41 ms·
The last person standing in the floppy disk business
- causi 4y agoNothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.
- blamarvt 4y agoAnd nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.
- myth_drannon 4y agoOnce my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.
- bornfreddy 4y agoI didn't know the temperature mattered? Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very bad quality.
- myth_drannon 4y agonah, some just melted. It was on the front seat with no shadow in Israeli +40C degrees heat.
- nine_k 4y agoThe wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies. It became more pronounced in late 1990s when disks became more ubiquitous and the race for the lower price likely made them less reliable. After that the idea of backing things up, no matter where they are recorded initially, feels very natural.
- Tijdreiziger 4y agoThat's still the wisdom. The 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least 3 copies of your data on at least 2 storage media, and keep at least 1 copy offsite.
- vardump 4y ago> The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies. Still true.
- daveslash 4y agoAlong similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups either. That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.
- noizejoy 4y agoI’d slightly amend the analogy into “an untested backup is akin to having a lottery ticket for your backups”. Maybe you win or maybe you don’t. Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.
- flotzam 4y agoddrescue trying to read a scratched DVD from a public library comes close. Horrifying sounds as you contemplate your drive wearing itself down, copy progress ETA 47:32:13
- amatecha 4y agoThe secret for scratched CDs/DVDs I learned way too late in the game was that you can actually polish the clear plastic underside with Brasso (brass polish) and a lens cloth. I restored sooo many optical discs this way. It really works!
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYeah, that, "Any second it will give up and shoot the disk back out" thought.
- gildas 4y agoAt that moment, I took the knife next to the computer to insert gently the blade into the drive above the diskette. It worked most of the time :p.
- drewzero1 4y agoGlad to hear I'm not the only one who routinely stabbed my computer! I used to keep a butter knife by my iMac to help eject CDs. I had the first slot-loading model and the rubber eject rollers they used seemed to lose their grip after a while.
- thesuitonym 4y agotik tik tik tik tik
- JohnTHaller 4y agoEspecially post-pandemic when most of the stuff in the theater is dead and there's only a single backup of the lighting board programming on a 3.5" floppy with a broken dust protector. Manually spinning it and blowing the dust out brought it back enough to save it after our first improv jam that took place with fluorescents on for the first 15 minutes while I manually programmed a single wash on a dimmer.
- rawoke083600 4y agoThat 'stutter-of-failure' :D
- deltarholamda 4y agoThis, and the click of death coming from a Zip disk that meant 100MB of Something Important had just entered Valhalla.
- Centmo 4y agoEspecially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.
- forinti 4y agoA friend of mine had his first job installing Oracle from floppies. I'm not sure what the actual count was, but we would joke about him installing disk 1 of 99...
- bluedino 4y agoFirst job I had was installing SCO off tapes and that was the year 2000
- dugmartin 4y agoThanks, that brought back a vivid memory I didn't even know was still knocking around my brain!
- stordoff 4y agoI recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.
- noizejoy 4y agoOr floppy #10 of Mark of the Unicorn’s DAW. Nervous times they were!
- throwaway742 4y agoAbort, Retry, Fail?
- Gibbon1 4y agoWith CP/M if you left the door open all your work was lost like tears in the rain.
- acheron 4y agoI've thought the same thing about those big power switches on AT and older motherboards/power supplies where you actually shut the power off.
- cogman10 4y agoThe 5 1/4 disks, IMO, had a superior kinesthetic. A much more solid thunk sound when being inserted and a deeper tone while being read. Enjoy, the sounds of floppies :D [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8
- Koshkin 4y agoThe ones that I remember had a locking lever which barely made any sound at all. https://i.stack.imgur.com/8D9f1.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/8D9f1.jpg
- Doxin 4y agoSome of em were spring loaded to where if it got past halfway it'd snap shut all the way. Flicking one of those makes a good noise.
- p1mrx 4y agoThe seeking at 1:48[1] sounds like Hall and Oates[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8&t=108s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8&t=108s [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY27wmTZwyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY27wmTZwyg
- linker3000 4y agoThe 8 inchers were a nightmre in some mechanisms (whichever ones Intel used in their MDS systems); slide 'em in too quickly and with a bit of passion (!?) and they'd catch on something, so if you weren't paying attention you'd fold them over and make a crease. Bye bye data!
- raintrees 4y agoAh, but 8" floppies made better frisbees - personal experience :) I used to work in the disk duplication industry, both at a copier (DisCopyLabs) and then later at the robot manufacturer, Mountain Computer, which was eventually bought by Nakamichi and combined with Trace, our competitor. We used to be able to sail those suckers over the building on Wyatt Drive to the San Thomas Expressway... Next person to work on roof equipment probably had a curious experience, many discs that did not make it all the way likely scattered all over the roof.
- wintorez 4y agoNot even a modem handshake noise?
- traceroute66 4y ago> Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible... Ahem, cough, dial-up modem handshake. That is all I have to say on the subject.
- martopix 4y ago> In modern computing
- stinkytaco 4y agoSurely the floppy disk is not more modern than the modem? They started to die around the same time, if I recall.
- quickthrower2 4y agoAgreed, I remember dial up using an AOL CD. And CDR was around the corner.
