5 ms·

Going in the other direction, prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk) there was the (already rare by 1995) 8 inch floppy disk (and truly floppy) b

Going in the other direction, prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk) there was the (already rare by 1995) 8 inch floppy disk (and truly floppy) basically an enlarged 5.25" disk. Supposedly they only stored 1.2MB but I recall seeing 2.X MB models for sale at boeing surplus in the mid 1990s and feeling like that was a much more economical option than 1.44mb 3.5" disks. The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be. Any larger, and you could not transfer them -- email wasn't an option yet, and serial transfer between two computers was damn near impossible. Having an 8 inch disk with 2mb would allow much better images and longer multimedia documents to be transfered. Alas, I could not convince my dad to shell out $45 for the 2.X MB 8" floppy drive, so I leaned on the 3x sony 1.44mb HDD I was given sometime in early elementary school all the way through middle school. 2.88mb would have been an absolute luxury. Sometime around 1998 we got a sony viao with the 100MB ZIP drive which felt palatial by comparison.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk) The 3.5" disks were "floppy" too: you just had to take the actual disc out out of its rigid protective shell. >Supposedly they only stored 1.2MB but I recall seeing 2.X MB models for sale at boeing surplus in the mid 1990s I can't find anything about this on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats There are some old drives that store 2 Mb per disk, but that's megabits, not megabytes. It seems the very largest 8" disks ever achieved was 1.2MB, exactly the same as the 5.25".
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Going in the other direction, prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk) The “floppy disk” is named for the round mylar storage medium inside the square casing, which is both floppy and a disk in all the sizes they came in, not the square casing, which, while somewhat flexible in 8” and 5¼” sizes, is not really floppy, and absolutely not a disk, for any of them.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >not the square casing, which, while somewhat flexible in 8” and 5¼” sizes, is not really floppy, and absolutely not a disk, for any of them. Not true. The square casing plus the circular thing inside was absolutely a "disk". But it was not a "disc". The thing inside was a "disc".
  - mkl 2y ago
    Depends where you're from. In American English, both are disks: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes
jmward01 2y ago
>The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be. pkzip spanning disks was a normal thing back then. I'm totally not showing my age by knowing that (and having used it a lot).
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  RAR was even better for multi-volume archives.
  - roywashere 2y ago
    Among me and my peers we used arj.exe
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      It's been a long time, so maybe I'm misremembering things, but I seem to remember ARJ being the "cool" replacement for ZIP, but then when RAR came along, ARJ quickly died out.
      - qurashee 2y ago
        LHA(lzh/lharc) was also a cool replacement at some point, especially since it was just one binary for both compressing and decompressing.
      - chx 2y ago
        The switch didn't happen until 1995 when WinRAR came along, if memory serves. RAR was 1993 and ARJ was 1991.
        prmoustache 2y ago
        Also I remember ARJ and PKZIP being used legitimately while I can't think of a single time I encountered a rar file in a non piracy context. Actually when I got my first job fixing up desktop computer in a large public institution the presence of winrar was a sure sign that I was better off airgaping the computer immediately, scanning with an offline antivirus and backing up noninfected user data and then reinstall, hoping I would not encounter child porn.
saithound 2y ago
> basically an enlarged 5.25" disk Those 8 inch disks were not enlarged 5¼-inch disks. The 5¼-inch ones were shrunk 8 inch disks. They were a fairly inconvenient form factor, the main benefit was the much reduced density, which made them super resistant to wear-and-tear. A lot of 8 inch floppies written in the 1980s still work just fine: last time I checked, BART used them. I'm not sure they were ever commercially available in high density configurations.
qw 2y ago
> The whole world ran on 1.44mb There were small pockets of Amiga users that could store 1.76mb on the same floppy disk due to a different type of hardware
- mkl 2y ago
  That was possible on DOS with the standard hardware, just different formatting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fdformat#DOS_tool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fdformat#DOS_tool I relied on it for years until CD writers became common and affordable.
  - qw 2y ago
    Interesting I was not aware of that. I was told the reason was that in addition to a different format, the drive was more flexible so that it could adjust more dynamically. But it seems that you could store it more efficiently and get similar results on PC. That said, I found a forum post that claimed an Amiga could store 1MB (1.1 in the comments) on a DD disk (standard size is 880k on Amiga, 720k on PC). So perhaps an HD disk could have been formatted to store over 2MB? I wouldn't be surprised if there were some drawbacks to this method that makes data corruption more probable. Ref: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102630 https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102630
    - mkl 2y ago
      HD 3.5" disks have a 2MB unformatted capacity, so I don't think anything could go over that. The Amiga drive was certainly more flexible (and some games used weird custom formats as a form of copy protection). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Amiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Amiga Some info about different sectors, tracks, etc.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how-does-2m-for-dos-2-mb-formatted-floppy-disks-achieve-what-it-does https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how..., https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/what-other-tricks-were-there-to-get-more-data-onto-floppy-disks https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...
hackingonempty 2y ago
> The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be. Not the whole world. In the late 80's through early 90's the publishing industry used 44mb SyQuest disks to transport files.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- porbelm 2y ago
  [dead]
mkl 2y ago
> The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be. Not Microsoft, they used 1.68MB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format Not me either, I used some utility whose name I've forgotten (might be fdformat as mentioned on that page) to get something like 1.74MB pretty reliably. I think I needed a driver loaded for it to work, but seem to remember either Windows 95 or 98 supporting it natively.
- romanhn 2y ago
  Sounds like DoubleSpace (later renamed to DriveSpace), which was built into MSDOS and early Windows versions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace
  - mkl 2y ago
    That was totally different. DoubleSpace made a virtual drive in a file and did software compression/decompression with a driver during writes and reads. It was a clone of Stacker, and both were slow as heck (but hard drives were only 40MB, so sometimes it was worth it).
- stuaxo 2y ago
  FDFORMAT is probably the one you are thinking of https://github.com/christoh/fdformat https://github.com/christoh/fdformat
compsciphd 2y ago
the 8" floppies predate the 5.25 ones (i.e. the original size when invented by IBM). 5.25 and then 3.5 came later. When I was growing up, we had an old Z-80 (I think?) cpm machine that had a tiny crt and 8" floppy drives. We then had a TI-99/4a that used 5.25" and then a panasonic 8086 pc compat also with 5.25" From there we moved to a 386 with both a 5.25 and 3.5 drive, but that was it for the 5.25s I still have some of the games from the 5.25 era on their original disks, though last time I glanced at both ebay and archive sites, there wasn't much value to keeping them as readily available, but hard to toss that element of my childhood.

