Meet the Man Who Still Sells Floppy Disks (aiga.org) 113
Eye on Design is the official blog of the US-based professional graphic design organization AIGA. They've just published a fascinating interview with Tom Persky, who calls himself "the last man standing in the floppy disk business."
He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene....
Perkins: I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It's shocking to me....
Q: Where does this focus on floppy disks come from? Why not work with another medium...?
Perkins: When people ask me: "Why are you into floppy disks today?" the answer is: "Because I forgot to get out of the business." Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I'd already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I'd just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn't try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me....
I made the decision to buy a large quantity, a couple of million disks, and we've basically been living off of that inventory ever since. From time to time, we get very lucky. About two years ago a guy called me up and said: "My grandfather has all this floppy junk in the garage and I want it out. Will you take it?" Of course I wanted to take it off his hands. So, we went back and forth and negotiated a fair price. Without going into specifics, he ended up with two things that he wanted: an empty garage and a sum of money. I ended up with around 50,000 floppy disks and that's a good deal.
In the interview Perkins reveals he has around half a million floppy disks in stock — 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch, 8-inch, "and some rather rare diskettes. Another thing that happened organically was the start of our floppy disk recycling service. We give people the opportunity to send us floppy disks and we recycle them, rather than put them into a landfill. The sheer volume of floppy disks we get in has really surprised me, it's sometimes a 1,000 disks a day."
But he also estimates its use is more widespread than we realize. "Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer. There's also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.... "
And in the end he seems to have a genuine affection for floppy disk technology. "There's this joke in which a three-year-old little girl comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says: 'Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.' The floppy disks will be an icon forever."
The interview is excerpted from a new book called Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium.
Hat tip for finding the story to the newly-redesigned front page of The Verge.
Perkins: I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It's shocking to me....
Q: Where does this focus on floppy disks come from? Why not work with another medium...?
Perkins: When people ask me: "Why are you into floppy disks today?" the answer is: "Because I forgot to get out of the business." Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I'd already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I'd just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn't try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me....
I made the decision to buy a large quantity, a couple of million disks, and we've basically been living off of that inventory ever since. From time to time, we get very lucky. About two years ago a guy called me up and said: "My grandfather has all this floppy junk in the garage and I want it out. Will you take it?" Of course I wanted to take it off his hands. So, we went back and forth and negotiated a fair price. Without going into specifics, he ended up with two things that he wanted: an empty garage and a sum of money. I ended up with around 50,000 floppy disks and that's a good deal.
In the interview Perkins reveals he has around half a million floppy disks in stock — 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch, 8-inch, "and some rather rare diskettes. Another thing that happened organically was the start of our floppy disk recycling service. We give people the opportunity to send us floppy disks and we recycle them, rather than put them into a landfill. The sheer volume of floppy disks we get in has really surprised me, it's sometimes a 1,000 disks a day."
But he also estimates its use is more widespread than we realize. "Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer. There's also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.... "
And in the end he seems to have a genuine affection for floppy disk technology. "There's this joke in which a three-year-old little girl comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says: 'Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.' The floppy disks will be an icon forever."
The interview is excerpted from a new book called Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium.
Hat tip for finding the story to the newly-redesigned front page of The Verge.
good old days (Score:3)
Re:good old days (Score:5, Insightful)
Like remembering fondly about having TB before there were antibiotics
I suppose that's true; but people are weird. Take me, for instance - I have somewhat fond memories of the old days when, for example, backing up your server meant you had to manually hook up a big magnetic tape spool and thread it properly (and then run a program you likely wrote yourself). Some of the knowledge we had, way back then, seemed very arcane - like you'd been admitted into a secret brotherhood.
I can't really see floppies in that same light, but I grok the sentiment.
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I hung my share of tapes for backups in the 80s, and I have NO desire whatsoever to go back to those times. Sure, there was a sort of pride in knowing you could do a job that few people could do. But everything was hard, you had to make your own figurative nuts and bolts (like your own backup software) for everything. I appreciate having all those kinds of basic tasks done for me, while I focus on making software that does something interesting.