- Dylan16807 4y agoBoth are not modern. I don't think the original post was trying to imply that floppies are modern.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bornfreddy 4y agoHow about the constant fan noise when having ESET [0] installed on a Windows laptop then? [0] if you don't have ESET at hand, I guess any "good" antivirus would do.
- linker3000 4y agoBah - font kerning issue (keeming).
- phoboslab 4y agoTrue. I'd put it on the same level as connecting XLR cables. MiniDiscs (and to a lesser extent) UMDs were maybe the last examples of such satisfying mechanics. We are moving towards a solid state future where no user interaction directly drives mechanics. Physical media has largely disappeared, few cars are sold with a manual transmission and everything is wireless. Maybe folding phones will fill the gap. For now, at least my toaster remains!
- grishka 4y agoModern computers are so silent that you have no idea whether they're working hard or it's just someone doing things on the UI thread that don't belong there.
- daveslash 4y agoI also really liked the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the 5.25 floppies.
- quickthrower2 4y agoMaybe the pinging of a modem? You can tell from the tune how well it is doing!
- vouaobrasil 4y agoI found some floppy disks in my house from when I was a kid last year. I plugged them into a reader I had and they still worked. I didn't need them so I sold them on eBay and someone bought them and the reader.
- biggc 4y ago> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-drive with an IDE floppy drive interface. A quick Google search revealed that someone already builds this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwL65rtjuBQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwL65rtjuBQ
- NoGravitas 4y agoYeah, this kind of thing is not exactly uncommon in the retrocomputing scene, though it's often an SD card rather than a USB drive.
- dleslie 4y agoYou can get floppy emulators on Amazon. https://www.amazon.ca/Emulator-SFR1M44-U100-Install-Industrial-Equipment/dp/B094TR5GDS/ https://www.amazon.ca/Emulator-SFR1M44-U100-Install-Industri...
- acomjean 4y agoThere is the "Woz" file format for the apple2 (and others). It takes a disk image (flux?) and makes the file bootable in some emulators. https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/ https://applesaucefdc.com/woz/ the images it creates are sometimes stunning and interesting depending on copy protection. https://archive.org/details/ApplesauceImages/Age%20of%20Adventure%20%28Electronic%20Arts%29/Age%20of%20Adventure%20-%20Disk%201%2C%20Side%20A.png https://archive.org/details/ApplesauceImages/Age%20of%20Adve...
- gattilorenz 4y agoThe most common/cheap solution is the Gotek floppy drive, easily found on Aliexpress or eBay, and with the FlashFloppy firmware [1] for expanding the capabilities of the hardware. Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :) [1] https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
- doomlaser 4y agoWhen I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like Sloppy Sokoban, Pong Wars, and Descender. Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world. Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppydisk.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...
- NoGravitas 4y agoI remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
- tjr 4y agohttps://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21 https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21
- gibspaulding 4y agoI love that the top comment on this (from 9 years ago) is complaining about the new macbook air not having a CD drive.
- grapescheesee 4y agoI enjoyed both of these parent posts. I love this whole chain.
- bombcar 4y agoPeople talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds. Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
- Gualdrapo 4y ago11 years old me was afraid about putting some liquid paper on a floppy disk label to write my name could damage the computer.
- bombcar 4y agoAt a similar age I did a "science project" to see if the big floppies or the small one were better at reading data after being stuck to a fridge with a magnet for a month, and similar with sticking them in a freezer. Every single disk had zero errors.
- bragr 4y agoYou need a moving magnetic field to destroy the data unless you have a very very strong magnetic.
- bombcar 4y agoYep, and temperature doesn't really have an effect on magnets (perhaps at very low or when the disk melts). I do recall that most of the teachers and students thought it was "most surprising outcome" or something like that, from years of "if you put a magnet near your computer or disk it will eat the world" propaganda.
- mikefivedeuce 4y agoI still have some old hypercard stacks on floppy from third grade that I can't bear to throw away. Every time I come across the disks I remember how awesome it was to fire up the IIGS in computer lab and create the dumbest animations.
- belfalas 4y ago“You won’t forget your assignment if you tack it onto the fridge with a magnet.”
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoOne advantage of floppy disks, is that you could safely take a random disk, reformat it and reuse it. Now, however, if you insert a random USB drive into your computer, you run a high risk that your computer will be pwned.
- seanc 4y agoNot true! Floppies had viruses too. Even back in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)
- b112 4y agoI recall a few on my c64, back in the early 80s for sure.
- koala_man 4y agoI think parent refers to the fact that if you insert a floppy disk and reformat it without running anything on it, it's safe. This is not true for USB drives, as USB controllers can be programmed to re-insert a virus or fry the system at any time in the future.
- wrycoder 4y agoNot true for floppies, either. To reformat the boot sector, include the /S switch. FORMAT /S
- outworlder 4y agoYeah, but they would not autorun anything. If you forgot them inserted and rebooted, however...
- AshamedCaptain 4y agoHe did claim "reformat", which tends to delete these viruses. Albeit to clarify you'd also need to clear the boot record, which is not something all DOS format tools would do. Compare that to USB devices, which contain data that survives to all host-initiated methods of erasure and which may in fact not be storage devices at all; i.e. fake keyboard/mouse presses et al.
- ck2 4y agoAnyone else old enough to remember the 8 inch floppies on TRS-80 Model II? Heh how far we've come, it's incredible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II
- tgv 4y agoHow desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read the multi-megabyte documentation.
