15 ms·

The floppy disk just won’t die

113 points by alexrustic 4y ago

suprjami 4y ago
Interesting to hear that floppies now get three uses before they die. I had the feeling they were getting worse and that confirms it.
jaclaz 4y ago
Hmmm. All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names): https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61 https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61
- wkjagt 4y ago
  Gotek are awesome. I use one in an old 486 and it works really well as a floppy drive replacement. Especially with the FlashFloppy firmware replacement.
  - FredPret 4y ago
    You have a working 486? If I had one, I'd spin up Civ1 just for old times!
    - wkjagt 4y ago
      Yeah! A DX2 66Mhz, with a real mechanical hard drive, in a real beige case with a turbo button :D Some modern "amenities" I have are the gotek, and a CF Card to IDE adapter, so I can more easily copy files to it. I use it mostly for Borland C++, but also Solitaire in Windows 3.1. I also have an 8088, a 286 and a 386...
      - FredPret 4y ago
        That’s awesome. Is it a vintage drive as well? I wonder about the failure points - CMOS battery meltdown, moving parts. If you can eliminate these, you can probably run that 486 for life.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  as soon as I saw the article title I figured someone had figured out a simple/cheap emulation solution and the comments would link to it. Thanks! They seem super cheap on ebay too https://www.ebay.com/itm/364063791560 https://www.ebay.com/itm/364063791560
- abruzzi 4y ago
  gotek is fine if your device uses FAT formatted floppies. If your device has a custom format, you need an HxC drive or HxC firmware fr a Gotek drive. Also, I have some devices that don't use standard 34 pin floppy connectors so I had to learn Kicad to build 26 to 34 pin adapters. All of my floppy using devices are synthesizers or samplers, and keeping them around is not a matter of not being able to afford to upgrade, but rather than many of these devices have very unique sounds that aren't replicated by newer equipment.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >If your device has a custom format, you need an HxC drive or HxC firmware fr a Gotek drive. It used to be the case. Nowadays, the Open Source FlashFloppy firmware will handle any custom format, including the HFE formats HxC use.
- askvictor 4y ago
  I was imagining something like a cassette tape->line in adapter like used to be common go play your ipod through your car stereo. I.e. something that would emulate the actual disk, not the disk drive.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful. You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.
- johnwalkr 4y ago
  There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    The obsolete format I’ve most recently gotten into is VHS tape. Used decks go for $10 or $20 at our reuse center, you can buy prerecorded tapes for 50 cents. If a deck fails or a tape gets pulled you won’t feel so bad. Decks from 2000 or so are solidly better than they were in the 1980s, particularly they all support HiFi sound which is excellent. The quality is not so good as a DVD or Blu-Ray but a good movie on VHS is still a good movie.
    - jccalhoun 4y ago
      Getting the best quality out of VHS is a rabbit hole I went down last year. There are a couple movies that I have that weren't released in any format besides VHS and I spent quite a lot of time trying to get the best quality digital copy I could. There are a dozen or so (mostly s-vhs jvc) models that have circuitry to stabilize the images and they start at $300 on ebay.
causi 4y ago
There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
- jghn 4y ago
  To this day I still once in a while hear something using the old Mac floppy drive reading noises to indicate "computer is doing something"
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future. I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.
  - masfuerte 4y ago
    I've had several hard drives fail over the years. They all signalled their impending doom by making interesting noises so I never lost any data. When my SSD fails I think I'm going to miss the noises.
    - toast0 4y ago
      I've worked with lots of (enterprisy) hard drives and SSDs. The hard drive failure rate was easily 10x the rate of the SSDs, but the SSDs basically never gave symptoms of impending doom. They just disappeared from the data channel. We did have one group of drives that gave symptoms... 50% of the batch dropped dead within 2 weeks of entering service, a good number failed over the time it took to get the rest of them replaced. And one drive that had very poor throughput for several minutes did show SMART metrics that it was reallocating sectors, but we took it as a sign of death and replaced it; I think it might have worked fine once it calmed down, but we'll never know.
charles_f 4y ago
> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as soon as a better one like usb storage became available and prominent.
- sys32768 4y ago
  To be fair, a few years ago I bought 8" floppies for the Ohio Scientific system that had been in storage since the late 80s. One of the labels had a 1979 date on it. I sent them to a guy who writes the emulator for that system and three out of four were totally readable.
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    three out of four were totally readable. This is probably fine for writing emulators, but it is not quite the reliability I expect from aviation!
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  Yes, it does happen, but in my experience they are much more reliable than most people seem to remember. I've had a few floppies that couldn't even be salvaged by a reformat (as mentioned in the article), but I also have many more original 3.5" floppies from the 90s that are still perfectly readable, and without errors (I know that as they contain data with checksums). "Utterly unrealiable" isn't doing them justice.
