HANDSOME floppies!
Look at these dudes. Not really handsome.
>>107794630MOOODS!!! This is a SFW board, man!
>>107794630>2MBWhy was that capacity never used and only the 1.44MB? Why did most format so inefficiently?
>>107794630>floppiesThey had the wrong title. They were small and stiff. Horse equivalent coming through:
i haven't use a floppy disk in a long time>>1077947415.25" and 8" floppies were actually physically floppy, it's only 3.5" which dominated their later life that weren't flexible
>>107794763really loved the transparent ones. I wonder if there were ever any transparent 5.25" ones. have never seen any.
>>107794776i haven't seen any. i think 5.25" was long gone before the mid-late '90s trend of transparent plastics
>>107794710>2MBIt was purely theoretical, the drives were capable of that but in practice with many vendors the diskette quality made them unreliable when used at full density - about 1.8 was the max some formats used I believe
>>107794776They came in many colors but I don't think any were translucent
>>107794795i'm a bit young to have seen everything, but 2.88MB floppy was something i saw an option in many places, but i've never seen one.>about 1.8 was the max some formats usedinteresting thing about floppy was that it was a rather "raw" format, like the PC/DOS 1.44MB format was really common, but the drive and disk format itself was really quite "dumb" in the sense that the capacity was pretty flexible, floppy disks were low-level formattable, which lead to several alternative low-level formats, like microsoft's 1.68MB "DMF" format used for their later floppy-based software distributionsthe ad in op is probably referencing a time i'm not familiar with, since "1MB/1.6MB/2MB" as apparently standard formats aren't something i'm familiar with. i'm a baby though and only saw the tail end of the dos pc compatible era. i think amiga floppies were 1MB, macintosh floppies were 800-something KB, but i don't know about all of the different formats floppies were used for
>>107794874classic
>>107794833Amiga were 880kB for DD and double that for HD. The 2.88 you're mentioning I'm pretty sure had a theoretical capacity of 4MB, so even bigger disparity between theory and practice.
>>107794892i really only know enough to know that floppy formats were a minefield. each machine that used them had their own format. it's hard to imagine now, but things were far more varied in the '90s. even the same physical 3.5" disk could be physically formatted in several different ways, physically, not just the data on them, but the actual track count and density might vary, too.
>>107794928sector density/sectors-per-track, i mean
>>107794874jej
>>107794937-- hell the sector size might vary by platform as well, i'm not sure about that. i got into computers only after the ibm pc clone was the dominant platform, so i know very little about the others in practical terms
Diskettes looked cool. Minidiscs looked insanely cool. CDs looked absolutely beautiful. I fucking miss those days when practical items also had a sense of wonder and beauty to them.
>>107794710The actual total 3.5" disk capacity would be near enough the stated total, but some of the bits were booked for metadata, and a lot were reserved for gaps between sectors. It adds up, and in the end you get with 1.44 MB of actual useable dataThe gaps are there to account for differences in drive speed, disk controller overhead (since the disk is always spinning)/etc. when writing individual sectors. You can make them smaller (giving you more actual data), but eventually they become too short for indivdual sectors to be reliably overwritten without corrupting adjacent onesThat's fine if the disk is only ever written a track at a time though, which is what the Amiga did I believeOr in the DOS case, it's OK if the disk is read-only (like MS DMF disks)
Are the gaps/sectors etc actually physically on those disks or are those disks homogeneously full of evenly spread magnetic particles?
>>107795149The magnetic material is physically homogenous.You can format the same disk in many ways.
>>107795719Neat
floppies are one thing I didn't missthank god my amiga had a hard drive
>>107795149There were some hard sectored 5.25" and 8" floppies, altough the material is the same. Only difference being more holes rather than the standard 1 index.
>>107795149evenly spreadhttps://youtu.be/TBiFGhnXsh8
>>107794763They are flexible, the enclosure isn't.
>>107794630>>107794741Floppies were the best, all other storage media doesn't have the same sex appeal. Perfect size, proportions, stiffness. Satisfying sliding metal cover that you could fidget with. Built-in hardware slider for convenient accidental write protection.
>>107795856kek
>>107795934this
>>107794630Why did LS120 Superdisk and Zip Disk fail as the next generation of floppies? CD's evolved into DVD's and then into Blu Ray's. But the next evolutions of floppy disks both died in the very early 2000s. Even though in 2001 a single 120mb USB Drive cost over 70 bucks. While a Zip Disk drive cost less than 100 bucks and a single 100mb Zip Disk was $10.
