The floppy disk just won’t die
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I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.
So far, most of the HDDs I've seen fail, gave _some_ indication prior to it, via smart or "strange" behaviour.
I've always distrusted SSDs, and manufacturers continue to use lower quality controllers and flash, including sometimes changing a currently great drive to use cheaper components and sell it as the exact same device.
Meanwhile games load from my spinning rust within a minute, and SSDs never seem to actually improve that that much, because the code responsible for parsing and loading RAM seems to matter more.
You can tell boarding is about to start because the dot matrix starts printing the final passenger manifest.
Seriously though, until very recently you could hear dot matrix printers at most airline gates. They used them to print out manifests to hand to the crew right before the plane departs.
It's much more enjoyable to use.
This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made.
The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.
According to Wikipedia (if I understood it correctly), the interval between the start of one transmission and the next one is 4.615 ms, or 9.230 ms for half-rate, which corresponds to 217 Hz or 108 Hz (if I did the calculations right), well within audible range.
Newer cellular standards use CDMA or OFDMA instead of TDMA, so they do not have that same low-frequency on-off behavior.
When we are on Teamspeak/Mumble with friends, we can always tell who will be receiving a text in the coming seconds; I assumed the headset wires were acting as an antenna and catching the SMS radio signal.
I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one.
Anyone have a good way?
Solution is to buy a portable SSD drive and be done with it.
It's fast enough for a megabyte or two, and sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge.
I have not found any good way to keep track of flash either, aside from using fewer and larger ones so it's all in one place.
Yeah, what the hell is with that? If I need to send files between phones I can use an app, but there's no telling when they'll stop developing it and it'll stop working. It's gotten to the point it's easer to copy a file onto my network drive and then recopy it to the destination device. When I'm away from home, though, I usually have to grab an actual USB cable.
> Yeah, what the hell is with that?
Back in the early 2000s, we had IrDA which could easily transfer files from one device to another through OBEX. Not much later, we had the same OBEX but now on top of Bluetooth. We still have Bluetooth; it should be easy to send files between phones (and even computers) through OBEX. Last time I tried, however, it was a pain, failing more than half of the time. I gave up, and now use syncthing for that.
I expect it might be solved in a few years, as long as no Apple products are involved, but for now we're still stuck taking pictures of each other's screens if we need something fast.
I suppose I could host a local IRC server on a RasPi or something, but that's way more convoluted.
Edit: I guess I haven’t used USB drive in while cause they don’t have place to write. Would have put label sticker on them, or printed label from machine.
Chungus data mediums, connectors, etc. almost never go missing or break from simple daily use.
I keep the bagged flash drives in a small cardboard box.
The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.
Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers.
But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would open the .doc assignment file in notepad as binary, delete some random data, then save it to floppy. It would be 2-5 days till the professor would get back to you saying "the floppy you gave me was corrupted, please resubmit your work ASAP" and that gave us enough time to finish it.
Thank you for your sacrifice floppies.
I may be a statistical anomaly, but although modern USB sticks are pretty reliable, I experienced an awful track record w.r.t. the ones from the 2000's-2010's.
Drives being out of alignment and incompatible with other drives common.
Yes, floppys can work really, really well. But I haven't encountered anything since that wasn't orders of magnitude better in this department.
Unfortunately we had to wait until usb-drives to become ubiquitous before we had a reliable way to transfer files between random computers.
I remember my Z80 with TR-DOS and 5.25" floppy controller. We all dreaded that "Disk Error. Abort,Retry,Ignore?" message. That meant time to copy floppy again, and with just 48KB of RAM, there was a lot of floppy swaps to do this.
I managed to spend 3 hours assembly and disassembling this one machine before finally figure out that my test floppy had gone bad.
Another one was this student whose assignments were constantly being erased.
After watching him go through the motions of what he was doing, I asked him if his bracelet was magnetic. Problem solved.
One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0].
Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein.
[0] - https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-...
CDs are the least satisfying though. Fiddly, easily scratched, long time to spin up, can get wedged into tray, laptop CD drives are flimsy too.
All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names):
If I had one, I'd spin up Civ1 just for old times!
I use it mostly for Borland C++, but also Solitaire in Windows 3.1.
I also have an 8088, a 286 and a 386...