- jscipione 4y agoNo, I’m not old enough to remember 8” floppies but I watched Adrian’s Digital Basement’s repair of the TRS model-2 including restoring the 8” floppy drive, connecting it to 24V, using a adapter to hook it up to a PC to make a boot disk. [0] Unfortunately once Adrian got the Model-2 working and booted to TRS DOS he didn’t test any other software on the machine. My experience with Tandy machines was playing Burger Time off a cartridge as a kid, no 8” floppies. [0] https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs
- virgulino 4y agoI remember laughing out loud the first time I handled an 8-inch floppy. The very definition of a FLOPPY disk. It was a little disturbing. I was already in the era of the 5.25" double-sided floppy back then.
- drewzero1 4y agoI was cleaning around a stack of DEC tapes at work a few weeks ago and found an 8 inch floppy. Having grown up with the 5 1/4" disks it was a bit surreal to hold the bigger one... almost felt like I'd shrunk a little!
- eu 4y agoI remember in college we were going back and forth between our dormitory and our computer lab with a bunch of FDs to copy the media files (mp3s and jpegs) we downloaded on the server overnight. Often one of the disk would have errors and had go back another time. A few years back, at $work we found some old FDs with some interesting labels on them: "survey data 199x". It turns out there were some binary files from an ancient stats program and I spent a few days figuring out how to extract the data. Fun times
- fortran77 4y agoA lot of musicians still use sequencers and synthesizers that save patches on floppies. (Over time people have been replacing them with floppy-to-usb-drive adapters)
- navbaker 4y agoWe had an information system that we used in the 2008-2011 timeframe on our military deployments that only used 3.5" floppies for data offload. Since we wrote our enormously long post-mission reports during each actual mission and had no desire to spend hours following the mission re-writing them from scratch, the week prior to deployment was always filled with folks fanning out to every office supply store we could find in a desperate search for any remaining boxes of disks so we had a sufficient stock to use 2-3 disks per mission and allow for the inevitable disk failures/attrition. It was tough finding them then, can't imagine trying to find them now!
- reiichiroh 4y agoNone of the disks he sells are the 5.25” floppy ones.
- throwaway12305 4y agoAt a previous job, I worked at a textbook wholesaler. The industry overall is dying. They were a small player, but they were outrageously profitable. They realize that the good times won't last and they'll never grow into a billion dollar company, but the party isn't over yet. Sometimes it's better to be the last person selling stage coaches than the tenth person selling cars.
- manholio 4y agoIn the money quote, he puts it quite eloquently: Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.
- asciimov 4y agoI miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr. Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of them are fiddly. They are obnoxiously easy to loose.
- wollsmoth 4y agoburning dvd/cds was fun. Figuring out how to burn a dvd that could run on a dvd player was fun. Now it's all just done via chromecast. Convenient and less wasteful, I have to admit.
- Koshkin 4y agoAnd the Germans had fun naming their software "Nero Burning ROM."
- ljf 4y agoI used Nero for years and 'got' the joke about Nero and Burning, but totally missed the ROM/Rome/German spelling of Rome. How did I miss that! Thanks for making the joke complete for me ;)
- dj_mc_merlin 4y agoI never got that, it's amazing. Was a teen when I was using it and hadn't learned enough Roman history. Thanks.
- akolbe 4y agoI remember that. :) And I remember buying a 1 Gigabyte hard disk for £1,000 ...
- yazantapuz 4y ago22 years later I find out there's a joke behind the name. Thanks HN.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago> Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I remember a little operation run out of Topeka, Kansas in the 80's called "Budget Bytes" that sold floppies with Macintosh shareware on them. I mean I could have downloaded some of the stuff over FTP from the university but you still needed a floppy to copy them on to. So fun, poring over the news-print catalog of disks they had available, deciding which ones to order. I assumed it was a Real Business™ at the time but in hindsight it was no doubt some entrepreneur copying floppies in his garage. I wish I had been as entrepreneurial at the time.
- myth_drannon 4y agoI'm actually reading a book about these shareware businesses. It was quite profitable selling them for 4$-7$ and they were popular. They would start as one person and occasionaly grow into huge operations involving hundreds of employees.
- ok123456 4y agoWhat's the book?
- myth_drannon 4y agoShareware Heroes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61272567-shareware-heroes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61272567-shareware-heroe...
- JKCalhoun 4y agoOh yeah, Richard Moss. Nice guy.
- wizardfeet 4y agoThat's me. Hi John! Lovely to run into you here. You still at Apple? I'd be happy to email you a PDF copy of the new book if you're interested.
- dang 4y agoRecent and related: Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32663995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32663995 - Aug 2022 (130 comments) Less recent and related: Ask HN: Why is there still a market for floppy disks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31658880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31658880 - June 2022 (12 comments) Tokyo says long goodbye to beloved floppy disks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29064316 - Nov 2021 (12 comments)
- przefur 4y agoI've read an article about Japanese policeman that've lost a floppy disks with personal data of some Japanese men, it was a story from this January. This data leak, due to obscurity and the volume was more of a joke in my country, than a serious news. I do however wonder, what it was back in the day? I've never heard of any large scale data leaks involving floppy disks, perhaps I'm too young.
