One thing I've always wondered is why no-one tried to double the track density for read-only floppies.
The reason floppies have so few tracks (100000 bits per track, only 80 tracks per side!) is that the read-write mechanism didn't track the track. It was just indexed to a specific position by a stepper in the drive mechanism. Because there were a lot of sources of radial position error, and the writing and reading process could be misaligned in opposite directions, the tracks needed to be wide and far apart for reliability, and the erasehead needed to erase a much wider area than what the rwhead could read/write. The various later superfloppy standards that failed to get market traction usually only got slight increases in bit density along the track, and most of their capacity increase from having some way for the rwhead to follow the track, enabling dramatically higher track density. But all those mechanisms would be much more expensive and complicated to do than a simple floppy drive.
But if you use a more precise and expensive machine to write the disk, the normal amount of precision in the drive that is used for reading ought to be sufficient for about twice the track density. The only hw change needed would have been allowing half-step positions for the rwhead, for no cost increase. And I can imagine 80's/90's software devs being interested in a format that is harder to copy at home. Yet no-one ever did it, does anyone know why it was never tried?
> Perpendicular recording was later used by Toshiba in 3.5" floppy disks in 1989 to permit 2.88 MB of capacity (ED or extra-high density), but they failed to succeed in the marketplace.
I think that is something else entirely, unless you consider that to be the expensive writing version.
Adding a little capability (in this case permitting finer stepping) and letting software guys figure it out was often the way to great new abilities.
I often think about tiny little changes to old hardware that would have been an insignificant cost but added great functionality. Like a 4 bit latch xored with the rgbi output of CGA would have enabled a huge gain in what colour options were available. It would only be a few gates. You would still only have 320x200 in four colours but the colours available wouldn't melt your eyes.
Your inquiry reminds me of Game Boy. Some 4000 early Game Boy consoles had a specific hardware quirk that limited the refresh rate of the screen under a specific method. For the whole decade of existence of Game Boy, every single game was tested for this specific bug by Nintendo, and a few developers got burned because they wanted to use the refresh method but couldn't.
I bet it's a similar situation. Something like 99% of all drives could have handled what you're describing, but the 1% stopped anybody from trying your method.
On a similar note, a couple of days ago I bought two factory sealed magneto-optical disks, one 230 MB and the other 640 MB, for 300 yens each. I had never seen one in person, and I think that they look really cool in a retrofuturistic sense.
When I was a kid I remember reading and dreaming about all these alternative storage formats: MO, flopticals, Zip drive, LS-120, etc. The idea of a little disk with the capacity of a hundred floppies was amazing, it's a pity that none could replace them.
As far as I remember the Zip drives came closest... but were held back by being proprietary and therefore relatively expensive. And of course all of these were eventually replaced by USB sticks.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
It's not so much that storage sucked, as the interfaces for storage sucked.
We didn't have much you could plug a better drive into. The floppy cable's protocol was too restrictive to support anything much fancier, exposing too many internal details. And the parallel port was awfully slow. And SCSI was unfortunately absent from the consumer hardware.
That made it really hard for anyone to make a better storage device, because it'd find itself immediately constrained.
It's only in modern times where we finally have technology-agnostic interfaces that make it possible to use any storage tech you like, bandwidth to spare, and a generic USB storage driver meaning that even if you do own some oddball device you can still plug it into any random computer and have it work out of the box.
ISA/PCI bus? (And IDE, which is just the ISA bus over a differently shaped cable)
In that era, addon cards were quite normal - not like today when the addon card slot is de-facto just a graphics card slot and motherboards are being designed around that assumption.
Nowadays a 2TB nvme USB drive that is barely bigger old usb pen drives. I wouldn't call that "officially shit".
Also, SD and MicroSD cards are fairly reliable in my experience as long as you don't stretch too much their usable life. But that has always been the case of flash technology and it was even worse in the floppy and CDRW days.
You could format a CD-RW to use it pretty much like a (slow) USB flash drive. I don't remember the details but it definitely was an option in Windows.
But then, before CD burners became popular and blanks cheap, most files I had to carry between computers (e.g. to school or to/from a friend) fit on a floppy. In the rare case they did not, I used WinRAR to make one of those split archives.
>It's amazing (in a bad way) how storage sucked in the 90s, early 2000s
>Floppy technology sucked even back then.
No, not "even": floppy technology sucked in the 90s, but it absolutely did NOT suck in the 80s. Floppies were extremely, even ridiculously reliable back in the 80s, and into the early 90s. They totally went to shit in the mid-to-late 90s because the quality of both the media and the drives went down the toilet.