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I have a short pile of 8mm DDS, Travan, and some huge QIC-150 backup tapes all of which are from the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
I forgot what's on them, though I still have the tape drives in my basement alongside my crates of 3.5" and 5.25" floppies.
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Tapes, and no floppy port to connect them. Heck, I had to buy a serial port card because motherboards no longer come with them.
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The Travan uses the floppy port. The others use plain old parallel SCSI.
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Tapes, and no floppy port to connect them. Heck, I had to buy a serial port card because motherboards no longer come with them.
Card? Isn't there a USB adapter for that (and just about everything else that used to be inserted into the motherboard)?
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Then one has to deal with the overhead of the USB protocol. Not good in a timing application.
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I kind of get a kick out of the fact that .tgz is a common compression format. It's short for tar'd and gzip'd. The "tar" parts stands for Tape ARchive.
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EXCUSE ME?
You were not part of the home computer scene, were you?
No one from it would say such a thing.
Having a home computer with floppy disks was a breeze. They were big in capacity, had direct access, were fast (C64 notwithstanding) and convenient (need to double your capacity? punch a hole and reverse sides).
The alternative to disk drives were audio tape drives.
Now, THAT was a miserable experience. Small capacity, sequential access, slow as snails and unreliable.
But even tape drives were good because th
Nostalgia for crappy media (Score:1)
I don't even have the patience to wait for cheap USB 2.0 flash drives. Floppies were painfully slow even in their heyday. Some technology really has no excuse for continuing to exist.
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Well I can image a few niche uses for it.
Imagine this scenario, you have some old equipment you need to do quick recovery on and the only way "in" is to boot with a floppy disk. You could always argue that we could pull the harddisk if the information is that important, but what if it uses an archaic controller and help is weeks away.
There's other scenarios too, like old machinery and old equipment that rely on floppy disks to boot. I know of several HP test instruments that can only fire up if you boot the
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Really, that old hardware should be re-fitted, at least with a legacy adapter that emulates FDD using something you can actually obtain. The volume of product needed is no longer enough to support even one manufacturer of new media. They all left the business. It's down to the guy in TFA and his inventory of approximately half a million disks, then it's just gone.
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It's down to the guy in TFA and his inventory of approximately half a million disks, then it's just gone.
Checking eBay there does not seem to be any shortage of disks or sellers.
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Checking eBay there does not seem to be any shortage of disks or sellers.
Same with Zip disks. I have a huge pile of them in perfect condition holding about 4 GB of data. I got the data off them but am now wondering what to do with them.
They're too cheap to sell on eBay (acceptable selling cost won't even cover shipping) and too pristine to send to the e-waste dump.
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I actually collect old media for this purpose.
You'd be surprised how many would like to purchase the right media whether it's old cd's of different types for different burners, storage cards for different old cameras and appliances etc. Minidisc isn't needed either - but people are going nuts over them.
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There are lots of articles about how the Boeing 747-400 (still in service at some level) requires a once-a-mon
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As I'm not in aviation I don't know how true these articles are. If true, I'm sure those airlines have their own stash though.
I've not heard this one, but it wouldn't surprise me. Getting any kind of new equipment certified for aviation is a pain in the ass and expensive process. That is the reason that general aviation airframes and engines haven't changed much in 60 years. Once you find something that works you stick with it till the FAA tells you to change it.
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"Really, that old hardware should be re-fitted, "
You are thinking of simple PCs. There are old CNC machines which programs are stored/loaded on floppy. There's no way to re-fit it with something else. And swapping out the machine is a mind-bendingly expensive prospect. Or -- just buy a box of $20 floppies once a year.
Some have ancient HDs, too. Cheaper to find an old working 20/30 MB HD (rll/mfm) for up to $1000 than to replace a the machine for $30k.