>>107798929AHAHAHAH UNC WHY DID YOU 3D PRINT SAVE ICON
>>107798929CDs were cheap enough by then that rewritability wasn't that big of an upsideCD-RW and MD (tbqh this was probably more down to Sony being retarded) failed for the same reason, not worth buying into a new hardware ecosystem even if it is technically superior when you could just burn an extra disk instead
>>107798929I remember my dad using these in the late 90s to early 2000s to backup his work finance stuff before rewritable cds got cheap enough. I think it used a serial connector? Cool tech eitherway
>>107799011CD-RW were great for data transfer on the sneakernet.
>>107798929I had a friend with a Jaz or Cliq or something drive, it was like a GIGABYTE on some little cartridge.
>>107798929few people had a drivewhy buy a drive if i can't bring the disks somewhere? sure i could bring the drive, but then it may as well just be an external hard drive
>>107794710>>107794795>>107795127There were 2.88MB drives.
is there any modern physical media that's as nice? I've always wanted blu-ray discs in clear cartridges desu
>>107794874DON'T COPY THAT FLOPPY
>>107794630 Not anywhere near as handsome as the fd drive in my mavica.
>>107794741I remember my Commodore 64 making funny sounds if you overwrote a floppy too many times. This was done by defeating the disk protection by putting a piece of scotch tape on the side of the little indent.
>>107798929There was a year or two where zipdrives were nominally priced, before that they were just way too expensive. But CD-R technology evolved soon after and people started burning discs for cheap
>>107794630Guys, I have floppy drives in every PC tower I own and 4x USB floppy drives for my laptops.I may have a problem.
>>107803381how come pc's never got 2x speed floppy drives like the mavicas?
>>107803483the big advantage with cd-r is that everyone at least had a reader, so you could burn a disc and actually use it elsewhere, which is half the point of removable/portable media, that and you probably wanted a cd burner anyway for other purposes, like burning music cd's, or a cheap way to give someone something, like you can burn a bunch of photos and just give it to someone on a 50c disc vs. a surely-more-expensive zip disk which you probably wanted back
>>107803483>>107803571-- if they were cheap in the early/mid '90s and more than just a few oems shipped computers with them, they would have been much more popular i think. floppies stuck around for way longer than they should have purely because they were the only option for writable media you can be certain that any other computer had a drive for. it's also why usb drives took off so easily, computers quickly all had usb ports, so anything could take them
>>107803559Too late in the game I guess. There were faster alternatives with much greater capacity. FD's would soon become merely a utility for bootstrapping.
>>107798929I went straight to CD-Rs in 1998 from floppy disks. I remember backing up all my gamerips on floppy disks in 1997. You have no idea how satisfying it was to start putting all those 1.4mb files on to CD-R in bulk.
>>107794630I need to build a pc with a dvd and a floppy drive while they're still available to buy. Cases with 3.5 and 5.25 slots are slowly dissappearing as well.
>>107803705it's crazy how big cd's used to be. the early '90s computer i had in my room in the late '90s had a 450MB hdd, smaller than a cd. just having enough space to construct an image to burn to a cd could be a challenge early on. sometimes if i was copying a disc and i was feeling lucky, i would copy it directly from one disc to the other without making an image, which was a bit riskyalso: you now remember the anxiety you felt staring at the buffer bar
>>107803771Hardcore
>>107803771Kek, I have like a pile of brand new and perfectly sealed nero cd's that'd come bundled with my cd/dvd wr drives. Never liked it. Pure bloat. ImgBurn mogs that shit.
>bust open a box of fujifilm>the colors duke, the colors>actually, they fucking suckthe best 3.5 floppies were those ones that were like, a shade lighter white than the usual beige with the black copy protection sliders, and the labels had cool lines on em and shitdamn, i used to love floppy disks and labels
>>107804083i was more of an Alcohol 120% guy myself. i had a couple bundled nero cds as well though i don't still have them
>>107804095i'm sure it's not just me, but i never used labels, not because i didn't want to, but because they were single use and i was afraid to waste them. which is funny in hindsight because it ended up being even more wasteful to not use them at all
>>107804160pencils exist
>>107804167now you tell me
>>107795856>makes floppy disk from scratch>barely passes greaseweasel flux dumps>it's about the journey etc.i want my 22 minutes back.
