6 ms·

Origins of the 3.5in Floppy Disk [video]

106 points by zdw 3y ago

ksec 3y ago
You know we say magnetic media dont last but my 5.25" Floppy Disk are still readable last time I tested it in 2020 during COVID when I was too bored at home. I have some 8" but the computer that had it wouldn't turn on anymore. The PC with 5.25" and 3.5" still does. Not the same could be said about CD though. CDs that were pressed are still ok, not so much for burned CD-R. Most of them are full or errors when reading it.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > not so much for burned CD-R. Most of them are full or errors when reading it. David Rosenthal tests this periodically. Most recently he tested in August. Notice the first sentence of the quote: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-update.html https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat... > The drives I use from ASUS and LG report read errors from the CDs but verify the MD5s correctly. I didn't notice them reporting any read errors from the DVDs. An off-brand drive fails to read the CDs, but read one of the older DVDs with no read errors. > Surprisingly, with no special storage precautions, generic low-cost media, and consumer drives, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 19 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 17 years old. Your mileage may vary. Tune in again next year for another episode. > Last year I found a NetBSD1.2 CD dating from October 1996 whose cksum(1) checksums all verified correctly despite a few read errors. That CD was still delivering good data after nearly 26 years, but this year a couple of the checksums failed.
  - gattilorenz 3y ago
    That's my experience as well. I recently imaged - a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 - my own collection of stuff downloaded or backed up around 2003-2004; most of it on Verbatim DVDs, but some on CD-R or CD-RW (likely also from Verbatim) I had very few read errors, and it was impressive especially considering it's more than 50 CDs and that I never payed too much attention to how they were stored. Most of the computer magazine CDs were stored directly in a "cardboard sleeve", not even one of those plastic/paper ones...
    - zozbot234 3y ago
      > a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 Please upload these disc images to Internet Archive if not included already, so that they can be preserved for the future. Downloads which used to be publicly available might be worthwhile too, but it could be more of a challenge to sort these out.
      - gattilorenz 3y ago
        That’s exactly why I imaged those in the first place :) Well, that, and to relive those years, find the games included in those magazines and finally play them on a Voodoo 2 instead of a poor S3 Virge…
        qingcharles 3y ago
        Thank you for doing this. Someone had uploaded a cover CD from 1994 recently and I was able to download my first piece of commercial software :)
    - ksec 3y ago
      >- a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 I still have lots of those as well from the early 90s! Mostly PC Gamer ( UK ) and some other computer magazine. I need to find a weekend and archive those. But a little sad as more than half of my CD-Rs have problems. May be I need to get a new external DVD reader just to test it out again see so many people have no problems with their CDs.
      - gattilorenz 3y ago
        Yes, try using a more recent drive. Especially laptop drives are particularly prone to issues, in my experience.
- Tor3 3y ago
  My 5.25" ones from the mid-eighties are still readable. As far as I can tell the 8" ones are as well, though I haven't tested many of them. But their density is low, which helps a lot. And that's also why none of my 3.5" 1.44MB floppies are readable - the density is a bit too high for what's feasible for that physical medium. I don't know about later ones, but early CD-R easily failed after less than a year back when I tried to use them as backup media. I quickly abandoned the idea of using them as backup.
- Zardoz84 3y ago
  My 3.5 floppy disks from early 90's keeps being fine. I a few months ago, I installed the demo of Hallowen Harry, and the Commander Keen 4 copy that comes with the Gravis Game pad, in a 486 without issues.
- plastic3169 3y ago
  From seeing everyone still archiving on magnetic tape I was under the impression that magnetic media was the gold standard for long time storage.
jimt1234 3y ago
I heard that 3.5" disks were originally marketed as "stiffies" to help differentiate them from "floppies", the older 5.25" and 8" disks. But, as the story goes, someone pulled the plug for obvious reasons. Not sure if that's true; I want it to be true because it's hilarious, though.
- biugbkifcjk 3y ago
  Cathode Ray Dude recently put out a new video on YouTube and mentions "stiffys" in that too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lUhDo7euPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lUhDo7euPs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffy_disk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffy_disk
jerriep 3y ago
Fun fact: In South Africa we called these a "stiffy" because it was so rigid compared to the 5¼-inch floppy.
- tomxor 3y ago
  :D Hah perfect, I can totally imagine that with the SA accent... and frankly more logical, I never got why they were called floppy disks in most of the world considering their predecessors.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Because by the time the 3.5s came out, "floppy" had become a word meaning "removable" instead of "bendy" - the alternative being "hard disks" which were fixed storage (internal or external).
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      No, the media of the 3½” was just as floppy as the media that was the source of the name for 5¼” and 8” floppies. It was never about the outer casing for any of them.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    They (and their 8" and 5¼" predecessors) were called floppy disks because of the disc of storage media within the outer casing, not because of the casing which was not particularly floppy for the 8” and 5¼” versions, and rather rigid for the 3½” version.
    - roywashere 3y ago
      I thought the 5 1/4s were called floppy disks and the 3 1/2s were called diskettes, at least by the people around me, don’t know if that is a Dutch thing or not
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 3y ago
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chx 3y ago