Absolutely agree. Source: I've read (in the last decade) tons of old floppies from (mostly) the late eighties. The recovery rate for 5.25" DD and HD floppies were nearly 100%. I had only a couple of floppies with issues (though it must be said that I know people who have had more problems, but that is always about Really Bad Storage Conditions).
But, as I've mentioned before in other threads, this does not translate to 3.5" floppies. Or at least not to HD 3.5" floppies. Even though mine were stored in the same conditions as the 5.25" and 8" floppies, the success rate was really low, and mostly non-existent for "HD" 3.5" floppies (the so-called 1.44MB floppies). The 720KB ones fared much better, but never as good as the older 5.25" ones. Of course that also when the nineties arrived, but more than that - the HD 3.5" floppies stretched the density too high for the medium, according to Chuck(G) and others with more understanding of the physical medium than myself. In any case my experience supports that claim.
So, the title of this thread is "Triple Density Floppy, Anyone?"
Well, obviously I have no belief in the feasibility of trying even higher density than what existed, with the problems already apparent with the existent densities (mind, the 5.25" ones didn't exceed what was possible).
As for other media.. CD-R used to fail reading for me after a year in storage. I quickly stopped using that as any kind of backup. And we all know about flash-based storage.. or at least I hope we all know. They're just like very slowly leaking capacitors. Spinning rust or spinning floppy media or even tape retains data for much longer (yes I have tons of CCTs which are also still readable, from back to the beginning of the eighties)
In the late nineties I had a laptop that supported SuperDisk¹ floppies that could store up to 120 MB. The disks were pretty expensive and the same laptop even had a CD-RW drive so I never got around to try it.
Those drives were nice. Windows 98 could fit on a ls-120, but not a zip-100. And, they were really good at reading regular floppy disks too. Handy as media seemed to be getting worse and worse towards the end.
> Much less known is ED 2.88MB. Only ever shipped in some 1990 IBM PS/2 and NEXT computers. 80 tracks ~100KB/s speed.
It shipped in some 1990s IBM RS/6000s. I know for sure it was available on the Model 250, which came out in 1993 (and was one of the first PowerPC systems).
I remember encountering one of these PS/2s in my school's storage in the late 90s and was kind of thrown for a loop to see 2.88 printed on the blue eject button. Until then I was unaware that standard existed and didn't understand why it hadn't take off, I assumed it was just another proprietary IBM standard that the market rejected.
Thanks for Adafruit link. I didnt know they picked up my Vogons thread and actually found picture of dedicated floppies. Sadly 2TD drives seem to be unobtanium :(
Technically its extended ED and should be as reliable, even the media should be interchangeable. I would love to get my hands on one too :)
I recall seeing 2.88mb disk drives in Tiger Electronics catalogues circa 1997. Someone with more time than me will find PDF scans of them and can verify. 1.44mb HD 3.5" disks were totally the norm as our elementary and middle schools were flush with Apple LCII and LCIII (LC meaning "low cost") computers of the era. If you were going to play Bolo, you needed your own 1.44mb disk to keep a copy of it to use at the computer lab.
Readit News
The reason floppies have so few tracks (100000 bits per track, only 80 tracks per side!) is that the read-write mechanism didn't track the track. It was just indexed to a specific position by a stepper in the drive mechanism. Because there were a lot of sources of radial position error, and the writing and reading process could be misaligned in opposite directions, the tracks needed to be wide and far apart for reliability, and the erasehead needed to erase a much wider area than what the rwhead could read/write. The various later superfloppy standards that failed to get market traction usually only got slight increases in bit density along the track, and most of their capacity increase from having some way for the rwhead to follow the track, enabling dramatically higher track density. But all those mechanisms would be much more expensive and complicated to do than a simple floppy drive.
But if you use a more precise and expensive machine to write the disk, the normal amount of precision in the drive that is used for reading ought to be sufficient for about twice the track density. The only hw change needed would have been allowing half-step positions for the rwhead, for no cost increase. And I can imagine 80's/90's software devs being interested in a format that is harder to copy at home. Yet no-one ever did it, does anyone know why it was never tried?
> Perpendicular recording was later used by Toshiba in 3.5" floppy disks in 1989 to permit 2.88 MB of capacity (ED or extra-high density), but they failed to succeed in the marketplace.
Adding a little capability (in this case permitting finer stepping) and letting software guys figure it out was often the way to great new abilities.
I often think about tiny little changes to old hardware that would have been an insignificant cost but added great functionality. Like a 4 bit latch xored with the rgbi output of CGA would have enabled a huge gain in what colour options were available. It would only be a few gates. You would still only have 320x200 in four colours but the colours available wouldn't melt your eyes.
