Floppy disks are not dead yet

The floppy will never truly die as long as our ballistic missile silos still require them to function lol (scary part is they use 8 inch floppies)
 
It is worth saying that amazon has a bunch of 3.5 inch floppy drives and disks for sale. They also sell things like VHS tapes(which I ordered as part of my Halloween costume this year). They also have some 5.25 floppy disks that you can get via prime.

The site mentions that there is no 5.25 inch floppy usb drive. That is half right. You can get a usb controller that works with 5.25 inch floppy drives and lets you make images off them. You can then use an image program to export the files. I'm guessing it is what they use in their service to copy stuff off the disks.

I actually have 2 5.25 inch floppy drives(and some usb 3.5 ones) and the controller for the drive. I had a client buy them for me like in 2013ish. Social Security was claiming he didn't make payments in the 80's. He still had a bunch of floppies from the 80's with his accounting info on them. I told him he had to pay for the hardware to recover the data and if I couldn't get it we wouldn't bill him any labor. More than 90% of the disks he had were readable. I ended up having to fight with the last version of lotus notes and managed to convert the files to a usable format.

I would expect a nice nitch market for this stuff. You also have a bunch of commercial equipment that takes floppy disks. Embroidery machines come to mind. Engraving machines come to mind as well. I know some trophies shops that have a few machines that use floppy disks. The machine from the 80's or 90's does letter engraving just as well as the new machines and at very least are kept as backups.

Never underestimate how much expensive equipment uses some old tech. I've seen a bunch of CNC machines from the 70's still in service that have tape reels support(luckily we had some custom serial cables to program them). I had a client buy a few of said machines in the last decade. The reasoning was they had the tolerance support needed and were 25 grand plus setup instead of the 250 plus grand for the new machine. For a small business this was a good way to save money but have some expansion.
 
I still have one and would only use it if there was some sort of HDD failure/problem. Now I just use a USB drive.
 
I still have a USB 3.5" floppy drive.

It was useful many times for loading special disk controller (RAID usually) drivers during OS installs.
I haven't needed the drive for quite some time though.

I can't believe how we used to trust crappy floppy disks for critical data. :p
 
i keep a drive and box of disks around just in case. Haven't needed them in a couple of years though, and the last time was loading drivers for some old server equipment.
 
Just had a memory of visiting my little brother with a stack of 3.5" floppies held together with a rubberband
when the original DOOM was released. He was very happy to see those diskettes.

I think it was one big zip file split across many disks that had to be rebuilt into a single zip file on
the computer and then unzipped.

Good times! lol

Also remembering now that I had a special punch so I could buy bulk 720k diskettes and punch the other
corner on them to convert them to the more expensive 1.44MB diskettes. :)
 
Somebody recently gave me a box 2000 3.5 floppies. I took them because I didnt want to hurt his feelings. They're resting peacefully at the county dump.
 
I still have a few dozen couple kicking in my photo studio. The 1995 Optronics drum scanners that we have use a 486 rig as a controller that uses a floppy to boot the software. They then are linked via gpib to another system with the scanning software. I've been meaning to convert the controllers to hard disks though. Now that's some old school hardware. :D
 
I think I finally got rid of my last drive during my last "purge" of PC equipment. Kept one for a long time just in case I needed to upgrade the BIOS, or drivers. Now, I just make a bootable USB flash drive.

And, I remember using the program Splitter(I think). Split 1 big file into chunks to fit onto 3.5" disks. Fun times.
 
I still use a USB floppy drive every time I reformat my hard drives...I use the HDDErase program (enhanced secure erase) which is on a floppy
 
Last time I used floppys was about 5 years ago. The place I worked used a very old Ghost application that booted from floppy. I also had to use them for F6 Windows XP installs.
 
I have a USB 3.5" floppy drive for when it's needed. I have a 5.25" floppy drive in my computer just for retro purposes. I would REALLY like to find a way to make it functional. I'm thinking something along the lines of a USB floppy controller that I can run internally. I just need to find one that will for sure work with a 5.25" drive.
 