  - charles_f 4y ago
    I remember picking up floppies from the stack of "ok to erase" ones, and having one not formatting being a common occurrence. Certainly we were using them quite a bit and it was a while back, but still, reliability was nowhere near a USB stick as long as you don't buy the cheapest ones
DeathArrow 4y ago
https://archive.is/imS5p https://archive.is/imS5p
TonyTrapp 4y ago
> Following the rodeo incident, Necaise decided to finally upgrade, but not to an entirely new machine—just to a floppy-to-USB emulator. These devices cost around $275 each... That's odd. Gotek and similar emulators should be available for a tenth of that price. There are several variations though, so it smells to me like someone is reselling a Gotek "guaranteed to work" with a specific type of machine with a large markup.
- squigg 4y ago
  Happens in the SCSI emulator market as well - there is a company massively marking up SCSI emulators and praying on naive musicians. Which is fair enough given they set them up before sending them out, but it still irks my sense of fairness
  - TonyTrapp 4y ago
    You're right, I remember now seeing exactly that when researching SCSI2SD options. But the markup was never 10x.
    - squigg 4y ago
      Fair point - not 10x, just normally about 2-3x!
- freerk 4y ago
  yep, sounds like getting something for 21$ on Aliexpress (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832100710868.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832100710868.html) and selling it for >13x more.
- Tor3 4y ago
  Odd indeed. As far as I know the Gotek was invented exactly for use by embroidery machines, and the ads are everywhere. I tried entering "embroidery floppy emulator" into Google and an Amazon link for a $38 Gotek came up first (and, as we know, we can get it cheaper than that). But of course a few lines below there's a "floppyusbemulator.com" page with a $250 "Nalbantov" drive (which are sold for $175 elsewhere, and there are probably other variantes).
squigg 4y ago
My Akai S1000 sampler from the late 80s still has it's floppy drive, which I occasionally still use even though it has a modern SD-card based emulated SCSI hard disk as well. I could change the floppy to a Gotek USB drive, but I'm not interested I love using it. It triggers so many happy teen memories from my BBC B and Amiga!
humanistbot 4y ago
I read the article and it sounds like the floppy disk is dying and will die very soon. What a clickbait headline, but that's what to expect from Wired.
Overtonwindow 4y ago
Is there a company that refurbished floppy disks? I've got maybe 50 of them and wouldn't mind giving them to some rodeo, or company that still needs them.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  That's an interesting idea. I tend to keep pretty much everything, at least for a while. I'd call myself a "hoarder", but really, I have a fairly decent system for categorization and storage, and clean everything out every couple of years and sell a lot of it online. I have a storage tote full of floppy disks - there have to be hundreds of them in there, though I've not counted. I think I'll go grab that box tonight and see if I can't sell them on eBay or something.
- _tom_ 4y ago
  Yes. See this article: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...
  - _tom_ 4y ago
    TLDR; there's one company left selling ( and reselling floppies). And, yes, if you have old floppies in good condition you can donate them.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
One of only very few boot devices, I wouldn't want to be completely without.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  You can trust a floppy and its hardware. You can’t trust a flash drive - Bunny proved that.
dale_glass 4y ago
One of the things I wonder about in retrospect is why floppy drives remained at a static level of ability for the most part. I mean I know there were the LS120 and such things, but why wasn't there a manufacturer just pushing the tech a bit further? Like why not have a drive made with additional precision and capable of squeezing 3 MB into a floppy? Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?
- pmontra 4y ago
  There were 2.88" floppy disks, not mainstream. From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over. We had CD burners in every computer. Floppy disks were too unreliable compared to CDs and files were already too large. We had external hard disks and pen drives in the late 90s when USB was released. That was the end of floppy disks for backups. So, to answer your question, no time to do it. Every manufacturer was probably working on the next big technology and not on incrementally perfecting the floppy disk.
  - forinti 4y ago
    The only time I ever saw a 2.88MB floppy drive was on a DEC machine circa 1990.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Yeah, but I recall that in the CD era, there were attempts to push the envelope. Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the normal end on standard CDs, because people figured that you can squeeze things a bit tighter and cut the corners a bit more here and there, and with the right drives that worked. I'm wondering why they didn't do that with floppy drives. It was definitely a thing on the software side with special formatting programs, but I don't recall it being a thing on the hardware side. Not in the sense of having new official upgrades like 2.88 MB, but drives advertising that they were made 20% better than the official spec and could squeeze more into each standard floppy.
mrlonglong 4y ago
How difficult would it be to start manufacturing new 3.5" floppies?
human 4y ago
I was sure this was going to speak of the floppy disk icon for saving; not the actual floppy disks!