https://ajovomultja.hu/mcd-1-casette-floppy-marcell-janosi?language=en https://ajovomultja.hu/mcd-1-casette-floppy-marcell-janosi?l... The rigid floppy was invented in Hungary in 1973, patented in 1974 but only in Hungary and Sony have stolen the idea.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  Worth noting the inventors in Hungary weren't capable of manufacturing it until the early 1980s. Sony released their version in 1981.
  - chx 3y ago
    They manufactured it starting 1979 -- but they were ready by 1975. It was just politics. The Japanese visited Járosi for the prototype many times and made a gazillion photos. There's zero doubt where the idea came from. As far as I am aware, Sony have officially recognized the idea came from Járosi and Járosi have acknowledged Sony's actual drive has improved on his.
hgjjugtyh 3y ago
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hgjjugtyh 3y ago
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rwmj 3y ago
It's a shame that he glosses over 3" disks. They were widely used in the UK of all places throughout the 1980s because Amstrad selected them for their Z80-based office systems. I'd love to know what cheap deal Alan Sugar got with Hitachi to offload old stock that made this happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW
- einr 3y ago
  Not just the Amstrad PCW series, but also the Amstrad CPC home computers as well as the ZX Spectrum +3 (produced after Amstrad bought Sinclair)
- AkBKukU 3y ago
  (I'm the video author) The focus was more on how the Sony drive became the standard and less about all the competing formats. The CFD was the only serious competition and, in the US at least, it never reached the levels of putting up a fight like the ZipDisk vs. SuperDisk or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. The Amstrad was the only system OEM I found that really used it, so while it did have some market it definitely wasn't wide spread to other systems like the BBC Micro, Acorn, or (Proper) Sinlcairs.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    Great video & channel BTW.
  - UncleSlacky 3y ago
    Tatung also used them on the Einstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatung_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatung_Einstein
meerita 3y ago
I can recollect possessing over 3,000 5.25-inch floppy disks, containing my entire software collection and files. Subsequently, my father procured a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, and I distinctly remember the considerable expense associated with these acquisitions. Nevertheless, their exceptional convenience for storage was undeniable. I believe I had the original Windows 95 and IBM OS/2 Warp on 3.5-inch disks; each installation required approximately 20 disks.
bajsejohannes 3y ago
I never knew these were actually 90mm, and not actually 3.5in. Surprising, since I'm in a metric country.
yodsanklai 3y ago
Suppose I pick my 30+ year old Amiga floppies from the basement. Any chance that there are still readable? what would be the simplest way to copy the content on a modern storage so I could inspect them on an emulator.
- snvzz 3y ago
  Most likely readable. Note that while GreaseWeazle is an awesome project, I have had more luck reading floppies with the actual Amiga. I suspect it would help to use a DD FDD like the one the Amiga has rather than an HD one.
- tymscar 3y ago
  Just buy a simple USB floppy drive for 15 bucks online. You can even connect it straight to the VM if you feel like it.
  - kiritanpo 3y ago
    A USB floppy drive won't read Amiga disks.
    - tymscar 3y ago
      You might like this: https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk
      - kiritanpo 3y ago
        That looks great, I was not aware this existed. However, considering you have to build your own custom Arduino board or be on the waiting list to buy one, it's a bit more complicated than "Just buy a simple USB floppy drive for 15 bucks online".
        snvzz 3y ago
        Better yet, GreaseWeazle[0]. 0. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/ https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/
cubefox 3y ago
This format was great initially, but it was hopelessly undersized after around ten years. It was a shame there was never a proper successor. The 1.44 MB double density were simply too little after many years, it wasn't even enough for a single DOC file with a few images. This created the situation where for a long time, it was a major pain to exchange small-to-medium sized files. A successor format with 10 to 50 MB capacity would have alleviated a lot of this pain. There were eventually "Zip disks" with 100 megabytes, but I think those were proprietary Iomega products and rather expensive, so normal PCs didn support them by default. Only when CD recorders became common, there was a replacement for floppy disks. But even these were suboptimal. They required cumbersome special software just to "burn" your CDs, since Windows didn't support them natively for several years. Moreover, it wasn't a format you could arbitrarily read and write data on. So it wasn't possible to just edit a file and save the changes, like on a floppy disk. And of course USB sticks often weren't a good solution either, since you wouldn't simply give your expensive thumbstick completely away without having to expect it back. Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments. To send and receive data, the smaller value of the sender/receiver was the bottleneck. (I think even today, Gmail only supports something like 50 megabytes.) Much later there was the so-called DVD-RAM, which worked similar to a floppy disk (arbitrary read/write), but it wasn't really a "DVD" -- normal DVD drives couldn't read it. So again no standard PCs supported it. I think it was also not exactly cheap, no doubt due to its unnecessarily large capacity of over 4 GB. Eventually the problem of exchanging files was solved again, after having been temporarily solved in the 80s with the 3.5 inch floppy. The solution today is uploading files to a free cloud provider like Google Drive, sharing the link, and deleting the file afterwards. It only took a few decades.
- bombcar 3y ago
  There was the SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk which saw some popularity in Asia. The real problem was the cost - the real key to floppies is you didn't care if you got it back (at the time people used them, very early on they were more pricey). So CDs did eventually replace them for sneakernet, and USB sticks have finally become cheap enough to be disposable.