GotNoRice said:
I have a USB 3.5" floppy drive for when it's needed. I have a 5.25" floppy drive in my computer just for retro purposes. I would REALLY like to find a way to make it functional. I'm thinking something along the lines of a USB floppy controller that I can run internally. I just need to find one that will for sure work with a 5.25" drive.
Click to expand...

http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

That is the one I used for recovering data off floppies from the 80's. They give drives they recommend using and I used a tec one and another I found NIB that wasn't officially listed but worked fine.

It doesn't make it work like a normal floppy drive would. You run their software and make an image of the disk(think like an iso of a cd). You can then use image software to open it. On the plus side this means it can read a lot of different formats of disks.

When I looked a few years ago you really didn't have many options. Most seemed to use an old like pentium 3 class machine to read 5.25 disks when needed as machines really didn't support 5.25 drives much past that.

I had a great picture of my brand new 3rd gen i7 macbook running a 5.25 floppy drive running off an atx power supply with a jumper wire to turn it on. I had some joke about how else was I going to play the apple 2 oregon trail we played in elementary school.

If you actually need to read 5.25 floppy disks though I'd look at that controller. It did exactly what I needed it to.
 
Too bad there isn't a PC equivalent of the old mac superdisk drives. I've got a bunch of IIgs 800k floppies i'd love to get images of. Right now the only way I have is via a null modem cable file transfer (xmodem!) from the aforementioned IIgs. Aka: Slowsville given it can only push out 19200 baud.
 
3.5" floppy disks are pretty useless even for retro systems now that you can get floppy emulators that use USB thumb drives and can break a usb drive into around 100 floppy disks.

You select the disk you want to use with buttons on the front of the emulator.
 
Spartacus said:
I can't believe how we used to trust crappy floppy disks for critical data. :p
Click to expand...

Actually, some of the floppy disks were more reliable than a lot of the current USB drives. I loved getting the AOL disks in the mail. They were easy to use, and I never had any problems with them. Some still work even though they've been in storage (not climate controlled) for years. The cheap bulk disks you purchase at the office store for the last 10-15 years? Not so much.

Another reason I think many people who have used floppy disks recently have had so many disk failures is that the drives haven't been used for years, and are full of dust. I have had to swap between several drives before getting some disks to read.

BTW - anyone remember the LS120 drives? 3.5" floppy drives that ran off the IDE controller, and could take 120MB disks, but still read the 1.44 disks? Killed Iomega ZIP in usefulness, but came out just at the time USB drives were becoming affordable, so never took off.
 
Last edited:
I'll take USB drives over floppy drives. :)

Could be dust, or it could just be good old track skew on those old floppy drives.
Sometimes a floppy formatted in one drive could not be used in another drive.

I used to see that all the time on those old QIC 40/80 tape cartridges too. You had
to format the tape in the drive you were using even if it was a pre-formatted new tape.

Years ago I had a call at a business who lost a hard drive on their main machine and
they called me to fix the problem. They said they figured I could replace the bad hard
drive and restore from their QIC 40 tape drive that they did backups on daily.

Replaced the drive then came the predictable tragedy in this story. They were using
pre-formatted tapes and never even did a test restore from the tape drive.

I still remember the look of horror on their faces when I told them I could not read
any of the tapes in their big stack of backup tapes. Their previous IT guy never told
them about having to format the tape in their own tape drive.

It was a small Mom & Pop shop and I felt really bad for them.

I don't miss tape drives or floppy drives (or horribly slow old computers) at all. :)
 
Spartacus said:
Just had a memory of visiting my little brother with a stack of 3.5" floppies held together with a rubberband
when the original DOOM was released. He was very happy to see those diskettes.

I think it was one big zip file split across many disks that had to be rebuilt into a single zip file on
the computer and then unzipped.

Good times! lol

Also remembering now that I had a special punch so I could buy bulk 720k diskettes and punch the other
corner on them to convert them to the more expensive 1.44MB diskettes. :)
Click to expand...

