3 ms·

The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" The things got so much better when our s

by theamk 4y ago

The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.

deleted 4y ago
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ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers. But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would open the .doc assignment file in notepad as binary, delete some random data, then save it to floppy. It would be 2-5 days till the professor would get back to you saying "the floppy you gave me was corrupted, please resubmit your work ASAP" and that gave us enough time to finish it. Thank you for your sacrifice floppies.
- shakow 4y ago
  I'm surprised this was your experience, because I lost many more USB thumbdrives (especially in the early 2000's) than I lost floppies.
  - patates 4y ago
    You mean lost, as in they got misplaced, right? I used to transfer files a lot with usb sticks and had one fail only once.
    - shakow 4y ago
      No, I mean lost as in “broke down”. I may be a statistical anomaly, but although modern USB sticks are pretty reliable, I experienced an awful track record w.r.t. the ones from the 2000's-2010's.
midoridensha 4y ago
What kind of crappy floppies were you using? In my experience, floppy disks were astoundingly reliable as long as they were handled correctly (and even when not), up until the late-90s when they became vestigial and manufacturing quality dropped. Back in the 8-bit micro days, they worked extremely well.
- tjoff 4y ago
  Hard disagree, peoples homework missing was a daily occurrence and frustration. Drives being out of alignment and incompatible with other drives common. Yes, floppys can work really, really well. But I haven't encountered anything since that wasn't orders of magnitude better in this department. Unfortunately we had to wait until usb-drives to become ubiquitous before we had a reliable way to transfer files between random computers.
- theamk 4y ago
  What kind of super floppy were you using? I remember my Z80 with TR-DOS and 5.25" floppy controller. We all dreaded that "Disk Error. Abort,Retry,Ignore?" message. That meant time to copy floppy again, and with just 48KB of RAM, there was a lot of floppy swaps to do this.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    I literally never saw problems with floppies with the Apple ][ or other micros of the time, or even with MS-DOS, up until the 1.44 became king and then people started moving to CD-Rs and other things. At that point, the drives became cheap junk (there were large, noticeable differences in the internals between a late-90s floppy drive and an early-90s one: much bigger and nicer motors for instance) and the media was terrible.
treeman79 4y ago
Spent time repairing computers in college. Replacing the disk drives was a very common task for lab computers. I managed to spend 3 hours assembly and disassembling this one machine before finally figure out that my test floppy had gone bad. Another one was this student whose assignments were constantly being erased. After watching him go through the motions of what he was doing, I asked him if his bracelet was magnetic. Problem solved.

by theamk 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers. But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would open the .doc assignment file in notepad as binary, delete some random data, then save it to floppy. It would be 2-5 days till the professor would get back to you saying "the floppy you gave me was corrupted, please resubmit your work ASAP" and that gave us enough time to finish it. Thank you for your sacrifice floppies.

shakow 4y ago
I'm surprised this was your experience, because I lost many more USB thumbdrives (especially in the early 2000's) than I lost floppies.
- patates 4y ago
  You mean lost, as in they got misplaced, right? I used to transfer files a lot with usb sticks and had one fail only once.
  - shakow 4y ago
    No, I mean lost as in “broke down”. I may be a statistical anomaly, but although modern USB sticks are pretty reliable, I experienced an awful track record w.r.t. the ones from the 2000's-2010's.

midoridensha 4y ago

What kind of crappy floppies were you using? In my experience, floppy disks were astoundingly reliable as long as they were handled correctly (and even when not), up until the late-90s when they became vestigial and manufacturing quality dropped. Back in the 8-bit micro days, they worked extremely well.

tjoff 4y ago
Hard disagree, peoples homework missing was a daily occurrence and frustration. Drives being out of alignment and incompatible with other drives common. Yes, floppys can work really, really well. But I haven't encountered anything since that wasn't orders of magnitude better in this department. Unfortunately we had to wait until usb-drives to become ubiquitous before we had a reliable way to transfer files between random computers.
theamk 4y ago
What kind of super floppy were you using? I remember my Z80 with TR-DOS and 5.25" floppy controller. We all dreaded that "Disk Error. Abort,Retry,Ignore?" message. That meant time to copy floppy again, and with just 48KB of RAM, there was a lot of floppy swaps to do this.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  I literally never saw problems with floppies with the Apple ][ or other micros of the time, or even with MS-DOS, up until the 1.44 became king and then people started moving to CD-Rs and other things. At that point, the drives became cheap junk (there were large, noticeable differences in the internals between a late-90s floppy drive and an early-90s one: much bigger and nicer motors for instance) and the media was terrible.

treeman79 4y ago

Spent time repairing computers in college. Replacing the disk drives was a very common task for lab computers. I managed to spend 3 hours assembly and disassembling this one machine before finally figure out that my test floppy had gone bad. Another one was this student whose assignments were constantly being erased. After watching him go through the motions of what he was doing, I asked him if his bracelet was magnetic. Problem solved.