UNLIMITED POWER
>>107804170it at the very least should demonstrate that even such seemingly-primitive technology is really pretty precise if you consider making one at home.also you have to admit that an aluminium floppy shell is pretty sick
>>107803771>cd could be a challenge early on.it was painful. i first used them in the mid 1990s. i think it was 2x.. with verify it was like 1x. painfully slow. couldn't touch the computer at all otherwise you'd cause a buffer underrun. much praying that disc doesn't fail during write/verify process otherwise you then have to waste more hours of your life burning discs. cd burners in their early days were excruciating
>>107800614That 2.88 decal looks like some warrior tattoo on those otherwise normal looking drives lol
>>107804184>it at the very least should demonstrate that even such seemingly-primitive technology is really pretty precise if you consider making one at home.it's a good education lesson for those not born when this stuff was around>you have to admit that an aluminium floppy shell is pretty sickinjection molded plastic with proper texturing, complete with custom aluminium dust shield and spring or gtfo
>>107804245>couldn't touch the computer at all otherwise you'd cause a buffer underrun.that's not how a buffer underrun works
>>107804245i can't imagine using one that early, i just saw the very end of those days. i got a burner in the early '00s (i don't remember specifically when, but i know i got a dvd burner in 2004, so it was earlier than that), but as a tween at the time i had all older hardware, stuff from the early-mid '90s mostly, all second stuff, anything i could find for cheap.crazier still is that while cd authoring was a challenge (as a consumer) in the mid '90s, cd as a format dates back to 1982. it's almost implausible that they managed to make such a format in the first place.
shhhhhhhhhckklllckclkclkclkbrrrrrrrtbrrrrrrrtbr br br brbrrrrrrrt
>>107804245>couldn't touch the computer at all otherwise you'd cause a buffer underrunyep, with single core cpus and very little device buffer memory to work with, you not only kept your hands away, you made sure nothing else was running, because if your computer got "distracted" for more than a few seconds, whoops, there goes 30 minutes and you have yet another plastic coaster :)
>>107804245>>107804305as a p.s. for others not sure what we're talking about. cd's and other optical media store data in a single, uninterrupted spiral, /unlike/ a hdd or floppy where they have many concentric rings split into sectors. burning a cd was a continuous, constant-speed operation, and could not be resumed if interrupted, once you hit start things need to run perfectly else the disc is just wasted
>WHALECUMMMMMMhttps://files.catbox.moe/2vi88g.mp4
>>107804277>it's almost implausible that they managed to make such a format in the first placedigital tape recorders appeared and made life easy from the start. sony's pcm series launched in the late 1970s was capable of 2 channel 14bit and 44khz or so stored on a beta or umatic tape. the recording tech was well advanced by 1980. reducing thousands of dollars of electronics into a consumer product just wasn't doable any earlier.
>>107804277Are you me?I got my first cd burner in 2002, dvd like you a couple years later and also only had second hand stuff. My first computer was from 1984 I got for free in 99 lol. All others were playing 3D shit from CDs while my HDD was 20 megabytes and used 5.25" floppies too. Back then people threw everything out on the curb on garbage day and I've learned a TON about computers putting old 286 to Pentium I machines together while my classmates were all drooling ignorants who at first made fun of me for that hobby and old "junk" but then kept coming to me for advice because they just kept consuming but had literally no idea how anything computer works.
>>107804245My first burner was a HP CD Writer Plus 7500. Burned everything at 1x/2x took about 45 minutes. Nice that it was portable but I think it cost me close to $600 at the time in 1998. I wish I would've kept it.
>>107800614>2.88MBYes, but as was already mentioned, they didn't use the same 2MB disks, but rather the disks they used were actually 4MB theoretical capacity, so even more of it was left unused.
How many of you still have new old stock floppies ready to use? I have over 150 of them myself. Found a Maxell 100 pack unopened in a thrift shop about 7 years ago for $7 or $8 if I remember correctly.
>>107804540Are they good though? NOS floppies aren't as relia le as one could think, depending on the conditions they were stored in, they can even grow mold on the inside.
>>107804486> I wish I would've kept it.It'd probably be dead or half-dead by now anyway. Lasers burn out, the plastic mechanical parts grind themselves to death. Not worth it, they didn't have as much SOVL as floppies do.
>>107804540I have some normal and a couple really colorful ones I sometimes look at for comfy feels but at least currently not in active use.
>>107804648>Lasers burn outYou'd have to use them A TON to achieve this though.
>>107804486i really don't miss that part. and it's easy to forget too as we were blessed later with cd burners that wrote at much faster speeds and had large caches.
>>107804534>but rather the disks they used were actually 4MB theoretical capacityEven 1.44MB could be more theoretically, doesn't mean you get a very reliable disk. Also depends on the heads of the drive, you can create some custom formats too to fit more, reliability goes down though and you're limited by the size of the head.
>>107804666Plenty of old PlayStation 1/2 have that problem though.