106 points by zdw 3y ago

ksec 3y ago

You know we say magnetic media dont last but my 5.25" Floppy Disk are still readable last time I tested it in 2020 during COVID when I was too bored at home. I have some 8" but the computer that had it wouldn't turn on anymore. The PC with 5.25" and 3.5" still does. Not the same could be said about CD though. CDs that were pressed are still ok, not so much for burned CD-R. Most of them are full or errors when reading it.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> not so much for burned CD-R. Most of them are full or errors when reading it. David Rosenthal tests this periodically. Most recently he tested in August. Notice the first sentence of the quote: https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-update.html https://blog.dshr.org/2023/08/optical-media-durability-updat... > The drives I use from ASUS and LG report read errors from the CDs but verify the MD5s correctly. I didn't notice them reporting any read errors from the DVDs. An off-brand drive fails to read the CDs, but read one of the older DVDs with no read errors. > Surprisingly, with no special storage precautions, generic low-cost media, and consumer drives, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 19 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 17 years old. Your mileage may vary. Tune in again next year for another episode. > Last year I found a NetBSD1.2 CD dating from October 1996 whose cksum(1) checksums all verified correctly despite a few read errors. That CD was still delivering good data after nearly 26 years, but this year a couple of the checksums failed.
- gattilorenz 3y ago
  That's my experience as well. I recently imaged - a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 - my own collection of stuff downloaded or backed up around 2003-2004; most of it on Verbatim DVDs, but some on CD-R or CD-RW (likely also from Verbatim) I had very few read errors, and it was impressive especially considering it's more than 50 CDs and that I never payed too much attention to how they were stored. Most of the computer magazine CDs were stored directly in a "cardboard sleeve", not even one of those plastic/paper ones...
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    > a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 Please upload these disc images to Internet Archive if not included already, so that they can be preserved for the future. Downloads which used to be publicly available might be worthwhile too, but it could be more of a challenge to sort these out.
    - gattilorenz 3y ago
      That’s exactly why I imaged those in the first place :) Well, that, and to relive those years, find the games included in those magazines and finally play them on a Voodoo 2 instead of a poor S3 Virge…
      - qingcharles 3y ago
        Thank you for doing this. Someone had uploaded a cover CD from 1994 recently and I was able to download my first piece of commercial software :)
  - ksec 3y ago
    >- a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001 I still have lots of those as well from the early 90s! Mostly PC Gamer ( UK ) and some other computer magazine. I need to find a weekend and archive those. But a little sad as more than half of my CD-Rs have problems. May be I need to get a new external DVD reader just to test it out again see so many people have no problems with their CDs.
    - gattilorenz 3y ago
      Yes, try using a more recent drive. Especially laptop drives are particularly prone to issues, in my experience.
Tor3 3y ago
My 5.25" ones from the mid-eighties are still readable. As far as I can tell the 8" ones are as well, though I haven't tested many of them. But their density is low, which helps a lot. And that's also why none of my 3.5" 1.44MB floppies are readable - the density is a bit too high for what's feasible for that physical medium. I don't know about later ones, but early CD-R easily failed after less than a year back when I tried to use them as backup media. I quickly abandoned the idea of using them as backup.
Zardoz84 3y ago
My 3.5 floppy disks from early 90's keeps being fine. I a few months ago, I installed the demo of Hallowen Harry, and the Commander Keen 4 copy that comes with the Gravis Game pad, in a 486 without issues.
plastic3169 3y ago
From seeing everyone still archiving on magnetic tape I was under the impression that magnetic media was the gold standard for long time storage.

