How Old-School Floppy Drives Worked

surprisingly an interesting video.. had completely forgot about the 8" floppy drives.
 
I remember notching 100s of disks (using the same punch that was on the video) on my commodore 64 and 128. I believe I just had cassettes for the vic-20. I had the fasttrack cartridge and certainly a 1541 and 1571 drives.
 
I remember those 5.25" disks...

Always wondered how they went from 360KB single sided to 1.2M double sided...
 
We had special programs that wrote 'errors' onto the media in certain spots to mimic the copy protection of the day. Our computer club met at some meeting hall on the air force base since a couple of the members were higher ups. I look back now and realize that we all would probably end up in the slammer, even though we didn't sell any of it. It was just so we could all play each others games. We each would purchase a different game then trade copies. Those 1541 drives just a banging away!!!.

Now my brain hurts.
 
I hate. Despise floppy disks.
I certainly do not look fondly upon memories of looking at a screen of this:
abortretryfail.jpg


When the floppy drive decided that the disk was full of bad sectors again.

//It also happened more frequently because my parents were too cheap to actually *buy* floppies, so all of the ones that we had were re-purposed AOL disks.

Though floppies were only half as bad as hard disk compression software. With bad floppies, you'd lose some files. With hard disk compression, you'd lose *everything*

...I wish that I were born 10 years later so that I could have skipped that era of computing.
 
Major Rage said:
Lol, I still flash my BIOS with the Floppy
Click to expand...


lol i stopped doing that in the early 2000's when i figured out how to make bootable USB drives.


gsilver said:
I hate. Despise floppy disks.
I certainly do not look fondly upon memories of looking at a screen of this:


When the floppy drive decided that the disk was full of bad sectors again.

//It also happened more frequently because my parents were too cheap to actually *buy* floppies, so all of the ones that we had were re-purposed AOL disks.

Though floppies were only half as bad as hard disk compression software. With bad floppies, you'd lose some files. With hard disk compression, you'd lose *everything*

...I wish that I were born 10 years later so that I could have skipped that era of computing.
Click to expand...

lol i still have a AOL beta gold floppy disk from when my parents first signed up with AOL, i have no clue why i saved it.
 
Necessary backstory: when we lived in France, my father often joked that his coworkers accents made 'floppy disks' sound like 'floppy dicks'

Now that that's out of the way, go watch the first 30 seconds of this video and replace floppy disk with floppy dick.

I haven't laughed that hard in a long long time. Yes, I'm a child.
 
Ahh memories, the Fast Load cartridge, the disk notcher to double the capacity of a single disk, the Commodore Owner's Workshop (COW) meetings where it was one big copy fest with some guy talking to some old farts need the front of the room :D
 
One of my first 5 1/4" floppy discs got folded, about an inch down from the top, a crease all the way across. It still worked! I suppose the outer envelope folded while the inner disc only flexed, but I never opened it up to see what happened inside.

Anti-piracy methods in those days were crazy. I recall terminology like writing on half tracks and quarter tracks so pirates wouldn't be able to copy them, but they figured that out and copied them anyway. Even more vaguely I recall that later on there was shenanigans with the speed of the rotation of the disc or some such thing, that some pirates (so I heard but never saw) would circumvent by using a screwdriver to adjust the speed of their disk drive as it was doing the copy. Such anti-piracy measures made the original discs flaky enough that they wouldn't necessary work in your disk drives, though I can't remember which titles had the worst troubles with annoying their legit paying customers.
 
Like others have said above... no, floppy disks are not still cool. They were barely cool before they were obsolete. Obviously they were better than cassette but man... those ARF errors. Even in the video they mention that floppy disk quality was crap toward the end, but even in the late 80's if you cheaped out(my family couldn't always afford the better namebrand floppy disks. First world problems, I know), you'd still run into the 1-2 out of a box of 20 being DOA, then some of them would just crap out over time. That meant keeping disks sorted, using the cheapies for temp storage, scrounging for better disks when you wanted something that would last...

Although it's kinda of funny because at the same time, early cd-rom burning was freakin' horrendous. Dirt slow speeds, crappy media where the faster the burn speed the crappier the write was, no buffering so the slightest disruption either via software or bumping the case meant you just made a coaster, doing write verification for even the most mundane of burns, making sure to get media that had the printer label on the back because it was better than the ultra cheap trash that barely had anything over the foil, etc. Fortunately that changed pretty damn quickly and wasn't too much of a problem when DVD burning came around.
 
Those 8 inch disks look huge. I didn't know that anything bigger than a 5 and a quarter existed. They look like something that you would use on a mainframe computer or something.

As a kid, having a data storage medium that could flex, seemed like a bad idea at the time.
 