Sooner or later they'll need to be replaced -- but f
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There exist emulator devices that look like a floppy drive to the disk controller and look like an SD card reader on the other side. They run about $30.
If the machine will be retired soon, I can see just letting it be, but if it still has a fair bit of life left in it, it's worth the refit, even if just to increase it's sale value for a soon to retire owner.
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Many of the CNC machines are "upgraded" with a Raspberry Pi, but can sometimes lose certification for specific military or aerospace parts when it is done. I don't know if they are restricted in terms of media, but for a while it was considered a security advantage to use floppies instead of general purpose media.
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"but can sometimes lose certification for specific military or aerospace parts when it is done." ... and that's exactly the case. You'd lose a huge chunk of government and private sector work depending on the parts being produced.
That's just you being impatient (Score:5, Interesting)
Floppy disks were (relatively) cheap and easily dropped in the mail. The closest alternative is CD-R or DVD±R and nobody uses those anymore either. (I have a stack of both, and a stack of old burners.) You'd think there'd be a market for cheap, extremely flat, mailable USB flash, but no.
Mini-cassettes, as used in dictation machines, came in holders that could be clipped to the transcripts. USB flash didn't pick up there much either.
I didn't like floppies back when either, and I don't like them now. (Ever try to install a Unix from a stack of floppies, and the next-to-last turned out to be broken?) But they did do things that modern replacements don't. And that's pretty curious.
On another note, the guy's website says
USB 3.5 inch drives do exist, and the interface differs only in connector, so you'd think it should be possible to build one of these things yourself. But maybe not, maybe 3.5 inch USB drives are different somehow.
I may have to try. Still have CP/M 5.25 floppies with lots of work on them somewhere. Also have a bulk box of unused DS/DD 5.25 floppies in storage. Maybe they'll be worth something again.
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If you really need something small and mailable, there's always an sd card. Of course, generally these days you just send the data over the net (possibly encrypted). If the data will fit on a floppy, it's small enough to send as an email attachment.
Supporting legacy hardware is a somewhat different and niche application, of course.
If you do manage to find a way to read those old 5.25s, you should save off images of the disks. If you wanna unload those blank still sealed 5.25s, perhaps try the guy in TFA.
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Especially since nobody knows how to email properly (bunch of top-posters), everybody hates it, and so we have a gazillion "better replacements" that are neither better nor general replacements.
It is 2022. I'm not sure where you get your information that "nobody knows how to email properly ". If you don't know how to email you are either really old or really young (and I would suspect that even a large portion of those groups can email if needed). The young that don't understand email also probably don't understand snail-mail.
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So a car is not a proper replacement for a horse used to commute because cracking the whip doesn't get it moving faster?
Any one of the newer methods used by most people can get the data to the recipient before you could even get an envelope addressed, stamped, and in the mailbox.
Re: That's just you being impatient (Score:2)
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That's why I specified "used for commuting" rather than "for any purpose". I chose my words carefully.
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You can get an SD card on Amazon for just under $5. Unlike floppy disks, they're small and light enough for avian carriers.
Re: That's just you being impatient (Score:2)
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We thought we were in heaven when 5.25" floppies were replaced by 3.5". So much "more" storage (back then!).
Still, it was a bit of a pain to install software of any significant size even with 3.5HD floppies. My first trial of Windows XP was from a set of floppies created from Usenet downloads. That was loads of fun. (And I still stuck with Win98 at the time.)
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We thought we were in heaven when 5.25" floppies were replaced by 3.5". So much "more" storage (back then!).
But it became hell when 3.5" floppies were found to be so much more unreliable.
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What's super ironic here is this reminds me of the CD/cassette/record situation.
For whatever reason, CD and cassette sales and interest plummeted to basically zero due to streaming music and the enormous capacity of cheap flash media devices, but records survive and their production volume is increasing.
