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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Towards the end of popular software distribution on 1.44MB floppy disks, and when cd-rom became more commonplace in peoples' PCs, it was not super rare for a game to come on five, six or eight 1.44MB disks.

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I'm pretty sure I had one of Sierra's King Quest games on a series of 12 disks (though they might have been 5.25" 512kb floppies). You'd walk from one screen to another and be met with "Please insert disk 8 of 12".

Most of the games I remember from that time would only run from an installed folder on a HDD, and came with an install script to unpack a multi-disk-spanned compressed set of files from the floppies. This was presuming that you had something like a 40 to 60MB hard drive in your PC, or larger, and wanted to dedicate 10MB of it to the new expensive game you just purchased.

Yep, remember that time. It is completely nuts to me that those same games that were 13 "the hard floppies" that took hours to install can now run within a few seconds of visiting a web page, let alone RUN in said web page.

I could be totally off my rocker, but weren't the 5.25 1.2 MB?

The original IBM PC standard for a double sided 5.25 disk had a formatted (FAT12???) capacity of 360KB. By around 1987 this was replaced by the 1.2MB standard, and by 1992 or so the 3.5" floppy was the preferred format. For a long time any reasonably specced x86 clone desktop PC would come with both a 5.25 1.2MB and 3.5 1.44MB drive mounted in it.

> 1992 or so the 3.5" floppy was the preferred format

3.5" disks/drives could also be 720KB, I have an 8086 from Olivetti with a 360KB and a 720 KB drive. I know 2880 kbyte disks and drives existed too (they used to be mentioned in every BIOS) , but I never saw a computer with one.

I'm pretty sure I still have my floppy storage doubling punch [i] tucked away in a box somewhere!

[i] https://i.ibb.co/7k4Prt2/floppy-punch.jpg

As I recall the 2.88mb drives (and disks) were prohibitively expensive. And around that time, the CD-ROM came out and pretty much ruined things for the 2.88mb disks.

But you couldn't write to CD-ROM, so they weren't a full replacement. What killed the 2.88 MB disk IMO was Iomega's Zip disk. By the time I was in high school, they were commonplace and moving to replace the floppy disk for carrying files around in your pocket. For larger files we did get CD-R and later CD-RW, but they were never convenient for e.g. saving your spreadsheets and word processing files. Eventually USB came along, and soon after that thumb drives, and that was the final nail in the coffin for both Zip disks and floppies.

CD-ROM was a fine replacement for software distribution though.

There was a 3,5" floppy compatible "SuperDisk" standard which could store up to 120Mb per disk. But the Zip disk already had a big market share then.

I remember using QIC-80 tapes for "software sharing" - since those drives were reasonably cheap and could be wired to an existing floppy disk controller.

> QIC-80

120 Mb at floppy drive speeds? That must have been painfully slow...

1994’s also late enough it could’ve shipped on CD-ROM, either exclusively or as an option in addition to floppies for those with the right hardware.

As a kid, I had a bunch of DOS games on CD from around that era.

If I recall right a version of Office came on about 45 floppies.

You were screwed if you had an error on disk 43.

For games I remember Star Trek 25th anniversary on 7 floppies, using 1/4 of my hard drive.

Hm, fair enough. I remember that happening with CDs before/at the start of DVDs, but the floppies I had/remember (later than '94) were just simple enough I suppose (Lemmings, Prince of Persia, Mahjong).

The 'triple A' games of the time sometimes used the amount of floppy disks as a sort of status symbol (11 disks of content! ;) )

I believe those games were mostly graphic adventures (especially Sierra's), or productivity software that came with lots of clip-art, fonts etc.

It seems as though there were always games that demanded multiple floppies or CDs or DVDs. Games for the Apple II and Commodore 64 would frequently require flipping the disk or inserting another floppy. PC games often required installation from multiple floppies before CD-ROM drives were commonplace. Multi-CD games were popping up as CD-ROM drives were becoming popular.

I'd have to dig around Mobygames to come up with specific examples for each case, but 7th Guest (1993) came on multiple CD's and King's Quest V (1990) came on a stack of floppies.

I remember installing Windows 95 from floppies. 21 of them!

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