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The History of the Floppy Disk
Esther Schindler writes "Ready for a nostalgic trip into the wayback? We had floppy disks long before we had CDs, DVDs, or USB thumb-drives. Here's the evolution of the portable media that changed everything about personal computing. 'The 8-inch drive began to show up in 1971. Since they enabled developers and users to stop using the dreaded paper tape (which were easy to fold, spindle, and mutilate, not to mention to pirate) and the loathed IBM 5081 punch card. Everyone who had ever twisted a some tape or—the horror!—dropped a deck of Hollerith cards was happy to adopt 8-inch drives. Besides, the early single-sided 8-inch floppy could hold the data of up to 3,000 punch cards, or 80K to you.'"
I/O Error, Try again.... I/O Error, Try again. Damn it! Now how am I going to play Oregon Trail.
I still teach students about Foppy Disk drives, their interfaces, the PC architecture, index hole, write protect notch, clamping notch, tracks, densities, FM and MFM recording to students in Engineering. This is still included in syllabi of most Indian Universities. We are able to get hold of 5-1/4" floppy diskettes to show to the students, but the 8" media is very very hard to find.
One thing I remember was a colleague spilling sweet hot coffee on a 5.25 inch floppy that had just arrived in the post. We all thought he would have to tell head office that we had just destroyed our latest update disk and get them to send another, but he opened the envelope, took out the actual disk, rinsed it under the tap, and carefully dried it. Next he got a blank floppy, opened this, and substituted the internal disk - finally sealing it with sellotape down the edge. We all said "it will never work", but it read perfectly - the first thing he did was take a back-up of course.
"Wang needed a smaller, cheaper floppy disk."
Check this out: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/five-disk-floppy-raid-4mb-of-blistering-fast-storage/
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
It's just not very satisfying...
... unfortunately it's only on a single set of 3.5s just like my ASCII/ANSI artwork. Probably unrecoverable by now. Windows for Workgroups and the rest are just minor nostalgia pieces I haven't trashed yet as I find it finny to run across them in my old hardware boxes. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I still wish someone would make (and sell) a USB 5.25" floppy drive. I still have a few 5.25" floppies kicking around that I'd love to get data off of, if they're still readable.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
still remember it...ahhh
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my drive A:?????
I remember taking bunches of old DD 3.5'' floppies and drilling a hole on the lower left side in order to later format them as HD (1.44 MB). Of course many of them were destroyed or ended up with lots of defective sectors in the process.
Aaaaah, the good old days!
"For data storage it used—I kid you not—a cassette tape player."
Do people not know that personal computers used audio cassettes to store data any more?
09
0A
0B
DATA!
BLOCK!
Please Rewind Tape!
I worked in tech support in the 1980s and 5.25" floppies were a great (unintended) source of fun.
For example, in response to "can you send me a copy of that floppy?" I was sent (a) a photocopy the floppy and (b) a floppy with a covering note stapled to it!
But best of all was the time I asked a user if they had a backup of some important documents. She pointed me to a 5.25" floppy - attached to the side of a filing cabinet with a fridge magnet.
Happy days!
I remember cards, and they weren't loathed. They were... cards. Just tools of the day.
You're one cheap writer. Please get off my lawn.
We would call the big ones "floppies" and the small ones "stiffies" (for obvious reaons) to keep them apart. And we would do it with a straight face.
This seems to have been a local thing in South Africa, however, since I have only heard it there.
Here in South Africa we used to call the 3.5" Floppies with the hard plastic cases stiffies.
There's only one good use for a "modern" floppy disk drive - MUSIC!
Doom's E1M1 soundtrack on eight floppy drives:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a7-5WYOKxE
Guy also has plenty more tracks. Makes me want to break out the Arduino again...
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
I want a USB ST-506 adaptor, so I can transfer files over sneakernet on a 20MB Miniscribe. OMFG! That would be the awesomest show-and-tell ever!
The only type of floppy I remember handling is in 3.5" (I'm still a young'un), but I still remember a kid's science magazine (not published anymore here in Taiwan) teaching us to insert the 5.25" floppies all the way to the bottom, flip the drive bay latches 90 degrees to lock it in place, and boot from A: using MS-DOS. I still have a 5.25" drive cleaner (where the magnetic material is substituted with some kind of textile and packaged in a standard casing) lying around, though I have no actual disks.
