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
Laughs in 5.25, the superior form factor.
Btw, how much data fits a 5.25 magnetic disk when using modern tech?
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.
Didn’t take much space, lol I remember the huge cases people used to buy to store them all.
For similar reasons, I feel like Gameboy Advanced cartridges were the optimal size for handheld consoles. Switch cartridges are so tiny and fragile.
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.
SD cards are perfect size. Micro SD feel fragile.
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.
Agree. Too bad my computers’ built in SD readers never worked, so I have to use a USB stick with SD slot instead
And a satisfying but not too jarring “thunk” when they seat in correctly.
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
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.
“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.
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
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.
Here’s one with a gui lol
Awesome 🤩
I still occasionally use floppies and I can assure you that they do in fact occupy more space than I’d like.
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
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 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.
A future that never was.
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.
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.
- 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.
But many 3.5" disks had end labels that you could read in a stack
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.… you can totally do that now?
Although possible, it’s not really optimal to run an OS via USB
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.
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.
Never saw one of those before, that looks super neat
They were super expensive, as storage solutions went.
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.
And then the button jams 😞