Stuff that uses CDs is maybe modern enough to just use emulated images, etc, but older embedded devices used floppies and still do because most simple embedded devices don't even need the information on a CD
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Floppy disks were (relatively) cheap and easily dropped in the mail. The closest alternative is CD-R or DVD±R and nobody uses those anymore either.
Back in the day, yeah. AOL used to carpet bomb the world with their floppies (and later CDs). These days, USB storage is about the only thing you can safely assume most people have some means of accessing. They do make flash drives that are thin enough to mail in an envelope [amazon.com] (just as an example, I'm not endorsing that seller at all). Problem is, even the cheapest flash drives are still considerably more expensive than the old spinning types of removable media.
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Mail them some punch cards.
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IIRC the USB floppy spec only includes the sizes for 3.5" disks.
Therefore maybe you could have a 5.25" USB-mass storage drive, but not a 5.25" USB-floppy drive.
I'm not sure what you'd lose by that, but I guess some stuff around formatting? raw-access?
See: https://twitter.com/Foone/stat... [twitter.com]
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In this day and age where one can shift a whole movie in a few seconds over a run of the mill network connection, it's hard to imagine that people would still want to have/move physical copies of documents or data.
But, I live in a country where the (state-owned) post
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USB 3.5 inch drives do exist, and the interface differs only in connector, so you'd think it should be possible to build one of these things yourself. But maybe not, maybe 3.5 inch USB drives are different somehow.
The interface is not quite the same, and more importantly, I bet there is no default device in USB for a 5.25 inch floppy drive. Even 3.5 inch floppy USB drives had problems because various computer companies used custom IDs to lock out foreign 3.5 floppy drives. I discovered this when doing a Windows install where the driver was on 3.5 inch floppy disk, and I tried to use a 3.5 inch floppy USB drive.
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Lots of USB devices with over a dozen different weird connectors certainly have no excuse for existing.
Floppies work with stuff that is still important at least.
9 track and paper cards truly are dead though
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What about punched paper tape? Haven't heard of that for awhile.
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Are there really any USB devices with weird connectors let alone over a dozen different ones. If you can find even one USB device that doesn't use one of the handful of standard USB connectors then it probably isn't actually a USB device.
USB-A (full size, mini or micro)
USB-B (full size, mini, micro)
USB-A 3.0 full size
USB-B 3.0 (full size, micro)
USB-C
Ok, if you consider both male and female variations I guess there are over a dozen but they aren't really "weird" any more than the various types of electrical
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hahaha you had to write "full, mini or micro" after a few, you just listed 10 different connectors! And you forgot a few, like USB-A superspeed and USB-B superspeed and USB 3 B micro superspeed. Then there was Apple's 30 pin one for some phones, a combination usb/firewire/audio perversion. That's 14 already!
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USB-A SuperSpeed is a transfer protocol not a connector type thus I didn't list it. Apple's 30 pin connector also isn't a USB connector so why would I list that one.
Combination ports that allow usb/firewire/audio are also transfer protocol examples. You can have a USB connector and use any kind of transfer protocol you want (even analog) it won't change the fact that the connector is still a USB connector.
Going back to my electrical connector example you could use a normal three prong electrical connector t
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Wrong, USB-A 3.0 superspeed has its own plug with five extra pins, look it up. All the superspeed are different, you're confused that they could be used backwards compatible for the slower plugs , but they are physically different with more pins.
Apple's 30 pin plug carries USB, if you want to use a USB device with those phones you'll be plugging into it. It's a USB plug! (and some other things)
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I listed the USB 3.0 Types A and B connectors. These are the SuperSpeed plugs you are referring to I guess. USB-X 3.0 is the connector type. The SuperSpeed is the transmission rate.
Apple's 30 pin connector may be able to transmit USB data but it isn't a USB connector it is an Apple proprietary connector.
Connectors and data transmission are two different things even if they both are labeled USB.
