Back there in the mid-80s I was a Commodore 64 user, and absolutely crazy about Silent Service, the Microprose WW2 submarine simulator. At some point my 1541 disk drive broke and there was no way I was going to have the money to repair it. To feed my Silent Service addiction, I sent away to a British store for the cassette version of the software. It took weeks to arrive, but worked surprisingly well with the Commodore Datasette hardware.
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(laughs) just to be fully cantankerous, should mention CD-rot (meaning the discs themselves rot and pucker) makes those things a horrible archival format. I doubt those AOL cds still work, let alone 50% of most of the ones you might have burned to keep data safe back at the same time.
https://blog.discogs.com/en/say-no-to-disc-rot-how-to-look-after-cds/
You won’t be able to restore the planet with an AOL cd, but the landline to call them might still function, at least once we get a generator up and running with the DOS vinyl.
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I remember when National Geographic had an article about humpback whales, and they included one of those records. I’m sure I got some others. Did SingOut! ever include them? I’m suddenly thinking that random issue I found much later that announced Phil Ochs death included a record.
So when they were used for data, it wasn’t a very new concept, just the content that changed.
There is also a director’s cut over at Technology Connections, where Alec rambles on for five episodes:
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I used a catweasel-style hack to read my Amiga disks not so long ago. Everything on them was just fine!
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I borrowed a co-worker’s KryoFlux and was able to dump over 100 ancient Mac 800K floppies with very little drama. For the most part everything was just fine (save for a few corrupted files here and there). The disks were all shoved in a shoebox left to sit for some 15+ years so it’s not like I even took any pain to archive them properly or anything.
Those old 3.5" floppies are more robust than people think.
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This is a great conversation. I feel compelled to mention that modular electronics, which deal with small kilobyte sized firmware, has returned to the sound file as a way to update settings on something.
Two examples: Raw sound file for Nanoloop, https://www.nanoloop.com/fm/update.html and Pam’s New Workout used to have a similar file, too, but has incorporated it into a dedicated boot loader: https://busycircuits.com/firmware/alm017/
I’m thinking there’s science out there that says a 20 year-old floppy is much, much more likely to yield data than a 20 year-old CD-R
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Good thing that they weren’t booting Windows.
Now loading album 78 of 142…
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Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone
It’s a glorious thing, and put this hack in mind of software turning up on records back in the 1980s. In 2004, Adam Kempa detailed some examples of the breed. Popster Shakin’ Stevens gifted listeners with “The Shaky Game” on a vinyl release of his “This Ole House” single while the cassette version of The Stranglers’ Aural Sculpture included a text adventure for Spectrum-owning fans to play.
They weren’t floppy. 5.25" and 8" flexible discs were floppy. 3.5" inflexible discs were stiffies. Consider the sexist stereotypes of floppy vs stiffy.
My first micro drives supported hard-sector 5.25" SSSD floppies with a capacity of 90kb each, I’ll admit a preference for Zip discs of 100mb capacity.
Was this a regional thing? We always only called them floppies.
Misuse of language IMHO. Try to twist one; see how floppy it gets.
But anyone who has taken them apart can see the floppy. That’s the medium, and the reason we called them floppies.
ETA: don’t even need to take it apart. Just slide the door over.
The outer casing was a hard plastic shell, yes, but the actual media was still a thin and floppy piece of plastic with a ferrous coating just like the 5.25” and 8” disks that came before. It’s still considered a floppy disk.
Zip disks are floppies as well - they are also a thin plastic media with a ferrous coating. Given their high data capacity they are part of a family colloquially called “superfloppies”.
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It’s nitpicking.
8 inch were floppier than 5.25 floppies. 3.5 were the next step, “floppy” being generic for removeable storage.
It never confused people who lived through the transition, and they were indeed still called floppies.
It does look different from a later standpoint. About 1992 someone who was 8 asked “why do you call it floppy”, so I showed her a 5.25" . I never saw an 8 inch until I found a box of them, leftover after a rummage sale. Boy do those flop.
There were multiple paths to smaller floppies. There were 3inch and there were 3.5inch that were “floppy” (no hard case) but had a metal hub. I think I got those straight.
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There were a few different 3” formats, also 2.5”, 2”, and 4” formats. None of them were particularly successful.
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Inside a floppy disk, there’s a flexible mylar disk. Inside a hard disk, there are inflexible steel platters.
A floppy disc couldn’t be spun as fast as a hard drive, and because the magnetic heads needed to be protected from dust and what not, stored data less densely.
The Bernoulli disks (an early iomega product) were designed so that the platters would bend towards the heads at high speeds, and away from the heads when the drive lost power. This would theoretically prevent head crashes, though, for all I know, this might have been an advertising gimmick.
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