I make hardware RNGs, which give 2.5849625 bits of entropy per use in theory (actual performance dependent on usage).
If you wanted an archival medium today, you could do worse than mylar punch tape. That stuff was damned near indestructible. You couldn't tear it if you tried. We kept all our important/frequently used data and programs on it.
Which made them frankly fairly useless for data storage and backup. Any company IT dept worth its salt used tapes and your average user just had to make sure he backed the same thing up on enough floppies that after N months/years at least one would hopefully still work. And as time went by and manufacturers cut costs to make up for falling sales reliability got so bad that in boxes of some of the last floppies to be produced at least 1 or 2 disks wouldn't even work to start with if my experience was anything to go by!
I miss some things about computers of the past but floppy disks are not one of them. Thank god for USB sticks and SD cards.
Y'all forgot, there weren't just 5.25" and 8" floppy drives, there was also no agreement among OEMs on whether diskettes should be soft sectored or hard sectored, and there were maybe 30 formatting schemes in use -- hard sectoring required punching holes in the media, sometimes several.
Even after the IBM-PC (which adopted 5.25" soft-sectored disks as the standard) there were attempts to use punched holes, or nonstandard data written to the disks, either as a copy protection scheme or in order to require computer purchasers to purchase the OEM's own diskette media (DEC Rainbow).
My experience was that 5.25" floppies were really reliable. I had hundreds of 5.25" floppies and I don't remember any of them ever failing. I had some failures with 3.5" floppies, but not too often. IMHO, USB flash drives are much more unreliable than floppies were (although capacity of USB flash drives is much larger than floppies).
It would be interesting to check if the floppies that I used over 20 years ago are still readable. I have to try that some day...
I was always under the impression that they were actually 9 cm discs. Being Japanese (Sony) in origin, they were in rest-of-the-world measurements, not American.
Yes, Steve Jobs popularized floppies with the Apple II, but he wasn't always so lucky. At the time the NeXT Computer came out, the lack of a floppy drive was a serious problem. Sneakernet was alive and well in those days, and uploading files via the network required bizarre things like Kermit and ZModem. And the NeXT magneto optical drive was horrendous. NeXT did eventually introduce a floppy in 1991, pretty late in the game. Of course, NeXT was way ahead of its time, the computer that the world wide web was invented on. and a precursor to OS X and iOS.
I was pretty amazed that I could read floppies from the 80s and very early nineties flawlessly, those were 5.25". I was collecting crap back then so I ended up with an Apple II and a PC/AT (where I added a VGA card, and a null modem cable for transfers).
3.5" were at least more physically robust, though you could bend the metal latch and at worst destroy the drive when you get it stuck in it. but, it was so incredibly unreliable! back then too, a home computer was only useful for gaming and the floppies were used for piracy. no used had a modem or used a BBS, because the costs would have been prohibitive. it was a US thing. as a kid I really wondered where these cracked versions of games were coming from.
I'm pretty sure that 5081 refers to a specific single-field layout, not to 80-column punched cards as such. There were many layouts. I seem to recall using something very similar to this FORTRAN card even when I wasn't doing FORTRAN, and I don't think they had "FORTRAN STATEMENT" printed on them.
I don't recall anybody loathing punched cards. They were a simple, reliable, if somewhat bulky medium. It is true that magnetic discs represented a great improvement. In my case, floppies were never more than a backup medium, since the systems I worked with always had hard disks.
Ahh, floppies. The very definition of optimism knowing that when the following message came up
Not ready reading drive A
Abort, Retry, Fail?
That you were screwed, but you would still choose one anyway
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abort,_Retry,_Fail%3F
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
I was a dodgy little software pirate too, I was constantly formatting floppy disks and checking for bastard CRC errors. I only had a 20mb hard disk to begin with.
So that is why the pin for my ATM card is 145766412139
(I can't fit the 52 at the end, they max out at 12 digits here, not 14)
Sad, I know.
The 2 combined numbers there, which you might be more familliar with in Ztree are. :) :( although I never got to work with them, the bank I was working in used them for transactions from offices only about 10 or 12 years ago - which really is pretty recent when you think about it.