>>107804721
>>107804623I tried 10 random ones from the pack and they worked fine.
incredibly comfy thread. hope you guys will keep it up for a while longer
>>107804403>Are you me?must be>My first computer was from 1984 I got for free in 99 lol.reminds me how i just the other day rediscovered by complete accident some completely unnoteworthy software which is probably my earliest computer-related memory, it was a christmas-themed program (animation + printable gift card editor) made in the late 80's, which came with a second hand computer probably also from the late '80s (i couldn't tell you what the specs were, it may have been the first computer i ever took apart). i remember it was running when i was called to dinner, and was dead when i got back. the only date reference i have for this was that it was before me and my sister switched rooms, for which the only memory reference i have for that is that i had a Small Soldiers poster on the door of the room i switched to, so it had to have been before 1998, so i was probably 7 at the latest.i remember scouring garage sales and flea markets for anything better than what i had, specifically looking for a windows 95 computer (and/or pentium/pci). my mum liked going to them and i enjoyed tagging along. good memoriesi learned a lot about such computers despite them being quite outdated when i got to try them, like how SIMM memory needed to be in pairs, how to configure pre-PnP cards, using and configuring MS-DOS, etc.
>>107804731manufacturing defects by one corporation doesn't mean they're all facing doom. it's not the same situation like laser disc where a majority of the lasers turn into shit because it's stone age technology. sony went cheap. that's it.
>>107804749What's the difference between abort and fail?
>>107804731those were made to a very low cost. i know that the original psx cd mech was made entirely plastic, which was so bad that they had to make it stronger in later revisions. you know it's bad when later revisions of a product are better than earlier ones.
Have you gotten this Floppy to USB adapter for your PC? I have and my 25 year old Flopyp Drive is working once again.
>>107804787Forgot the pic
>>107804759Exactly. It was an incredibly awesome time when you could make giant leaps in your hobby with almost now money spent. Free shit on the curbs, really cheap parts posted in the local papers, flea markets, garage sales. Nowadays everyone is the "I KNOW WHAT I GOT" type who'd rather dump shit in the trash than selling it for pocket money.
>>107804770i can't remember exactly. i forget all the quirks of msdos.
>>107804770one aborts the other fails
>>107804770https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abort,_Retry,_Fail%3F
>>107804540I own 2 sealed, never opened 10-floppy boxes (3.5" 1.44MB), from Sony and TDK. None of them are the traditional black shell, in the TDK box each floppy is a different color, and the Sony are all blue.I purchased these boxes nearly 25 years ago, back when CD-Rs were already becoming commonplace, USB drives already existed but were pretty new, and floppies were still being used. I thought I would need and use them eventually, but never did.
>>107804794Also, they changed trash laws around here like 20 or so years ago so e-waste needs to get brought to e-waste places and it doesn't go to the curb anymore. Officially this law is for eco reasons but I think it was rather kicked off by the absolutely INSANE amount of garbage collectors from Romania and Poland who came over with their falling apart sprinters, picking apart trash a day before garbage day. They drove up and down all roads all day and sometimes picked stuff right out of the hands of people.
>>107804787>>107804789>not Kryoflux NGMI
>>107804794well these days everyone uses basically one website where the thing they're selling has almost certainly been sold there before, so they can "see what it's worth". not like back then were you just put something in your local newspaper classifieds for what you think it's worth and call it a day, or if you have enough junk, run a garage sale and put $5 on anything you aren't familiar with
>>107804787>>107804789I'd rather keep the internal floppy drives in a case hooked up to the motherboard. External USB floppy drives are good enough without having to use something like this. But if it works for you, then that's good.
>>107804857sorry anon, greaseweasel is where it's at now
>>107804858>one website where the thing they're selling has almost certainly been sold there before, so they can "see what it's worth".The worst thing about this is that most normgroids do not even care enough to look up what shit actually sold for. They just open Ebay, see a couple absolutely INSANE prices that will never actually work and go "ah yes, so that's what it's worth..." and put it on for 100 bucks more. When you tell them that those prices are literally not real and no one will buy the shit for that money they even get pissy at you lmao
>>107804794Back then hardware progressed fast, a computer was out of date in a few years, like extremely. Nowadays you can get a computer that can do YouTube and shitposting, even light gaming, i.e. a used laptop for 50 bucks. Even though it's 10 years old. >>107804850Here it has caused even more shit to be given away, people don't want to pay ewaste centers to take their old shit, plus hauling it there costs and is bothersome too. Hence you can find even high end CRTs from boomers on pension who don't care about the few hundred bucks they could make selling it to some Redditor on r/retro and instead list it for free for pickup, so they get rid of it easily and quickly.