They seem super cheap on ebay too https://www.ebay.com/itm/364063791560
All of my floppy using devices are synthesizers or samplers, and keeping them around is not a matter of not being able to afford to upgrade, but rather than many of these devices have very unique sounds that aren't replicated by newer equipment.
It used to be the case. Nowadays, the Open Source FlashFloppy firmware will handle any custom format, including the HFE formats HxC use.
Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as soon as a better one like usb storage became available and prominent.
I sent them to a guy who writes the emulator for that system and three out of four were totally readable.
This is probably fine for writing emulators, but it is not quite the reliability I expect from aviation!
Commercial optical disks, as in the disks that you got when you bought games and movies and the like, are physically stamped. The data is recorded as physical pits that are stamped onto the disk from a master copy. That disk isn't degrading unless it suffers severe external physical damage.
By contrast, recordable optical disks write their data using inks and dyes that are burned by a recording drive's laser. These inks and dyes can and will degrade over time, eventually leading to data loss.
The CD's (media) in those times were surely more durable, but also the actual drives were much more robust.
I still have somewhere a (SCSI) CDRW drive using one of those "caddies" that can read at 1x that could sometimes read old CD's that more modern drives failed at (used to, it's a lot of time I don't use it).
If you had equipment from say 1990 and blank disks from then too and a reason to keep it running, it likely still is. Although floppy disk emulators are probably a reasonable retrofit in most applications.
It ends up being that some manufacturers made good stuff and some made junk, but you don't know which until much later.
I have a batch of nos nameless 3.5" 720k I got from floppydisk.com that are basically all junk. Fail to even verify a format, or maybe succeeds once and then fails within 3 uses.
I have other even older, actually labelled as single sided 3.5", but made by Basf that just run and run and run.
In fact most 8" are even more reliable than any of the later versions because a lot of 8" machines spun the disks the entire time the machine was on. All day every day at work that disk is just grinding away... so they had to be good just to be usable at all.
I have a 1987 Apple //c with a bunch of 5.25" floppies of the same period and they all work just fine : games, UCSD Pascal, utilities, Mouse Desk...
Not in my experience. Mine all failed.
You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.
IIRC, the last big customer for cassette tapes was prisoners in the prison system, so "new" tape players are universally garbage (because priority 1 is complying with prison regulations, priority 2 is being as cheap as possible, and priority 3 is having nice things in prison is a liability).
https://www.wearerewind.com/en-us
But “crème de le crème” doesn’t apply here in that the wow and flutter on an old Sony Walkman is much less.
The tape speed should be precisely calibrated and, as much as possible, unvarying, instead it wobbles all over the place and is just roughly dialed in. On average the mech might say run 2% fast, but then also vary moment by moment by 1%.
The right way to enable recording is to add an electromagnet, which can randomise the magnetic alignment of the particles on the tape the tape just before it is rewritten, but that costs money so the cheap option is a permanent magnet, moved near the tape when needed, this aligns everything, so it kinda works but it's much noisier (in terms of the recording)
The tape head is essentially a stethoscope in direct physical contact whith every other part in the machine, and even the table it's sitting on and your house and the world.
Every part of it from the quality of the bearings or bushings, or lack of either just plastic parts rubbing directly on metal pins, the motor, gears, all of it is present in the physical motion of the tape, which is directly added to the signal you get out of the head.
It's like putting your ear on any machine, you can hear every single part inside the machine.
It can't be fixed by electronics In the same way that you can't unscramble an egg.
You can only fake improving it with filters that really just modify the signal even more. It may sound a "better" if one of the worst components is a big simple crude regular motor pulse or ac hum, and a filter can somewhat match that well enough to make it less noticeable, but the resulting output is even further deviated from the original signal.
Digital does not have this problem because a bit is a bit. A bit that barely registered and a bit that came from a strong signal are both the same bit once read, and even some amount of incorrect bits are repaired by math and redundant data.
And digital doesn't care how slow or fast the bits come. Any deviations from imaginary perfect media speed aren't turned into audio signal because the data is not being turned from physical aspects of the media directly into sound like a stethoscope, it's just a block of data that could arrive at any speed, and the audio is fabricated later by interpreting the data. The audio there is determined by the quality of the dac.
For instance a direct drive mechanism (gears instead of belts) with few moving parts and sloppy tolerances on those few parts will be will be highly reliable, in that it will run every time and run forever. "sloppy tolerances" is usually a bad thing but it also means it never gets stuck. This is in general not just a tape drive. But it's garbage for this application because a tape drive isn't a rock saw.