I still have a deep distrust of installing printers during an OS install. Win 95 had something like 30 floppies you had to feed one after another. Could take hours. Somewhere around disk 28 or so, it would ask if you would like to detect and install a printer. If it failed for whatever reason, the entire install failed and you got to start over from disk 1.

I remember attending a C-64 Users Group meeting where the topic was repairing the alignment damage caused by a common copy protection method that caused the 1541 to bang the head seek limiter trying to find a non existent track.
 
Blast from the past: I remember when my Amiga games would degrade due to floppy damage.
Usually it was cylinders 70+ (the edge of the disk IIRC).
So, me being 14 and thinking I was hot shit, would copy the damaged floppy to a known good one with X-Copy.
Then I'd open up a media editor and zero-out the corrupted part. Can't remember what program I used.
Oddly enough, I had a lot of luck with that and could salvage like 80% of broken games.
One thing about growing up on floppies - making backups was pretty much an obvious requirement for continued funhaving.
 
MrAgmoore said:
Those 8 inch disks look huge. I didn't know that anything bigger than a 5 and a quarter existed. They look like something that you would use on a mainframe computer or something.

As a kid, having a data storage medium that could flex, seemed like a bad idea at the time.
Click to expand...

IBM System/34 and System/36 used 8-inch disks. You could load 10 in a magazine and the magazine holder could hold 2 magazines; the one's I worked with anyway. Without the magazines, doing backups were a huge pain. This was when systems had 256MB hard drives. If you had 2 in the machine, you were "rich". :D
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
lol i stopped doing that in the early 2000's when i figured out how to make bootable USB drives.
lol i still have a AOL beta
Click to expand...
I had a board recently (BIOS was small enough to fit on a floppy) that was a total PITA on wanting to boot from a USB flashdrive, had to break out ye ole USB floppy drive to flash the damn BIOS.
 
I've recently had to work with 5.25" floppy diskettes again in order to get software and drivers installed on the Sharp X68000 in my sig.
The last time i used a 5.25" floppy drive was in 2000, and even back then, I thought I would never have to touch one again, let alone pay a premium for a working drive and use an x86 system from 2003 with hardware support for 5.25" FDDs in BIOS and custom diskette r/w software (OmniFlop) in order to get these to work with the X68000, or any other older non-IBM or non-x86 equipment from the 1980s and older.

I've heard the expression, "beauty is pain", and in this case, so is retrocomputing. :D
Good times!
 
Strolling down memory lane like an old codger with a stick walking..

I paid something like $50 extra or so back in 1993 to upgrade to a dual floppy drive when I bought a 486/33Mhz Gateway 2000 tower..

canon_md5511_v6_1_21_44_mb_combo_dual_floppy_dri.jpg


At the same time, paid an extra $200 to go from an 486SX to 486DX CPU (DX had the built-in math coprocessor).. and another $100 or so to upgrade from a 14" to 15" inch monitor. At the time I am sure I thought it was all $ well spent and worth it.

When I worked summer and Christmas breaks as a clerk typist for a US Government agency outside of DC in the early 80s, worked with 8 inch floppies (although they weren't used often by this time, just for legacy stuff) and all offices had huge dot matrix printers that were always inside a sound box because they were so freaking LOUD..

acoustical_printer_covers_30.jpg


At that time, no where I worked had a desktop computer.. the closest I used was an Exxon word processor.. all you could do on it was just type and save letters on it..
vydec1800.jpg


Also remember getting on a Wang dumb terminal a few times for work and it actually had some text based games on it but the only one I specifically remember was some fencing game where you typed in commands like "advance" and "parry".. yeah super boring now but advanced stuff for 35 years ago!! Yeah I am OLD!!
 
I remember in the Apple II days, the floppy drive was completely and totally controlled by the cpu. The drive was physically capable of 80 tracks, with the exception of the R/W head, which couldnt do that many tracks (too large of a head gap probably).

One of the copy protection schemes was to step the head "1/2" track (1 increment instead of 2) twice every rotation. Another was to do a one time step of like 1.5 tracks then continue normally.

those protection schemes would make it seem like the disk was bad if you tried to read it from apple dos, due to the track layout. However, since the software on the disk had their own floppy read/write routines, they could control it how they wanted
 
Back in the day all of us network techs had a pile of floppies with drivers, diagnostics, etc. Between viruses and bad discs it was a never ending battle.
I was always amazed at how many viruses hopped around these discs. It was like trying to flick buggers trying to keep them off our discs.

Don't miss them one bit.
 
