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People who won't give up floppy disks
- greenbit 2y agoJust think of them as tangible icons for the items they contain.
- AshamedCaptain 2y agoAren't they exaggerating a bit? You can go to Amazon and buy 3.5'' floppy 10 packs, and a USB UFI drive...
- alchemist1e9 2y agoThere is a lot of options too, for both drives and disk packs, and inexpensive. I wonder who is using them mostly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y agoMany many years ago I read an observation that men tend to keep unchanged into their later years the hairstyle that they happened to have in the period of the lives when their were the happiest. I think that probably applies to things other than hairstyle, like storage media :-) I have tried to analyze about myself in which aspects of life I'm doing the same thing. It's not true for hair/clothing styles or tech. But surely I'm not so unique that I'm immune to this effect? I wonder if this phenomenon can also manifest in more subtle ways, e.g. you keep the slang from the time when you were the happiest, or the ideology, or etc. Might be true about music, I seemed to have stopped evolving in my music taste unless when I put in deliberate effort (which I rarely do, because I don't think it's something worth optimizing form).
- lotrjohn 2y agoPerhaps this explains why I have a collection of over 10 CRT television sets squirrelled away in the various corners of my house…yes, I know it’s a sickness.
- jjgreen 2y agoZip drives FTW
- bombcar 2y agoClick. Click. Click.
- SomeoneFromCA 2y agoNothing bets a hardrive wrapped in a blanket, in case you accidentally hit or drop the bag you put it in. This is how we did in my university, in late 1990s.
- SanjayMehta 2y agoJazz drives FTL Literally threw one against a wall to destroy it and never get tempted to use one ever again. Went back to a 150Mb QIC tape drive for a while thanks to Jazz. The stuff of nightmares.
- nubinetwork 2y agoJaz was really that bad? I've been pondering buying a scsi one for my retro PC.
- hypercube33 2y agominidisk or superdisk ftw
- SanjayMehta 2y agoLook up the Jaz drive click of death. It was in a class of its own.
- projektfu 2y agoHeadline: these people who use floppy disks are obsolete but not gone.
- Euphorbium 2y agoGive me petabyte sized floppies, they were peak user experience. Microsd is too easy to lose.
- masklinn 2y agoNVMe SSDs in USB enclosures is probably what you’re looking for. I assume tool-less enclosures exist if you don’t want to buy multiple.
- mrob 2y agoI miss the predictability of floppy disks. Assuming it was manufactured correctly, a floppy disk would always act like every other floppy disk. You could look at it and see everything there was to see. It didn't have firmware with mysterious origins and capabilities. If you bought a floppy disk from a reputable manufacturer and it failed, it was usually your own fault. Modern flash drives fail for inscrutable reasons, and that makes them more stressful to work with.
- doubloon 2y agoi remember differently you buy 1.2 and accodentally stick in a 360 or was it vice versa… and things dint work right. Diff drives had diff head widths. Also apple vs commodore vs pc vs mac. Then there was dust and untecoverable read errors
- mrob 2y agoI remember floppy disks failing, but mostly things like free AOL trial disks I repurposed by covering the write protect hole. I assume those were the cheapest they could find. The major brand name ones generally worked reliably.
- Rinzler89 2y agoFloppy disks were anything but predictable. My mom was at a public office where they would get data on floppy disks, and read issues were super common and reliability was really hit or miss, data corruption, sector errors, you name it.
- 2y ago
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI was surprised the story claimed that 3.5" disks weren't "floppy", just based on their external shell. EDIT: Back when they were in common use, I remember that computer people generally called them "3.5 inch floppy disks", and non-computer called them "hard disks". Which caused some initial confusion because computer people meant something else by "hard disk". It looks like there's still some debate about the ambiguity of the terms: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335352/what-s-so-floppy-about-floppy-disks https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/335352/what-s-so...
- nullhole 2y agoWell, 5 1/4" disks were floppy on the inside & outside, so compared with them, 3.5" disks weren't floppy. To me, at least, the name 'floppy disk' already felt like an anachronism, even in the heyday of 3.5" disks.
- temp0826 2y agoI don't think they were as long-lived as their brethren, but can't forget about the extra floppy 8-inchers!
- drewzero1 2y agoI found one of those in a folder at work a few months ago and was surprised how extra-floppy it was. I grew up with mostly 3 1/2” diskettes and some 5 1/4” disks, so the "floppy" name always seemed like a bit of a stretch. Seeing an 8" disk really made more sense why they called it that. (Eight inches was a really clever size for storage in a paper-based office environment... It fits just right in a spot meant for a sheet of letter or A4!)
- julian_t 2y agoA South African colleague of mine reasoned that if 5.25" disks were "floppies", then the 3.5" ones must be "stiffies". Somehow this never caught on at work.