jimt1234 3y ago

I heard that 3.5" disks were originally marketed as "stiffies" to help differentiate them from "floppies", the older 5.25" and 8" disks. But, as the story goes, someone pulled the plug for obvious reasons. Not sure if that's true; I want it to be true because it's hilarious, though.

biugbkifcjk 3y ago
Cathode Ray Dude recently put out a new video on YouTube and mentions "stiffys" in that too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lUhDo7euPs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lUhDo7euPs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffy_disk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffy_disk

jerriep 3y ago

Fun fact: In South Africa we called these a "stiffy" because it was so rigid compared to the 5¼-inch floppy.

tomxor 3y ago
:D Hah perfect, I can totally imagine that with the SA accent... and frankly more logical, I never got why they were called floppy disks in most of the world considering their predecessors.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Because by the time the 3.5s came out, "floppy" had become a word meaning "removable" instead of "bendy" - the alternative being "hard disks" which were fixed storage (internal or external).
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    No, the media of the 3½” was just as floppy as the media that was the source of the name for 5¼” and 8” floppies. It was never about the outer casing for any of them.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  They (and their 8" and 5¼" predecessors) were called floppy disks because of the disc of storage media within the outer casing, not because of the casing which was not particularly floppy for the 8” and 5¼” versions, and rather rigid for the 3½” version.
  - roywashere 3y ago
    I thought the 5 1/4s were called floppy disks and the 3 1/2s were called diskettes, at least by the people around me, don’t know if that is a Dutch thing or not
    - dragonwriter 3y ago

hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 3y ago

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chx 3y ago

https://ajovomultja.hu/mcd-1-casette-floppy-marcell-janosi?language=en https://ajovomultja.hu/mcd-1-casette-floppy-marcell-janosi?l... The rigid floppy was invented in Hungary in 1973, patented in 1974 but only in Hungary and Sony have stolen the idea.

Symbiote 3y ago
Worth noting the inventors in Hungary weren't capable of manufacturing it until the early 1980s. Sony released their version in 1981.
- chx 3y ago
  They manufactured it starting 1979 -- but they were ready by 1975. It was just politics. The Japanese visited Járosi for the prototype many times and made a gazillion photos. There's zero doubt where the idea came from. As far as I am aware, Sony have officially recognized the idea came from Járosi and Járosi have acknowledged Sony's actual drive has improved on his.

