Post title at limit, but meant to be peak tactile feedback in computer storage.
The space saved from being thin made it bad for looking up and finding a specific disk within a stack, tho, as it couldn’t fit an end label
“didn’t take too much space”
Someone never installed an operating system from floppies. Win98 was 38 floppies. Heaven help you if you didn’t notice you only have 37 disks until halfway through the install.
A media format with 1.44mb per disk is not conducive to space saving even back in the day.
They’re talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.
You could build SSDs today with the exact same tactility of floppy disks but with terabytes of storage.
You better patent this.
To be fair, by 1998 something as big as win98 wasn’t supposed to be shipped in floppies. Then again, win95 was available as 27 disks
Windows 95 on CD-ROM included three music videos, presumably to show off the capabilities of the format.
I remember my copy had Buddy Holly by Weezer, and I think something called Good Times. What was the third?
The third was the trailer to Rob Roy.
I still occasionally use floppies and I can assure you that they do in fact occupy more space than I’d like.
That’s just 37 floppy disks of bloat. All you really need is 1.44 MB.
Those distros even have a GUI? Amiga Workbench on 720k all the way! 😁
Ok, you forgot the Kickstart boot disk loading the Kernel before. But yes, the Amiga was amazingly resource efficient.
I learned a lot about the Amiga reading Ars Technica’s history of the Amiga series. Such a shame that that computer never reached Brazil
Don’t fret. Only snobby kids whos parents bought it for them had them. Because they wanted to one-up you. And they didn’t even appreciate it. Like I did my C128D that had a built-in floppy drive.
Fuck you, Csabika.
I see it and rise it to Atari ST TOS (256 KiB), GEM included.
Yep, an Atari ST man myself, but I had the STFM and then the STE, so TOS was in ROM. Wonderful machines. Still going to this day.
But it could be copied on a 720 KiB floppy with space left after writing.
Here’s one with a gui lol
Awesome 🤩
Never saw one of those before, that looks super neat
They were super expensive, as storage solutions went.
And a satisfying but not too jarring “thunk” when they seat in correctly. Plus, the activity light let you know it was safe/not safe to hit the eject button.
Remember how sometimes you’d put the disk in and you could hear the floppy part spinning for a fraction of a second to line up with, I guess the motor head, before it fully clunked in? That shit was peak.
Brrr-click!
Yep lol.
And you could tell by the sound if your read/write operation was going to fail for whatever reason.
(A)bort, ®etry, (F)ail?
R-R-R-R-R-(sigh)-A
I don’t even remember what (F)ail did
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. Didn’t Abort just cancel trying to read that sector, while Fail would cancel the entire operation?
Nope, I looked it up. Abort would completely abort the whole thing, while Fail was supposed to return an error code to the program so that it could decide what to do next. Like Ignore but less crashy.
Thanks for that. All I could remember was that pressing F just meant that I had to press A anyway so I just pressed A.
3.5 disks were my fidget spinners before the term existed. pulling back the slide and letting it snap shut kept my idle brain occupied for hours while waiting for stuff on the computer to happen.
Flashbacks of flipping around a 5¼" floppy disks that were actually floppy and manually spinning the cassette tape wheels while something is loading.
I have loaded punch cards and punch tape also. The only thing I haven’t loaded is those big open platters. I’ve used 5 1/4" floppies as late as 2017 with an old Apple Lisa and CMM.
OP they really were. Back in the day when I was a sysadmin I would keep a bunch of tools on a floppy that I would carry around as I did user support.
It was like carrying around a toolbox to work on things.
I still do that but with a usb drive, which is way more capable especially with ventoy on it.
Diggit!
I don’t do sysadmin work anymore, but near the end of my time doing that the network capabilities were much ore stable than what I worked on in the early 2000s so I put them on a share.
Lol. I did the same.
Growing up, my dad used to download a lot of games off BBSes for me and my brother. He would save them on 3.5 floppies and then label what game was on each one. I’ve got fond memories of flipping through his box of floppies seeing what new games he had for us to play.
We didn’t stack them though. We kept them in those boxes with a pointless lock, and flipped through them.
The good old days. I wish I still had mine but alas my old floppy box died in a fire.
Ah just like flipping through records at a record store.
Mine lived in the original cardboard boxes
Look at Mr Moneybags over here, playing his games without hand written labels and cracktros.
Who said that? I meant the boxes that held the original empty floppies
God that sounds nice actually, I miss it terribly
Not all drives had buttons. There were workstations (Sun Sparcs) which had. motorized eject mechanisms.
Used 10 of these workstations to copy my freshly downloaded Slackware Linux to the stack of 60 floppies it took. (Twice, so I wrote 120 disks, as at least one of the disks would have read errors on average). Each time one of the Sparcs was done, it did spit out the disk and I’d insert a new one, labeling the old one with what was written on screen.