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superspeed has more pins than the slower ones they're backward compatible ones don't have, that to me counts as separate connector which is what I was saying, there are too many, more than a dozen. You won't be doing superspeed with cable that doesn't carry those pins.
You're funny discounting apple's USB thing that is the only port you'll be plugging in USB on those devices. "proprietary", yes. and yet another connector to do USB.
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We are kind of saying the same thing.
USB 3.0 connectors have extra pins to provide the faster transfer rates of USB 3.0 (the transmission spec). You are calling these superspeed connectors but I am listing these as USB-A 3.0 and USB-B 3.0 connectors. Having those extra pins don't make the connectors any less backwards compatible. In fact, if the connector doesn't have those pins they are USB 1.0 or USB 2.0 connectors (well just USB connectors really since USB 1.0 and USB 2.0 are just transmission standards)
Re:Nostalgia for crappy media (Score:5, Insightful)
If slowness were the only problem with floppies, then they would have been great.
Data corruption was by far the worst thing about them.
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If you want data corruption problems, look at the 800 BPI Even Parity magnetic tapes. (In the 200 and 556 BPI tapes the inter-record gap was delectably larger than the NUL byte.)
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Several years ago, I finally got around to copying every 3.5" floppy I still owned over to modern spinning rust. I didn't encounter a single read error.
I certainly did have my share of encounters with General Failure back in the day, but I guess once you've weeded out the defective media, the disks that remained proved to be quite reliable.
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You must have figured out how to get the high quality stuff.
Re: Nostalgia for crappy media (Score:3)
Painfully slow? Remember âoepress play on tapeâ ? I was so jealous of my friends that had a floppy drive with their c64. Those 5,25 inch floppies were so fast!
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Was so happy when I got my cassette tape drive back then. I used to type stuff out of the Compute! magazine then leave my C64 running til the power went out, then type more stuff in. Then i saved up and got that drive and life was sooo good.
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Ever since Reagan was in office, we've been continuously underfunding most government offices. As a result, they rarely upgrade their computer systems. My wife does a lot of work with government agencies, and she still needed to send them files on floppy discs around the time I stopped using CD-R/DVD-R discs. I think the agencies she worked with finally switched to using CD-R discs around the same time I realized I hadn't used optical discs in years.
It's really all cases like that. Underfunded government a
Re: No 8 inch disks? Not even 5 1/4... (Score:2)
While I realize you're joking, I don't know
if you noticed this part of the summary:
In the interview Perkins reveals he has around half a million floppy disks in stock â" 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch, 8-inch, "and some rather rare diskettes.
I like floppies (Score:5, Funny)
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Yep, just try not to think too hard about those bits quickly disappearing as the disks lose their magnetism and become impossible to read, after just a few times reading and writing them.
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I never had that as a major problem (or even a noticeable problem...thought there sure were others), so I suspect your hardware rather than the floppies.
FWIW, I played "Wizardy, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord" nearly every day for well over a year, and the floppy never went bad.
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Yep. I pulled some old 3.5s out after about 10 years and could still read them. I suspect being in climate controlled environments most of the time helps. I could probably still read those disks, but I no longer have anything with a floppy drive. Just a box full of memories.
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Likely it was both. In the 80s, a floppy drive was a fairly expensive thing, both the media itself and the drive. The boom in computers in the late 80s through the 90s pretty much created a boom in floppy disk manufacturing and to do so in the most economical fashion - basically to the point where you could get a pack of 10 for under $5 and less on sale. Th
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WHooSH
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But they tend to get angry and fart once in a while. :P
longevity (Score:3)
It's interesting (to me anyway) that the only remains of floppy technology for most is the save file icon. A lot of younger users are not sure why that particular icon should suggest saving a file. OTOH, other programs use an icon of a filing cabinet which is still immediately recognizable even after it's "replacement" has come and gone.
