People who won't give up floppy disks

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240510-floppy-disks-why-some-people-are-still-in-love-with-this-obsolete-computer-storage-technology

by hoppyhoppy2 • 2 years ago

64 86 2 years ago

bbc.com

greenbit2• 2 years ago

Just think of them as tangible icons for the items they contain.

lkdfjlkdfjlg• 2 years ago

Many 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• 2 years ago

Perhaps 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• 2 years ago

Zip drives FTW

bombcar• 2 years ago

Click. Click. Click.

SomeoneFromCA• 2 years ago

Nothing 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.

SanjayMehta2• 2 years ago

Jazz 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.

pasquinelli• 2 years ago

i only used a zip drive once or twice. obviously that was decades ago, but in my head they are still the height of computing luxury.

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

Until the click of death. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

I'm more in favour of MiniDisc. Compact enough, large enough for storage but Sony screwed up with DRM requiring a Sonic Stage, eurk.

projektfu• 2 years ago

Headline: these people who use floppy disks are obsolete but not gone.

Euphorbium• 2 years ago

Give me petabyte sized floppies, they were peak user experience. Microsd is too easy to lose.

masklinn• 2 years ago

NVMe 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.

mrob2• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

i 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

mrob2• 2 years ago

I 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• 2 years ago

Floppy 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.

greenbit2• 2 years ago

Abort, Retry, Ignore?

IshKebab4• 2 years ago

Modern flash drives are at least an order of magnitude more reliable than floppy disks were. This is just rose-tinted nostalgia.

jjav• 2 years ago

Modern flash drives are at least an order of magnitude more reliable than floppy disks were.

I don't know if that is true. I have 5.25" floppies from ca.1990 that were readable as of just a couple years ago, so about 30 years.

You're saying flash drives are readable for at least 300 years? I don't know but I doubt that.

(The floppies might still be readable today, I just haven't tried. The content is now archived in a zfs pool.)

dwb• 2 years ago

I treated floppies fine and they were a constant pain. They give a nostalgic pang, but I'm very glad to see the back of them in actual use.

kalleboo• 2 years ago

I got so fed up with how unreliable floppy disks were in Middle School and High School, that I started using the 1999 equivalent of Dropbox. Before I left for school, I'd start an FTP upload of the document(s) I needed to my ISPs 20 MB free web space, it would finish and automatically disconnect from the 56k dialup, and then at school I'd download it on the school's 128K ISDN connection.

Maybe I've been exceptionally lucky, but I've never had a USB drive fail or act oddly. The only data-loss flash media failures I've had were microSD cards in Android phones, and an early SATA SSD.

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

I 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...

nullhole2• 2 years ago

Well, 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.

temp08262• 2 years ago

I don't think they were as long-lived as their brethren, but can't forget about the extra floppy 8-inchers!

julian_t• 2 years ago

A 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.

RF_Savage2• 2 years ago

Here in Finland the terms for 3.5" floppies is "korppu", a type of hard biscuit, do distinguish them from "lerppu" "floppy", which refers to the older 5 1/4" discs that actually flopped around.

nullhole2• 2 years ago

What's the word for "hard disk"?

IshKebab4• 2 years ago

They aren't floppy. They're just called that because old disks really were floppy and the name stuck.

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

If you open one, you'll see that the disk is floppy. As floppy as the larger versions of it.

drewzero13• 2 years ago

The only person I ever heard call them "hard disks" was as a joke in a cartoon[1]. Non-computer people I knew called them stuff like "little floppies" to distinguish them from the big 5 1/4" ones. Windows used "floppy" for both in the file manager.

1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnLBNS9jDw&t=1m8s

AshamedCaptain• 2 years ago

Aren't they exaggerating a bit? You can go to Amazon and buy 3.5'' floppy 10 packs, and a USB UFI drive...

alchemist1e9• 2 years ago

There is a lot of options too, for both drives and disk packs, and inexpensive. I wonder who is using them mostly.

DontBreakAlex• 2 years ago

If it works, don't fix it

fxj• 2 years ago

For 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-g...

https://studio-services.de/produkt/zuluscsi-rp2040-mini/

jmclnx• 2 years ago

When 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_nu2• 2 years ago

Strange 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.

tentacleuno2• 2 years 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...

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

You can either have a port where you can run trusted devices without hassle, or one where you can input untrusted data safely. You can't have the same port do both.

amelius2• 2 years ago

My first Linux distro was about 50 diskettes ;)

rpdillon• 2 years ago

Same! I think it was back in 1997 in college, and my dorm mate only had 4 floppies sitting around, and Slackware was around 50, so I kicked off the installation with the first couple of disks, and when I'd finish up with one I'd toss it across the hall to him, and he'd reimage it with the next in the sequence and toss it back. Pretty tedious, but it got the job done.

I'll never forget how foreign Slackware felt after having grown up on DOS. It wasn't long before I got used to it, though, and I never did go back. Great memories.

bandie91• 2 years ago

mine was tomsrtbt[1]. 1 diskette.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt

vkaku• 2 years ago

MicroSD cards would fit that definition today: cheap, lightweight, writeable and somewhat reliable.

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

Not that cheap, almost no computer has an exposed port for it, and way too lightweight for that use.

But yes, it's the closest we have.

marcosdumay5• 2 years ago

Yes there is email

It may very well not be. Email is iffy for people that share the same domain, and completely useless for sharing stuff with random people.

That one democratic tool is already completely tamed out, and presents no risk for our corporate overloads anymore.

GJim• 2 years ago

YOu can't make that comment without justification!

Email for sharing documents just works for me and the vast majority of the business and IT world. Frankly, I don't agree with you.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

Plus you cannot find a box of say 1G flash drives as cheep as a box of diskettes were.

Actually, that's close. On AliExpress, you can get 10 1GB USB sticks for about $15. Adjusted for inflation, that's about how much a box of 10 cheap 1.44MB floppies cost in 1990. It became a bit cheaper in the late 90s, but that's about the time CD-R took over for the purpose of handing out stuff.

Of course, these cheap USB sticks are not the most reliable by far, but neither were diskettes, at least for the cheap ones, they were absolutely terrible in that regard.

forinti• 2 years ago

Someone 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.

Clubber2• 2 years ago

A probably fake anecdote is a young person saw a disk and asked, "Why do you have a 3D printed save button?" I did have someone refer to a CD drive tray as a cup holder once though.

ambichook• 2 years ago

Free_Cupholder.exe

rm445• 2 years ago

People 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?

amelius2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath but it required a device driver.

proamdev123• 2 years ago

the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input

It was called a “cassette adapter” (for anyone interested in looking it up).

jayofdoom• 2 years ago

A 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• 2 years ago

Does BART still use them?

kkfx• 2 years ago

Not 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.

porkbeer2• 2 years ago

The 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• 2 years ago

It'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• 2 years ago

The FS-UAE emulator (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-o...) last summer.

abruzzi• 2 years ago

Like 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.

porkbeer2• 2 years ago

Many 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.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Of 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/

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

Let's not forget the floppotron:

https://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

People who won't give up floppy disks

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