD cards have a write-lock. It always amazes me that it's purely physical and only a suggestion to the software.

Gotta love how the write-lock switch is positioned just perfectly so that inserting it knocks the switch into read-only position.

Doing that rather than switching into write-allowed position is a good example of fail-safe design. But yeah, I've had that happen more than once.

On some SD cards in some SD readers, the write-lock switch is too small to trigger the mechanical switch in the reader, making the card appear as read-only until tape is applied over the switch. This problem affects my BeagleBoard's OS SD card.

I only ever had drives with write locks. I must have gotten into USB drives late because I've never heard of read lock.

While not built into drives, an add-on hardware solution exists, Wiebetech's USB Writeblocker:

http://www.wiebetech.com/products/USB-WriteBlocker.php

We did this on VCR tapes too. Little electrical tap over the broken tab, and bam -- you've got re-writable media!

My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying normal 3.5" disks, stamping holes in them and selling them as pristine 3.5" HD disks. Let's just say it was less successful than I'd hoped.

I did this on an Acorn Archimedes disk and though okay at first, the floppy got corrupted after a few days. Bad idea!

The Archimedes would format any floppy to any density, so you didn't need the hole punch.

My point was that formatting a 800kb disk to 1600kb (as you could on the Archimedes) is likely to - and in my experience has - corrupt after a few days of use, and thus is not worth the amount of money saved.

Luckily it was just copied games that got corrupted, but it could have been worse.

My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying up used floppies for pennies slapping a blank label on them and selling them for $1 a piece. But I was a pushover so most people could bargain me down to $2-3 for a pack of five.

They had something similair for 5 1/4" floppies to go from 360k to 720k.

Get off my lawn.

Remember punching single-sided 5 1/4" disks to make them double-sided?

Yeah, and they worked really well.

Did that all the time for the Apple //e disks. Since most of the media at the time was for 360K disks for IBM compatibles but since the Apple format was 143K the vast majority of the time it worked.

In fact if I dug around in the box under my desk I could probably find the special puncher, and a couple unused ribbons for the old daisy wheel printer, etc.

I didn't have a punch. Scissors worked just as well.

Square hole punches cost money. Scissors are already lying around the house. Sure, the results weren't pretty, but then pretty was not the stated goal.

This was for 5 1/4" floppies, naturally. By the time 3 1/2" was the standard, I had a job and could simply requisition them as needed.

I remember getting a few funny looks from the stores in the Electrical Engineering department when I requisitioned a few (probably at least five) boxes of 3 1/2" floppies so I could install Linux (Slackware) complete with a pretty full X11 environment (I'm pretty sure X and its apps was split over at least 12 floppies).

This would have been late '93 or so.

I used a soldering iron. The holes were round, but with a utility knife to cut the extra plastic, it looked very good.

Thanks, AOL!

By the time AOL launched in this country, they were giving away CDs which weren't good for anything but drink coasters. It seems they've long since departed as well.

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