Floppy disks.
They're ancient, yet easily recognizable by their modern form: The save icon.
Well, well... Floppy disks are the most nostalgic aspect of old tech for many people around the world. Some say they're junk, some say they're absolutely awesome. I'm with the latter group.
Floppy disks, also called diskettes, are really similar to cassettes, or even modern hard drives: They're a magnetic storage medium. While cassettes are used to store analog signals, designed to store audio (or video), floppies are used to store digital data, which is readable by a floppy drive in a computer.
Tapes are designed to be played from the beginning to the end, which is why they're magnetic material is stored on a reel, and the tape head constantly reads the signal while the material is moving at a constant speed.
Floppies, however, are supposed to be able to access data randomly, because a user requires instant access to a file stored anywhere on the floppy.
This is why a floppy disk is a round magnetic sheet, enclosed in a plastic casing, rather than a reel of material. The floppy drive can access any part of the disk just by rotating the sheet and adjusting the position of the head.
This is an image of the magnetic material inside a 3.5" (or 8.89 cm) floppy disk from Wikipedia. These are the last of the floppy disk species, and can hold a whopping 2.88 megabytes (but, to tell you the truth, most drives could only read 1.44 megabyte disks.)
These are the only kind of disks I currently have access to, because my current collection of computers isn't old enough for 5.25" ones.
This is the most typical, and well recognized appearance of a floppy. A black, 3.5" one, with a metallic shutter. The one in this picture is also my first floppy disk, which I got two years ago, before I had started collecting anything. I still remember my enthusiasm. It was simply amazing, holding one of these in my hand.
I'm not really sure what's so special about them. Maybe it's the sound a computer makes when reading one of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qz9a8kYYkA
This might sound terrible, but in practice it's not that loud, and there is something really comforting about this sound.
Or maybe it's just the fact that this was pretty much the first true form of removable media. (not counting really ancient stuff, like punched paper or datasettes, which are actually not that old, but still)
It's just amazing.
The older, 5.25" floppies, are, besides the relatively unpopular 8" floppies, the truly floppy disks.
They're really flexible, and can hold as much as 1.2 megabytes of data.
The one on the left is the 5.25" (13.335 cm) one. As you can see, it has no shutter, and the way people used to protect these was to put them in paper sleeves, so the exposed part is no longer... exposed, I guess.
You might notice a small cutout on the top left of the disk: That is the write-protect notch. If it is covered, the disk is write-protected. To cover it, one had to use scotch tape.
Well now, you might be thinking: How could one write on the other side of the disk, if the disk only had this notch on the first side?
Well, one had to cut out a notch on the other side, manually, or with a product specifically designed for that task.
Too much ones, I'm sorry.
3.5" floppies also have this feature, but they have a more convenient write-protection slider on the bottom left.
These are all three (standard) types of floppies, one over the other. The 8" (20.32 cm) one is the first one ever invented, being first produced in the early 1970s. These could only hold, at most, up to 1.2 megabytes, just like the 5.25" ones.
"Data is generally written to floppy disks in sectors (angular blocks) and tracks (concentric rings at a constant radius). For example, the HD format of 3½-inch floppy disks uses 512 bytes per sector, 18 sectors per track, 80 tracks per side and two sides, for a total of 1,474,560 bytes per disk." -Wikipedia
There were also some formats, like the DMF format used in commercially distributed software, which could store 1.68 megabytes on a standard HD disk, by increasing the sector count from 18 to 21. These disks could still be read in a normal floppy drive.
I mostly use floppy disks to copy software to older computers.
I guess the most useful task I use a floppy for, is booting my mid-2000s IBM computer from USB, as it doesn't support that natively. I use Plop Boot Manager to achieve that task.
Floppy disks were standard in personal computers up until the early 2000s. I currently own three computers with floppy drives, and also plan to get a USB floppy drive.
The three computers are the IBM I mentioned earlier, the Zenith Z-Note Flex I reviewed in my last post, and a Sony Vaio PCG-F801a.