- kingsloi 4y agoI can't wait to bust out my collection of "PC Genius" floppy disks that I had growing up, and play them with my son in a few years. I haven't inserted a floppy disk in a reader in about 10-15 years, but secretly super excited to do it again!
- egypturnash 4y agoI get nothing but a little eye in the center of the screen, blinking. It is cute but does not contain the promised information. Reloading with the adblockers off gets the story. I hate this world.
- shantnutiwari 4y agoI use ublock origin on firefox and I could read the story?
- Tor3 4y agoI have adblocking on all the time and it looks fine to me.
- marban 4y agoThe medium I miss the most are Mini-Discs — They really were the sweet-spot in combining digital (albeit lossy-ish) with a tactile, analog experience. The pinnacle of mixtapes.
- dehrmann 4y agoWhat I really miss about them is the recording technology and case meant they're really good for long-term storage.
- 101008 4y agoFloppy disks (or diskettes, as they are called in Spanish) were very important for my formation when I was a kid. I had a computer but I hadn't internet access at home (very expensive for my family), so I was going to the computer café two blocks away and I downloaded files into the diskette that then I was able to check at home. That's how I downloaded tutoriales (File > Save page as...) and a lot of stuff. Things became better when I had 2 or 3 diskettes and I was able to download bigger files using Hacha, a free software to split large files. Of course, nothing was worse than arriving home and one of them failing. As someone said in another comment, I miss the sound and the "physicality" of them. It reminds me of a time when you were offline by default, and you had to go online. Now it is, sadly, the other way around.
- lake_vincent 4y agoI remember actually exchanging floppy disks containing images (made in Paint, of course) with my friends via snail mail. It was the original version of Snapchat. Horrible latency.
- actionfromafar 4y agoWere some of them also, hrm, explicit in nature?
- lake_vincent 4y agoLol, no, I was way too young then! They were probably pictures of Power Rangers or Super Mario I drew, lmao. By the time I was of that age, we had the wonders of dial up internet and semi-scrambled adult TV channels. :')
- int_19h 4y agoFor what it's worth, BBS porn was a thing, as was sharing it on floppies.
- snvzz 4y agoSame story. I guess it's pretty common. What's odd is I used DD floppies, not HD floppies, because my only computer at home was an Amiga.
- tpmx 4y agoEarliest capture of this guy's original site: https://web.archive.org/web/19980623131044/http://www.diskduper.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980623131044/http://www.diskdu... Earliest capture of his site on floppydisks.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20030330102403/http://floppydisks.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030330102403/http://floppydisk... Floppy duplication prices from these pages: June '98: $0.59 @ 500 March '03: $0.39 @ 500
- blantonl 4y agoYou haven't lived until you installed an operating system from 38 floppy disks. Slackware and OS/2 for example My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2 Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you were dead in the water.
- system2 4y agoI remember installing windows 95 from floppy disk. It was only 13 disks but with MSDOS it would go up to 16. Some drivers here and there, 20+ disk installation would take hours.
- jhbadger 4y agoIn the early 1990s you could get Linux distributions on floppy (if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive yet) -- I remember one that had over 30 disks.
- phpisthebest 4y agoWindows 10 Floppy Install... Please Insert Disk 1 of 4166
- grishka 4y agoYou'd probably only need a third of that if you opt to not install any of the .net/UWP stuff though.
- Swizec 4y agoMy friend got Settlers 2 on CD for his birthday. My computer didn’t have a CD drive. Solution? Copy the installed game from his computer onto 30 floppy disks. Carefully reconstruct the installation on my computer. It worked.
- rcarmo 4y agoSlackware yes, OS/2 Warp I had the good fortune to only get on CD. But those Mac System 6 disks…
- fbn79 4y agoThere is a funny story that my Computer Science teacher used to tell. One day a friend called him saying his floppy drive was not working as expected. He went to check and found two floppy disk crushed inside the floppy drive. So my prof asked his friend why have pushed two floppy in the drive, broking everything. He answered: "computer said to insert disk 2, I have done something wrong?"
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoFrom the first sentence of TFA: > Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” Why editorialize they HN title? He’s a guy! And “last man standing” is a set phrase. “Last person standing” is not.
- brunoTbear 4y agoEditorialization serves a valuable role of making writing better. IMO, language that is more inclusive is better than language that is less inclusive. Keeping needlessly gendered phrases around simply because they're a "set phrase" doesn't serve any compelling interest. Language evolves. You can fight the ocean with a rake, or you can be supportive of changes that make language better for your friends and neighbors.
- bdowling 4y ago“‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’”
- samatman 4y agoThere is nothing generic in the sentence "last man standing". It's referring to one person, who is, in this case, a man. The argument, which at least makes sense, is that a "Chairman", even if he's male, should be a "Chairperson" because the office is not male, and therefore the title shouldn't be gendered. That just doesn't apply here. "A Chairperson" makes sense, "a last man standing" doesn't. "Last person standing" is also something you could say, but the title didn't, and there is no cause to 'correct' it, because it isn't wrong.
- Noumenon72 4y agoI have no problem with calling a waitress a server or whatever, but when I clicked on this title I did spend some time thinking about the lost euphoniousness and wondering whether there is a special masculine quality to "last man standing". It sounds like it might come from some knockdown game that women would not play. Google says boxing.