Ha, I have a very similar memory. Took DOOM over to a friend's house on a bunch of 3.5" floppies. Had them in my pocket, put them in my friend's dad's nice fancy new white Gateway to unzip and install. One of the disks had some sand/dust or something from my pocket that got under the metal thing on the disk and then into the drive itself. Didn't break it but my friend's dad was piiiiissed. So I became that friend that was forbidden from ever coming over and touching their computer ever again, lol. Good times.
 
illram said:
Ha, I have a very similar memory. Took DOOM over to a friend's house on a bunch of 3.5" floppies. Had them in my pocket, put them in my friend's dad's nice fancy new white Gateway to unzip and install. One of the disks had some sand/dust or something from my pocket that got under the metal thing on the disk and then into the drive itself. Didn't break it but my friend's dad was piiiiissed. So I became that friend that was forbidden from ever coming over and touching their computer ever again, lol. Good times.
Click to expand...

Yep, that's another thing that sucked about floppies... those metal shutter doors on them.

They were all the time getting messed up. I remember having to take apart floppy drives to remove those shutter doors from being jammed inside the drive and also the little springs for them that would pop out.

FnordMan said:
So.. a USB floppy drive then? :D
Click to expand...

Yep, I've had one for a long time.
 
jardows said:
BTW - anyone remember the LS120 drives? 3.5" floppy drives that ran off the IDE controller, and could take 120MB disks, but still read the 1.44 disks? Killed Iomega ZIP in usefulness, but came out just at the time USB drives were becoming affordable, so never took off.
Click to expand...

LS120 were popular in Japan, an all over Asia. J&R in NYC was selling PCs with them, after they sold ZIP drives. I had a Zip Drive and just 2 100mb disks. So $10-100mb ZIP or 0.20c for 700mb CD-R?!

I almost got in SparQ and JAZ drives; JAZ disks were expensive, but SparQ drives had 3 free 1TB disks for less!
I also considered tape drives, but their price vs.external hdd was too much.

Only a hdd can back-up a hdd, not USBs, disks, tapes.
 
I'm still miffed that after ZIP/Jazz disks floundered about for a while, MiniDisc Data disks failed to make an impact :(

They were basically like CDs, only far, far faster and more reliable and rewritable by default..

Personally I use but loathe USB drives. Mostly because since they're not easily made bootable, it can be quite a song-and-dance routine to accomplish anything with them.
 
DataLinx said:
i remember thos zip /disks at the time thay were a good idea but VERY costly and did not sell
Click to expand...

I had an IDE-based ZIP drive with a bunch of 100 & 250 MB disks. They were pretty nifty and great for making backups at the time.

The parallel port-based ZIP drives were practically unusable, though. Far too slow...
 
I had to use floppies not that long ago when I had to flash firmware for IBM sata controllers for my file server. Even had to allocate memory through emm386 so the flash util could work. I forgot how painful that was lol.
 
Elledan said:
The parallel port-based ZIP drives were practically unusable, though. Far too slow...
Click to expand...

I had one system that had the miracle parallel port. After running the Zip port optimization utility, I was able to get IDE-level performance!

Must have been one golden parallel port with just the right combination of EPP support, because I never again was able to recreate that, and had to wait forever for transfers :mad:

I did use my Zip drive at work to playback mp3s during my summer internship in back in 2000. I could fit an hour and a half of music per-disk, and swap it out nightly. Also, the old Pentium 90 system they had me working on only had enough horsepower to playback mp3s in mono!
 
Last edited:
My Fiance's grandmother's computer recently had an issue that I needed a floppy for.

It was a Dell Pentium 4 system circa 2005 with Windows XP. She uses it to check email and play card games. I needed to run Memtest but the dvd drive didn't work and it wouldn't boot to a USB drive.

Fortunately I keep a box with a couple spare floppy drives and floppy disks for this kind of situation.
 
I have a box full of old floppies, ZIP, etc.
I haven't had any use for them but they're there just in case.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top