The last person standing in the floppy disk business
eyeondesign.aiga.org
eyeondesign.aiga.org
Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world.
Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...
Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds.
Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combination of slow Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most users.
No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't be until considerably later that casually transferring files over the Internet would become feasible.
"Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the time.
Besides -- early on, a lot of PC makers put USB ports on the back of the computer, since that's where all the other ports were. It took some time for PC makers to realize that USB ports weren't just for permanently installed equipment like printers or modems, and to start redesigning cases or using drive bay breakouts to make the ports more accessible.
You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.
I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.
When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.
Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.
But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)
That wasn't really solved until the era of the "affordable" CD burner, so there was a moderately painful 1998-2001 or so era where you had to do some tricks often or trust someone with a relatively expensive piece of equipment.
Even in 2000 a burner was around $250 or more, but spending $15 or whatever on a ZIP disk was painful even then, if you weren't sure you'd get it back.
The floppy drives at least yielded a jigsaw puzzle set of text they could piece back together. The USB drive at the time got nothing back.
I was always amazed at how someone so smart as to do a PhD could waste so much of their time by not having a second copy.
But here I am with a neglected backup system...
Github has a word-by-word visual diff thing that would be really nice since usually you don't want to consider whitespace to be semantically significant in the context of a diff, eg word wrapping.
The business world likes to fret over every detail and I get it but a lot of powerpoint presentations/etc could really be done pretty simply with a latex template, and git checkin/merging/etc is sooo nice. Let alone chapter material or stuff that needs equations/figures, a bibliography manager, table of contents, etc. Super super nice for cross referencing, kind of like a generalized form of javadocs, and it does layout pretty well with some help, and it doesn't randomly spazz out and break borders etc.
Etckeeper is really nice for change tracking for your /etc folder too... love being able to look back and see if there's been any changes that might have broken stuff, get a log of package updates etc.
But that was just when things like IRC fileservs and Napster (1999) started to take off which was the main medium of "file sharing" at that point (for local transfers networking gear had dropped significantly, the iMac had ethernet built in, everyone had some sort of yumcha network setup - often sharing that 56k connection. 56kbps is 18 gigabytes a month, and the proliferation of "unlimited" internet was right around that time.
The final nail in the coffin was affordable CD-Rs. Once those started to proliferate (rip mix burn) you finally had disposable removable storage you could give people. Floppies were that, but zip and USB were not.
Used floppies to transfer data to and from the fast computer until 2002 or 2003.
Having a decent router available also helped. I'm still pretty miffed at whoever axed the Airport group. I kept expecting it to come back. Or for the apple TV to sprout router functionality. Something.
I now own mostly Bluetooth headphones and use an adapter in the rare cases otherwise, I generally don't even notice that it isn't there.
The walled garden has a few advantages...
The point isn't that there's only so much bandwidth for mic + headphones, the point is that the bluetooth stack on Windows just doesn't work. I tried connecting multiple bluetooth headphones (Airpods, Beats, Sony) to a new Windows 11 computer (Microsoft Surface). I only got one set paired and it defaulted to the headset profile immediately. It was horrible. The others never connected or the connection was unreliable.
The process was so bad, my son recently bought a set of wired headphones just to avoid the entire issue.
If you've never been in the Apple garden and used headphones + device, it's a night and day difference in experience.
Oh, and neither MacOS or iOS support high-bitrate audio playback. They're not even on the same eschelon as Android or Linux, which support codecs like LDAC and APTx, with 3x the bandwidth of Apple's 330kbps AAC stream. Come to think of it, if Apple switched to APTx for their newer Airpods, they would have no problem recording and playing audio back at the same time.
All bluetooth devices do this on all platforms when you use both sound + microphone. It has to split the available bandwidth between the two.
My Sony headphones will go into "headset mode" on Windows and Mac and sounds horrible in both, just have to make sure no programs are trying to use the headphones' microphone and then you get full bandwidth for audio.
It is one of the reasons I got it.
Good luck pressing that button five dozen times to take the call on your work phone after using them with your desktop, only to find out that your glorious BT device only has 4 memory slots like a videogame from 1991, and unlinked your work phone when you used them with your tablet.