1,457,664 BYTES FREE
1,213,952 BYTES FREE
No CRC errors on those bad boys, every block is working
Oh and I have an 8" floppy stuck up on the wall of my nerd cave
(A lot of our Aussie companies here purchased used hardware from the US to set themselves up, I believe Coles supermarkets used US based registers and ANZ banks used some kind of US based banking hardware - both second hand)
In conclusion: I don't miss the sound of drive heads seeking on cheap floppies with cheap drives, but I do fondly recall some aspects of them.
730,112
362,496
I keep an old Compaq 500 mhz box in my basement so that I can read 5.25 floppies on a 1.2 meg floppy drive (I don't often, but I can.). The bios changed after that, and (in my experience) wouldn't recognize any floppy drive other than the 1.44 meg.
Loading Windows & Office on a new PC using more than 60 floppies, spending all afternoon praying God the last one wouldn't fail...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I remember both Apple ][ and Commodore floppies would seek past the end of the rail to recalibrate track 0. The apple made a noise on power up but 1541s made a scary noise whenever formatting a new disk or trying to recover a read error.
After a while the rattle actually threw the head out of alignment as the pulley was slipping on the axle. I connected the read head to the microphone input of a tape recorder to listen to the signal strength as I adjusted the stepper motor alignment.
After a while the screw threads were worn and I had to tap&die them. Then I got tired of realigning the heads and drilled in a cotter pin to stop the pulley from slipping.
Good times.
FTA: "Besides, the early single-sided 8-inch floppy could hold the data of up to 3,000 punch cards, or 80K to you. I know that's nothing today — this article uses up 66K with the text alone – but then it was a big deal."
There is no way that the text ALONE in this article could take up 66K. That would be something like 200 pages.
Proverbs 21:19
My first computer was that 1977 TRS-80 Model I, with the 600 baud cassette tape player. It finally bit the dust around 1990.
My favorites, though, were the Tandys I had. In 1985, my dad brought home a shiny new Tandy 1000A. He spent the money to upgrade it to dual 360K floppy disks, and bought the DRAM on the aftermarket to upgrade it to 640K. It took a lot longer to boot with 640K than it did with the factory 128K it came with.
DOS 2.11 was the O/S at the time, and DeskMate was something revolutionary to my 10 year old eyes.
He added 1200bps modem to the mix for his business in 1988 or 89, and it was then that I discovered the online Bulletin Board System. I spent the next couple of years monopolizing the PC, starting my own BBS that ran on floppies, running MiniHost.
So in 1990 for my birthday, I came home to find a new Tandy 1000TX sitting on the desk in the basement. I had originally thought he had just bought a 3.5" floppy drive for the existing PC, but I was elated to learn I had received a new PC for my birthday.
The 3.5" floppy was amazing. With the companion 5.25" floppy, I was able to copy everything over no problem. My new PC had its own 1200bps modem in it. Having the larger floppy meant I could put a few precious more programs on my BBS, which ran Phoenix RCS. I installed a couple of door games, and even a sub-BBS since Phoenix could do that. I also borrowed a 2400bps modem from a friend who had an extra one, and expanded my BBS to consume 2 of the 4 phone lines we had in the house, primarily for my dad's business.
When I was 15, my brother "handed me down" an old rusted out Honda Accord that I could fix up and use for a car when I turned 16. I promptly traded it to a guy at school for a 40-megabyte hard card that was compatible with the TX. It used a Miniscribe 8450 RLL Hard Disk, and an ST-412 RLL controller.
Boy, that was epic. My BBS could finally store files! I started leeching everything I could from other BBSes in the area: Tiny BBS, PC Paradise, The Works, The Outer Limit, The Open Door, and many others. Tiny in particular had become a huge BBS in the Hudson Valley - I think he grew to 3 or 4 phone lines, two of which were reserved for donators.
I would have friends over and stay up all night downloading from two different BBSes on two computers and phone lines. I was so officially a nerd by then, also having gotten my ham radio license in 1987.
When 1990/1991 rolled around, I had gotten my drivers license and a car, and was getting to the point that my juvenile computer pursuits were falling by the wayside in favor of being outside more. But, I still worked on the BBS, and spent late nights writing code in BASIC to do various things, and playing with things like DESQview, bimodem, MNP/5, and other cool things that came about during my formative years.