- Tor3 4y ago
  I have recently seen some weird icons which I couldn't understand at first, in some software.. turned out it tried to depict a USB thumb drive, and meant "save". So someone, at least, is trying to replace the floppy disk icon. If that's an actual improvement I'm not so sure about.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
I prefer to retrofit old equipment with more reliable technology. Highly recommend Keir Fraser's Flash Floppy project: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy =)
- snvzz 4y ago
  To still be able to read/write floppies proper with modern computers, handling custom formats, the excellent GreaseWeazle, also Keir Fraser's: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
dehrmann 4y ago
I recently saw the Sony MSAC-FD2MA. It's a memory stick to floppy adapter. I assume an SD to memory stick adapter would work with it. I'm curious how it works internally. How does it interface with the read/write head? How does it map logical data (files, FS) to sectors and tracks? Or if it doesn't, how does it even map a flat image file? Floppies can be formatted all sorts of ways.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xmodem 4y ago
  It uses the magnetic head of the floppy drive for IO. Devices like that don't function without the correct driver and are thus unsuitable for embedded devices.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
Why should old things always die if there is a demand and they are working fine for intended purposes? Let there be a cottage industry selling a single new floppy disk to upgrade flight software for $999, beats buying a new airplane. If we lost ability to make previously commonplace objects in limited quantity when needed, that's not good for our economy, environment or preserving entire cultural legacy of our civilization. Resurgence of vinyl is a great example of what can be accomplished in consumer space. Making floppies available as long as expensive machine need these could do same for enterprise.
- anaganisk 4y ago
  The real question is, do shareholders see it as an advantage or profitable?? Isn't that the final question for every industry? We can't even have good things that are relevant today because of unlimited growth expectations.
ibcj 4y ago
I still have a sheet of the write-protect tabs for 5.25" floppies that I, for some unknown reason, refuse to throw away. I have one flash drive that I stuck a tab on ages ago for giggles (I didn't want to lose the contents until I got it replicated), and it still makes me smile. I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Fond memories of the ‘true’ floppy 5.25” what an upgrade that was from cassette tape for me!
  - ibcj 4y ago
    PRESS PLAY ON TAPE. I also think I still have a 5.25" notcher that I couldn't bring myself to let go of. I promise I don't have THAT MUCH shit sitting around...
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      ah the notcher!!
unxdfa 4y ago
I had a weird dream last night that my M1 MacBook Pro had a 5 1/4” floppy drive still. No idea why or what brought that on but to wake up and read this was refreshing :)
kunley 4y ago
<nostalgia> OMG, who would think that when 1541 floppy drive was a luxury solution to the storage problem!
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
Fun fact, the disk material of a floppy disk is a really good poorman IR filter, I had a lot of fun building a janky wiimote clone for my kids to play with, using a makeshift IR filter from floppy disks?
RobotToaster 4y ago
There's still no cheap easy way to just physically hand someone data the way you could a floppy. It's a shame.
- cubefox 4y ago
  Smaller (≤16GB) MicroSD cards cost a few Euros, perhaps less than that in bulk. They are not quite as cheap as floppies were at some point. And not every device accepts them. There are also some very cheap USB sticks, though they usually come with older USB type A.
kloch 4y ago
> Davit Niazashvili, a maintenance manager at Geosky, a cargo airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia, still uses floppy disks to apply critical updates to two 36-year-old 747-200s, which were originally delivered to British Airways in 1987: GeoSky frequently lets youtubers film in the cockpit of their 747-200's. If you are a fan of the classic 747 steam gauge cockpits, these videos are priceless. Some examples: Classic Boeing 747-200 Clock Shop! Geo Sky Takeoff from Tbilisi, Georgia, to Frankfurt! https://youtu.be/JSKYoqVPtWw?t=88 https://youtu.be/JSKYoqVPtWw?t=88 BOEING 747-200 Takeoff | Less than 10 B747 Classic still flying now! https://youtu.be/O8AA_tkY49g?t=503 https://youtu.be/O8AA_tkY49g?t=503
steponlego 4y ago
I'm going to ramp up my floppy hoarding now. Years ago I started hoarding Type II and Type IV cassette tapes, and I've 10x'd my investment on those easy. I don't have to even do anything and they just keep going up in value. That Florian guy they quoted sounds like a real dick, too.
HelixEndeavor 4y ago
lol to the guy accusing floppy disks of being "plastic waste." As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were. On a more serious note, wouldn't most of these machines be well served by floppy disk emulators? Or is the barrier to entry there the modicum of technical know-how needed to interface with those properly.
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  > As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were. For floppy-sized pieces of data, a typical SSD will afford you literally several billions of write cycles [0] until the media fails. In comparison, a floppy disk manufactured in the 00s is going to fail after five write cycles. I can see how one would call that plastic waste. [0]: assuming SSD write lifetimes in the ballpark of single-digits PBW (petabytes written), which is a realistic value in 2023.

