9 ms·

Using 8-inch diskette drives with a PC

53 points by Cocktail 6y ago

paulsutter 6y ago
Embarrassed to be old enough to remember: 8" floppies were actually called disks, and the smaller 5.25" floppy drives were called diskettes because they were so compact
- louwrentius 6y ago
  In Dutch, we always talked about 'diskettes', when talking about the rigid 3.5" disks. The large 5.25" were called floppies. Diskettes were called floppies too sometimes, but never the other way around. I'm from the time frame in which I never saw 8 inch floppies. The 5.25" were on the way out, many PCs had both 1.44 and 1.2 MB drives for a while. /rambling
  - unixhero 6y ago
    It was/is the same rule in English also. Cheers.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    8" were very floppy. ;-) We, in Silicon Valley, used "floppies" to mean "5.25 or 3.5 inch disks." (Confusing, yes?) And, we used "disks" to mean "any type of storage media, fixed or removable." Also, "diskettes" meant "the formal name of 3.5 inch floppies." I think this is the same nomenclature.
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      Yes, I think it's mostly the same with more emphasis in NL on the 'diskettes' but that's about it.
  - p_l 6y ago
    At least in Poland, the PC culture seems to have ended up calling both 5.25" and 3.5" "dyskietka" (lit. "diskette"). "Disk" tended to be encountered in "official" names used by OS software (so, "disk A:" etc.) but at least I never encountered "disk" to refer to anything other than hard drive since ~1992 or so.
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      Exactly the same for The Netherlands. A diskette/floppy was never a disk. Only hard drives were called disks.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  I'm also old enough, and we called both 8 and 5.25 disks, disks. Diskettes came around later, and that nomenclature was far from universal.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    My elementary school had 5.25" disks, but 8" was before my time (and really, 5.25" almost is). 3.5" disks were called "disks", but occasionally something would refer to them as diskettes. Diskette was not a normal word for any context.
- lsllc 6y ago
  Nothing to be embarrassed about -- it was the golden age of computing! Lucky to have been able to experience it!
- tartoran 6y ago
  Haha, good one. I never used 8” disks but I do remember the diskette term going along with floppy disks late 80s/early 90s when I got my first PC. I never put one and one together
- bitwize 6y ago
  No. ALL floppies were called "diskettes" because they were tiny compared to hard disks, which were the usual sort of "disk" up until IBM devised the floppy format for loading boot code into their mainframes. Sauce: My dad had a Tandy Model 16 with 8" drives (of the Shugart Thinline variety, one of which is pictured in the article!). Tandy sold blank 8" media that were labeled as diskettes. In addition, when the computer booted, if it could not detect a boot disk it would turn the screen white (green) with the words "INSERT DISKETTE" in the middle. In addition, IBM referred to the 8" floppy format as the "Type 1 Diskette", which nomenclature dates from 1973.
anonymousiam 6y ago
I had four 8" drives. Two (DSDD) were connected to my IMSAI (modified with CompuPro S-100 boards). The other two (SSDD) were connected to my Ferguson Big Board. I never tried using the 8" drives on systems that would normally interface to 5-1/4" drives, but I always assumed it would be a simple matter of adapting the 50-pin edge connector used for the 8" drives to the 34-pin edge connecter used for the 5-1/4" drives. At one time I had a calibration disk and an "exerciser board" for 8" drives that could be used (along with an oscilloscope) to adjust the track positions and gain settings on the drive. I gave away all of those old goodies after I purchased at 25MHz 386 PC clone that could emulate CP/M faster than the native Z-80 hardware. It was fun tinkering with computer hardware in that era, but it was also frustrating because of the limitations of the technology. It's hard to believe that processors of today run three orders of magnitude faster, and have six+ orders of magnitude more RAM, with six orders of magnitude more disk storage with about five orders of magnitude faster disk I/O. I don't miss the old days so much.
zabzonk 6y ago
I seriously got into computing in 1979, working for the Microbiology Department at Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, using Research Machines 380Zs, equipped with both 8 and 5.25 inch floppy drives. Here are a few of my observations on the beasts: - They required quite a lot of strength to open and particularly to close - some of our students were scared they were going to break them (and the cost a lot back then) because of the force needed. - One student did the classic "remove disk from envelope" thing where they took the actual mylar disc out of the floppy container. He may have been taking the piss, but if so he lost out, as we made students pay for the disks. - Somewhat unrelated - when I was working in the Netherlands in the 90s, I noticed that supermarkets in Utrecht, a big university town, had floppy disk dispensers in supermarkets - students put in a guilder or whatever, and got a 3.5 inch floppy they could submit their coursework on. - They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which I mostly was. - They were horribly unreliable - we used to have to keep sending ours back to RML in Oxford to get them recalibrated or replaced every few months. Still, all in all they were a million times better than my own personal computer at the time - a Dragon32 with a cassette deck for storage!
- jerrysievert 6y ago
  > They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which I mostly was. heck, even my 5.25" c64 drive was so noisy from knocking its head that I kept the cover unscrewed to realign it on a regular basis. especially after trying to use "copy protected" disks that causes even more knocking. I was also confused when 3.5" floppies came out and were stiff, and people started talking more about "hard disks".
  - zabzonk 6y ago
    My Dad had a floppy on his C64 and it was terribly unreliable, but (once again) less unreliable than the cassette deck that I was stuck with. He loved gadgets, but really only used it to play "Hunchback" and similar games. I often thought "Shall I hit him over the head with a hammer and steal it, so I can create some truly brilliant software?", but I never did.