shiroiushi 2y ago

>prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk) The 3.5" disks were "floppy" too: you just had to take the actual disc out out of its rigid protective shell. >Supposedly they only stored 1.2MB but I recall seeing 2.X MB models for sale at boeing surplus in the mid 1990s I can't find anything about this on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats There are some old drives that store 2 Mb per disk, but that's megabits, not megabytes. It seems the very largest 8" disks ever achieved was 1.2MB, exactly the same as the 5.25".

dragonwriter 2y ago

> Going in the other direction, prior to the 5 1/4" disk drive (a true "floppy" disk) The “floppy disk” is named for the round mylar storage medium inside the square casing, which is both floppy and a disk in all the sizes they came in, not the square casing, which, while somewhat flexible in 8” and 5¼” sizes, is not really floppy, and absolutely not a disk, for any of them.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>not the square casing, which, while somewhat flexible in 8” and 5¼” sizes, is not really floppy, and absolutely not a disk, for any of them. Not true. The square casing plus the circular thing inside was absolutely a "disk". But it was not a "disc". The thing inside was a "disc".
- mkl 2y ago
  Depends where you're from. In American English, both are disks: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes

jmward01 2y ago

>The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be. pkzip spanning disks was a normal thing back then. I'm totally not showing my age by knowing that (and having used it a lot).

