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.'"

Comments

I remember the old floppies well

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:I remember the old floppies well

[JosKarith]

First step - make a back-up.
Second step - put the originals somewhere safe and use the back-up disks
We got tripped up with this on a graphic design program for the Archimedes at school. We made a copy of the original and ran off that for a while. Then the copy went missing so the teacher grabbed the original and tried using that. It refused to work. We thought that it had somehow gotten fried but someone dutifully ran off a copy anyway and that worked fine. We were all really confused till we realised that the original had the write-protect tab set. The program needed to write back to the disk occasionally nut the manufacturer had assumed that everyone who used the program would run off unprotected copies... fun times.

Re:Read Error

[hairyfeet]

What was "fun" was some of the later OS installs that came on floppies. Anybody remember how many floppies Win95 took? And it never failed that one of the floppies, usually one of those needed at the very end, wouldn't work.

Still I remember how excited I was when I got my first CD burner...no more floppies yay! And I could overburn too! I for one was damned glad when floppies finally bought the farm, I always seemed to end up with the damned discs dead and my data toast, no matter how much I babied the stupid things.

Ahhh memories!

[Jahta]

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!

Re:Ahhh memories!

[knarfling]

You may not have experienced them, but many of us have.

The magnet issue happened to my supervisor, but I was there at the time. What made it difficult was that he would bring the disks in to the shop completely trashed. It took over a week and 5 sets of replacement floppies before we figured out the trouble.

Stapling, however, happened to me personally. An office assistant was told to bring the floppy to our shop and was given a paper with our address on it. She was specifically told not to paper clip the address to the floppy so as to prevent bending, so she stapled it. Surprisingly, we were able to gently pry the staple out an recover the data. But it prompted us to have fun with other customers. We took a bad floppy, put it in the protective sleeve, covered it with a piece of paper that said "Important Data. Do NOT erase" and stapled it to the disk and sleeve about 20 times. We then placed it out on the counters next to the demo machines and counted how many people tried to slide the disk out of the sleeve. Several people asked us if we could put it in to see what was on the disk, a few tried to slide it out, and at least four tried to put the disk, sleave, staples and paper into the drive.

My favorite experience happened when someone tried to return a game as defective. He stated that it worked the first time, but he took it to a friends house and it didn't work. When he brought it home, it didn't work. When I asked him if I could see the disk, he took it out of his shirt pocket and unfolded it. It was still in the the sleeve. I put my hands behind my back and asked him to turn the disk over and read the warning on the back of the sleeve. When he got to the "Do Not Bend" warning, he looked up and said, "That's probably why it doesn't work, isn't it?"

The Sector Wars

[mbstone]

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).

Re:Read Error

[hairyfeet]

Oh I believe you friend, I remember doing a WinNT 3.5 floppy install and I think it was like 42 or 43 floppies, just nuts. the kids today don't realize how truly nutty it had gotten with the floppies right before the CD took off, we had 17 floppies for Win95, someone else posted Office 4.2 took something like 40 floppies for a full install, Banyan took a couple of dozen, your Slackware took 40...it was insanity.

I remember at the shop I was working at the time we had these giant filing cabinets just filled with row after row after row of floppy boxes with various OSes and software marked on the top. This is why we were practically dancing with joy when the first CD burners got released, even though the discs were high and the burning software would get flaky, just because the amount of damned floppies we had to deal with on a daily basis was like some bad parody.