- rcarmo 4y ago“Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics.” Well, I hope they don’t run out of space, or have a bad sector…
- Animats 4y agoA few years ago, the last man standing in the punched paper tape business, "westnc.com", finally gave it up. There were still some numerically controlled machine tools running off paper tape. In 2019, NSA punched a crypto key into paper tape for the last time. As far as I can tell, nobody in the US still sells punched paper tape. Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore old Teletype machines, including the kind that printed on 5/16" paper tape. I had a thousand rolls of such tape made up by a company in China, that being the minimum order, and I still sell some now and then to Teletype collectors.
- CliffStoll 4y agoI've got a couple boxes of 80-column punch cards ...
- 83457 4y agoMy mom has many boxes from her long career programming for mainframes. She uses them for todo lists... for herself now, not a computer.
- grogenaut 4y agoBar I worked at in the late 90s did all their checks and orders on these. Guy who worked there par tike worked dismantling mainframes and had tons of them. Cheaper than any other paper they could find.
- 83457 4y agoNice. Not the cheapest if bought from IBM is my understanding.
- taftster 4y agoOr maybe she is the computer now.
- fourjawchuck 4y agoThe machine shop I work at still runs machines that use 5 hole paper tape. In fact there is a fixture in the shop we just finished on one of those machines that is for an aerospace customer of ours. It’s very interesting to me and something I hadn’t seen before working at this shop. It’s amazing what is still out there running.
- tpl 4y agoVery happy to have not had to deal with a floppy that was done being able to be read in a very long time. I used to work at a campus computer lab and we would experience failures commonly while imaging machines. I do miss floppys but I am happy to see the extent that they are no longer critical.
- Apocryphon 4y agoWhat coincidence, I just found some old floppy disks of mine, and bought a vintage HP drive as per this guide to connect to my modern machines. Hopefully it works: https://www.howtogeek.com/669331/how-to-read-a-floppy-disk-on-a-modern-pc-or-mac/ https://www.howtogeek.com/669331/how-to-read-a-floppy-disk-o...
- rawoke083600 4y agoPart of the "joy/hell" of using floppies, the waiting to see if your data was ok. Example when you have ARJ/ZIP/RAR a 10+ disk "floppy collection" (pirate copy) of your favourite game from you friends from school. You get home after school and dammit floppy number 7 has CRC error :/ sigh It could take DAYS to copy a game, back then, between you friend forgetting for a day or two and having to redo big copies at least once :) All with the turnaround time of waiting one-school-day #GoodTimes :)
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoThe pirate copy of Dark Forces took ~41 disk. It was rather had to make it fit in a 120 MB hard drive...
- incanus77 4y agoGreat interview; really enjoyed this. In the late 80s / early 90s, I had a home computer with 5.25” floppies. I remember at the mall around the holidays, Radio Shack would run a holiday animation on their Tandy computers to show them off. One in particular sticks out to me — an animation of a 3.5” “modern” floppy going into a shirt pocket and then an attempt at a 5.25” which resulted in a torn pocket, showing off the superior portability of the new, smaller disks. Does anyone else remember this?
- SllX 4y agoA few weeks ago I actually watched a video with this same gentleman. The video itself is from 6 years ago but it was insightful and some of you may prefer that medium. Link: https://youtu.be/z9tENHe19gk https://youtu.be/z9tENHe19gk
- rawoke083600 4y agoWhat was also funny was "floppy grammar" (at least in my time and locale) Whenever you gave someone x amount of floppies to copy something for you (prob a game)... the usual grammar/conversation was "you can just copy over it" yet no such thing exists, you can't in 999/1000 cases "copy-over something" you first have to delete/format it then copy. Always thought it was 'funny/weird' :)
- int_19h 4y agoThat's just legacy of audiocassettes and VHS tapes, and later on, magnetic tape data storage used for popular home microcomputers. With those, you literally "copied over". With floppies, you actually could do that as well, if you were copying floppies verbatim with e.g. DISKCOPY.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jaclaz 4y agoYes, in the good ol' times I would have used a nifty little DOS program called Venus, that would simply copy the "whole disk" (a lot like dd but with a semi-graphical interface). Of course the "real thing" was the Deluxe Option Board (some details about it and a bunch of the common copying utilities of the time here): http://retro.icequake.net/dob/ http://retro.icequake.net/dob/
- flyinghamster 4y agoStashed away somewhere, I still have a couple of 8" floppy disks. The only time I ever used them was for a CS class that, for whatever reason, used IBM 9000s [0] running Xenix for coursework, and they were difficult to find even in 1986-87. The one and only place that had any was, naturally, Radio Shack, and they were Tandy-branded, no doubt intended for the TRS-80 Model II. Assuming bitrot hasn't set in, they likely still have Xenix filesystems on them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000
- weinzierl 4y agoThe money quote from the article - and it is so well put - is : "Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me." My floppy story is: In the late 90s 3.5" floppies were ubiquitous and the Zip disk was the new kid on the block. 5.25" was a thing of the past and I'd never ever seen a 8" floppy and I did not expect to see one either. This was until I interned at a Siemens research lab where they still had 8" floppies. Why? Because the room-sized, several floors below ground housed electron microscopes used them.
- pimlottc 4y agoI’m a bit surprised he doesn’t deal in Zip drive disks as well.
- selimthegrim 4y agoLet’s not give the nuclear weapons silos any ideas (I think they just got off 5.25”) In a no doubt soon to be discovered manuscript of Journey to the Center of the Earth maybe 16” floppies will be mentioned.
