We’d take stacks of the 720k floppies into the shop class and use a drill press to “upgrade” them to 1.44mb we thought we were fancy because we had glued two by fours together to make a box that you stack 10-12 in at a time to drill all at once. We were one very small notch above cave men back then with our tools.
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Wow. Were the resulting “faux HD” disks reliable?
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It’s generally reserved for hiding a menu when there’s not enough screen real estate to display it - e.g. when you’re viewing a site on your phone. Regardless, most people know what it means at this point. If I were the designer of this site I’d just have it say something reasonable “menu”, etc. since there’s plenty of room up there.
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If I want to be able to brush, pull and twist the hamburger (so called because a greeked or leading (Pb leading) is a name for horrors alone) does it mean I hate the hamburger menu? I mean it’s this deprecated thing (Lollipop-wise) like IPv4, but there it is, the hook for a show dedicating Patricia Arquette to fighting a vim tuned for docker to keep turning out Gnome 2.12 instances that are putting these figures everywhere. “You can’t touch the moonbats!”
So…on the other design side, is it a rasterized logotype of a black square like AT&T has done with their logo, shimapan for Spongebob, the lower-cost 1-color ‘fallout shelter’ sign, or a sideways dieresis that smeared? Mostly the last one, right?
According to an article I read way back when, single-sided floppies were a scam. The reason being that the manufacturer supposedly only tested one side of the disk, while they would test both sides of the more expensive double-sideds. BUT! Drive manufacturers differed on which side of the disk the heads were on, so an IBM drive might use the labeled side and an Apple drive might have the heads underneath. So how could the disk manufacturers know which side was considered “up?”
Ah ha, found it. Not exactly an “article,” but I knew it was the Beagle Bros Bulletin:
Lordy, do I miss them.
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Information you have passed to me a mere 15 years too late to be useful. I used HD anyway.
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Well, not quite. Notice that he’s holding a 5.25 inch floppy. At that time, Apple IIs, commodore 64s and the like only used a single side of the disk-- you’d physically flip the disk over to use the other side. That’s why Commodore disks were only 170 k, and Apple disks were only 140k, while IBMs were storing 360k on a floppy. Even the original macintosh disks were 400 k (but you couldn’t actually use the other side)
By the time that HD floppies came around, disk drives were already reading from both sides of the disk. So Mac disks were 800k, and IBM disks were 720k. With HD disks, the density of the storage increased to 1440 k.
HD floppies therefore could theoretically differ in two ways.
One, they could have an extra hole in them that somehow communicated to 720k drives: “I’m not a normal disk. Please eject me,” which would solve incompatibility problems, but only if the feature had been designed in long before. Drilling the hole would simply instruct both types of drive to treat it as a HD disk.
Two, the magnetic material was designed to record a higher density signal, but it’s probably more a matter of certification.
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This looks legit:
High density diskettes NOT same as SD, DD
Use of HD and DD drives, diskettes
I suppose if you were doing nonarchival stuff, you could throw the dice, but now, it’s all about computer history, and sloppy computer habits of thirty years ago mean missing data now.
I would fix this, but there are literally like 20 page views a day with Conkeror, and that is totally just you, and I’m afraid the dude from Belarus who wants the markup Lynx-friendly is going to be served first.
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Yeah, it sounds like the bugs should be lodged against conkeror.
They were as reliable as floppy disks could be. We screwed up a few batches but it was obvious, because you could see we had hit the edge of the floppy disk inside. With the high RPM’s of the drill press it generally just melted the plastic so there wasn’t too much concern for small chunks of plastic getting caught up between the layers in the floppy. Seriously though knowing what I know now I wouldn’t have done it that way, but hey we were just simple cave people back then.
At least that could lead to greater Accessibility!
Or a philosophy class (where you may study logic) or a linguistics class or an engineering class, or just ask a freakin’ ten year old.
Aside: I’m older and grumpier than you, but trying to use my gifts for good.
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