Ah the hours I spent downloading and installing 100-200 Megabytes of operating systems.
Labeling the disks would just be a sequence number, I’d label the disk boxes with the content.
Late 90s memories…
At home, I’d install the os by inserting each of these disks into my PC with16MBytes of RAM.
All that took about a day of work.
You kids don’t know how good you have it, we had to fetch out Xfree86 mode lines in a wooden bucket from outside in the snow, barefoot.
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The MacIntosh did not have an eject button famously.
The 3.5” disk was designed as a consumer product by Sony, whose industrial design is second to none. (Compare the 5¼ “ and 8” floppies, which were designed by IBM engineers and only intended for use by technical specialists.)
… was second to none. Looking at almost illegible black text labels on a black Sony TV enclosure.
It’s easy to read as long as you have 20/20 vision and are under 25 years old.😂🤓
I wish they’d make SSDs in a similar format with plug-and-play functionality.
Stick your disk in and boot from it. Remove after shutdown and take it with you.That’s called a thumb drive and you can do it as long as the computer you are using has the option to boot from USB enabled in BIOS (typically personal machines come with that enabled but machines out in the public often disable it specifically because they don’t want you booting a different OS)
But if it were an NVMe slot… That’d be juicy.
You can get near that level of performance with a small thunderbolt drive.
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Although possible, it’s not really optimal to run an OS via USB
But if you get a really lightweight one it still can be better than those times… There were much less storage, RAM, CPU, etc. back then and still worked. Maybe not Windows, but there are more OSes
FreeDOS if you wanna go real retro.
Yep, all you have to do is buy a hot swap bay for your computer, and sometimes enable the feature on your motherboard.
For similar reasons, I feel like Gameboy Advanced cartridges were the optimal size for handheld consoles. Switch cartridges are so tiny and fragile.
SD cards are perfect size. Micro SD feel fragile.
Agree. Too bad my computers’ built in SD readers never worked, so I have to use a USB stick with SD slot instead
If you don’t feel like you need to move your feet when you accidentally drop it (to avoid a toe smack) , it’s too small.
MemoryStick Pro Duo was far worse. Sony, SanDisk, or PNY… Brand didn’t matter… they’d just split open over time. Thankfully Micro SD to MSPD cards came about.
Switch cartridges also taste terrible, so simultaneously you need to put them somewhere to be sure you don’t lose them while switching cases AND you don’t want to make the mistake of finding out the hard way because you needed your hands free.
They taste that way on purpose to stop little kids from putting them in their mouths and potentially choking.
Oh, I know. I’m not a little kid but I probably shouldn’t put them in my mouth. Honestly, I’d be more worried about my dog.
This and CD caddys. Nothing like spending a full minute swapping out the cd in the caddy, then getting that satisfying chunk when the mechanics kick in.
I never liked cd caddies. The push button, wait for motor to eject, then push button, wait for motor to load was dissociative.
The floppy drive was a direct mechanical link between the button and eject.
The labeling was a good thing, and stackability, but otherwise I prefer USB sticks. Tactile, easy to stick in or pull out. Esp. since even an old one replaces thousands of disks. 1GB==711floppies
I kind of wish that something along the lines of the old PCMCIA format had survived. Flat, stackable, big enough for easy labelling, and these days could easily fit many terabytes of flash storage.
SATA SSDs, if only there were floppy-like docks in PCs’ front panels for them. I see adding one usb-c female adapter as a part of the protective case, and adding a male one on the opposite end of the dock could’ve been the way, since modern USB ports have sufficient power and data capabilities. Adapter’s firmware could’ve signaled it’s nothing more than a big USB thumb drive, it can also be (made?) compatible with portable devices e.g. digital cameras, phones, etc to make it more useful.
I remember 2,5" hot-swap bays being a thing some years ago, surely some cases still come with them. Although for the average user that setup is pretty overkill, and pcmcia cards were smaller, kinda figures that it hasn’t gotten mass adoption.
I have a desktop hard-drive dock and keep most of my games installed on cheap SSDs. Feels like starting an n64 when I use steam.
A future that never was.
In regards to tactile feedback, I still prefer diskettes, the larger size makes them easier to grip and pull/push. USB sticks are great for storage nowadays, but pulling one out with one hand can be a small hassle sometimes
I’ve never had an issue knowing which side was up on a floppy though. Once USB-C sticks become prevalent (in my collection), that annoyance will finally be lifted!
Fair enough, that often makes me swear.
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Btw, how much data fits a 5.25 magnetic disk when using modern tech?
Edit: I did the math. With the same storage density as modern LTO-10 tapes, a 5.25" disk could hold around 31GB, while a 3.5" one could hold around 15GB.
Zip disks at least the 100’s had the same tactile qualities, little door to fidget and label space all while having that satisfying clicking sound each time you used them.