- wrycoder 4y agoFor once, an article more interesting than the HN comments!
- throw_m239339 4y agoOld samplers/MIDI sequencers without SCSI interfaces do use floppy disks so I hoarded a hundred of them just in case (even though there is a system now that allows a floppy disk reader to be replaced by a USB thumb drive reader). They are getting quite expensive in Europe, not paying 5€ for a single HD disk...
- WalterBright 4y agoI've used punch cards, paper tape, DECtapes, magtapes, cartridge tapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and Bluray disks. I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance. Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective. Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too. Today I use terabyte drives, and have a box of USB sticks. For inexplicable reasons, the terabyte drives USB sticks have no way to write on them. So I stick an Avery label on them and write on that.
- Fileformat 4y agoI've been collecting photos of them all: https://www.fileformat.info/media/a.htm https://www.fileformat.info/media/a.htm
- WalterBright 4y agoNice to meet another data hoarder :-)
- timbit42 4y agoYou need to add some mainframe and minicomputer media, like DECtape, etc.
- timbit42 4y agoI'm nostalgic about them but I don't want to use them due to the lack of reliability. If they were reliable, I'd love to use them.
- zoobab 4y agoSplitting Big files with ARJ, recycling floppers from the magazines, downloading files over 56k computer room at school, putting them floppies, going back home to find out one is defect... That's how i installed my first Linux without any internet connection at home, a 6 months job!
- bornfreddy 4y agoARJ... Now that is a blast from the past! Thank you. :)
- smm11 4y agoZIP drive was the bomb. I don't recall what it was, but there was a Gateway or something (maybe) with a built-in ZIP drive. The future, man.
- jeramey 4y agoAt least until you heard the click of death, that is!
- linker3000 4y agoAnd by coincidence, an unopened, branded box of 10 x DS/HD 3.5" floppy disks arrived in the post for me today. They will be used with a couple of Z80 systems I have constructed - when I build a floppy controller board!
- slowhand09 4y agoI prob have 2 boxes, shrink wrapping intact... in my storage closet.
- linker3000 4y agoI have 2 boxes somewhere that I bought when Staples in the UK was closing down; they presumably found them right at the back of a shelf in the stores. 50p a box I think.
- linker3000 4y ago...oh and I dumped this lot a while back: https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-ASM- https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-AS...
- mikewarot 4y agoThe tiny storage and slow access time/speed are not something I'll miss. What I do miss is the security that they provided. The serenity of having known good backups, that just work, is something that nobody under 50 is likely to ever experience. Because we had the ability to copy and write protect our software and data, we could easily make manage our security in a completely transparent manner. You could take your little case of floppy disks and have your work environment up and running on any IBM compatible in no time flat.
- outworlder 4y ago> that just work Eh. The reliability wasn't really great. We never knew if our data was still there.
- Tr3nton 4y agoI fondly recall when my friend became the first kid in our neighborhood to get cable internet instead of dialup. I biked over to his house with a backpack full of 3.5" floppies and spent hours filling them up with games. It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk; same for the total download size of a fairly barebones website. Nostalgia!
- iggldiggl 4y ago> It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk … and the full decompressed version of that image might not have fit into your computer's memory at that time, either.
- outworlder 4y agoFor quite a while, floppy disks exceeded the system memory by at least one order of magnitude.
- timbit42 4y agoIt will fit if you use a Sony Mavica with the floppy drive built in.
- titoo22 4y ago
- atourgates 4y agoI think he might have figured out the secret to happiness: > "Me, I just like to get up in the morning, have people ask me questions, and try to solve problems. My business is a little bit of an adventure for me every day."
- titoo22 4y ago
- titoo22 4y ago[flagged]
- przefur 4y agoAs a person born in '95 I still remember floppy disks, it was probably the very first 'computer' thing that I've broken. Heck, I still should have a pile of those stashed in the basement, maybe it's a good time to plug the reader to my PC, and dig through those? This article was really well written, good reading!
- sunnytimes 4y agoI work in the mentioned embroidery business and we have a decent collection of floppy disks and gear. roughly 300 disks with 40 in circulation being used. about 20 USB floppy drives for PC's and new machines to use disks still. its a handy medium for us. I have one of the local e-waste places collecting anything they get disk related for me , lot of cases which is ok , gotta keep the dust off of the disks so everyone's desk has one now .. we can switch to USB and we do use USB as well so its not like the end of the world when they finally go.
- iancmceachern 4y agoI've read this here before, but will regurgitate it. It's amazing that many software products still use the disc icon to represent saving. Many folks using computers now have never even seen one in person. To them it's the save icon, not a disc.
- davidw 4y agoIs it just me, or are there are a lot of these stories from that generation along the lines of * I was doing this thing somewhat successfully * Then someone asked me to jump into this software thing even if I had zero experience. * Then we did X, Y and Z... It seems rarer these days?
- ryanmercer 4y agoI've been buying from him for a decade plus for both my 8-bit Atari use and Win/DOS use, my last order was a couple of months ago - bought two of the used Dell drives and some more 3.5s from him.
- robertq 4y agoI have some old 5.25" floppies backed up with FastBack. If I can get the data transferred, anybody know how to decode the backup compression?