>>107804867I mean I do keep it internally in the case. I just connect the floppy drive to one of these USB 2.0 header to usb A cables internally.
>>107804901>Back then hardware progressed fast, a computer was out of date in a few years, like extremely.it's insane and i'm still debating where it's a good or bad thing thing i was around to experience ita 10 year gap then was the difference between running commander keen and unreal tournament. a 10 year gap now is the difference between running on low or high. "we are not the same", as the kids would say
>>107804945Yep. In 1994 to build a 386 system with 2mb of ram and a floppy drive would have cost you $566 (this was basically the cheapest PC you could have built yourself). By 1999 a Cyrix MII 333, 32mb ram and CD drive system would have cost you.... $247. (Also basically the cheapest system you could have built)The jump from the 386 to the Cyrix is huge. And the Cyrix system cost less than half of the 386 system. Nowadays a 5 year old PC can still run everything.
>>107804749Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over user guides and handbooks piled up on the desk and floor --As I nodded, after nine or ten straight hours of design,I finely drew the final line, then pulled a floppy out to store --Locked and loaded, then, I saved, and waited for the disc to store;Only this and nothing more.Ah, distinctly I kept hearing such a sound it set me fearing,Fearing as I sat there peering at the Saved Percentage score,Fearing, as the disc kept turning, turning with a grinding, churningSound while I was yearning -- yearning as I'd never yearned before,"Save!" I yearned again, but hopeless, read the words I'd feared before:Read: "Abort, Retry, Ignore."
>>107805000We went from 66MHz Pentium 1 in 1993 to 1GHz Pentium 3 in 1999. Even leaving out all the bolted on SIMD instructions, faster RAM, caches and buses, the performance increase from pure clock rate alone is over a dozen times.
>>107805019classic
>>107805019Too cringe, didn't read.
>>107804929Ah ok, I thought you were doing it for external use. That's cool too.
>>107805047>doesn't recognize classics
>>107805037Myself>1997>486 25mhz, 8mb ram, 250mb HDD, VGA graphics>Pentium 166, 32MB ram, 2gb HDD, ATI 2MB, Voodoo 1 6MB>1998Pentium 2 266, 64mb ram, 10gb HDD, ATI 8mb>1999Celeron 466, 128mb ram, 30gb HDD, Voodoo 3 16mbIt was wild in the late 90s
>>107805000it's good in the sense that upgrades were truly amazing, like you could do thing many times faster and even do new things you simply couldn't do before at allon the other hand, out family computer went from running games great in 1999 to not running faster than a sideshow by 2003. it was equally exciting and frustrating
>>107804867But the reason you have to use this way to keep it inside a case is simply because modern MB's don't have a floppy connector. And there aren't PCIE cards to add a floppy connector (there are cards that add IDE but no floppy).So unless you got a LS120 Superdisk drive you have to use one of these USB adapters to connect a floppy drive to a modern computer.
>>107805138The 266 is burned into my head for some reason.Maybe it's because it was one of the last times when you regularly saw MHz numbers in big LED displays on huge ass impressive tower cases.
>>107805303I think my Pentium 166 had that display on the case. My P2 266 was in a low profile case with none of that.
>>107805427the newest system i recall with an led cpu clock speed display was a pentium mmx 233 machine
>>107805702Last one for me was a PIII 550Mhz.
>>107805748don't think i've seen a PIII 550, i''ve seen a 500, 667, 800, 933, and 1000, and hearing about the 1400, but not 550. and certainly never seen a machine with something newer than a P1 with an lcd clock speed display
>>107805839led*
>>107805839Wel there you go. You learn something new every day.
I still think a computer doesn't look like a real computer without a disk drive. That autism goes so far I still have a disk drive in mine since it's an old case even when the innards are from 2020 and the drive isn't even connected.
>>107806421Based
>>107800614unicorns
>>107794710there were 768k floppy too?
>>107807463If I remember correctly those didn't have as expensive materials used as the higher density ones so kinda made sense. Higher density material was more expensive to produce at least in the early days.
why did minidisc not catch on?
>>107808073Sony being completely up their own ass with DRMcheap, broadly available drives with arbitrary read/write would have saved the format, but instead you needed to fuck around with proprietary shitware to record purposely gimped audio files with no way to use them as generic data storage.MD was basically a write-only format, the MZ-RH1 was the only device that supported ripping discs
>>107808200>Sony being completely up their own ass with DRMinfuriating.
One of the sexiest slots out there
>>107809229sex