And how do AirPods know whether I want to use them to take a conference call on my work laptop, listen to a YouTube video on the personal laptop, or watch a quick video my friend sent me on WhatsApp on my phone?
Do they have telepathic powers that I don't know of?
Oh, and will they prioritize the work phone call over an incoming call on my personal phone too, unless it's something really important?
If I’m actively playing a video or listening to audio on my Mac, my iPhone, or my iPad and I put my AirPods in my ear, sound is automatically rerouted to my AirPods from the device.
If I’m watching a video on my iPad and then I click on a video on my iPhone, they switch.
My AppleTVs don’t automatically switch. An AppleTV is a shared experience most of the time.
But even if you turn automatic switching off, I still don’t have to pair my AirPods with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, two AppleTVs and my Mac individually. I can just click a drop down and they automatically show up on each device or any new device I use with my AppleID.
It came out this year — there are plenty of sane manufacturers releasing phones with features that people want out there.
Use cases for 3.5mm jack that Bluetooth can't handle:
* Never having to worry about headphones running out of charge
* Zero added latency - critical for music making apps (somewhat remediated with latest BT versions, but good luck finding latency specs on the box)
* Switching between devices instantly (work/personal laptop and phone) - especially not fun if you use more than 2 of them
The last issue is especially annoying. It's 2022, I should be able to pair my headphones instantly by tapping them to the device I want to pair them to, without screens and buttons. Accelerometers exist. Proximity sensors exist.
But noooo, apparently, UX is not a consideration in the design of this godforesaken protocol.
It’s better. But still not great.
https://9to5google.com/2021/03/05/google-android-audio-laten...
At some point overpriced audio equipment became a way to bribe myself to do adulting for things I really didn’t want to do, so while for most people the moral might be to stay in the Apple ecosystem, that advice isn’t great for me.
However at this point I’m one gen behind on their receivers so maybe those issues have already been fixed.
Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgic.
On a more serious note, did you manage to make a living out of it and - either way - what made you stop?
In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making original indie games for PC and launched http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s)
Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie, worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc.
I switched from building games in my own bespoke C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also curating cool unique indie game work I see at https://twitter.com/Doomlaser
btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give Descender a try, Name: test Registration #: SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034
“The last person standing” is self-proclaimed, and even on quick search [0] there are other floppy disk makers, just not in the US and not answering magazine interviews. In particular Hitachi-Maxxel was outsourcing floppy disk to a chinese maker, and I’d expect that company to still be producing, but just not to the international market.
Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of them are fiddly. They are obnoxiously easy to loose.
How did I miss that! Thanks for making the joke complete for me ;)
There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds me of the tape trading days of the 80s:
"...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene, floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups typically had members whose sole “job” in the group was as a “trader” or “swapper” - we also wrote to each other. As a particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest friendships I formed during those years were with the other members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to each other with “Jiffy Junk” - little trinkets we’d collect and swap: Kinder surprise toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder what they’re all doing now.
As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I’d be interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when most communication is probably electronic in nature..."
They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.
It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.
I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing.
I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and Nintendo Famicom) that don’t work too.
Now, true, a lot of the dud floppies had been filtered out back in the day. But I was shocked at how well they had faired over the long term vs optical media.
Or who am I kidding, I still use my A500 so I can't really say I miss it.
If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB, with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which in its default state would likely find this all very confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk" devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a disk, and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in their fully stock configuration. [1]
I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun.
[1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven forfend its hard drive ever fail, though...
edits: correcting misrecalled SuperDisk technical details
Yes, much lower capacity per dollar than silicon, but if it were very sturdy (it was) and offered near-infinite rewriteability (it did), it could have had a market.
A modern development of that technology would have greater capacity, sure, but I can't imagine how it would approach the low random-access latency of solid-state media.
Personally, I wish someone would produce a consumer grade tape system, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
I deployed a batch of desktops to an office with the drives and 1 disk each. We hoarded the disks of course.