- romwell 4y agoI'm still using floppy disks with my Yamaha PSR-630 workstation keyboard — you can arrange an entire song on that machine in no time. Plenty of highly acclaimed vintage music equipment — notably, Ensonique samplers — still use them too. I got the floppy disks for my machine from Microsoft's supply room when I was an intern there in 2014. At the time, there were still some niche uses for floppies in the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., RAID drivers for Windows XP could only be loaded from a floppy on install, IIRC), but that was on the way out too — so I grabbed half a dozen disks from a pile. Remarkably, they are still perfectly usable. The major problem I have with them is that the floppy disk drive on the keyboard is slightly out of alignment. Which means that the only way to read the floopies is to use that specific disk drive. I've been meaning to replace the drive for years, but never really got to it. I've also considered swapping it out for an SD card reader/USB drive (ones meant to replace floppy drives are readily available), but where's the charm in that?
- mrb 4y ago«I once got a request from the Netherlands for half a million floppy disks» I want to know (1) who are they, and (2) why do they need them?
- TacticalCoder 4y agoI found "NIUB" (New In Unopened Box) floppies at home: 5"1/4 floppies, never used. I've got no idea: are they still as good as new even though they're something like 35 years old? I found more than that: I found my "time capsule" C128 (safely stored for 30 years+, still working, non polluted by anything modern). I found a "copier" software (Fast Hack'Em II IIRC) still working and managed to use it to copy a still working copy of Commando (chiptune sountrack by Rob Hubbard, the god of SID music back in the days). But I have no idea: are these NIUB floppies as good as new or do they decay as years passes by?
- themagician 4y agoCompletely depends on the make/model/manufacture date. Older floppies are actually much better made than newer ones. Disks from 1994 or earlier tend to be better than those made after. Many floppies are good for 30+ years.
- Tor3 4y agoAs themagician says. Unless they're of a particularly notoriously bad brand.. I can't remember the name now but I'll recognize it when I see it. Can you see what brand it is?
- icambron 4y agoWhat a great interview! It's unusual that you read a business interview and find it this charming and interesting. I like the guy already.
- narrator 4y agoWhat's funny, economically, about this guy is that his investment in floppy disks made roughly a 10x return! "Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars." Reminds me of when I was at a thrift store and these used paperbacks were being sold used for triple the cover price that they sold for new in the 1950s.
- _tom_ 4y agoThe books are probably just inflation. People think a dollar per book is cheap, now. But cover prices in the fifties for paperbacks look to be 25 to 50 cents. (Source: A quick google). Books with actual increases in value won't be at a thrift store, typically.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThe first time I installed Linux was from 4 (yes really) 3.5" floppies.
- jlarcombe 4y agoAbout five or six years ago there was a single packet of 5.25 inch floppy discs for sale in the window of a strange shop near my office in London. It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed to come in or go out. I walked past the shop every lunchtime and grew increasingly obsessed with this box of discs, the first I'd seen for sale for maybe twenty years. Where had it come from? Why was it in the window? Who was going to buy it? Eventually I decided that I'd have to buy them myself, just so I could stop thinking about it. But the next time I walked past the shop, the discs were gone!
- jagged-chisel 4y agoStrange Stories fodder
- bryanrasmussen 4y agooh sure, The Shop in Go By Street http://fullonlinebook.com/poems/a-shop-in-go-by-street/ftpz.html http://fullonlinebook.com/poems/a-shop-in-go-by-street/ftpz....
- saruken 4y agoFunny, I did the same thing with a 5-pack of Zip disks a couple years ago. I ended up buying them though, for a couple bucks. Who else would have? I still have them sitting on my desk, keep telling myself I'll finish rebuilding the old tower PC I picked up at a thrift store, and I'll buy a Zip drive for it. I used to have a Zip drive in my PC in high school -- I remember saving 3ds Max files to it when I was first learning to model. And Deadlock, a turn-based strategy game that came with some version of Windows, I copied it onto a Zip disk and distributed it to some friends. But as I remember they were too busy with Kingdom Under Fire and Brood War.
- int_19h 4y agoSounds like https://wiki.lspace.org/Wandering_Shop https://wiki.lspace.org/Wandering_Shop
- iamandras 4y agoI enjoyed reading this article. It's amazing to think about the number of machines in the industry that need on floppy disks :)
- pan69 4y ago> How did your business initially come about? > > I started out as a tax lawyer in Washington, DC. I became involved with a software company in California that was doing unique tax calculations. Ah, right, "unique tax calculations". I guess thats one of describing it. :)
- systems_glitch 4y agofloppydisk.com bought Athana a few years ago, and got the remainder of their stock. AFAIK Athana was one of the very last manufacturers of several media formats. I don't know if floppydisk.com ended up with any of their manufacturing capability, or if Athana even had any at the time of sale. Athana had stopped manufacturing at least some of their offerings (e.g. 5.25" hard sector) over a decade ago. floppydisk.com didn't get them all though, we bought around 28,000 5.25" DSDD diskettes surplus: https://i.imgur.com/f5jM4mO.jpg https://i.imgur.com/f5jM4mO.jpg The above pictured lot is where the diskettes for the boxed releases of Nox Archaist and Burger Becky's game came from.
- zoobab 4y agoKeep at least one for Tomsrtbt!
