4 ms·

I'm quite surprised by this. My experience with floppies (dos-formatted) was that in a bike ride of 1 hour 1 out of 10 floppies would have corruption. Or maybe

I'm quite surprised by this. My experience with floppies (dos-formatted) was that in a bike ride of 1 hour 1 out of 10 floppies would have corruption. Or maybe the drives i used to copy on them just did not do write verification.

t_tsonev 11y ago
Should've formatted them with ZFS or something j/k :> Confirmed from my experience too. Luckily, archives with recovery records sometimes saved the day.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  You can't zfs, grub would already take all sectors.
  - ekimekim 11y ago
    ZFS is just a filesystem, it's usable on any storage format. It reserves some space for metadata but not much more than most filesystems. You wouldn't need a bootloader like grub unless you're trying to boot from the floppy.
toast0 11y ago
I think that's a function of the quality of the disk drives and the media; both of which went into the toilet when floppies stopped being generally useful. (was windows 98 available on floppies?)
- cgriswald 11y ago
  Windows 98 was available on floppy. I know, because I painfully installed it that way. For me, floppies started failing when I didn't need to use them as often. The drive would get dusty from lack of use, and I'd put a disk in and it would be destroyed. I ended up using one floppy as a "cleaning disk" for the rare occasion when I needed to use the floppy. I'd attempt to do something on the disk and the activity would make it safe for the next disk I put in (generally).
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    I recall doing an Oracle Forms based install back in 94 you had to feed 13 or 14 floppys in the right order then you could install our forms application (another 3 floppys). It to a coworker and my self 2 days to install the pilot site for only 5 users. I remember saying to my boss that about the www that when the it becomes more mature we could save so much time in product roll out.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      In effect bringing back the X terminal era...
      - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
        Only with much less suck :-) at one time our entire team at BT was slated to switch to native X development luckly the MCI fiasco happened and we dodged a bullet
        digi_owl 11y ago
        From a user angle i find it to be a different kind of suck. I have yet to find a web app that can make up its mind about being a app or a site. Maybe the problem is more that they invariably existing inside a chrome-less browser window, but sooner or later some niggle shows up that you can't find on proper native UI.
kalleboo 11y ago
Same here. I quickly switched to FTP once my school got PC's with shared internet access. Anything that could fit on a floppy could reasonably quickly be FTP'ed up to the 30 MB I got from my ISP even on 56k.
arethuza 11y ago
I think something in your setup must have been faulty - I remember cycling to and from work (10 miles each way) with stacks of floppies and never had a problem - that's how I first installed Linux! Maybe your bike was generating a magnetic field?

t_tsonev 11y ago

Should've formatted them with ZFS or something j/k :> Confirmed from my experience too. Luckily, archives with recovery records sometimes saved the day.

agumonkey 11y ago
You can't zfs, grub would already take all sectors.
- ekimekim 11y ago
  ZFS is just a filesystem, it's usable on any storage format. It reserves some space for metadata but not much more than most filesystems. You wouldn't need a bootloader like grub unless you're trying to boot from the floppy.

toast0 11y ago

I think that's a function of the quality of the disk drives and the media; both of which went into the toilet when floppies stopped being generally useful. (was windows 98 available on floppies?)

cgriswald 11y ago
Windows 98 was available on floppy. I know, because I painfully installed it that way. For me, floppies started failing when I didn't need to use them as often. The drive would get dusty from lack of use, and I'd put a disk in and it would be destroyed. I ended up using one floppy as a "cleaning disk" for the rare occasion when I needed to use the floppy. I'd attempt to do something on the disk and the activity would make it safe for the next disk I put in (generally).
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  I recall doing an Oracle Forms based install back in 94 you had to feed 13 or 14 floppys in the right order then you could install our forms application (another 3 floppys). It to a coworker and my self 2 days to install the pilot site for only 5 users. I remember saying to my boss that about the www that when the it becomes more mature we could save so much time in product roll out.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    In effect bringing back the X terminal era...
    - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      Only with much less suck :-) at one time our entire team at BT was slated to switch to native X development luckly the MCI fiasco happened and we dodged a bullet
      - digi_owl 11y ago
        From a user angle i find it to be a different kind of suck. I have yet to find a web app that can make up its mind about being a app or a site. Maybe the problem is more that they invariably existing inside a chrome-less browser window, but sooner or later some niggle shows up that you can't find on proper native UI.

kalleboo 11y ago

Same here. I quickly switched to FTP once my school got PC's with shared internet access. Anything that could fit on a floppy could reasonably quickly be FTP'ed up to the 30 MB I got from my ISP even on 56k.

arethuza 11y ago

I think something in your setup must have been faulty - I remember cycling to and from work (10 miles each way) with stacks of floppies and never had a problem - that's how I first installed Linux! Maybe your bike was generating a magnetic field?