- DontBreakAlex 2y agoIf it works, don't fix it
- fxj 2y agoFor legacy hardware (synths, samplers) there are not many options when the company who produced them is out of business like E-mu or Ensoniq. I have 2 of these old keyboards and now I am trying to replace the floppy und SCSI drives with something more modern. For floppys there is the Gotek FlashFloppy which replaces the floppy drive with a USB adapter. But it is a mess to install it. Also it does not work with all legacy synths. For SCSI there exists the RaSCSI solution which is a Raspi nano or pico which emulates a SCSI drive. https://studio-services.de/produkt/gotek-flashfloppy-extra-grosses-oled-display-rotary-encoder-beige/ https://studio-services.de/produkt/gotek-flashfloppy-extra-g... https://studio-services.de/produkt/zuluscsi-rp2040-mini/ https://studio-services.de/produkt/zuluscsi-rp2040-mini/
- jmclnx 2y agoWhen this comes up, I always mention I like the convenience of diskettes and the fact they were rather cheap. I had no issues giving or mailing someone a diskette and never getting the media back. CDs/DVDs are a PITA to write, plus most are write once. Plus you cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as a box of diskettes were. These days, with flash drives, I would want the media back. Back then, documents would fit on 1 diskette, now documents created with office applications are at best multi-MB, some approaching 1 gig. Yes there is email and things, but I know some lawyers who like to distribute documents on brand new physical media because for them, encryption is hard and their clients have no clue about encryption. So they buy flash drives for that these days.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoStrange flashdrives are also a bit sketchy. I know there were diskette-viruses, but you can straight up fry a computer with a flash drive that has been tampered with. USB in general doesn't really seem to be designed with security in mind.
- tentacleuno 2y ago> you can straight up fry a computer with a flash drive that has been tampered with. USB in general doesn't really seem to be designed with security in mind. I don't think it's fair to claim USB is insecure because you can buy accessories that charge a capacitor bank over the 5V, and then feed that back to the computer. That could be solved by using an isolated hub to host USB devices, like the Spectra 3022. Then again, if you have equipment that expensive, I hope you're not plugging random stuff into it...
- temp0826 2y agoI wonder if there's a market for USB hubs with breakers/fuses to protect against this. Probably only security researchers plugging in known-sketchy things though.
- 2y ago
- forinti 2y agoSomeone put a floppy icon on our intranet not long ago. I looked at it and sensed it was wrong. It was a bottom-side view and the dented corner was on the right. It's become an abstract symbol. Young people don't ever see the real thing.
- rm445 2y agoPeople might remember the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input, that you could use to play music from other sources on a tape-only car stereo.Does something similar exist for legacy floppy drives? Like a fake floppy with a micro SD card slotted in. Packing it into an actual diskette might be challenging - I guess you'd need to read an encoder on the rotation. Perhaps if you had some legacy musical or scientific instrument with a tape drive you'd be better swapping out the whole drive with something that presented as a floppy drive to the device?
- amelius 2y ago> Packing it into an actual diskette might be challenging - I guess you'd need to read an encoder on the rotation. Wasn't the rotational speed more or less fixed?
- crtasm 2y agoI see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath but it required a device driver.
- proamdev123 2y ago> the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input It was called a “cassette adapter” (for anyone interested in looking it up).
- jayofdoom 2y agoA device like this exists for Apple II floppy emulation. I've not seen one for PCs, and modeling it as a floppy would have significant downsides to the alternative, just modeling it as a removable (hard) drive
- xjlin0 2y agoDoes BART still use them?
- kkfx 2y agoNot so adherent to the article topic but more related to the title: I suspect a large number of people is incapable to evolve, no matter what. They have learnt something and they want to keep that for their entire life, no matter if it's good or not, no matter if better options are available or not. This is a damn issue because it means we need to squeeze many out of the society anytime we want to evolve.
- porkbeer 2y agoThe issue is less 'evolving', than the fact that humans are terrible, some posit wholly incapable, of UNlearning things. Learning new things is easy within our established models, but outside a reality-translation device, transgressing things we "know", is still subconscuiously verboten to even the most open-minded of us.
- SteveMoody73 2y agoIt's probably more nostalga than anythng but I do sometimes miss the sound of floppy drives and hard drives. With modern computers there is usually no disk activity indicators and silent drives. I was working on restoring an old Amiga 500 recenty and the sound of a game booting off disk is so satisfying.
- asjo 2y agoThe FS-UAE emulator (https://fs-uae.net/ https://fs-uae.net/) emits the familiar grinding floppy disk sounds of Amigas, if you need a hit without getting the old hardware out :-) I was surprised by the sounds while trying "Little Computer People" for a nostalgia trip after reading "Hacking Little Computer People on the Amiga" (http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/hacking-little-computer-people-on-the-amiga http://www.jaruzel.com/blog/hacking-little-computer-people-o...) last summer.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- abruzzi 2y agoLike the musician in the story, I have many synthesizers with floppy drives. I love the synth, but not the floppies. I keep floppies around because I have to in order to keep the synth operable, but I am slowly changing the floppies out of floppy emulators. At $100 a pop it’s slow going.
- porkbeer 2y agoMany of that era might do better with sysex dumps for most of the things floppies do. Still kinda slow but no media to futz with.
- joshu 2y ago[flagged]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoOf interest: a book interviewing more of these "people who won't give up": Floppy Disk Fever, 2022. https://www.onomatopee.net/product/floppy-disk-fever/ https://www.onomatopee.net/product/floppy-disk-fever/
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoLet's not forget the floppotron: https://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/ https://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/