the_only_law 6y ago
A few years ago I was looking at purchasing an IBM DisplayWriter from someone. I had a handful of devices with 5.25” drives but have never an 8” drive in person until then. Unfortunately the machine was not in a working state. There was some suspicion that it was a simple issue, but I’m not an EE and I try to make sure my retro equipment works prior to buying it. Since the system wouldn’t boot, I was unsure whether the drives were even working. I ended up not buying it in part because of this and in part because I was moving soon, but I kinda regret not doing so, seeing how rare full DsiplayWriter systems are and how much a complete system will sell for (a lot more than I was going to pay for it). At the time I had done a small amount of research on using the disk drives with a PC. I was mostly inconclusive with me finding maybe one person selling boards to adapt 8” drives. So it’s cool to see something like this now.
- zabzonk 6y ago
  Not many people seem to know that there was a software version of DisplayWriter on the original IBM PC. I know this because IBM were desperate to get into the education market in the UK in the early 1980s and I was at the time working at Middlesex Polytechnic (in the UK, university now) and they gave us a PC and the software - and it was laughably crap. I was a WordStar user at the time, and I couldn't believe how inept DisplayWriter it was - and I was a big fan of VM/CMS they sold us and the 4381 super-minis that it ran on. DisplayWriter was deeply, deeply pants.
yardshop 6y ago
At my first full-time computer programming job in 1987, we had two NEC-APC computers[1], huge all-in-one units that housed a 10 or so inch screen and 2 8" floppy drives! One of them had a color screen and was connected to an equally enormous 10MB hard drive! My boss used that one. I got the monochrome green one. We had numerous plastic roll-top boxes of disks for various different programs, all written in dBase II: Clients, Employees, Billing and Payroll. As I was coming on they were just being upgraded to dBase III+. After a couple years I talked them into getting PC clones, but the consultants overruled and convinced the agency to get us an IBM AT with a 60GB^H^HMB hard drive, 2 floppy-only XTs, and a Token Ring Network! The server software used so much space on the AT that you could barely run anything else on it. Then we had the issue of transferring all of the data from 8" disks over to the IBMs. The consultants wanted thousands of dollars to put each disk into a "toaster" (they called it) that would transfer things to 5.25 disks. I knew it could be done much cheaper, so after a trip to the library to look up serial cable diagrams, a stop at Radio Shack to get some connectors, and a rummage in the office basement to find some old phone cord, I rigged up a transfer cable! The sending program on the NEC was written in their version of BASIC, and the receiving program was written in Turbo Pascal. After several hours at a low baud rate, all of the data was transferred. I got a decent $600 bonus out of it! [1] http://oldcomputers.net/nec-apc.html http://oldcomputers.net/nec-apc.html [edit: MB, not 60GB!]
- jhgb 6y ago
  Clearly the 60GB HDD machine was the superior choice for years to come. ;)
  - 7thaccount 6y ago
    Did they mean 60 MB? Seems like a lot for ~1987
    - yardshop 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure it must have been MB!
analog31 6y ago
I wrote my first computer program on an 8" floppy. I had signed up for a course in BASIC at my high school, in 1981. The school had a computer facility with access to a mainframe operated by the county school district. We had these machines made by IBM, that emulated a keypunch machine, but stored the data on an 8" floppy. They had the same keyboard layout as a keypunch, and a one-line alphanumeric display. The idea was that a skilled keypunch operator could start using floppies with no retraining. You entered your program and handed the disk to the operator, and received your printout later. You could do one or two debug cycles during a class period, maybe three if you came in later during the day, after which the operator's patience wore out and you were told to write your program more carefully. In reality, they were probably doing this work as a favor for the math teacher who was teaching the class. The next semester, the school got some CRT terminals, but there were five terminals for a class of about 15 kids, hand picked by the math teacher. I still remember my user name and password. I wrote a program that generated mazes, and when I thought it was working OK, I set it to print out a maze the size of a sheet of green bar paper. Next day, I got a big scolding for creating an endless loop. But in reality, my program was OK and I learned a lesson about complexity -- my program probably had some insanely high order like O(n^3) or even worse. I don't know of anybody remembers or noticed, but I remember taking some of my first plane flights, and the person behind the ticket desk was typing very quickly on their terminal, but with just their index fingers. That's keypunch technique.
bcaa7f3a8bbc 6y ago
Fan fact: Shugart is today's Seagate, the name was changed because the founder, Alan Shugart Shugart, had two companies, one for HDDs (Shugart Technology) and another for FDDs (Shugart Associates), both named after him. Later the FDD company was sold to Xerox but kept the name, so the HDD company had to change its name to Seagate. The rename was quite clever, it still rhymes with the original word.
ck2 6y ago
Ha memories. Used to bike down to the local Radio Shack every weekend and fiddle around with their Model II display for hours. How far we've come in my lifetime.
EarlKing 6y ago
The first computer I ever used was a Heathkit H89 microcomputer kit running CP/M. Somehow my old man got ahold of an 8" floppy drive from somewhere. I don't recall that it ever saw much use, though. 5 1/4" floppies were simply so much more convenient. Those were also the days when we still used acoustic couplers with our Hayes Micromodem 100's because god forbid we should ever attach anything directly to Ma Bell's precious phone lines. ALL HAIL THE PHONE COMPANY! BLESSED ARE THE DIAL TONE MAKERS!
mrlonglong 6y ago
I broke my 5.25" floppy disk drive attached to my Pentium 166MHz by putting in a rusty floppy disk. I didn't know enough about these drives to fix it. A real shame, as the 3.5" drive still works.

