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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 no
by 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 agoHard 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 agoWhat 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 agoI 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.