4 ms·

> 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

> 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
  - TonyTrapp 4y ago
    Let's go revisit some USB sticks that hasn't been touched in 10-20 years though. Flash memory can also get unreliable if you don't access it for a prolonged time. SSDs should be powered on regularly to keep the data alive.
    - Tor3 4y ago
      Back when we started to use CDs for backups I was horrified when I found that in general those CDs started to become unreadable after only a year in storage. We never had any problems with original CDs (say, the tons of CDs that came with an SGI computer), but the consumer-type writable ones didn't last at all. I think the technology got better after some years, but I still wouldn't trust a writable CD or DVD to last. For flash, at least, they are actually spec'ed.. and they don't last. They can't. Every bit holds a charge.. which will dissipate, eventually.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        This is because commercial optical disks and recordable optical disks are actually completely different storage mediums. Commercial optical disks, as in the disks that you got when you bought games and movies and the like, are physically stamped. The data is recorded as physical pits that are stamped onto the disk from a master copy. That disk isn't degrading unless it suffers severe external physical damage. By contrast, recordable optical disks write their data using inks and dyes that are burned by a recording drive's laser. These inks and dyes can and will degrade over time, eventually leading to data loss.
        TonyTrapp 4y ago
        True in general but there are, as always, exceptions. Some more expensive recordable discs use really stable dyes and remain readable for a very long time. On the other hand, some commercially pressed discs also suffer from bit rot. I have some mid-90s CD-based games that have become partially unreadable due to that. Some CD pressing facilities are known to have produced lots of discs at certain times that are now faulty.
toast0 4y ago
If you bought floppy drives at the tail end of their run and disks at the tail end of their run, then yes. Everything was engineered good enough to work a couple times and that was it, because files were too big and 1.44mb wasn't enough; 2.88 was Japan only; people were moving on to zip drives or ls-120 drives (which were also quite good at reading 1.44 media), cd-rs sometimes, and usb mass storage (with drives that are now comically small... I think my first was 16 MB) If you had equipment from say 1990 and blank disks from then too and a reason to keep it running, it likely still is. Although floppy disk emulators are probably a reasonable retrofit in most applications.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  It goes both ways. Things at the tail end are also optimised for cost so extremely and they were valued so little by the users by then that the latest stuff is junk. It ends up being that some manufacturers made good stuff and some made junk, but you don't know which until much later. I have a batch of nos nameless 3.5" 720k I got from floppydisk.com that are basically all junk. Fail to even verify a format, or maybe succeeds once and then fails within 3 uses. I have other even older, actually labelled as single sided 3.5", but made by Basf that just run and run and run. In fact most 8" are even more reliable than any of the later versions because a lot of 8" machines spun the disks the entire time the machine was on. All day every day at work that disk is just grinding away... so they had to be good just to be usable at all.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  2.88 ED disks were available in the US. They were obscenely expensive and few stores carried them.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    2.88 was pushed by IBM with their PS/2 line that tried to push the clones out of the market and take over with their own, very expensive, and completely proprietary PC computers. They came with 2.88MB drives, but no one else adopted them, or most other technologies included in the PS/2 line. So the disks stayed expensive and uncommon, and went nowhere.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
Can't say I've ever experienced that. I use some 3.5" floppies that are nearly 40 years old now for some kit, and they work just fine.
wazoox 4y ago
Actually late floppies from the early 00s are terrible, but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible. I have a huge pile of floppies from 1988 to 1992 and they all work. Even HDD ones formatted as FDD, though it's not recommended, still work fine 30 years later. I have a 1987 Apple //c with a bunch of 5.25" floppies of the same period and they all work just fine : games, UCSD Pascal, utilities, Mouse Desk...
- Tor3 4y ago
  That's my experience as well. The ones that fail are 3.5" HD floppies (1.44MB). Over on the ctech mailing list an old-timer expert explained that it's basically because the 3.5" HD floppies are just above the density limit the medium and technology can handle, which is why the 720KB DD floppies are fine (and 1.2MB 5.25" ones are also fine), but the HD ones fail. I tried to recover all my floppies from the eighties and nineties, it went very well except for the 3.5" HD ones - couldn't recover a single one, whatever drives I used. From what I'm told the 8" ones should read fine too, we'll see.. I have many, and I have a drive, but I haven't got it set up yet.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    All the HD 3½" (90mm, dammit) floppies I have tried from around 1988-1995 work. They're formatted to Acorn ADFS at 1.6MB.
  - wazoox 4y ago
    In my experience old HDD floppies work quite fine really. But the ones made after 2000 failed en masse.
- bombolo 4y ago
  > but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible Not in my experience. Mine all failed.
  - wazoox 4y ago
    Maybe you had a bad drive or something? I didn't even stored them in very good conditions...
throwaway742 4y ago
It really came in handy though when I needed an extension on my homework. I would just intentionally corrupt the file, blame it on the floppy, and the teacher would give me an extra day to turn it in.
lenkite 4y ago
The floppy disks made in the 200x era are terrible. The ones in the 90s were amazingly reliable and work to even this day.
the_third_wave 4y ago
Newer floppies are unreliable. Older floppies of somewhat reputable brands are not nearly as bad as what people remember from the latter days of the floppy-era. They got their bad reputation from the deluge of throw-away bad quality disks and drives which hit the market around the dot.com boom.