113 points by alexrustic 4y ago

Interesting to hear that floppies now get three uses before they die. I had the feeling they were getting worse and that confirms it.

jaclaz 4y ago

Hmmm. All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names): https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61 https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61

wkjagt 4y ago
Gotek are awesome. I use one in an old 486 and it works really well as a floppy drive replacement. Especially with the FlashFloppy firmware replacement.
- FredPret 4y ago
  You have a working 486? If I had one, I'd spin up Civ1 just for old times!
  - wkjagt 4y ago
    Yeah! A DX2 66Mhz, with a real mechanical hard drive, in a real beige case with a turbo button :D Some modern "amenities" I have are the gotek, and a CF Card to IDE adapter, so I can more easily copy files to it. I use it mostly for Borland C++, but also Solitaire in Windows 3.1. I also have an 8088, a 286 and a 386...
    - FredPret 4y ago
      That’s awesome. Is it a vintage drive as well? I wonder about the failure points - CMOS battery meltdown, moving parts. If you can eliminate these, you can probably run that 486 for life.
AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
as soon as I saw the article title I figured someone had figured out a simple/cheap emulation solution and the comments would link to it. Thanks! They seem super cheap on ebay too https://www.ebay.com/itm/364063791560 https://www.ebay.com/itm/364063791560
abruzzi 4y ago
gotek is fine if your device uses FAT formatted floppies. If your device has a custom format, you need an HxC drive or HxC firmware fr a Gotek drive. Also, I have some devices that don't use standard 34 pin floppy connectors so I had to learn Kicad to build 26 to 34 pin adapters. All of my floppy using devices are synthesizers or samplers, and keeping them around is not a matter of not being able to afford to upgrade, but rather than many of these devices have very unique sounds that aren't replicated by newer equipment.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >If your device has a custom format, you need an HxC drive or HxC firmware fr a Gotek drive. It used to be the case. Nowadays, the Open Source FlashFloppy firmware will handle any custom format, including the HFE formats HxC use.
askvictor 4y ago
I was imagining something like a cassette tape->line in adapter like used to be common go play your ipod through your car stereo. I.e. something that would emulate the actual disk, not the disk drive.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful. You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.