1992 brought about graduation from high school and a move away from home for college. I had built myself a 286 machine over the summer, with 1MB of RAM and QEMU on it. So, I left a lot behind. The Tandy 1000TX stayed home, but the hard drive came with me, so the BBS was no more. The 2400bps modem I had borrowed went back to its owner as well, but that didn't matter since the dorms at Ga Tech had their very own DB25 with a direct serial connection to Hydra - it was like being on a 9600bps BBS all the time! And this email thing - whoa - it was instant, too.
I dabbled in BBSes here and there, especially after I moved out of the dorm and could do it again, but it was never the same. By 1996 the Internet was starting to take shape in a big way, and I realized that BBSes were to quickly become a thing of the past, in favor of this World Wide Web thing everyone was talking about.
In 1997, I still had floppies in my computer. By then I was still in school, having taken the requisite year or two off to get in-state tuition. I started playing with Linux, and built myself a whopping dual-CPU machine. Floppies were still handy, as I'd still had all of the ones I had used on the old Tandy 10
The typical terabyte hard drive is equivalent to how many punch cards, and how much would they weight?
--
Ah, the smell of punch cards in the morning!
No mention of the Zip & Jazz disks that were an attempt to keep the portable "floppy" magnetic disk paradigm alive? I remember using the Zip drive with a parallel port connection, and the 'Guest' program so you could use these on other computers.
As a joke, I once stuck a 5.25" floppy to the refrigerator with a large magnet.
On the floppy, a sticky note to my roommate read: "Alex. This is important information. Please keep it safe"
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Disk
I believe the first use of the floppy was on the IBM System 360. It was used to distribute changes to the microcode. That would have been in the early to mid 1960s.
1000 cards could hold ~80K bytes (1000 x 80 columns).
I worked there for three months, got paid little more than minimum wage, not too bad as living expenses were not as high like they are now. This was the flexible disk plant at Central Expwy and San Tomas (I think) in Santa Clara, right there in Silicon Valley when this place was rockin. Rest of country may have been in the gutter in 1979 but here in Santa Clara Valley you would never know. Lots of places hiring, engineers can name their own price. Assemblers hired with no experience necessary. My first job was to insert a 5.25 cover (with no disk) into a machine that stamps out holes, this cover was then passed over to someone else that inserted the flexible disk.
This Memorex plant produced 5.25 and 8 inch floppies. Magnetic medium came in large rolls, i.e. recording tape but about 9 inches or 6 inches wide from "The Tape Plant" which the flexible disks were stamped from the roll. These circular disks were then burnished. Covers were made from black material that was pressed with white soft cloth with a heat stamp. For you younguns, need to get one of these old disks and take it apart to better visualize these pieces. After covers were pressed with white clothes, they were folded in half and given to me to stamp out the holes for the recording heads to make contact with magnetic medium (I worked swing shift, normally could stamp about 9000, one night on a roll I got up to 10,000 stamped well had a larger number of botches...). This plant was a 3-shift operation, but many times we also had to work Saturdays (which I hated). Later on I did a few other things but overall it was boring. I had cash flow problems and had to get a job real quick.
One particular thing I most remembered is this 2-story building had the sales and marketing upstairs (they only worked day shift), all these people upstairs were all tall, thin, and beautiful. Everyone below were all short, fat, and ugly. However there was one lady that worked grave shift, nice looking and she wore tons of makeup. Not sure why at this time of night but she was quite attractive.
There was one time when demand for flexible disks was high and Memorex was pressed to deliver more (customer was a computer company, I forgot who). When disks were burnished they were inspected for blemishes in the magnetic material, too many blemishes they were placed in a rejected pile (which actually was quite a large quantity). Because of the demand, they pulled these disks out and we took a second look, "well this one doesn't look too bad" and proceeded to make a final product (which finished disks are individually tested for write/read). I asked the boss if this computer company knows we are "recycling" from the reject pile, he said, "None of their concern!"
There was one case when someone working the machine that presses white cloth to the black material, he saw a spider, grabbed it, and put it between the white cloth and black material and fed into the heat press. So somewhere there is a Memorex 8-inch floppy with a squished spider inside.