Now, you might be wondering: Why does the title of this post contain "not quite"?
It's because the US military still uses 8" floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations.
Wow.
This is the reason, among other modern uses.
Well, That's all, folks!
Hope y'all learned something, and are having a wonderful day!🎈
They're ancient, yet easily recognizable by their modern form: The save icon.
Well, well... Floppy disks are the most nostalgic aspect of old tech for many people around the world. Some say they're junk, some say they're absolutely awesome. I'm with the latter group.
Floppy disks, also called diskettes, are really similar to cassettes, or even modern hard drives: They're a magnetic storage medium. While cassettes are used to store analog signals, designed to store audio (or video), floppies are used to store digital data, which is readable by a floppy drive in a computer.
Tapes are designed to be played from the beginning to the end, which is why they're magnetic material is stored on a reel, and the tape head constantly reads the signal while the material is moving at a constant speed.
Floppies, however, are supposed to be able to access data randomly, because a user requires instant access to a file stored anywhere on the floppy.
This is why a floppy disk is a round magnetic sheet, enclosed in a plastic casing, rather than a reel of material. The floppy drive can access any part of the disk just by rotating the sheet and adjusting the position of the head.
These are the only kind of disks I currently have access to, because my current collection of computers isn't old enough for 5.25" ones.
I'm not really sure what's so special about them. Maybe it's the sound a computer makes when reading one of these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qz9a8kYYkA
This might sound terrible, but in practice it's not that loud, and there is something really comforting about this sound.
Or maybe it's just the fact that this was pretty much the first true form of removable media. (not counting really ancient stuff, like punched paper or datasettes, which are actually not that old, but still)
It's just amazing.
The older, 5.25" floppies, are, besides the relatively unpopular 8" floppies, the truly floppy disks.
They're really flexible, and can hold as much as 1.2 megabytes of data.
The one on the left is the 5.25" (13.335 cm) one. As you can see, it has no shutter, and the way people used to protect these was to put them in paper sleeves, so the exposed part is no longer... exposed, I guess.
You might notice a small cutout on the top left of the disk: That is the write-protect notch. If it is covered, the disk is write-protected. To cover it, one had to use scotch tape.
Well now, you might be thinking: How could one write on the other side of the disk, if the disk only had this notch on the first side?
Well, one had to cut out a notch on the other side, manually, or with a product specifically designed for that task.
Too much ones, I'm sorry.
3.5" floppies also have this feature, but they have a more convenient write-protection slider on the bottom left.
These are all three (standard) types of floppies, one over the other. The 8" (20.32 cm) one is the first one ever invented, being first produced in the early 1970s. These could only hold, at most, up to 1.2 megabytes, just like the 5.25" ones.
"Data is generally written to floppy disks in sectors (angular blocks) and tracks (concentric rings at a constant radius). For example, the HD format of 3½-inch floppy disks uses 512 bytes per sector, 18 sectors per track, 80 tracks per side and two sides, for a total of 1,474,560 bytes per disk." -Wikipedia
There were also some formats, like the DMF format used in commercially distributed software, which could store 1.68 megabytes on a standard HD disk, by increasing the sector count from 18 to 21. These disks could still be read in a normal floppy drive.
I mostly use floppy disks to copy software to older computers.
I guess the most useful task I use a floppy for, is booting my mid-2000s IBM computer from USB, as it doesn't support that natively. I use Plop Boot Manager to achieve that task.
Floppy disks were standard in personal computers up until the early 2000s. I currently own three computers with floppy drives, and also plan to get a USB floppy drive.
The three computers are the IBM I mentioned earlier, the Zenith Z-Note Flex I reviewed in my last post, and a Sony Vaio PCG-F801a.
Now, you might be wondering: Why does the title of this post contain "not quite"?
It's because the US military still uses 8" floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations.
Wow.
This is the reason, among other modern uses.
Well, That's all, folks!
Hope y'all learned something, and are having a wonderful day!🎈
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