I think I mostly just fidgeted with them at my desk since we just had a few machines that could use them.
They were more reliable than our external SATA CD burner (Smart & Friendly brand), though. That had its own table we wouldn’t touch while burning at 1x. It could 2x but the failure rate was too high and CDRs were still expensive. Zip drives were for peasants being mostly parallel or IDE. :)
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/floppy-disk-as-usb-thumb-drive...
... and praying that there is no read error.
That was my experience in this part of the world where the computer environments were not dust-free enough for floppies to be reliable. But yes, the nostalgia is still strong.
Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore old Teletype machines, including the kind that printed on 5/16" paper tape. I had a thousand rolls of such tape made up by a company in China, that being the minimum order, and I still sell some now and then to Teletype collectors.
In fact there is a fixture in the shop we just finished on one of those machines that is for an aerospace customer of ours.
It’s very interesting to me and something I hadn’t seen before working at this shop.
It’s amazing what is still out there running.
Where do you get blank tape? I know Teletype collectors who need a supplier.
I've never seen 5-hole tape CNC gear. Most is 8-hole.
It’s black wax 5 hole paper tape and the controllers the use it are Allen Bradley, manufactured in early 80s I believe but I’d have to check dates.
We also have a few machines that read from magnetic tape so lots of old almost historical computer equipment, but still being used amazingly and making money.
It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made them less reliable.
After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where they are recorded initially, feels very natural.
Still true.
That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.
Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.
The 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least 3 copies of your data on at least 2 storage media, and keep at least 1 copy offsite.
Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very bad quality.
Nervous times they were!
Enjoy, the sounds of floppies :D [1]
I used to work in the disk duplication industry, both at a copier (DisCopyLabs) and then later at the robot manufacturer, Mountain Computer, which was eventually bought by Nakamichi and combined with Trace, our competitor.
We used to be able to sail those suckers over the building on Wyatt Drive to the San Thomas Expressway... Next person to work on roof equipment probably had a curious experience, many discs that did not make it all the way likely scattered all over the roof.
Ahem, cough, dial-up modem handshake.
That is all I have to say on the subject.
[0] if you don't have ESET at hand, I guess any "good" antivirus would do.
We are moving towards a solid state future where no user interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual transmission and everything is wireless.
Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my toaster remains!
Slackware and OS/2 for example
My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2 Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you were dead in the water.
Please Insert Disk 1 of 4166
Solution? Copy the installed game from his computer onto 30 floppy disks. Carefully reconstruct the installation on my computer.
It worked.
But those Mac System 6 disks…
I don't recall if this was an official implementation or something we cooked up.
Oh yes, and there was the floppy way too.
I am not sure if those early CD writers even had buffers - but they were so expensive back then, that I didnt have one.
There was "that one guy" who had it and was supplying pirated stuff for whole neighborhood.
I had a brand new IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM which was not supported yet. About 6 months later it was and I started ordering the multi CD set from Walnut Creek cdrom.com every 6 months or so to get new distributions.
That's the best onomatopoeia I've seen in a while, and it brings the feeling of instant dread
Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32663995 - Aug 2022 (130 comments)
Less recent and related:
Ask HN: Why is there still a market for floppy disks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31658880 - June 2022 (12 comments)
Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064316 - Nov 2021 (12 comments)
This data leak, due to obscurity and the volume was more of a joke in my country, than a serious news. I do however wonder, what it was back in the day? I've never heard of any large scale data leaks involving floppy disks, perhaps I'm too young.
Sometimes it's better to be the last person selling stage coaches than the tenth person selling cars.
Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-drive with an IDE floppy drive interface. A quick Google search revealed that someone already builds this!
https://www.amazon.ca/Emulator-SFR1M44-U100-Install-Industri...
https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/
the images it creates are sometimes stunning and interesting depending on copy protection.
https://archive.org/details/ApplesauceImages/Age%20of%20Adve...
Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :)
Well, LS-120 were available in ATAPI, which is at least IDE adjacent, if you don't want to call it IDE.
"Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me."