53 points by Cocktail 6y ago

Embarrassed to be old enough to remember: 8" floppies were actually called disks, and the smaller 5.25" floppy drives were called diskettes because they were so compact

louwrentius 6y ago
In Dutch, we always talked about 'diskettes', when talking about the rigid 3.5" disks. The large 5.25" were called floppies. Diskettes were called floppies too sometimes, but never the other way around. I'm from the time frame in which I never saw 8 inch floppies. The 5.25" were on the way out, many PCs had both 1.44 and 1.2 MB drives for a while. /rambling
- unixhero 6y ago
  It was/is the same rule in English also. Cheers.
- airhead969 6y ago
  8" were very floppy. ;-) We, in Silicon Valley, used "floppies" to mean "5.25 or 3.5 inch disks." (Confusing, yes?) And, we used "disks" to mean "any type of storage media, fixed or removable." Also, "diskettes" meant "the formal name of 3.5 inch floppies." I think this is the same nomenclature.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    Yes, I think it's mostly the same with more emphasis in NL on the 'diskettes' but that's about it.
- p_l 6y ago
  At least in Poland, the PC culture seems to have ended up calling both 5.25" and 3.5" "dyskietka" (lit. "diskette"). "Disk" tended to be encountered in "official" names used by OS software (so, "disk A:" etc.) but at least I never encountered "disk" to refer to anything other than hard drive since ~1992 or so.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    Exactly the same for The Netherlands. A diskette/floppy was never a disk. Only hard drives were called disks.
zabzonk 6y ago
I'm also old enough, and we called both 8 and 5.25 disks, disks. Diskettes came around later, and that nomenclature was far from universal.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  My elementary school had 5.25" disks, but 8" was before my time (and really, 5.25" almost is). 3.5" disks were called "disks", but occasionally something would refer to them as diskettes. Diskette was not a normal word for any context.
lsllc 6y ago
Nothing to be embarrassed about -- it was the golden age of computing! Lucky to have been able to experience it!
tartoran 6y ago
Haha, good one. I never used 8” disks but I do remember the diskette term going along with floppy disks late 80s/early 90s when I got my first PC. I never put one and one together
bitwize 6y ago
No. ALL floppies were called "diskettes" because they were tiny compared to hard disks, which were the usual sort of "disk" up until IBM devised the floppy format for loading boot code into their mainframes. Sauce: My dad had a Tandy Model 16 with 8" drives (of the Shugart Thinline variety, one of which is pictured in the article!). Tandy sold blank 8" media that were labeled as diskettes. In addition, when the computer booted, if it could not detect a boot disk it would turn the screen white (green) with the words "INSERT DISKETTE" in the middle. In addition, IBM referred to the 8" floppy format as the "Type 1 Diskette", which nomenclature dates from 1973.

