Hacker News Reader

Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

And yet was an absolute marvel of engineering. I often used to wonder at the accuracy and reliability they got out of those stepper motors, trying to imagine the size of the tracks.

Fun thought experiment. The 128 GB SD card on my desk could store a 1-bit bitmap of 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 pixels. Imagine shrinking that down to the size of the die, and how small each (logical) cell is.

View on HN

Maybe that's the charm of mechanical watches? Precise metal parts moving in harmony. You can entertain yourself with analyzing its workings by simply watching it (no pun intended).

Precise, but featureless digital clocks lack "soul" which you can actually see.

For sure. And early specimens are worth a close look if you ever get an opportunity!

Humans can do amazing things! One of those things happens to be really precise, tiny parts literally willed into existing.

There was a hacked driver you could get that would tighten up the tolerances of the stepper motor and get from 1.5 to 1.9 MB of data onto a single floppy, but sliding the tracks closer together.

There was I believe at some point a game that shipped 1.5MB disks as a copy protection mechanism. But if you had this tool you could copy them anyway.

Are you referring to 2M/2MGUI? That didn't change the track spacing (which is fixed) but used bigger sector sizes (similar to how HDDs went from 512B to 4K physical sectors):

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how...

(Big fuckings to Wikipedia for erasing history, and kudos to archive.org for preserving it: https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipe... )

No they definitely did more tracks, but it seems to be a smaller multiplier than I recalled.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...

2-5% more tracks, 12.5% more sectors.

The track spacing didn't change, but yes, many if not all floppy drives could step the head slightly past the officially supported number of tracks.

Stepper motors were last used for HDDs with the capacity in megabytes.

I was thinking 5¼ floppies actually. But the same applies to the voice coils in newer hdds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com