All the way up to 2004 or 2005, my home router was an old 486dx box running FREESCO (https://freesco.info/) - and it was, indeed, booting from a single floppy. Linux 2.0.something.
To my surprise I discovered today that FREESCO was still releasing updates all the way until 2014.
As a purveyor of floppy disk technology including MFM copiers, SCSI FDs, PS/2 FDs, and NOS ED disks and FDs, I can say that floppies suck and should be assumed to be bad and that any success of reading/writing/formatting is indeed a miracle. Any reading or writing of them will surely lead to their failure soon. And, they will fail just sitting there too.
Back in the day, I did try inducing errors into 3.5" HD floppies by waving a cheap, small voice-coil speaker magnet over a floppy and comparing its contents sector-by-sector to a disk image stored previously. I was only able to do this after opening the shutter and touching the magnet directly to the diskette surface.
PSA: Never write to 5.25" 360K floppies using 1.2M drives because the created track width is too small to be picked up by 360K drives.
Two decades ago, my former manager saved the day after a university hardware firewall went down.
Over the phone, he instructed the guy to download this floppy disk firewall, specify the ports, traffic direction, basic stuff.
Boot the computer and voila, the university network was up again giving the teams hours to get things sorted out.
I forgot its name now but many business would run this floppy disk firewall coz it just worked, once booted it would run "forever".
Interesting history, which does seem to be true: In the Beginning, the reliability of floppies was really quite good. Over time, as the mass market developed, however, quality went down as people shaved pennies and fractions of pennies. Storied brands such as Sony ended up being bad sector magnets (well, you know what I mean...).
My big secret for those of us still using floppies (USB floppies are a steal!) --- get Maxell NOS; they're about $3 per diskette now, but I have beat them hard and they keep going. Of course, I also had a batch of poorly-stored floppies that would not even turn (!) from one vendor (cheap, tho...) and they almost ruined one drive.
My rule now is: once a single sector goes kaput, make a new working copy from your backup (you HAVE a backup, right???), mark the bad sector of the failed disk, and put it in the 'BAD' pile. I have not yet had a sector on a Maxell 1.44 diskette go bad. Several SONY diskettes however are in that pile.
Note that the head drags on the surface of a floppy, so you're always losing a little; what that closeness does, tho, is allow phenomenal bits-per-square-inch. The coatings are very good, binders are good, magnetic properties are excellent. And the head widths (both sides, after all) are small. So you get formatted 80 cylinders of 18,432 bytes per cylinder MSDOS-compatible capacity, at that 5 revolutions per second ( 300 RPM, but gosh, RPS is a better unit here...) speed.
The floppy drive is an incredible chunk of engineering. It's unfortunate that Zip 100 and Zip 250 arrived so relatively late in the game.
In my teens I ran a combination ipmasq(NAT, this was back when we called it ip masquerading) firewall and dial-up POP for my girlfriend at the time off a scrap 386 motherboard some ISA NICs and a 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive. It was packed full of SIMMs, I don't remember how much probably 8MB RAM.
The userspace was all in the initramfs, linux booted directly without any LILO or GRUB (this was back in the days the kernel included its own boot loader), and the floppy drive was totally out of the picture once the system was up and running from RAM.
Prior to adding the dial-up aspect for my gf to share my internet from her home, the init was deliberately exited which technically panicked the kernel. Basically it was a /linuxrc shell script setting up the networking then deliberately breaking userspace - not even PID1 existed while it was just my firewall. The kernel keeps doing networking stuff even if panicked.
[+] [-] ActionRetro|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] armenarmen|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] wowczarek|1 month ago|reply
To my surprise I discovered today that FREESCO was still releasing updates all the way until 2014.
[+] [-] burnt-resistor|1 month ago|reply
Back in the day, I did try inducing errors into 3.5" HD floppies by waving a cheap, small voice-coil speaker magnet over a floppy and comparing its contents sector-by-sector to a disk image stored previously. I was only able to do this after opening the shutter and touching the magnet directly to the diskette surface.
PSA: Never write to 5.25" 360K floppies using 1.2M drives because the created track width is too small to be picked up by 360K drives.
[+] [-] h4kunamata|1 month ago|reply
Over the phone, he instructed the guy to download this floppy disk firewall, specify the ports, traffic direction, basic stuff. Boot the computer and voila, the university network was up again giving the teams hours to get things sorted out.
I forgot its name now but many business would run this floppy disk firewall coz it just worked, once booted it would run "forever".
[+] [-] dddw|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] VoidWhisperer|1 month ago|reply
Archive link incase people want to see the page but can't load it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129015513/http://floppy.ddn...
[+] [-] accrual|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] bot403|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] burnt-resistor|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] asdefghyk|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Linkd|1 month ago|reply
I'm a big fan OP, cool project!
[+] [-] x13|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] reconnecting|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] GeorgeTirebiter|1 month ago|reply
My big secret for those of us still using floppies (USB floppies are a steal!) --- get Maxell NOS; they're about $3 per diskette now, but I have beat them hard and they keep going. Of course, I also had a batch of poorly-stored floppies that would not even turn (!) from one vendor (cheap, tho...) and they almost ruined one drive.
My rule now is: once a single sector goes kaput, make a new working copy from your backup (you HAVE a backup, right???), mark the bad sector of the failed disk, and put it in the 'BAD' pile. I have not yet had a sector on a Maxell 1.44 diskette go bad. Several SONY diskettes however are in that pile.
Note that the head drags on the surface of a floppy, so you're always losing a little; what that closeness does, tho, is allow phenomenal bits-per-square-inch. The coatings are very good, binders are good, magnetic properties are excellent. And the head widths (both sides, after all) are small. So you get formatted 80 cylinders of 18,432 bytes per cylinder MSDOS-compatible capacity, at that 5 revolutions per second ( 300 RPM, but gosh, RPS is a better unit here...) speed.
The floppy drive is an incredible chunk of engineering. It's unfortunate that Zip 100 and Zip 250 arrived so relatively late in the game.
[+] [-] prmoustache|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] nickdothutton|1 month ago|reply
[1] https://www.employees.org/univercd/Feb-1998/cc/td/doc/prod_c...
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pengaru|1 month ago|reply
The userspace was all in the initramfs, linux booted directly without any LILO or GRUB (this was back in the days the kernel included its own boot loader), and the floppy drive was totally out of the picture once the system was up and running from RAM.
Prior to adding the dial-up aspect for my gf to share my internet from her home, the init was deliberately exited which technically panicked the kernel. Basically it was a /linuxrc shell script setting up the networking then deliberately breaking userspace - not even PID1 existed while it was just my firewall. The kernel keeps doing networking stuff even if panicked.
Fun times.
[+] [-] viraptor|1 month ago|reply
You can still do that if your machine supports coreboot.
[+] [-] miladyincontrol|1 month ago|reply
I mean hey these days you dont necessarily need some external bootloader either, on uefi systems the kernel can boot itself thanks to the efi stub.
[+] [-] WesolyKubeczek|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] crumpet|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Duplicake|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] KellyCriterion|1 month ago|reply
:-D
[+] [-] wumms|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] geerlingguy|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|1 month ago|reply