My floppy story is: In the late 90s 3.5" floppies were ubiquitous and the Zip disk was the new kid on the block. 5.25" was a thing of the past and I'd never ever seen a 8" floppy and I did not expect to see one either.
This was until I interned at a Siemens research lab where they still had 8" floppies. Why? Because the room-sized, several floors below ground housed electron microscopes used them.
In a no doubt soon to be discovered manuscript of Journey to the Center of the Earth maybe 16” floppies will be mentioned.
Things became better when I had 2 or 3 diskettes and I was able to download bigger files using Hacha, a free software to split large files. Of course, nothing was worse than arriving home and one of them failing.
As someone said in another comment, I miss the sound and the "physicality" of them. It reminds me of a time when you were offline by default, and you had to go online. Now it is, sadly, the other way around.
By the time I was of that age, we had the wonders of dial up internet and semi-scrambled adult TV channels.
:')
What's odd is I used DD floppies, not HD floppies, because my only computer at home was an Amiga.
It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed to come in or go out.
I walked past the shop every lunchtime and grew increasingly obsessed with this box of discs, the first I'd seen for sale for maybe twenty years. Where had it come from? Why was it in the window? Who was going to buy it?
Eventually I decided that I'd have to buy them myself, just so I could stop thinking about it.
But the next time I walked past the shop, the discs were gone!
I used to have a Zip drive in my PC in high school -- I remember saving 3ds Max files to it when I was first learning to model. And Deadlock, a turn-based strategy game that came with some version of Windows, I copied it onto a Zip disk and distributed it to some friends. But as I remember they were too busy with Kingdom Under Fire and Brood War.
So I went back as soon as I could a few days later, walked to that intersection and up that road, about a hundred meters.. and the shop was not there. There was nothing on that corner. I thought I was losing my mind, or at least I had managed to mess up something.. after that I started out from every bridge on the Tiber, walked to the nearby major intersection, and up whatever street in the right direction. Nothing.
I continued my search for years after that whenever I came back to Rome, but I never found the shop. At that time I didn't really want to buy the coffee machine anymore, I just wanted to solve the mystery.
Obviously (if I think logically) there's a natural explanation, but it still comes back to me now and then, all these years later. Back when I read that Pratchett book in your link, which went into details about how a Wandering Shop behaves, I suffered major déjà vu!
I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance.
Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective.
Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too.
Today I use terabyte drives, and have a box of USB sticks. For inexplicable reasons, the terabyte drives USB sticks have no way to write on them. So I stick an Avery label on them and write on that.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980623131044/http://www.diskdu...
Earliest capture of his site on floppydisks.com:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030330102403/http://floppydisk...
Floppy duplication prices from these pages:
June '98: $0.59 @ 500
March '03: $0.39 @ 500
I remember a little operation run out of Topeka, Kansas in the 80's called "Budget Bytes" that sold floppies with Macintosh shareware on them. I mean I could have downloaded some of the stuff over FTP from the university but you still needed a floppy to copy them on to.
So fun, poring over the news-print catalog of disks they had available, deciding which ones to order.
I assumed it was a Real Business™ at the time but in hindsight it was no doubt some entrepreneur copying floppies in his garage. I wish I had been as entrepreneurial at the time.
I'd be happy to email you a PDF copy of the new book if you're interested.
Sure, send me a PDF!
I got the floppy disks for my machine from Microsoft's supply room when I was an intern there in 2014. At the time, there were still some niche uses for floppies in the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., RAID drivers for Windows XP could only be loaded from a floppy on install, IIRC), but that was on the way out too — so I grabbed half a dozen disks from a pile.
Remarkably, they are still perfectly usable.
The major problem I have with them is that the floppy disk drive on the keyboard is slightly out of alignment. Which means that the only way to read the floopies is to use that specific disk drive.
I've been meaning to replace the drive for years, but never really got to it. I've also considered swapping it out for an SD card reader/USB drive (ones meant to replace floppy drives are readily available), but where's the charm in that?
I was a bit surprised and had expected a bit of work.
> Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.”
Why editorialize they HN title? He’s a guy! And “last man standing” is a set phrase. “Last person standing” is not.