johnwalkr 4y ago
There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  The obsolete format I’ve most recently gotten into is VHS tape. Used decks go for $10 or $20 at our reuse center, you can buy prerecorded tapes for 50 cents. If a deck fails or a tape gets pulled you won’t feel so bad. Decks from 2000 or so are solidly better than they were in the 1980s, particularly they all support HiFi sound which is excellent. The quality is not so good as a DVD or Blu-Ray but a good movie on VHS is still a good movie.
  - jccalhoun 4y ago
    Getting the best quality out of VHS is a rabbit hole I went down last year. There are a couple movies that I have that weren't released in any format besides VHS and I spent quite a lot of time trying to get the best quality digital copy I could. There are a dozen or so (mostly s-vhs jvc) models that have circuitry to stabilize the images and they start at $300 on ebay.

causi 4y ago

There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.

jghn 4y ago
To this day I still once in a while hear something using the old Mac floppy drive reading noises to indicate "computer is doing something"
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future. I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.
- masfuerte 4y ago
  I've had several hard drives fail over the years. They all signalled their impending doom by making interesting noises so I never lost any data. When my SSD fails I think I'm going to miss the noises.
  - toast0 4y ago
    I've worked with lots of (enterprisy) hard drives and SSDs. The hard drive failure rate was easily 10x the rate of the SSDs, but the SSDs basically never gave symptoms of impending doom. They just disappeared from the data channel. We did have one group of drives that gave symptoms... 50% of the batch dropped dead within 2 weeks of entering service, a good number failed over the time it took to get the rest of them replaced. And one drive that had very poor throughput for several minutes did show SMART metrics that it was reallocating sectors, but we took it as a sign of death and replaced it; I think it might have worked fine once it calmed down, but we'll never know.

charles_f 4y ago

> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as soon as a better one like usb storage became available and prominent.

sys32768 4y ago
To be fair, a few years ago I bought 8" floppies for the Ohio Scientific system that had been in storage since the late 80s. One of the labels had a 1979 date on it. I sent them to a guy who writes the emulator for that system and three out of four were totally readable.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  three out of four were totally readable. This is probably fine for writing emulators, but it is not quite the reliability I expect from aviation!
TonyTrapp 4y ago
Yes, it does happen, but in my experience they are much more reliable than most people seem to remember. I've had a few floppies that couldn't even be salvaged by a reformat (as mentioned in the article), but I also have many more original 3.5" floppies from the 90s that are still perfectly readable, and without errors (I know that as they contain data with checksums). "Utterly unrealiable" isn't doing them justice.
- charles_f 4y ago
  I remember picking up floppies from the stack of "ok to erase" ones, and having one not formatting being a common occurrence. Certainly we were using them quite a bit and it was a while back, but still, reliability was nowhere near a USB stick as long as you don't buy the cheapest ones

DeathArrow 4y ago

https://archive.is/imS5p https://archive.is/imS5p

TonyTrapp 4y ago

> Following the rodeo incident, Necaise decided to finally upgrade, but not to an entirely new machine—just to a floppy-to-USB emulator. These devices cost around $275 each... That's odd. Gotek and similar emulators should be available for a tenth of that price. There are several variations though, so it smells to me like someone is reselling a Gotek "guaranteed to work" with a specific type of machine with a large markup.

squigg 4y ago
Happens in the SCSI emulator market as well - there is a company massively marking up SCSI emulators and praying on naive musicians. Which is fair enough given they set them up before sending them out, but it still irks my sense of fairness
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  You're right, I remember now seeing exactly that when researching SCSI2SD options. But the markup was never 10x.
  - squigg 4y ago
    Fair point - not 10x, just normally about 2-3x!
freerk 4y ago
yep, sounds like getting something for 21$ on Aliexpress (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832100710868.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832100710868.html) and selling it for >13x more.
Tor3 4y ago
Odd indeed. As far as I know the Gotek was invented exactly for use by embroidery machines, and the ads are everywhere. I tried entering "embroidery floppy emulator" into Google and an Amazon link for a $38 Gotek came up first (and, as we know, we can get it cheaper than that). But of course a few lines below there's a "floppyusbemulator.com" page with a $250 "Nalbantov" drive (which are sold for $175 elsewhere, and there are probably other variantes).

