People who won't give up floppy disks

[jmclnx]

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_nu]

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.

[amelius]

My first Linux distro was about 50 diskettes ;)

[GuB-42]

> 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.

[marcosdumay]

> 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.

[vkaku]

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

[CoastalCoder]

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...

[nullhole]

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.

[RF_Savage]

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.

[drewzero1]

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

[IshKebab]

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

[fxj]

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/

[forinti]

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.

[Clubber]

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.

[lkdfjlkdfjlg]

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]

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]

Zip drives FTW

[mrob]

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.

[IshKebab]

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

[kalleboo]

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.

[doubloon]

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

[dwb]

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.

[Rinzler89]

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.

[rm445]

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?

[jayofdoom]

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

[crtasm]

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

[amelius]

> 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?

[proamdev123]

> the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input

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

[greenbit]

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

[kkfx]

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.

[porkbeer]

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.

[AshamedCaptain]

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

[alchemist1e9]

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

[abruzzi]

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.

[porkbeer]

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.

[SteveMoody73]

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]

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.

[ChrisArchitect]

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]

Let's not forget the floppotron:

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

[DontBreakAlex]

If it works, don't fix it

[Euphorbium]

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

[masklinn]

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.

[projektfu]

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

[xjlin0]

Does BART still use them?