Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
You might want to have them read http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006QMXYEA "The Floppy Disk Story - which describes the evolution of the FD from the user's end
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
... 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 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!
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!
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.
That, and if you don't teach people about them they won't know which icon to click to save their work.
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).
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.
Data density was much higher on a floppy disk than tapes of the day (if you think about it , and entire floppy disks surface area is probably only equivalent to a few inches of tape) so consequently minor faults that would do nothing to data on a tape could cause complete data loss on a floppy disk.
It wasn't. 9 track tapes lasted a few years and at that point the oxide flaked off. Ever wonder where Google's Usenet archive came from? DejaNews. Wonder where that came from? Archive.org (I think it's all still there somewhere in 4 of the biggest files on earth). Wonder where they got it from? I sort of arranged them to get a copy from magi@uwo who had taken Henry Spencer's tape backups made because a friend of his wanted rec.birds ad it was easier to just store all of it. magi told me at the worst point they'd run a tape for a foot, then have to stop and clean all the flaked oxide off the heads and keep going. It took, I think, two summers to read them all that way.
Tapes were ok if you used them the same year or next, but if you were serious about data, you kept it on disk packs, either 2314 single platers or 2311 packs or multiple platters.
8" floppies may have been introduced in 71 but it wasn't really anywhere close to common until the late seventies and never had much traction with large computers. More so with minicomputers but still fairly useless given the volumes of data. Where they shone was with micros, their 8-bit cpus and low data requirements made them ideal; you could easily boot an O/S off one and have all your data on the other and this lasted until about the early to mid 80s when 5" floppies - much less reliable - took over.
IBM introduced them and they were called "flexible diskettes" and nobody thought they would work or work reliably if they did, which really wasn't too far off the mark.
You know all those gaps in Google's Usenet archive? That's where the oxide flaked off and that data is just plain extinct. No, tapes sucked but then, as now, expensive dick drives had outstanding longevity.
Need Mercedes parts ?
You're describing "sticky shed syndrome", or hydrolysis of the polyurethane binding layer between the oxide and the base. Some tape brands are more susceptible to it than others. Storage conditions are another significant determinant.
Basically, humidity reacts with the glue that keeps the rust sticking to the plastic. If there was archival data of such significance, the tapes should have been "baked" - that is, slowly heated to a precise temperature which would re-dry the glue. After that, the tapes would probably mount fine.
If you had conferred with some people like the Computer History Museum (just down the block from the Googleplex), they would have helped you out.
toresbe
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
Are there still people today that use floppies? :)
Yes. I click on them all the time to save documents and files.
I could never be proud of having a 3.5" stiffie.
Great. Now I feel like I shouldn't be proud I had my hands on quite a few 8" floppies when I was a young child ...
8" floppies ... never had much traction with large computers.
Are you forgetting the VAX 11/780's console floppy drive? No VAX would have ever booted without it.
No, tapes sucked but then, as now, expensive dick drives had outstanding longevity.
Best typo today.