anonymousiam 6y ago

I had four 8" drives. Two (DSDD) were connected to my IMSAI (modified with CompuPro S-100 boards). The other two (SSDD) were connected to my Ferguson Big Board. I never tried using the 8" drives on systems that would normally interface to 5-1/4" drives, but I always assumed it would be a simple matter of adapting the 50-pin edge connector used for the 8" drives to the 34-pin edge connecter used for the 5-1/4" drives. At one time I had a calibration disk and an "exerciser board" for 8" drives that could be used (along with an oscilloscope) to adjust the track positions and gain settings on the drive. I gave away all of those old goodies after I purchased at 25MHz 386 PC clone that could emulate CP/M faster than the native Z-80 hardware. It was fun tinkering with computer hardware in that era, but it was also frustrating because of the limitations of the technology. It's hard to believe that processors of today run three orders of magnitude faster, and have six+ orders of magnitude more RAM, with six orders of magnitude more disk storage with about five orders of magnitude faster disk I/O. I don't miss the old days so much.

zabzonk 6y ago

I seriously got into computing in 1979, working for the Microbiology Department at Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, using Research Machines 380Zs, equipped with both 8 and 5.25 inch floppy drives. Here are a few of my observations on the beasts: - They required quite a lot of strength to open and particularly to close - some of our students were scared they were going to break them (and the cost a lot back then) because of the force needed. - One student did the classic "remove disk from envelope" thing where they took the actual mylar disc out of the floppy container. He may have been taking the piss, but if so he lost out, as we made students pay for the disks. - Somewhat unrelated - when I was working in the Netherlands in the 90s, I noticed that supermarkets in Utrecht, a big university town, had floppy disk dispensers in supermarkets - students put in a guilder or whatever, and got a 3.5 inch floppy they could submit their coursework on. - They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which I mostly was. - They were horribly unreliable - we used to have to keep sending ours back to RML in Oxford to get them recalibrated or replaced every few months. Still, all in all they were a million times better than my own personal computer at the time - a Dragon32 with a cassette deck for storage!

jerrysievert 6y ago
> They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which I mostly was. heck, even my 5.25" c64 drive was so noisy from knocking its head that I kept the cover unscrewed to realign it on a regular basis. especially after trying to use "copy protected" disks that causes even more knocking. I was also confused when 3.5" floppies came out and were stiff, and people started talking more about "hard disks".
- zabzonk 6y ago
  My Dad had a floppy on his C64 and it was terribly unreliable, but (once again) less unreliable than the cassette deck that I was stuck with. He loved gadgets, but really only used it to play "Hunchback" and similar games. I often thought "Shall I hit him over the head with a hammer and steal it, so I can create some truly brilliant software?", but I never did.

the_only_law 6y ago

A few years ago I was looking at purchasing an IBM DisplayWriter from someone. I had a handful of devices with 5.25” drives but have never an 8” drive in person until then. Unfortunately the machine was not in a working state. There was some suspicion that it was a simple issue, but I’m not an EE and I try to make sure my retro equipment works prior to buying it. Since the system wouldn’t boot, I was unsure whether the drives were even working. I ended up not buying it in part because of this and in part because I was moving soon, but I kinda regret not doing so, seeing how rare full DsiplayWriter systems are and how much a complete system will sell for (a lot more than I was going to pay for it). At the time I had done a small amount of research on using the disk drives with a PC. I was mostly inconclusive with me finding maybe one person selling boards to adapt 8” drives. So it’s cool to see something like this now.

zabzonk 6y ago
Not many people seem to know that there was a software version of DisplayWriter on the original IBM PC. I know this because IBM were desperate to get into the education market in the UK in the early 1980s and I was at the time working at Middlesex Polytechnic (in the UK, university now) and they gave us a PC and the software - and it was laughably crap. I was a WordStar user at the time, and I couldn't believe how inept DisplayWriter it was - and I was a big fan of VM/CMS they sold us and the 4381 super-minis that it ran on. DisplayWriter was deeply, deeply pants.

