5 ms·

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

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.
  - toast0 4y ago
    You having a fancy drive that could write more data isn't super useful unless other drives are likely to be able to read it. Looks like there was some softwarw [1] to jam more data onto disks, and Microsoft used an advanced format for software distribution on floppies as well. I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the 80/90 minute cds came several years later. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)
    - anthk 4y ago
      I used both zip and split.
  - mkl 4y ago
    Most floppy drives were like that. I mostly formatted my nominally 1.44MB disks to 1.72MB (the "unformatted capacity" is 2MB). It worked so reliably on different drives that Microsoft distributed software on disks formatted this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format (it says there that they were harder to copy, but that's not my experience, and MS operating systems supported them directly from about the mid 1990s).
- anthk 4y ago
  You forgot something. For small documents, the fd was the king. Burning a CD for small data was a waste, and damn slow.
komadori 4y ago
There were extra-high density floppy disks which held 2.88 MB. However, as with the change from double density to high density, it required a different magnetic coating on the media to work (reliably).
bawolff 4y ago
I suspect there just wasn't as much interest once CD-Rs and high (ish) speed internet became mainstream.
ianburrell 4y ago
I think they were limited by the medium. If there was more capacity, we would have seen bigger sizes. Instead, they jumped to LS120 (SuperDisk) and Zip Disk. I think tracking was problem, hence the optical tracking SuperDisk. Zip drive was more like hard drive, with rigid platter and cover.
Tor3 4y ago
"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?" For floppies: Yes. It wouldn't help to use better precision. The medium itself can't handle that kind of density. 3.5" floppy drives actually went over the limit with 1.44MB ones - they fail when kept in storage for some years. Much much more than 720KB floppies.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  360K disks also last longer than 1.2M. Nearly all of my HeathKit Z89 disks from ‘79 are perfectly fine, and only a handful of 1.2M disks from the mid-80s are okay.

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.
- toast0 4y ago
  You having a fancy drive that could write more data isn't super useful unless other drives are likely to be able to read it. Looks like there was some softwarw [1] to jam more data onto disks, and Microsoft used an advanced format for software distribution on floppies as well. I felt like there was a pretty good amount of time between when cd-rom was widely available and when cd burning was reasonably priced. And the 80/90 minute cds came several years later. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)
  - anthk 4y ago
    I used both zip and split.
- mkl 4y ago
  Most floppy drives were like that. I mostly formatted my nominally 1.44MB disks to 1.72MB (the "unformatted capacity" is 2MB). It worked so reliably on different drives that Microsoft distributed software on disks formatted this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format (it says there that they were harder to copy, but that's not my experience, and MS operating systems supported them directly from about the mid 1990s).
anthk 4y ago
You forgot something. For small documents, the fd was the king. Burning a CD for small data was a waste, and damn slow.

komadori 4y ago

There were extra-high density floppy disks which held 2.88 MB. However, as with the change from double density to high density, it required a different magnetic coating on the media to work (reliably).

bawolff 4y ago

I suspect there just wasn't as much interest once CD-Rs and high (ish) speed internet became mainstream.

ianburrell 4y ago

I think they were limited by the medium. If there was more capacity, we would have seen bigger sizes. Instead, they jumped to LS120 (SuperDisk) and Zip Disk. I think tracking was problem, hence the optical tracking SuperDisk. Zip drive was more like hard drive, with rigid platter and cover.

Tor3 4y ago

"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?" For floppies: Yes. It wouldn't help to use better precision. The medium itself can't handle that kind of density. 3.5" floppy drives actually went over the limit with 1.44MB ones - they fail when kept in storage for some years. Much much more than 720KB floppies.

BirAdam 4y ago
360K disks also last longer than 1.2M. Nearly all of my HeathKit Z89 disks from ‘79 are perfectly fine, and only a handful of 1.2M disks from the mid-80s are okay.