- dEnigma 4y agoThe fact that this site keeps spawning eyes all over the place while you are inactive really creeped me out when I went back to the tab to continue reading after a while.
- tssva 4y agoMy local computer store sells 3.5 and 5.25 floppies. You can find them at the rear of the left side of the store on a shelf just above the one with the new in wrapper Zip disks.
- somat 4y agoSometimes there are people that appear confused why you would do something yourself. "Just buy it" or "just use the cloud service". I think this quote sums up the situation perfectly. ''' At one point we did a gigantic deal with a US payroll company for which we needed to copy hundreds of thousands of disks. We sent the work out to a third party who did the duplication for us. That was okay, but expensive, and it took a lot of time. The quality also wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be. So the next time we decided to do the floppy duplication in-house and we got our own equipment. '''
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoPro tip: floppy disks are extremely useful to observe solar eclipses. Still keep a box with a few floppies in my desk for this very purpose.
- turtledragonfly 4y agoCompletely unrelated: I was impressed by this interview for being no-BS and interesting. It's such a rare occasion that I actually think to myself "ooh, I wonder if this site has more good articles like this." Never heard of Eye on Design before, but glad it's on my radar, now (:
- golem14 4y agoI recently found an old backup 3.5" floppy from ≈1993 with some thesis material. I could read it without any problems on an old USB connected floppy drive (and as a bonus, compile the LaTeX with zero problems). I was a bit surprised and had expected a bit of work.
- insane_dreamer 4y agoThe first laptop computer I used was a Bondwell 2 (running CP/M) which was one of the first to use a 3.5" floppy for storage. But I actually preferred the Epson PX-8 which had a micro cassette for storage instead of a floppy (too large). I wonder if there's still any market for micro-cassettes for digital storage anymore just as there is for floppies. (DAT was another tape storage format used in professional audio studio equipment but also used by some computers such as SGI.)
- insane_dreamer 4y agoOne pretty amazing thing about floppy disks is that powerful full-featured software was written so efficiently so as to fit on them. WordStar fit on a single side of a 5.25" Floppy, IIRC Lotus 1-2-3 did as well.
- quickthrower2 4y agoHow about a floppy to USB/flash/SSD adapter. Do we need to make the physical thing still?
- _tom_ 4y ago3.5" external usb drives are easy to find on amazon, etc. If anyone knows of a 5.25 (5 1/4) external usb drive, please tell me! I still have thousands of old 5.25 floppies. I've transferred or tossed most of the 3.5, since I was able to get a drive for that.
- quickthrower2 4y agoI mean just the other way: say you have an old mainframe in production and you need to clone a floppy, clone it to a more modern medium then use an adaptor.
- Tor3 4y agoJust be aware that the USB external drives are pre-coded for "PC" formats only, so you can't use those as a source for a generic floppy recover session. I.e. you can't expect to be able to ready anything from some other non-PC brand of computer.
- ThinkBeat 4y agoHe says "recycle". Does that mean he disposes of them in a responsible manner. or that he resells them as "nearly new"?
- _tom_ 4y agoThat was an unexpected blast from the past, since I wrote the software he's talking about at his first software company.
- thenthenthen 4y agoFor those interested, the authors organise a two day festival / book launch 16+17 Sept in Rotterdam, The Netherlands[0]. [0] https://v2.nl/events/floppy-totaal-floppy-disk-fever https://v2.nl/events/floppy-totaal-floppy-disk-fever
- dtgriscom 4y agoIn 1990 I was the Exhibits Engineer at The Computer Museum in Boston (RIP). We were opening a new exhibit, the Walk-Through Computer, a giant, two-floor PC. Of course, it had a giant floppy drive, and at my suggestion they marked it as a 2.88MB drive (just to be ahead of the curve): https://youtu.be/CoxQLJkLq1c?t=407 https://youtu.be/CoxQLJkLq1c?t=407
- paulirish 4y agoIn the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), which I've kept. About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate the folks who keep the door open to legacy technology. (…but meanwhile I'm still realllly curious what's on that disk!)
- kupopuffs 4y agoGet out a microscope and notepad and write down those bits
- Tor3 4y agoIf it was HD then the data is probably gone. Or at least the floppy will have read issues. 720KB should do a bit better. I have recovered data from a lot of old media, CCT tapes, floppies, 3.5" floppies - except that in practice it turned out that a) CCT ok. No problems. b) 8" floppies ok. No problems. c) 5.25" floppies (low density, high density) ok. No problems (except that for a while I didn't have a controller which could read a minority of them - they're FM, not MFM), d) 3.5" Not ok. All unreadable. All of them. And that was not due to the drive - I have lots of drives, including one I bought because it was calibrated. All of the media had been stored either in the same location or in a similar environment, but at this point I don't even bother trying those darn 3.5" floppies unless they're written recently. I'll just be a ton of read errors.
- MexicanJoe 4y agoI have not used a floppy in maybe 20 years but this is awesome. More power to him!
- 1letterunixname 4y agoCopy II PC Option board, actual floppy notchers, and cleaning disks and diskettes are just some of the other floppy paraphernalia. Floppies have notoriously low reliability (unrecoverable reads) and painful transfer rates. ZIP disks were only slightly better. CDs and DVDs were far better and then USB thumb drives killed everything else with the then futuristic holy grail of solid state storage.
- countryclub 4y ago[flagged]