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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
Readit News
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.
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.
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...
Dead Comment
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt
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.
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.
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.
But yes, it's the closest we have.
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...
To me, at least, the name 'floppy disk' already felt like an anachronism, even in the heyday of 3.5" disks.
1: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wKnLBNS9jDw&t=1m8s
https://studio-services.de/produkt/gotek-flashfloppy-extra-g...
https://studio-services.de/produkt/zuluscsi-rp2040-mini/
It's become an abstract symbol. Young people don't ever see the real thing.
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).
[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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
Wasn't the rotational speed more or less fixed?
It was called a “cassette adapter” (for anyone interested in looking it up).