[HN Gopher] Back to the Floppy (2019)
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Back to the Floppy (2019)
Author : doener
Score : 31 points
Date : 2024-02-03 11:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.markround.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.markround.com)
| controversial97 wrote:
| Until about the year 1993, 3.5" disks were very reliable if you
| didn't abuse them.
|
| Around the early days of windows 3.11, someone figured out how to
| make cheaper 3.5" disks and putting data on off-brand disks
| became a gamble.
|
| Enticed by the low price, I bought several boxes of ten floppy
| disks that had plastic shutters instead of metal. A few from each
| box of ten had bad sectors from new.
|
| I end up trying to only use TDK disks, though later in the 1990s
| it seemed to me that the quality of new 3.5" floppy drives went
| down as well.
| greenbit wrote:
| There were those double high density disks that never quite
| caught on, but one fun thing was having the double hd drive
| (2.8M) and doing anything that would write to an existing
| 'regular' (1.4M) floppy -- the drive would write narrower
| tracks than the existing data, and then when you went to read
| that sector back, the head would pick up both the new narrow
| track and the adjacent remainder of the wider track, hilarity
| ensuing. This led to a certain amount of cursing cheap floppies
| that weren't really to blame.
| bobim wrote:
| And in the meantime we were drilling cheap 720k floppies.
| Strangely never had an issue with these.
| cyberax wrote:
| For some reason, 5.25" floppies always never failed me. But
| 3.5" floppies had always been a source of problems.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| I remember I bought a box of floppies in the early 2000s. From
| that box, I don't think I got a single disk that had zero bad
| sectors. At that point, I moved to thumb drives, CD-R's, or
| email for my data transfer needs.
| roblatham wrote:
| that sounds right to me.. worked universit help desk in the
| late 90s. wow, the number of distressed people who kept their
| only copy of their thesis on this one floppy drive that no
| longer works. some harsh lessons in backups ...
| zubairq wrote:
| Don't copy that floppy!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You wouldn't download a car.
| cout wrote:
| I do miss watching Stewart Cheifet.
| johnklos wrote:
| Even when using a FlashFloppy on a real computer (Amiga), it
| still feels better. You know where your data are. You know how
| and when it's being accessed.
|
| Also, it's interesting how an Amiga can boot off of a floppy
| faster than most modern computers can boot from an SSD. Floppies
| required people to be deliberate about loading files. It's a
| lesson I think most of us have forgotten now that a web browser
| can be a few hundred megabytes on disk.
|
| For the fun of it, not long ago I loaded all the DMF (1680K)
| floppy images for Windows 98 onto a USB stick for a FlashFloppy,
| booted the boot disk in PC-Task on an Amiga 3000 (with original
| m68030), then proceeded to install Windows 98. It's amazing that
| a modern device can emulate a floppy drive, that the Amiga could
| read the emulated floppy whatever the data rate (Amigas can't do
| HD floppy data rates, so Amigas cheated by using drives that
| could run at half the RPM), and could even support the 21 sectors
| per track that Windows 98 DMF disks use. Of course, it can be
| done with real floppy disks, too.
|
| Floppies are cool :)
| Moru wrote:
| Yeah, you really know where your data is. I have fond memories
| of saving documents to a floppy, walking to the library to
| print only to find an empty floppy disk. Going back home,
| formatting it, saving again, doublechecking in a friends drive,
| still there. Going back to library, empty floppy. Going back
| home, floppy disk still empty. Had this happening several times
| with different floppies. Friends had the same problem. Write-
| lock didn't help a thing. It was less than 50% chance it would
| actually work. But it did work now and then.
| johnklos wrote:
| That sounds like an MS-DOS problem. Some systems didn't
| properly detect disk changes, so if lots of buffers were
| configured, the system would just keep reading the same data
| out of memory.
|
| If your system is fine, and your data is on the floppy
| according to your friend's system, too, then the issue was
| most likely the library's system. That's not a floppy issue
| ;)
| cat_plus_plus wrote:
| There is no good replacement for just giving out floppies without
| worrying about cost to this day. 8GB SD cards, a practical size
| to give out applications, photos or videos, are about $6 each, so
| giving one to everyone in your class is a non-trivial expense.
| DVDs are too fragile and many don't have an optical drive at home
| these days. Online hosting requires remembering the URL and then
| an extra download step.
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