The last use I had for a floppy drive would've been around 2005 when installing Windows XP on a SATA drive that was over 128 GB. Custom drive controller driver installs. An absolute pain in the butt when the floppy would have issues or Windows was feeling particularly picky about the hardware. I just love EFI as I can just pop the new firmware on a flash drive and plug it in and update that way. I never realized how much I hated configuring the BIOS until I no longer had to do so. Kind of the theme of technology I suppose. We don't realize how much we hated certain aspects until we go back and go, "God, that was annoying." Jumpers and floppy drives are both part of that.
 
All the floppy hate up in here. Back in the day, those of us stuck on tape based systems LUSTED after floppy drives, and would have killed for a 5MB "winchester." Winchester was what most hard drive systems were called. Usually the HDD system was bigger than the actual computer using it (for home systems at least).

Sure, floppies had issues, but at the time they were state of the art. I mean dissing on floppies is like saying you don't want 128x64 B&W resolution for graphics! LOL!
 
What I always thought was amazing was that the head never actually knows where it is. It sets the "zero" position at the beginning, and then it goes off reading data from where it thinks it should be at. But the drive has no way to verify its reading from the right spot. Pretty incredible considering their life span and day to day reliability.
 
My favorite past time in the early nineties. Backing up data to floppy disks, all day long. I mostly used 5.25 disks, since they were mostly sent my way for free from acquaintances working IT. ARJ the shit out of the data, to try to fit things on the least amount of disks. Of course I used 2M Format. So my 5.25 disks had a capacity of 1.47 MB and later my 3.5 disks had 1.828. You could push the envelope even further with 2MFormat I think to 1.5 something on 5.25 and 1.9 on 3.5, but then they become highly unreliable.
 
I remember people calling the old Apple II 3.5" disks "hard disks"....I used to do the notch trick with 3.5", the hole opposite the write protect signified high-density so you could use 720KB discs as 1.44MB.....It worked to varying degrees of success, good quality disks generally worked the same as store-bought 1.44MB disks, in fact I'd say they were the exact same disks internally, although manufacturers later claimed they couldn't guarantee the integrity of the other side that hadn't intended to be used. The quality of the old disks ensured a consistent, evenly applied magnetic coating on both sides just by virtue of the standards to which they manufactured the magnetic discs, but as they cheapened their processes, from a QC standpoint this was no longer true. As the video pointed out, in later years disks weren't made as robustly and they continued to get worse, but by then double-density disks weren't widely available anymore and the price difference was negligible to bother getting unreliable space from both sides through a cheap hack. Most of the branded disks came from the same few factories by that time anyway. There were also 2.88MB disks but they never caught on, the drives and media were too expensive and didn't have a chance to come down in price since better options than floppy disks were coming into use by then.

It's easy to forget how easy we have it with storage these days, we'd do anything we could back then to squeeze as much limited space as possible, including things like "Turn your 40MB drive into 80MB with Stacker 2.0!".....I still always think of that whenever I see Stacker, the nutritional supplement!
 
I definitely do not miss floppies, especially the double density flippy bastards. At one point I had my 10MB MFM drive fail, and I couldn't afford a replacement, as they were expensive as hell, and you had to sit there for two days testing them to ensure they had a bad block count you'd be willing to live with. I went around gathering 5.25" floppy drives from every Egghead Software within an hour driving distance, as well as floppy/serial controllers to fill all of the ISA slots on the motherboard. I loaded DOS and Desqview in memory using VDISK.SYS and a series of batch files I devised to keep me online, having to swap disks all day to keep my BBS up -- as that 286/8 only had 2 MB of RAM, and my BBS crap was nearly 6 MB. If I wasn't around, people would try to load a door game, or the mail tosser batch file would screw up copying archives to one of the disks, and the BBS would just sit there at a prompt waiting for me to insert a disk for the next archive, or another disk because the last copy didn't fit and the errorlevel returned a value. Those batch files used SEA (ARC) compression, and I had to create series of archives because the compression format didn't support directory structure, and the batch files translated/moved them back into directories all convoluted and haphazardly. I learned a LOT about how people stored door game data commonly, and even more about message board file hierarchy for tosser/scanners. Not a good way to spend your summer, and that knowledge never paid off for anything else in the future. Well aside from... when you split and combine files, you make sure there isn't a damned ^Z in there.

Awful failure prone technology that despite what the video elaborated, I am almost positive was fueled by butthurt and tears, hitting that Ignore option over and over again hoping that Norton FileFix or Disk Test would rescue you from this eternal nightmare.
 
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gsilver said:
...I wish that I were born 10 years later so that I could have skipped that era of computing.
Click to expand...
lol nooo... if anything it adds to ones character. Patience, moments of Zen. Rage rising.. rising... falling... rising! 15-16 years from now I can tell my kid (who probably will be fed information directly to the brain via facebook AI) that "you know son, I used to have hair before I got my first computer".
 
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