Language evolves. You can fight the ocean with a rake, or you can be supportive of changes that make language better for your friends and neighbors.
The argument, which at least makes sense, is that a "Chairman", even if he's male, should be a "Chairperson" because the office is not male, and therefore the title shouldn't be gendered.
That just doesn't apply here. "A Chairperson" makes sense, "a last man standing" doesn't.
"Last person standing" is also something you could say, but the title didn't, and there is no cause to 'correct' it, because it isn't wrong.
Why say person then? Are you anti-other mammals? Not very inclusive is it!
'more inclusive' is not always better, because it's less specific and less exact.
Over-inclusivity serves no purpose in this situation. It makes the language clunky and needlessly unspecific.
1. This is the last man standing, but there are women still standing. In which case there are still persons providing this service and it is not newsworthy.
2. This is a legacy saying from a period where only men could be involved in business enterprises. There may have been women running such businesses, but they are not worthy of record.
If not 1, then the correct phrase is “last person standing”.
The issue is not whether the last person standing is male or female. The issue of “last X standing” is about all the Xs except the last one.
Just find a different way of expressing the idea.
Was not.
I had no problem reading the title, and didn't even notice anything unusual about it until reading this comment.
Language changes. Complaining about it won't change it back.
Yeah, language changes. Organically. Not because of silly, clunky usage like this.
Usage is usage. What is clunky and silly is complaining against language that is perfectly clear and understandable, whatever words it uses.
"Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars."
Reminds me of when I was at a thrift store and these used paperbacks were being sold used for triple the cover price that they sold for new in the 1950s.
Books with actual increases in value won't be at a thrift store, typically.
I found more than that: I found my "time capsule" C128 (safely stored for 30 years+, still working, non polluted by anything modern). I found a "copier" software (Fast Hack'Em II IIRC) still working and managed to use it to copy a still working copy of Commando (chiptune sountrack by Rob Hubbard, the god of SID music back in the days).
But I have no idea: are these NIUB floppies as good as new or do they decay as years passes by?
Older floppies are actually much better made than newer ones. Disks from 1994 or earlier tend to be better than those made after.
Many floppies are good for 30+ years.
''' At one point we did a gigantic deal with a US payroll company for which we needed to copy hundreds of thousands of disks. We sent the work out to a third party who did the duplication for us. That was okay, but expensive, and it took a lot of time. The quality also wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be. So the next time we decided to do the floppy duplication in-house and we got our own equipment. '''
> "Me, I just like to get up in the morning, have people ask me questions, and try to solve problems. My business is a little bit of an adventure for me every day."
A few years back, at $work we found some old FDs with some interesting labels on them: "survey data 199x". It turns out there were some binary files from an ancient stats program and I spent a few days figuring out how to extract the data. Fun times
In the late 80s / early 90s, I had a home computer with 5.25” floppies. I remember at the mall around the holidays, Radio Shack would run a holiday animation on their Tandy computers to show them off. One in particular sticks out to me — an animation of a 3.5” “modern” floppy going into a shirt pocket and then an attempt at a 5.25” which resulted in a torn pocket, showing off the superior portability of the new, smaller disks. Does anyone else remember this?
* I was doing this thing somewhat successfully
* Then someone asked me to jump into this software thing even if I had zero experience.
* Then we did X, Y and Z...
It seems rarer these days?
Heh how far we've come, it's incredible.
You get home after school and dammit floppy number 7 has CRC error :/ sigh
It could take DAYS to copy a game, back then, between you friend forgetting for a day or two and having to redo big copies at least once :) All with the turnaround time of waiting one-school-day
#GoodTimes :)
I want to know (1) who are they, and (2) why do they need them?
It's amazing that many software products still use the disc icon to represent saving. Many folks using computers now have never even seen one in person. To them it's the save icon, not a disc.
They will be used with a couple of Z80 systems I have constructed - when I build a floppy controller board!
https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...
About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate the folks who keep the door open to legacy technology. (…but meanwhile I'm still realllly curious what's on that disk!)
