There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future.
I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.
The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?"
The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.
I've fallen deeper and deeper into the nostalgia of retro computing YouTube channels. They're amazing (and make YouTube tolerable). They have all kinds of interesting devices and adapters to make SD cards appear as SCSI HDs for old Macs (or whatever), I think even floppies and such going as far back as the Apple II.
One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0].
Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein.
At around 1990 as a high school student I was working in a wholesale supermarket and in the office they had a microcomputer (IIRC a MicroVAX) which had audible database transactions. Every time one of the cashiers scanned an item, you could hear the hard disk move into place to write out the data. I found that endless fascinating for the same reason.
I liked the old floppies. They were great for backing up personal data. They were easy to write on and store in special trays.
I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one.
The Apple Pay bell sound is the most satisfying modern sound. It also makes use of the vibration motor to make it feel like an actual bell has been struck in your phone
I shoot on DVCAM tape a bit, and I have to say there are few things as mechanically satisfying as putting one of the full-size DVCAM tapes into the camera and hoisting it onto your shoulder.
...and the feeling of relief at the fact that, unlike a USB drive, it'll never turn into something else like a keyboard and perhaps do something malicious.
The memories I have are more connected to the sound of the floppy drives on an Apple II, it was very special. It's probably connected to the fact that I was relatively young, and the feeling of using an active computer and software - but there was something special with the Apple II, I think I connected the stripes of colours with the sound somehow. But it was magic to listen to that sound while loading a floppy. Which is why the emulators don't really work for me..
All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names):
> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation
Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as soon as a better one like usb storage became available and prominent.
I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful.
You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.
I still have a sheet of the write-protect tabs for 5.25" floppies that I, for some unknown reason, refuse to throw away. I have one flash drive that I stuck a tab on ages ago for giggles (I didn't want to lose the contents until I got it replicated), and it still makes me smile.
I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.
Why should old things always die if there is a demand and they are working fine for intended purposes? Let there be a cottage industry selling a single new floppy disk to upgrade flight software for $999, beats buying a new airplane. If we lost ability to make previously commonplace objects in limited quantity when needed, that's not good for our economy, environment or preserving entire cultural legacy of our civilization. Resurgence of vinyl is a great example of what can be accomplished in consumer space. Making floppies available as long as expensive machine need these could do same for enterprise.
One of the things I wonder about in retrospect is why floppy drives remained at a static level of ability for the most part. I mean I know there were the LS120 and such things, but why wasn't there a manufacturer just pushing the tech a bit further? Like why not have a drive made with additional precision and capable of squeezing 3 MB into a floppy?
Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?
From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over.
We had CD burners in every computer. Floppy disks were too unreliable compared to CDs and files were already too large. We had external hard disks and pen drives in the late 90s when USB was released. That was the end of floppy disks for backups.
So, to answer your question, no time to do it. Every manufacturer was probably working on the next big technology and not on incrementally perfecting the floppy disk.
"Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?"
For floppies: Yes. It wouldn't help to use better precision. The medium itself can't handle that kind of density. 3.5" floppy drives actually went over the limit with 1.44MB ones - they fail when kept in storage for some years. Much much more than 720KB floppies.
I think they were limited by the medium. If there was more capacity, we would have seen bigger sizes. Instead, they jumped to LS120 (SuperDisk) and Zip Disk.
I think tracking was problem, hence the optical tracking SuperDisk. Zip drive was more like hard drive, with rigid platter and cover.
There were extra-high density floppy disks which held 2.88 MB. However, as with the change from double density to high density, it required a different magnetic coating on the media to work (reliably).
> Following the rodeo incident, Necaise decided to finally upgrade, but not to an entirely new machine—just to a floppy-to-USB emulator. These devices cost around $275 each...
That's odd. Gotek and similar emulators should be available for a tenth of that price. There are several variations though, so it smells to me like someone is reselling a Gotek "guaranteed to work" with a specific type of machine with a large markup.
Odd indeed. As far as I know the Gotek was invented exactly for use by embroidery machines, and the ads are everywhere. I tried entering "embroidery floppy emulator" into Google and an Amazon link for a $38 Gotek came up first (and, as we know, we can get it cheaper than that).
But of course a few lines below there's a "floppyusbemulator.com" page with a $250 "Nalbantov" drive (which are sold for $175 elsewhere, and there are probably other variantes).
Happens in the SCSI emulator market as well - there is a company massively marking up SCSI emulators and praying on naive musicians. Which is fair enough given they set them up before sending them out, but it still irks my sense of fairness
> Davit Niazashvili, a maintenance manager at Geosky, a cargo airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia, still uses floppy disks to apply critical updates to two 36-year-old 747-200s, which were originally delivered to British Airways in 1987:
GeoSky frequently lets youtubers film in the cockpit of their 747-200's. If you are a fan of the classic 747 steam gauge cockpits, these videos are priceless. Some examples:
To still be able to read/write floppies proper with modern computers, handling custom formats, the excellent GreaseWeazle, also Keir Fraser's: https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
I had a weird dream last night that my M1 MacBook Pro had a 5 1/4” floppy drive still. No idea why or what brought that on but to wake up and read this was refreshing :)
Is there a company that refurbished floppy disks? I've got maybe 50 of them and wouldn't mind giving them to some rodeo, or company that still needs them.