yardshop 6y ago

At my first full-time computer programming job in 1987, we had two NEC-APC computers[1], huge all-in-one units that housed a 10 or so inch screen and 2 8" floppy drives! One of them had a color screen and was connected to an equally enormous 10MB hard drive! My boss used that one. I got the monochrome green one. We had numerous plastic roll-top boxes of disks for various different programs, all written in dBase II: Clients, Employees, Billing and Payroll. As I was coming on they were just being upgraded to dBase III+. After a couple years I talked them into getting PC clones, but the consultants overruled and convinced the agency to get us an IBM AT with a 60GB^H^HMB hard drive, 2 floppy-only XTs, and a Token Ring Network! The server software used so much space on the AT that you could barely run anything else on it. Then we had the issue of transferring all of the data from 8" disks over to the IBMs. The consultants wanted thousands of dollars to put each disk into a "toaster" (they called it) that would transfer things to 5.25 disks. I knew it could be done much cheaper, so after a trip to the library to look up serial cable diagrams, a stop at Radio Shack to get some connectors, and a rummage in the office basement to find some old phone cord, I rigged up a transfer cable! The sending program on the NEC was written in their version of BASIC, and the receiving program was written in Turbo Pascal. After several hours at a low baud rate, all of the data was transferred. I got a decent $600 bonus out of it! [1] http://oldcomputers.net/nec-apc.html http://oldcomputers.net/nec-apc.html [edit: MB, not 60GB!]

jhgb 6y ago
Clearly the 60GB HDD machine was the superior choice for years to come. ;)
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  Did they mean 60 MB? Seems like a lot for ~1987
  - yardshop 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure it must have been MB!

analog31 6y ago

I wrote my first computer program on an 8" floppy. I had signed up for a course in BASIC at my high school, in 1981. The school had a computer facility with access to a mainframe operated by the county school district. We had these machines made by IBM, that emulated a keypunch machine, but stored the data on an 8" floppy. They had the same keyboard layout as a keypunch, and a one-line alphanumeric display. The idea was that a skilled keypunch operator could start using floppies with no retraining. You entered your program and handed the disk to the operator, and received your printout later. You could do one or two debug cycles during a class period, maybe three if you came in later during the day, after which the operator's patience wore out and you were told to write your program more carefully. In reality, they were probably doing this work as a favor for the math teacher who was teaching the class. The next semester, the school got some CRT terminals, but there were five terminals for a class of about 15 kids, hand picked by the math teacher. I still remember my user name and password. I wrote a program that generated mazes, and when I thought it was working OK, I set it to print out a maze the size of a sheet of green bar paper. Next day, I got a big scolding for creating an endless loop. But in reality, my program was OK and I learned a lesson about complexity -- my program probably had some insanely high order like O(n^3) or even worse. I don't know of anybody remembers or noticed, but I remember taking some of my first plane flights, and the person behind the ticket desk was typing very quickly on their terminal, but with just their index fingers. That's keypunch technique.

bcaa7f3a8bbc 6y ago

Fan fact: Shugart is today's Seagate, the name was changed because the founder, Alan Shugart Shugart, had two companies, one for HDDs (Shugart Technology) and another for FDDs (Shugart Associates), both named after him. Later the FDD company was sold to Xerox but kept the name, so the HDD company had to change its name to Seagate. The rename was quite clever, it still rhymes with the original word.

ck2 6y ago

Ha memories. Used to bike down to the local Radio Shack every weekend and fiddle around with their Model II display for hours. How far we've come in my lifetime.

EarlKing 6y ago

The first computer I ever used was a Heathkit H89 microcomputer kit running CP/M. Somehow my old man got ahold of an 8" floppy drive from somewhere. I don't recall that it ever saw much use, though. 5 1/4" floppies were simply so much more convenient. Those were also the days when we still used acoustic couplers with our Hayes Micromodem 100's because god forbid we should ever attach anything directly to Ma Bell's precious phone lines. ALL HAIL THE PHONE COMPANY! BLESSED ARE THE DIAL TONE MAKERS!

mrlonglong 6y ago

I broke my 5.25" floppy disk drive attached to my Pentium 166MHz by putting in a rusty floppy disk. I didn't know enough about these drives to fix it. A real shame, as the 3.5" drive still works.