I have recovered data from a lot of old media, CCT tapes, floppies, 3.5" floppies - except that in practice it turned out that a) CCT ok. No problems. b) 8" floppies ok. No problems. c) 5.25" floppies (low density, high density) ok. No problems (except that for a while I didn't have a controller which could read a minority of them - they're FM, not MFM), d) 3.5" Not ok. All unreadable. All of them. And that was not due to the drive - I have lots of drives, including one I bought because it was calibrated. All of the media had been stored either in the same location or in a similar environment, but at this point I don't even bother trying those darn 3.5" floppies unless they're written recently. I'll just be a ton of read errors.
The serenity of having known good backups, that just work, is something that nobody under 50 is likely to ever experience. Because we had the ability to copy and write protect our software and data, we could easily make manage our security in a completely transparent manner.
You could take your little case of floppy disks and have your work environment up and running on any IBM compatible in no time flat.
Eh. The reliability wasn't really great. We never knew if our data was still there.
Well, I hope they don’t run out of space, or have a bad sector…
Whenever you gave someone x amount of floppies to copy something for you (prob a game)... the usual grammar/conversation was "you can just copy over it" yet no such thing exists, you can't in 999/1000 cases "copy-over something" you first have to delete/format it then copy.
Always thought it was 'funny/weird' :)
With floppies, you actually could do that as well, if you were copying floppies verbatim with e.g. DISKCOPY.
Of course the "real thing" was the Deluxe Option Board (some details about it and a bunch of the common copying utilities of the time here):
Of course, it had a giant floppy drive, and at my suggestion they marked it as a 2.88MB drive (just to be ahead of the curve):
Every single disk had zero errors.
I do recall that most of the teachers and students thought it was "most surprising outcome" or something like that, from years of "if you put a magnet near your computer or disk it will eat the world" propaganda.
Heck, I still should have a pile of those stashed in the basement, maybe it's a good time to plug the reader to my PC, and dig through those?
This article was really well written, good reading!
Never heard of Eye on Design before, but glad it's on my radar, now (:
Ah, right, "unique tax calculations". I guess thats one of describing it. :)
floppydisk.com didn't get them all though, we bought around 28,000 5.25" DSDD diskettes surplus:
https://i.imgur.com/f5jM4mO.jpg
The above pictured lot is where the diskettes for the boxed releases of Nox Archaist and Burger Becky's game came from.
Now, however, if you insert a random USB drive into your computer, you run a high risk that your computer will be pwned.
This is not true for USB drives, as USB controllers can be programmed to re-insert a virus or fry the system at any time in the future.
FORMAT /S
Compare that to USB devices, which contain data that survives to all host-initiated methods of erasure and which may in fact not be storage devices at all; i.e. fake keyboard/mouse presses et al.
The operating systems of the time didn't have any autoplay functionality that could be exploited by viruses. I guess in theory viruses could have exploited things like buffer overflows in the OS code that reads the file allocation table or directories, but I've never heard of such a thing, and Michelangelo and similar boot viruses certainly were not that advanced.
DOS' shell would run autoexec.bat when booting but only the one from the boot volume.
Also, lots of machines with hard drives were configured to boot from floppy by default. Few floppies had working boot sectors, so most people never noticed. Until they put an infected disk into A:, turned on the computer and saw chaos ensue.
> Infects the Desktop file used by the Finder. … Spread through sharing disks, as every Mac disk includes a Desktop file. It is not necessary to run a program to spread this virus; simply mounting the disk is enough for it to infect the Desktop file of every disk mounted on the Mac.
Maybe there would be a market for a "data USB port" which would filter away all other kinds of USB devices than storage devices.
I still have thousands of old 5.25 floppies. I've transferred or tossed most of the 3.5, since I was able to get a drive for that.
https://www.howtogeek.com/669331/how-to-read-a-floppy-disk-o...
It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk; same for the total download size of a fairly barebones website. Nostalgia!
… and the full decompressed version of that image might not have fit into your computer's memory at that time, either.
Reloading with the adblockers off gets the story. I hate this world.