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
Not that I don’t agree but… I’d take Mini Disc over them. Really similar but smaller -but not to the point of losing tactility or nice labels- and I love the eject mechanism of some players/recorders. Amazing mix of cassette tapes (usability) and CDs (capacity, non-linearity…), kinda late to the party.
UMDs are cool too, thought not as much IMHO.
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.
3.5" were peak tactile feedback
I hear you
And then the button jams 😞
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)
… you can totally do that now?
5 1/4"'s smell better.
CDs (and derivatives) have all of these features as well and orders of magnitude more capacity.
Nope. You have to put them in a caddy to turn them into a satisfying fidget widget. And no one does that.
Still remember my friend making a copy of doom 2 for me using pkzip… I think it took about 10 disks.
NES roms were the way to go. You could pack the emulator + a couple of games in a single 1.44MB floppy no problem.
That would’ve been great. I don’t think I was aware of emulators until well after I’d stopped using floppies though. Looks like the first widespread emulator was iNES in 96 and then Nesticle in 97, though apparently someone made a very early Famicom one in 1990!
But many 3.5" disks had end labels that you could read in a stack
- Great for storing half a photo
Less if you were sensible and included an error correction scheme to combat the unreadable sectors that were bound to pop up after a while. I can be quite nostalgic, but if there is one thing I don’t miss it’s the ‘reliability’ of floppies.
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.
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.
Never saw one of those before, that looks super neat
They were super expensive, as storage solutions went.
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.
They still have a button. It’s just hidden and difficult to use.
“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.
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.
That’s just 37 floppy disks of bloat. All you really need is 1.44 MB.
Here’s one with a gui lol
Awesome 🤩
Those distros even have a GUI? Amiga Workbench on 720k all the way! 😁
I see it and rise it to Atari ST TOS (256 KiB), GEM included.
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
I stop occasionally use floppies and I can assure you that they do in fact occupy more space than I’d like.