The floppy standard failed, but it became the norm in hard disk drives as soon as the patent on the special rwhead that was needed for it expired.
I bet it's a similar situation. Something like 99% of all drives could have handled what you're describing, but the 1% stopped anybody from trying your method.
When I was a kid I remember reading and dreaming about all these alternative storage formats: MO, flopticals, Zip drive, LS-120, etc. The idea of a little disk with the capacity of a hundred floppies was amazing, it's a pity that none could replace them.
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.
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).
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.
Not Microsoft, they used 1.68MB: 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace
https://github.com/christoh/fdformat
Not the whole world. In the late 80's through early 90's the publishing industry used 44mb SyQuest disks to transport files.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
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
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".
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.
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".
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.
There were small pockets of Amiga users that could store 1.76mb on the same floppy disk due to a different type of hardware
I relied on it for years until CD writers became common and affordable.
Floppy technology sucked even back then. Then we got CDs, which were fine, but read-only
Iomega came up with Zip drives only to promptly shoot themselves in the foot instead of standardizing the format and fixing their issues
There were also a couple of also-rans that never got much traction
USB drives got there but they had to wait for USB and good enough/big enough flash chips to exist
We didn't have much you could plug a better drive into. The floppy cable's protocol was too restrictive to support anything much fancier, exposing too many internal details. And the parallel port was awfully slow. And SCSI was unfortunately absent from the consumer hardware.
That made it really hard for anyone to make a better storage device, because it'd find itself immediately constrained.
It's only in modern times where we finally have technology-agnostic interfaces that make it possible to use any storage tech you like, bandwidth to spare, and a generic USB storage driver meaning that even if you do own some oddball device you can still plug it into any random computer and have it work out of the box.
In that era, addon cards were quite normal - not like today when the addon card slot is de-facto just a graphics card slot and motherboards are being designed around that assumption.
They are so unreliable and there is no brand that you can trust.
Which truly sucks for the rare cases when you actually do need some form of physical media.
Also, SD and MicroSD cards are fairly reliable in my experience as long as you don't stretch too much their usable life. But that has always been the case of flash technology and it was even worse in the floppy and CDRW days.
You could format a CD-RW to use it pretty much like a (slow) USB flash drive. I don't remember the details but it definitely was an option in Windows.
But then, before CD burners became popular and blanks cheap, most files I had to carry between computers (e.g. to school or to/from a friend) fit on a floppy. In the rare case they did not, I used WinRAR to make one of those split archives.
No, not "even": floppy technology sucked in the 90s, but it absolutely did NOT suck in the 80s. Floppies were extremely, even ridiculously reliable back in the 80s, and into the early 90s. They totally went to shit in the mid-to-late 90s because the quality of both the media and the drives went down the toilet.
But, as I've mentioned before in other threads, this does not translate to 3.5" floppies. Or at least not to HD 3.5" floppies. Even though mine were stored in the same conditions as the 5.25" and 8" floppies, the success rate was really low, and mostly non-existent for "HD" 3.5" floppies (the so-called 1.44MB floppies). The 720KB ones fared much better, but never as good as the older 5.25" ones. Of course that also when the nineties arrived, but more than that - the HD 3.5" floppies stretched the density too high for the medium, according to Chuck(G) and others with more understanding of the physical medium than myself. In any case my experience supports that claim.
So, the title of this thread is "Triple Density Floppy, Anyone?" Well, obviously I have no belief in the feasibility of trying even higher density than what existed, with the problems already apparent with the existent densities (mind, the 5.25" ones didn't exceed what was possible).
As for other media.. CD-R used to fail reading for me after a year in storage. I quickly stopped using that as any kind of backup. And we all know about flash-based storage.. or at least I hope we all know. They're just like very slowly leaking capacitors. Spinning rust or spinning floppy media or even tape retains data for much longer (yes I have tons of CCTs which are also still readable, from back to the beginning of the eighties)
But yes there was a point in the 90s where quality went down even for the 3½ ones (and that elementary pre-IDE floppy interface certainly didn't help)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
It shipped in some 1990s IBM RS/6000s. I know for sure it was available on the Model 250, which came out in 1993 (and was one of the first PowerPC systems).
Documentation: https://www.ardent-tool.com/RS6000/docs/pdf/7011_Operator_Gu...
Other reference from Adafruit containing an image of the media this drive took: https://blog.adafruit.com/2024/10/31/yes-there-was-a-13mb-tr...
I would bet my left pinky finger that it was even more fragile and prone to errors than HD much less ED media.
Technically its extended ED and should be as reliable, even the media should be interchangeable. I would love to get my hands on one too :)