What's a floppy disk?

[legion]

Anyone want my Bernoulli box?

[Schumi]

I'm pretty sure I had a computer with two Amstrad 3" 'floppy' drives in it at one point- they were these hard disks, about the thickness of an audio casette, made of hard plastic. I remember them being bigger than 3" but the Amstrad is the only drive I can find on the net that resembles these 'thick' floppy disks. We shoehorned windows 3.0 on one I think, it must have been mildly big. It took 20 minutes to boot.



Although the more I think about it the more I think they were 5 1/2" wide or bigger. And about .25" thick. Anyone seen one of those before?

[fingpilot]

Originally Posted by tomphot

OMG - I hated it when you had a stack of punch cards and one of them got out of order!

And who can forget 'hanging chad'?

It WAS called something else then, but it was the same thing.


Holding a card up to the ceiling lights and being able to 'read' it.... I was much younger then. I wore earplugs then, but went 37 years in airplanes without them. You knew your 'run' was done from across the street when the card machine stopped.

[BRPORSCHE]

I actually have a brand new dell sitting on my desk at work with a floppy drive. Thought it was hilarious.

[herr_oberst]

Anybody remember disc-packs - a round plastic box about the size of a stack of big dinner plates, held about 300mb (on ten magnetic discs! 30mb each disc) Took two hands to carry one safely, inserted into the top of a reader the size of a dishwasher.

[fingpilot]

I wasn't going to embarass myself with mentioning those in here. Had one 'come apart' at speed late one night.

When parts stopped flying, I had made it under a desk just as the now denuded spindle reached terminal velocity and the electric motor frapped in a shower of sparks and flame.

I figured out real quick why they paid college students no money to come in and do night audits.

[74-911]

Originally Posted by herr_oberst

Anybody remember disc-packs - a round plastic box about the size of a stack of big dinner plates, held about 300mb (on ten magnetic discs! 30mb each disc) Took two hands to carry one safely, inserted into the top of a reader the size of a dishwasher.

Absolutely, Disc packs were the big deal in the late 60's thru early 80's or later?

[Porsche-O-Phile]

I still have a 3.5" drive around - just in case. My laptop is pretty vintage and has one also that I can hot-swap in. I think I used it once, maybe 2 or 3 years ago to read some disk I'd found.

I find it amusing that all "new" PCs still have compatibility for all this legacy stuff that nobody in their right mind would ever use. Heck, my current PC doesn't even have a serial port (which kinda' actually bugs me because I have an old Summagraphics CAD tablet I'd like to be able to use if I ever needed...)

[Brian Cameron]

Anybody ever program using one of these??

[speedracing944]

What about the cutting edge laser disks from the late '80s. You know the ones that were about as big as the old vinyl records.

[PorscheGAL]

We were recently trying to figure out how to hook up an old Atari unit to show our son how different it is from WII or PS3

[s_morrison57]

Floppy disks? Yep, gotta few of them, unfortunatly they are part of my spine

[URY914]

My company had tape backups that someone different took home everynight. As if it was top secret info. Silly now...

[legion]

I got rid of all of my floppies a few years ago. When I realized I had a few dozen flash drives laying around the house, I realized it was time to put the technology in the past.

[legion]

Originally Posted by URY914

My company had tape backups that someone different took home everynight. As if it was top secret info. Silly now...

That may have been less about security and more about spreading out the risk that the tapes get destroyed. My employer pays a company to store tapes offsite in an undisclosed, secure location. Yes, there is some personal financial data in there (hence the security), but it is really about being able to recover should our corporate headquarters get struck by a tornado.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by BRPORSCHE

I actually have a brand new dell sitting on my desk at work with a floppy drive. Thought it was hilarious.

Last week I had to update the firmware on a SCSI card that runs one of our RAID devices. The only way to update that firmware was to use a floppy. I had to make a DOS bootable floppy, then switch floppies to run the firmware update. Of course I had to change the BOIS to boot from the floppy. I felt like I was back in the 80s.

[Scuba Steve]

Originally Posted by Schumi

I'm pretty sure I had a computer with two Amstrad 3" 'floppy' drives in it at one point- they were these hard disks, about the thickness of an audio casette, made of hard plastic. I remember them being bigger than 3" but the Amstrad is the only drive I can find on the net that resembles these 'thick' floppy disks. We shoehorned windows 3.0 on one I think, it must have been mildly big. It took 20 minutes to boot.



Although the more I think about it the more I think they were 5 1/2" wide or bigger. And about .25" thick. Anyone seen one of those before?

SyQuest drives. We had some for the Mac IIcx. 44MB each and they were pretty much a hard drive platter in a grayish case. They sometimes came in the mail DOA.

[Scuba Steve]

dp

[Icemaster]

Originally Posted by masraum

I've heard/read somewhere that in Australia or the UK they call 3.5" disks "stiffies".

South Africa.

Counter-intuitive if you think about it - 3.5" stiffies, 5.25" floppies....odd.

[GH85Carrera]

There is a brand new never used Jaz drive sitting on a shelf a few feet from my desk.