hgjjugtyh 3y ago

[dead]

hgjjugtyh 3y ago

[dead]

rwmj 3y ago

It's a shame that he glosses over 3" disks. They were widely used in the UK of all places throughout the 1980s because Amstrad selected them for their Z80-based office systems. I'd love to know what cheap deal Alan Sugar got with Hitachi to offload old stock that made this happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW

einr 3y ago
Not just the Amstrad PCW series, but also the Amstrad CPC home computers as well as the ZX Spectrum +3 (produced after Amstrad bought Sinclair)
AkBKukU 3y ago
(I'm the video author) The focus was more on how the Sony drive became the standard and less about all the competing formats. The CFD was the only serious competition and, in the US at least, it never reached the levels of putting up a fight like the ZipDisk vs. SuperDisk or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD. The Amstrad was the only system OEM I found that really used it, so while it did have some market it definitely wasn't wide spread to other systems like the BBC Micro, Acorn, or (Proper) Sinlcairs.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Great video & channel BTW.
- UncleSlacky 3y ago
  Tatung also used them on the Einstein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatung_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatung_Einstein

meerita 3y ago

I can recollect possessing over 3,000 5.25-inch floppy disks, containing my entire software collection and files. Subsequently, my father procured a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, and I distinctly remember the considerable expense associated with these acquisitions. Nevertheless, their exceptional convenience for storage was undeniable. I believe I had the original Windows 95 and IBM OS/2 Warp on 3.5-inch disks; each installation required approximately 20 disks.

bajsejohannes 3y ago

I never knew these were actually 90mm, and not actually 3.5in. Surprising, since I'm in a metric country.

yodsanklai 3y ago

Suppose I pick my 30+ year old Amiga floppies from the basement. Any chance that there are still readable? what would be the simplest way to copy the content on a modern storage so I could inspect them on an emulator.

snvzz 3y ago
Most likely readable. Note that while GreaseWeazle is an awesome project, I have had more luck reading floppies with the actual Amiga. I suspect it would help to use a DD FDD like the one the Amiga has rather than an HD one.
tymscar 3y ago
Just buy a simple USB floppy drive for 15 bucks online. You can even connect it straight to the VM if you feel like it.
- kiritanpo 3y ago
  A USB floppy drive won't read Amiga disks.
  - tymscar 3y ago
    You might like this: https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk
    - kiritanpo 3y ago
      That looks great, I was not aware this existed. However, considering you have to build your own custom Arduino board or be on the waiting list to buy one, it's a bit more complicated than "Just buy a simple USB floppy drive for 15 bucks online".
      - snvzz 3y ago
        Better yet, GreaseWeazle[0]. 0. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/ https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle/

cubefox 3y ago

This format was great initially, but it was hopelessly undersized after around ten years. It was a shame there was never a proper successor. The 1.44 MB double density were simply too little after many years, it wasn't even enough for a single DOC file with a few images. This created the situation where for a long time, it was a major pain to exchange small-to-medium sized files. A successor format with 10 to 50 MB capacity would have alleviated a lot of this pain. There were eventually "Zip disks" with 100 megabytes, but I think those were proprietary Iomega products and rather expensive, so normal PCs didn support them by default. Only when CD recorders became common, there was a replacement for floppy disks. But even these were suboptimal. They required cumbersome special software just to "burn" your CDs, since Windows didn't support them natively for several years. Moreover, it wasn't a format you could arbitrarily read and write data on. So it wasn't possible to just edit a file and save the changes, like on a floppy disk. And of course USB sticks often weren't a good solution either, since you wouldn't simply give your expensive thumbstick completely away without having to expect it back. Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments. To send and receive data, the smaller value of the sender/receiver was the bottleneck. (I think even today, Gmail only supports something like 50 megabytes.) Much later there was the so-called DVD-RAM, which worked similar to a floppy disk (arbitrary read/write), but it wasn't really a "DVD" -- normal DVD drives couldn't read it. So again no standard PCs supported it. I think it was also not exactly cheap, no doubt due to its unnecessarily large capacity of over 4 GB. Eventually the problem of exchanging files was solved again, after having been temporarily solved in the 80s with the 3.5 inch floppy. The solution today is uploading files to a free cloud provider like Google Drive, sharing the link, and deleting the file afterwards. It only took a few decades.

bombcar 3y ago
There was the SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk which saw some popularity in Asia. The real problem was the cost - the real key to floppies is you didn't care if you got it back (at the time people used them, very early on they were more pricey). So CDs did eventually replace them for sneakernet, and USB sticks have finally become cheap enough to be disposable.