squigg 4y ago

My Akai S1000 sampler from the late 80s still has it's floppy drive, which I occasionally still use even though it has a modern SD-card based emulated SCSI hard disk as well. I could change the floppy to a Gotek USB drive, but I'm not interested I love using it. It triggers so many happy teen memories from my BBC B and Amiga!

humanistbot 4y ago

I read the article and it sounds like the floppy disk is dying and will die very soon. What a clickbait headline, but that's what to expect from Wired.

Overtonwindow 4y ago

Is there a company that refurbished floppy disks? I've got maybe 50 of them and wouldn't mind giving them to some rodeo, or company that still needs them.

Ancapistani 4y ago
That's an interesting idea. I tend to keep pretty much everything, at least for a while. I'd call myself a "hoarder", but really, I have a fairly decent system for categorization and storage, and clean everything out every couple of years and sell a lot of it online. I have a storage tote full of floppy disks - there have to be hundreds of them in there, though I've not counted. I think I'll go grab that box tonight and see if I can't sell them on eBay or something.
_tom_ 4y ago
Yes. See this article: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-standing-in-the-floppy-disk-business/ https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/we-spoke-with-the-last-person-s...
- _tom_ 4y ago
  TLDR; there's one company left selling ( and reselling floppies). And, yes, if you have old floppies in good condition you can donate them.

fuzzfactor 4y ago

One of only very few boot devices, I wouldn't want to be completely without.

wrycoder 4y ago
You can trust a floppy and its hardware. You can’t trust a flash drive - Bunny proved that.

dale_glass 4y ago

One of the things I wonder about in retrospect is why floppy drives remained at a static level of ability for the most part. I mean I know there were the LS120 and such things, but why wasn't there a manufacturer just pushing the tech a bit further? Like why not have a drive made with additional precision and capable of squeezing 3 MB into a floppy? Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?

pmontra 4y ago
There were 2.88" floppy disks, not mainstream. From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over. We had CD burners in every computer. Floppy disks were too unreliable compared to CDs and files were already too large. We had external hard disks and pen drives in the late 90s when USB was released. That was the end of floppy disks for backups. So, to answer your question, no time to do it. Every manufacturer was probably working on the next big technology and not on incrementally perfecting the floppy disk.
- forinti 4y ago
  The only time I ever saw a 2.88MB floppy drive was on a DEC machine circa 1990.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Yeah, but I recall that in the CD era, there were attempts to push the envelope. Like I do recall you could get 800 and even 900MB CDs and write past the normal end on standard CDs, because people figured that you can squeeze things a bit tighter and cut the corners a bit more here and there, and with the right drives that worked. I'm wondering why they didn't do that with floppy drives. It was definitely a thing on the software side with special formatting programs, but I don't recall it being a thing on the hardware side. Not in the sense of having new official upgrades like 2.88 MB, but drives advertising that they were made 20% better than the official spec and could squeeze more into each standard floppy.

mrlonglong 4y ago

How difficult would it be to start manufacturing new 3.5" floppies?

human 4y ago

I was sure this was going to speak of the floppy disk icon for saving; not the actual floppy disks!

Tor3 4y ago
I have recently seen some weird icons which I couldn't understand at first, in some software.. turned out it tried to depict a USB thumb drive, and meant "save". So someone, at least, is trying to replace the floppy disk icon. If that's an actual improvement I'm not so sure about.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

I prefer to retrofit old equipment with more reliable technology. Highly recommend Keir Fraser's Flash Floppy project: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy =)

snvzz 4y ago
To still be able to read/write floppies proper with modern computers, handling custom formats, the excellent GreaseWeazle, also Keir Fraser's: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

dehrmann 4y ago

I recently saw the Sony MSAC-FD2MA. It's a memory stick to floppy adapter. I assume an SD to memory stick adapter would work with it. I'm curious how it works internally. How does it interface with the read/write head? How does it map logical data (files, FS) to sectors and tracks? Or if it doesn't, how does it even map a flat image file? Floppies can be formatted all sorts of ways.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xmodem 4y ago
It uses the magnetic head of the floppy drive for IO. Devices like that don't function without the correct driver and are thus unsuitable for embedded devices.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago

Why should old things always die if there is a demand and they are working fine for intended purposes? Let there be a cottage industry selling a single new floppy disk to upgrade flight software for $999, beats buying a new airplane. If we lost ability to make previously commonplace objects in limited quantity when needed, that's not good for our economy, environment or preserving entire cultural legacy of our civilization. Resurgence of vinyl is a great example of what can be accomplished in consumer space. Making floppies available as long as expensive machine need these could do same for enterprise.

anaganisk 4y ago
The real question is, do shareholders see it as an advantage or profitable?? Isn't that the final question for every industry? We can't even have good things that are relevant today because of unlimited growth expectations.

ibcj 4y ago

I still have a sheet of the write-protect tabs for 5.25" floppies that I, for some unknown reason, refuse to throw away. I have one flash drive that I stuck a tab on ages ago for giggles (I didn't want to lose the contents until I got it replicated), and it still makes me smile. I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.

jamiek88 4y ago
Fond memories of the ‘true’ floppy 5.25” what an upgrade that was from cassette tape for me!
- ibcj 4y ago
  PRESS PLAY ON TAPE. I also think I still have a 5.25" notcher that I couldn't bring myself to let go of. I promise I don't have THAT MUCH shit sitting around...
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    ah the notcher!!

unxdfa 4y ago

I had a weird dream last night that my M1 MacBook Pro had a 5 1/4” floppy drive still. No idea why or what brought that on but to wake up and read this was refreshing :)

kunley 4y ago

<nostalgia> OMG, who would think that when 1541 floppy drive was a luxury solution to the storage problem!

DoingIsLearning 4y ago

Fun fact, the disk material of a floppy disk is a really good poorman IR filter, I had a lot of fun building a janky wiimote clone for my kids to play with, using a makeshift IR filter from floppy disks?

RobotToaster 4y ago

There's still no cheap easy way to just physically hand someone data the way you could a floppy. It's a shame.

cubefox 4y ago
Smaller (≤16GB) MicroSD cards cost a few Euros, perhaps less than that in bulk. They are not quite as cheap as floppies were at some point. And not every device accepts them. There are also some very cheap USB sticks, though they usually come with older USB type A.

kloch 4y ago

> Davit Niazashvili, a maintenance manager at Geosky, a cargo airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia, still uses floppy disks to apply critical updates to two 36-year-old 747-200s, which were originally delivered to British Airways in 1987: GeoSky frequently lets youtubers film in the cockpit of their 747-200's. If you are a fan of the classic 747 steam gauge cockpits, these videos are priceless. Some examples: Classic Boeing 747-200 Clock Shop! Geo Sky Takeoff from Tbilisi, Georgia, to Frankfurt! https://youtu.be/JSKYoqVPtWw?t=88 https://youtu.be/JSKYoqVPtWw?t=88 BOEING 747-200 Takeoff | Less than 10 B747 Classic still flying now! https://youtu.be/O8AA_tkY49g?t=503 https://youtu.be/O8AA_tkY49g?t=503

steponlego 4y ago

I'm going to ramp up my floppy hoarding now. Years ago I started hoarding Type II and Type IV cassette tapes, and I've 10x'd my investment on those easy. I don't have to even do anything and they just keep going up in value. That Florian guy they quoted sounds like a real dick, too.

HelixEndeavor 4y ago

lol to the guy accusing floppy disks of being "plastic waste." As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were. On a more serious note, wouldn't most of these machines be well served by floppy disk emulators? Or is the barrier to entry there the modicum of technical know-how needed to interface with those properly.

Hackbraten 4y ago
> As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were. For floppy-sized pieces of data, a typical SSD will afford you literally several billions of write cycles [0] until the media fails. In comparison, a floppy disk manufactured in the 00s is going to fail after five write cycles. I can see how one would call that plastic waste. [0]: assuming SSD write lifetimes in the ballpark of single-digits PBW (petabytes written), which is a realistic value in 2023.