Yep, such as things were in the 20th century.
mfwright@batnet.com
I don't know how many people are aware of this, but here is my brief story. As an Australian I had the privilege of boarding a US Battleship when I was younger. An interesting fact I came away with was the fact that they committed (this is in about 1997) everything to those 8 inch floppy. Why? With its incredible 80kb - 1.2MB storage capacity, apparently the 8 inch drive was the most resilient storage medium in the event that the vessel was sunk and records needed to be recovered from the ocean floor. I personally found that fascinating.
And my favorite memory is...
The CB App. What's your 20?
used them in a Motorola eXorcisor and, of course, the VAX 11/785 booted from a Wang floppy drive. came time (past time, DEC was not going to support us any longer if I didn't apply the 3 years of updates my predecessor had not installed) that I had to build a new boot floppy for VMS 6.x, and man, was that the most careful I have ever been in my life.
worst floppies ever... 1.2 Mb PC-DOS format. scratch, scratch, scratch Abort, Retry, Fail?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
on a 286 with a compatible a floppy controller . I could backup 16 megs (not gigs) on 16 high density floppies in 20 minutes. It used an error correction method that could recover bad sectors 95% of the time (throw away another disk).
I loved that program, it literally saved my butt several times.
ya know i have one of those new solid state drives they call them floopy drive .yeah n i am an IT manager .pretty smart one at that
> 3,000 punch cards, or 80K to you
Punch cards were 80 column. 3,000 x 80 -> 240Kb which is the actual capacity of the original 8 inch SSSD disks.
5,25 disks originally had a capacity of 80Kb, such as those on the Apple II. This may be where you got your confusion from.
Not to nitpick too much But for 3,000 punch cards to be 80k that would mean each card only had 28 columns. 3000 * 80 = 240,000 / 1024 = 234k I think it's the 3,000 that is the wrong number. The original IBM 23FD was about 80k or about 1,000 80 column punch cards worth. I used to do microcode updates on the mainframe at work. It was a huge pain and took forever. When the 5 1/4 disks came out it was Amazing!
AFAIK no PC used an 8 inch disk (please correct me if I'm wrong)
h8ers gonna hate
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Sadly, I still have to use 3.5" floppies on a weekly basis. My lab has very old (specialized, expensive) equipment that only runs with a DOS interface, and we use floppies to transfer the data because there is no other option. This was very nostalgic at first, then quickly just became a PITA.
Interestingly, the older floppies we have tend to be slightly more reliable than the later-produced discs ... makes me wonder if production quality went down towards the end (though it could be any number of reasons).
..ferpetesake. Get it right.
I changed the Registry and placed the Windows logs (.evt files) on floppy. And those creepy WBEM .log files.
I suspect that a floppy spin-up uses less power than a HardDrive spin-up from sleep.
In any case i get the wonderful ka-chick ka-chuck sounds randomly several times a-day. Windows is very log-happy.
Just last week I watched War Games - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
Still a good movie.
Matthew Broderick uses 8" floppies and a 300 baud acoustic coupling to hack into a mainframe. Circa 1983.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I hate to be pedantic, but 5081 Hollerith cards had 12 holes per column, which means you could actually encoded 12 bits per column if you wanted to. 12 bits x 80 columns = 960 bits per card, or 120 bytes. 120 x 3,000 = 360,000 bytes; divide by 1024 = 351.5 KB
The VAX 11/780 has a PDP-11/23 microcomputer as the console processor that booted the machine, and the 11/23 used an 8" floppy in some DEC format. There were drivers in 4.1BSD and maybe in System V that made the floppy device accessible if you wanted to use it.
We had a project in the late 80s which had a bunch of people sending us field data in all kinds of random and often inappropriate data formats, and one set of users sent us data on 8" floppies. We ended up deciding that yes, it really would be safe to put this dubious floppy into the console floppy drive, the machine really only used it at boot time, and we tried it and successfully copied the data into the Unix machine, where we could parse it into some useful format. Made sure to take the floppy out right after reading it and put the standard one back in. Other formats people sent us included a lot of VMS backup tapes, and a stack of tapes with duct-tape labels on them and a badly photocopied description of the bytes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
we will have stories about floppy dick?