To make any kind of analog signal handler, the mechanical parts need super close tolerances, which means they more easily stick from dust, oxidation, or dried out sticky lubes, and has fragile elements like rubber belts and rollers that all age poorly and even suffer from normal use like getting glazed, and even suffer from not getting used, like rollers forming dents where contacting parts rest for too long, belts taking on the shape of a pully, sticking to the pully, etc. Basically even though the better mechanisn is much more expensive and does the most important job better, one thing it's not is more reliable in the way that a hammer is reliable. It's delicate and needs lots of care and maintenence, and that is not the result of poor engineering or manufacturing or quality.
I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.
I also think I still have a 5.25" notcher that I couldn't bring myself to let go of.
I promise I don't have THAT MUCH shit sitting around...
Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?
From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over.
We had CD burners in every computer. Floppy disks were too unreliable compared to CDs and files were already too large. We had external hard disks and pen drives in the late 90s when USB was released. That was the end of floppy disks for backups.
So, to answer your question, no time to do it. Every manufacturer was probably working on the next big technology and not on incrementally perfecting the floppy disk.
Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the normal end on standard CDs, because people figured that you can squeeze things a bit tighter and cut the corners a bit more here and there, and with the right drives that worked.
I'm wondering why they didn't do that with floppy drives. It was definitely a thing on the software side with special formatting programs, but I don't recall it being a thing on the hardware side. Not in the sense of having new official upgrades like 2.88 MB, but drives advertising that they were made 20% better than the official spec and could squeeze more into each standard floppy.
I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the 80/90 minute cds came several years later.
I think tracking was problem, hence the optical tracking SuperDisk. Zip drive was more like hard drive, with rigid platter and cover.
For floppies: Yes. It wouldn't help to use better precision. The medium itself can't handle that kind of density. 3.5" floppy drives actually went over the limit with 1.44MB ones - they fail when kept in storage for some years. Much much more than 720KB floppies.
Nearly all of my HeathKit Z89 disks from ‘79 are perfectly fine, and only a handful of 1.2M disks from the mid-80s are okay.
That's odd. Gotek and similar emulators should be available for a tenth of that price. There are several variations though, so it smells to me like someone is reselling a Gotek "guaranteed to work" with a specific type of machine with a large markup.
But of course a few lines below there's a "floppyusbemulator.com" page with a $250 "Nalbantov" drive (which are sold for $175 elsewhere, and there are probably other variantes).
Besides the (now common) Gotek, there are every kind of emulators/replacements for industrial machines, like, besides embroidery, CNC's, some early robots, etc., here is a site dedicated to them:
https://embeddedsw.net/EMUFDD_Floppy_Hardware_Emulator_Home....
GeoSky frequently lets youtubers film in the cockpit of their 747-200's. If you are a fan of the classic 747 steam gauge cockpits, these videos are priceless. Some examples:
Classic Boeing 747-200 Clock Shop! Geo Sky Takeoff from Tbilisi, Georgia, to Frankfurt! https://youtu.be/JSKYoqVPtWw?t=88
BOEING 747-200 Takeoff | Less than 10 B747 Classic still flying now! https://youtu.be/O8AA_tkY49g?t=503
Highly recommend Keir Fraser's Flash Floppy project: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
=)
I tend to keep pretty much everything, at least for a while. I'd call myself a "hoarder", but really, I have a fairly decent system for categorization and storage, and clean everything out every couple of years and sell a lot of it online.
I have a storage tote full of floppy disks - there have to be hundreds of them in there, though I've not counted. I think I'll go grab that box tonight and see if I can't sell them on eBay or something.
And, yes, if you have old floppies in good condition you can donate them.
I love using it. It triggers so many happy teen memories from my BBC B and Amiga!
That Florian guy they quoted sounds like a real dick, too.
On a more serious note, wouldn't most of these machines be well served by floppy disk emulators? Or is the barrier to entry there the modicum of technical know-how needed to interface with those properly.
For floppy-sized pieces of data, a typical SSD will afford you literally several billions of write cycles [0] until the media fails.
In comparison, a floppy disk manufactured in the 00s is going to fail after five write cycles. I can see how one would call that plastic waste.
[0]: assuming SSD write lifetimes in the ballpark of single-digits PBW (petabytes written), which is a realistic value in 2023.