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
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  Let's go revisit some USB sticks that hasn't been touched in 10-20 years though. Flash memory can also get unreliable if you don't access it for a prolonged time. SSDs should be powered on regularly to keep the data alive.
  - Tor3 4y ago
    Back when we started to use CDs for backups I was horrified when I found that in general those CDs started to become unreadable after only a year in storage. We never had any problems with original CDs (say, the tons of CDs that came with an SGI computer), but the consumer-type writable ones didn't last at all. I think the technology got better after some years, but I still wouldn't trust a writable CD or DVD to last. For flash, at least, they are actually spec'ed.. and they don't last. They can't. Every bit holds a charge.. which will dissipate, eventually.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      This is because commercial optical disks and recordable optical disks are actually completely different storage mediums. Commercial optical disks, as in the disks that you got when you bought games and movies and the like, are physically stamped. The data is recorded as physical pits that are stamped onto the disk from a master copy. That disk isn't degrading unless it suffers severe external physical damage. By contrast, recordable optical disks write their data using inks and dyes that are burned by a recording drive's laser. These inks and dyes can and will degrade over time, eventually leading to data loss.
      - TonyTrapp 4y ago
        True in general but there are, as always, exceptions. Some more expensive recordable discs use really stable dyes and remain readable for a very long time. On the other hand, some commercially pressed discs also suffer from bit rot. I have some mid-90s CD-based games that have become partially unreadable due to that. Some CD pressing facilities are known to have produced lots of discs at certain times that are now faulty.

toast0 4y ago

If you bought floppy drives at the tail end of their run and disks at the tail end of their run, then yes. Everything was engineered good enough to work a couple times and that was it, because files were too big and 1.44mb wasn't enough; 2.88 was Japan only; people were moving on to zip drives or ls-120 drives (which were also quite good at reading 1.44 media), cd-rs sometimes, and usb mass storage (with drives that are now comically small... I think my first was 16 MB) If you had equipment from say 1990 and blank disks from then too and a reason to keep it running, it likely still is. Although floppy disk emulators are probably a reasonable retrofit in most applications.

Brian_K_White 4y ago
It goes both ways. Things at the tail end are also optimised for cost so extremely and they were valued so little by the users by then that the latest stuff is junk. It ends up being that some manufacturers made good stuff and some made junk, but you don't know which until much later. I have a batch of nos nameless 3.5" 720k I got from floppydisk.com that are basically all junk. Fail to even verify a format, or maybe succeeds once and then fails within 3 uses. I have other even older, actually labelled as single sided 3.5", but made by Basf that just run and run and run. In fact most 8" are even more reliable than any of the later versions because a lot of 8" machines spun the disks the entire time the machine was on. All day every day at work that disk is just grinding away... so they had to be good just to be usable at all.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
2.88 ED disks were available in the US. They were obscenely expensive and few stores carried them.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  2.88 was pushed by IBM with their PS/2 line that tried to push the clones out of the market and take over with their own, very expensive, and completely proprietary PC computers. They came with 2.88MB drives, but no one else adopted them, or most other technologies included in the PS/2 line. So the disks stayed expensive and uncommon, and went nowhere.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

Can't say I've ever experienced that. I use some 3.5" floppies that are nearly 40 years old now for some kit, and they work just fine.

wazoox 4y ago

Actually late floppies from the early 00s are terrible, but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible. I have a huge pile of floppies from 1988 to 1992 and they all work. Even HDD ones formatted as FDD, though it's not recommended, still work fine 30 years later. I have a 1987 Apple //c with a bunch of 5.25" floppies of the same period and they all work just fine : games, UCSD Pascal, utilities, Mouse Desk...

Tor3 4y ago
That's my experience as well. The ones that fail are 3.5" HD floppies (1.44MB). Over on the ctech mailing list an old-timer expert explained that it's basically because the 3.5" HD floppies are just above the density limit the medium and technology can handle, which is why the 720KB DD floppies are fine (and 1.2MB 5.25" ones are also fine), but the HD ones fail. I tried to recover all my floppies from the eighties and nineties, it went very well except for the 3.5" HD ones - couldn't recover a single one, whatever drives I used. From what I'm told the 8" ones should read fine too, we'll see.. I have many, and I have a drive, but I haven't got it set up yet.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  All the HD 3½" (90mm, dammit) floppies I have tried from around 1988-1995 work. They're formatted to Acorn ADFS at 1.6MB.
- wazoox 4y ago
  In my experience old HDD floppies work quite fine really. But the ones made after 2000 failed en masse.
bombolo 4y ago
> but old floppies from the 80s and early 90s are nearly indestructible Not in my experience. Mine all failed.
- wazoox 4y ago
  Maybe you had a bad drive or something? I didn't even stored them in very good conditions...

throwaway742 4y ago

It really came in handy though when I needed an extension on my homework. I would just intentionally corrupt the file, blame it on the floppy, and the teacher would give me an extra day to turn it in.

lenkite 4y ago

The floppy disks made in the 200x era are terrible. The ones in the 90s were amazingly reliable and work to even this day.

the_third_wave 4y ago

Newer floppies are unreliable. Older floppies of somewhat reputable brands are not nearly as bad as what people remember from the latter days of the floppy-era. They got their bad reputation from the deluge of throw-away bad quality disks and drives which hit the market around the dot.com boom.