shiroiushi 2y ago
RAR was even better for multi-volume archives.
- roywashere 2y ago
  Among me and my peers we used arj.exe
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    It's been a long time, so maybe I'm misremembering things, but I seem to remember ARJ being the "cool" replacement for ZIP, but then when RAR came along, ARJ quickly died out.
    - qurashee 2y ago
      LHA(lzh/lharc) was also a cool replacement at some point, especially since it was just one binary for both compressing and decompressing.
    - chx 2y ago
      The switch didn't happen until 1995 when WinRAR came along, if memory serves. RAR was 1993 and ARJ was 1991.
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        Also I remember ARJ and PKZIP being used legitimately while I can't think of a single time I encountered a rar file in a non piracy context. Actually when I got my first job fixing up desktop computer in a large public institution the presence of winrar was a sure sign that I was better off airgaping the computer immediately, scanning with an offline antivirus and backing up noninfected user data and then reinstall, hoping I would not encounter child porn.

saithound 2y ago

> basically an enlarged 5.25" disk Those 8 inch disks were not enlarged 5¼-inch disks. The 5¼-inch ones were shrunk 8 inch disks. They were a fairly inconvenient form factor, the main benefit was the much reduced density, which made them super resistant to wear-and-tear. A lot of 8 inch floppies written in the 1980s still work just fine: last time I checked, BART used them. I'm not sure they were ever commercially available in high density configurations.

qw 2y ago

> The whole world ran on 1.44mb There were small pockets of Amiga users that could store 1.76mb on the same floppy disk due to a different type of hardware

mkl 2y ago
That was possible on DOS with the standard hardware, just different formatting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fdformat#DOS_tool https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fdformat#DOS_tool I relied on it for years until CD writers became common and affordable.
- qw 2y ago
  Interesting I was not aware of that. I was told the reason was that in addition to a different format, the drive was more flexible so that it could adjust more dynamically. But it seems that you could store it more efficiently and get similar results on PC. That said, I found a forum post that claimed an Amiga could store 1MB (1.1 in the comments) on a DD disk (standard size is 880k on Amiga, 720k on PC). So perhaps an HD disk could have been formatted to store over 2MB? I wouldn't be surprised if there were some drawbacks to this method that makes data corruption more probable. Ref: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102630 https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=102630
  - mkl 2y ago
    HD 3.5" disks have a 2MB unformatted capacity, so I don't think anything could go over that. The Amiga drive was certainly more flexible (and some games used weird custom formats as a form of copy protection). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Amiga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Amiga Some info about different sectors, tracks, etc.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how-does-2m-for-dos-2-mb-formatted-floppy-disks-achieve-what-it-does https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how..., https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/what-other-tricks-were-there-to-get-more-data-onto-floppy-disks https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...

hackingonempty 2y ago

> The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be. Not the whole world. In the late 80's through early 90's the publishing industry used 44mb SyQuest disks to transport files.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
porbelm 2y ago
[dead]

mkl 2y ago

> The whole world ran on 1.44mb as a hard limit on how large files could be. Not Microsoft, they used 1.68MB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format Not me either, I used some utility whose name I've forgotten (might be fdformat as mentioned on that page) to get something like 1.74MB pretty reliably. I think I needed a driver loaded for it to work, but seem to remember either Windows 95 or 98 supporting it natively.

romanhn 2y ago
Sounds like DoubleSpace (later renamed to DriveSpace), which was built into MSDOS and early Windows versions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace
- mkl 2y ago
  That was totally different. DoubleSpace made a virtual drive in a file and did software compression/decompression with a driver during writes and reads. It was a clone of Stacker, and both were slow as heck (but hard drives were only 40MB, so sometimes it was worth it).
stuaxo 2y ago
FDFORMAT is probably the one you are thinking of https://github.com/christoh/fdformat https://github.com/christoh/fdformat

compsciphd 2y ago

the 8" floppies predate the 5.25 ones (i.e. the original size when invented by IBM). 5.25 and then 3.5 came later. When I was growing up, we had an old Z-80 (I think?) cpm machine that had a tiny crt and 8" floppy drives. We then had a TI-99/4a that used 5.25" and then a panasonic 8086 pc compat also with 5.25" From there we moved to a 386 with both a 5.25 and 3.5 drive, but that was it for the 5.25s I still have some of the games from the 5.25 era on their original disks, though last time I glanced at both ebay and archive sites, there wasn't much value to keeping them as readily available, but hard to toss that element of my childhood.