floppy discs

[genrex]

My girlfriend and I were cleaning out the guest bedroom closet, and we found some 3.5" computer floppy discs. There's no data on them. It's interesting to think that these were state-of-the-art about 20 years ago.

But why are they called floppy discs? They're not floppy at all.

__

[Por_sha911]

The original floppy disks were 5.25" and they were flexible to some degree. I would assume that the 3.5" kept the name even though they had a hard shell (which protected the writable media and prevented data loss).

[VaSteve]

Original disks were like 8 1/2". Those came before the 5.25" discs.
Remember Zip drives? I skipped that completely.

[masraum]

And the actual disk inside the shell is very floppy unlike the platters inside a hard disk

[id10t]

But unlike the floppy floppies you can't use a hole punch on the other side to create a second read/write notch and double the capactiy

Anyone else ever save to audio tape in a standard tape recorder via RCA inputs/outputs ?

[mossguy]

I uploaded and downloaded data to a tape recorder on my Trash-80. Does that count?

[id10t]

Originally Posted by mossguy

I uploaded and downloaded data to a tape recorder on my Trash-80. Does that count?

Yup, thats exactly what I was doing. In fact, the first google employee did the same a few chairs over in the lab from me. Makes me wish I had applied myself in high school instead of smokin dope and chasing girls.

[GH85Carrera]

My Commodore Vic 20 saved to tape. I knew 20K was not enough so I bought the 16K expansion module. It woul get do hot it would burn my hand

[masraum]

When my parents bought our Commodore 64, you couldn't get a floppy for it so we spent the first month or two using a tape drive until they released the floppy drive.

[bivenator]

I recently needed a floppy for an older piece of medical equipment. I first had to call around to 4 different stores where I got the same answer, "You want what? No, we don't carry those." Fortunately I have a brother in law who is IT and he had some stuck in a desk drawer.

[id10t]

Originally Posted by bivenator

I recently needed a floppy for an older piece of medical equipment. I first had to call around to 4 different stores where I got the same answer, "You want what? No, we don't carry those." Fortunately I have a brother in law who is IT and he had some stuck in a desk drawer.

I had to dig out a 5.25" floppy *drive* a few years ago to read some data off a disk for a student who was challenging a grade from teh early 90s.... why the admins let him challenge I have no idea, but it was fun reading the data...

[imcarthur]

My 1st job in 'real' Consumer Electronics in 1981 involved selling 5 1/4 & 8 1/2 Maxell floppy discs. I didn't even personally own a computer that would accept them until 1986.

Ian

[74-911]

Originally Posted by imcarthur

My 1st job in 'real' Consumer Electronics in 1981 involved selling 5 1/4 & 8 1/2 Maxell floppy discs. I didn't even personally own a computer that would except them until 1986.Ian

We used to buy Maxell floppies by the tens of thousands back during the 70's through late 90's. We used them to send out system releases and updates for our insurance agency rating and accounting software.... fond memories spending hour after hour manually duplicating 5 1/4 and 8" floppies on dual drive systems until we could finally afford to buy disk duplicators.

We started out software business in 1978 using TRS-80 Mod I's with 48K of memory (writing software for insurance agents in BASIC). Initially backing up to tape (very slow and unreliable) then moving to 360K 5 1/4" single-sided floppies when they came out. The 5 1/4's eventually went double-sided read/write (720K). Our turnkey system ( a TRS-80 MOD I, 48K with dual 5 1/4" floppy drives and a dot matrix printer) with our basic rating software package ran almost $7500 and we sold a lot of them.

When the MOD II TRS-80s came out in late 1978 IIRC, you could get up to 512K memory and they used 8" floppies. RS evenually released a HD drive for the MOD II with 8 MBytes of storage and just the drive retailed for $4500.... They ran using the TRSDOS operating system... a Model II with 8 meg HD and our full rating software package went for around $10K...

We eventually moved to Model 16's running multi-user XENIX with dumb terminals and much of our software written in COBOL....

Radio Shack was light years ahead of everyone else at that time but quality control problems, proprietary hardware and just the name Radio Shack doomed them when the IBM PCs came out... although the early versions of MSDOS weren't much better than TRSDOS

This was all before the advent of the IBM PCs. Apple was around but were totally useless for serious business software development as Apple never released any developmental software for serious business use and being totally proprietary allowed no one else to do so....

The open architecture of the IBM PC and, most importantly, just the name IBM doomed Radio Shack even though it was years before we could actually sell a multi-user system on PCs and that was using Novell or Alloy multiuser software, not Microsoft... and was very expensive as each workstation was a PC, not a dumb terminal..

Anyway, On all these systems, we used Maxell floppies (5 1/4", 3.5" and 8") for releases and updates.... by the tens of thousands over the years...

and forgive the trip down memory lane...

footnote which may interest no one: the most pirated software in the late 1970's was the first word processor which came out in 1976: "Electric Pencil" by Michael Shrayer.

[gorthar]

I had many of the same early computer experiences as others here. As a kid we had a TRS-80, Commodore 64, etc. Our first computer though was called an Exidy Sorcerer...anybody remember those? It came with a tape deck to load software. I still can remember if you unplugged it while loading something it would squawk and squeal similar to a modem. Fun times playing those old Scott Adams text adventure games!

[GH85Carrera]

When I bought my first gloppy drive I bought just two discs. One fir all my programs and one as a backup. They were several bucks each.

[spuggy]

The original floppy disks were 8".

[jyl]

I have some of the 3.5" in a box here. With the Apple Newton, the palmtop 386, and a few other obsolete curios.

[GH85Carrera]

I still have my copy of Compaq DOS 2.1 on 5.25 inch floppy. 360k discs. One to boot from and one to operate from. A whopping 256K of RAM.

[porsche4life]

Did somebody say floppy discs? I found some copies of MSDos in there, and all of the circa 1990 sign making software you could need...

And I think even a copy of leisure suit Larry!


Now what the hell do you do with it all?

[lane912]

I still use them with one of the lighting consoles we own-