I tend to keep pretty much everything, at least for a while. I'd call myself a "hoarder", but really, I have a fairly decent system for categorization and storage, and clean everything out every couple of years and sell a lot of it online.
I have a storage tote full of floppy disks - there have to be hundreds of them in there, though I've not counted. I think I'll go grab that box tonight and see if I can't sell them on eBay or something.
I recently saw the Sony MSAC-FD2MA. It's a memory stick to floppy adapter. I assume an SD to memory stick adapter would work with it. I'm curious how it works internally. How does it interface with the read/write head? How does it map logical data (files, FS) to sectors and tracks? Or if it doesn't, how does it even map a flat image file? Floppies can be formatted all sorts of ways.
My Akai S1000 sampler from the late 80s still has it's floppy drive, which I occasionally still use even though it has a modern SD-card based emulated SCSI hard disk as well. I could change the floppy to a Gotek USB drive, but I'm not interested
I love using it. It triggers so many happy teen memories from my BBC B and Amiga!
I'm going to ramp up my floppy hoarding now. Years ago I started hoarding Type II and Type IV cassette tapes, and I've 10x'd my investment on those easy. I don't have to even do anything and they just keep going up in value.
That Florian guy they quoted sounds like a real dick, too.
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.
[+] [-] theamk|3 years ago|reply
The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.
[+] [-] pjot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virgulino|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY
[+] [-] kkielhofner|3 years ago|reply
One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0].
Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein.
[0] - https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-...
[+] [-] dual_dingo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrycoder|3 years ago|reply
I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one.
Anyone have a good way?
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StapleHorse|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rr888|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tor3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jghn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calimoro78|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
CDs are the least satisfying though. Fiddly, easily scratched, long time to spin up, can get wedged into tray, laptop CD drives are flimsy too.
[+] [-] jcadam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xupybd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlesrocket|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaclaz|3 years ago|reply
All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names):
https://www.gotekemulator.com/
https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61
[+] [-] charles_f|3 years ago|reply
Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as soon as a better one like usb storage became available and prominent.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|3 years ago|reply
You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.
[+] [-] ibcj|3 years ago|reply
I'll occasionally show the sheet to groups of engineers and ask them if they know what it is. Only the dinosaurs ever get it.
[+] [-] cat_plus_plus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DeathArrow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrlonglong|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dale_glass|3 years ago|reply
Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?
[+] [-] pmontra|3 years ago|reply
From memory, the home computer market moved quite quickly from cassettes to floppy disks (mid 80s). Everybody then used floppy disks either as primary storage or as a way to install software to hard disks (late 80s), increasingly so until we got CD-ROMs. They became the primary software distribution media (early 90s). That was 650 MB vs 1.44, game over.
We had CD burners in every computer. Floppy disks were too unreliable compared to CDs and files were already too large. We had external hard disks and pen drives in the late 90s when USB was released. That was the end of floppy disks for backups.
So, to answer your question, no time to do it. Every manufacturer was probably working on the next big technology and not on incrementally perfecting the floppy disk.
[+] [-] Tor3|3 years ago|reply
For floppies: Yes. It wouldn't help to use better precision. The medium itself can't handle that kind of density. 3.5" floppy drives actually went over the limit with 1.44MB ones - they fail when kept in storage for some years. Much much more than 720KB floppies.
[+] [-] ianburrell|3 years ago|reply
I think tracking was problem, hence the optical tracking SuperDisk. Zip drive was more like hard drive, with rigid platter and cover.
[+] [-] komadori|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bawolff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TonyTrapp|3 years ago|reply
That's odd. Gotek and similar emulators should be available for a tenth of that price. There are several variations though, so it smells to me like someone is reselling a Gotek "guaranteed to work" with a specific type of machine with a large markup.
[+] [-] Tor3|3 years ago|reply
But of course a few lines below there's a "floppyusbemulator.com" page with a $250 "Nalbantov" drive (which are sold for $175 elsewhere, and there are probably other variantes).
[+] [-] freerk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squigg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kloch|3 years ago|reply
GeoSky frequently lets youtubers film in the cockpit of their 747-200's. If you are a fan of the classic 747 steam gauge cockpits, these videos are priceless. Some examples:
Classic Boeing 747-200 Clock Shop! Geo Sky Takeoff from Tbilisi, Georgia, to Frankfurt! https://youtu.be/JSKYoqVPtWw?t=88
BOEING 747-200 Takeoff | Less than 10 B747 Classic still flying now! https://youtu.be/O8AA_tkY49g?t=503
[+] [-] Joel_Mckay|3 years ago|reply
Highly recommend Keir Fraser's Flash Floppy project: https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
=)
[+] [-] snvzz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzfactor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wrycoder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unxdfa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ancapistani|3 years ago|reply
I tend to keep pretty much everything, at least for a while. I'd call myself a "hoarder", but really, I have a fairly decent system for categorization and storage, and clean everything out every couple of years and sell a lot of it online.
I have a storage tote full of floppy disks - there have to be hundreds of them in there, though I've not counted. I think I'll go grab that box tonight and see if I can't sell them on eBay or something.
[+] [-] dehrmann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobotToaster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squigg|3 years ago|reply
I love using it. It triggers so many happy teen memories from my BBC B and Amiga!
[+] [-] kunley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steponlego|3 years ago|reply
That Florian guy they quoted sounds like a real dick, too.