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A lot of younger users are not sure why that particular icon should suggest saving a file. OTOH, other programs use an icon of a filing cabinet which is still immediately recognizable even after it's "replacement" has come and gone.
That's because the file cabinet is still everywhere because there are still legal requirements to keep paper files in a locked office somewhere. Use of floppies may be legally mandated (at least in practice based on equipment approvals) but if so it's all in places that most people never see.
Cassette tapes (Score:5, Insightful)
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110 not 1100
then to 300
I had a trs-80 mdl 100 with acoustic couplers for BBS'ing
4 line text display
Yes, I could type faster.
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A talented typist can outtype 1200 baud! I myself have done it for short parts of sentences on an IBM keyboard. It's pretty easy to outpace 300 baud, 33 cps isn't even that fast.
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Would you believe I still have a manual "hand crank" specifically for rewinding audio cassettes! (Radio Shack brand, I believe) It's still useful for rewinding the tapes back & forth to loosen them up a little, so they'll play better.
I used to have a little machine/device(?) for splicing tape back together, too; had a couple little 'feet' with rubber holders and a roll of splicing tape, with a little razor blade thingey to cut it.
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LOL! I still have my Radio Shack branded one
Let's put a modern AAA title on those... (Score:2)
Just to keep somebody busy for the foreseeable future unzipping the entire thing.
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Read error in floppy 497, rolling back install. Please insert floppy 496.
Where Japanese governments go (Score:4, Informative)
What a relief (Score:2)
What a relief. For a minute there I was thinking that if Putler starts shooting nukes at us and we had no brand new 8-inch floppy disks to load the coordinates into our missile silos then how could we ever respond? There would be no way to even get MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) at Putler if we had just old and deteriorated 8-inch floppy disks. I'm just glad we are not using as old of technology as Russia is in Ukraine!
But then punch-cards or paper tape might have a longer shelf life than floppies so m
My retirement fund (Score:4, Funny)
I've still got a box full of sets of 10 floppies in original packaging from mid 90s somewhere in my house. One day in 20-30 years will sell them all to collectors and comfortably retire.
CNC (Score:2)
There are still CNC machines out there and in use that take floppy disks to load in patterns. Some manufacturers offer updated control panels that are networked, or accept USB, but those upgrades can cost thousands of dollars per machine. A new CNC machine can cost hundreds of thousands.
So, you either trudge along using floppies, or lay out some serious cash to upgrade. It's usually just not worth it.
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There's a rather large marketplace of floppy disk emulators using flash drives for practically every antique computer and all floppy form factors.
It might help to look into it.
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Those were the days...I think... (Score:2)
I used to support legacy equipment that used 3.5" floppy drives. I figured out a way to burn disk images (it used its own format) from a Linux system with creative parameters to dd and we packaged this as a bootable Linux image for our customers to use. We also noted a sharp drop in floppy manufacturing quality from 2000 to 2010.
The hardware had only recently been upgraded from 8" floppies. We threw out several boxes of those - nothing we could do with them. I tried to talk my boss in to a software upgrad
We use floppy disks at my job (Score:2)
Is this nostalgia day at /. ? (Score:1)
I just posted in the What Was Your First Computer thread. What's going on? Some of us are older than others of us, OK?
Sounds like a market opportunity still. (Score:2)
Wouldn't a replacement device to interface the same way be handy? Like a USB stick that had floppy IO and power connectors. Maybe with a UI to select which disk image to expose to the parent device.
Or something like the old cassette interfaces that would turn magnetic info into a signal for the reader (Aux to cassette adapters). You'd insert it into the drive and line up the output with the reader head. The negative being you'd still need a working drive, but it might work around a failed motor.
It is fu
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Already exists - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . Quite a few on eBay.
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What I would like to see is a floppy emulator that transitioned between the floppy and FAT filesystem.
The idea is to have say a 1.44MB partition with the FAT filesystem on that you could just use as is on a regular PC. Plug in your SD card or USB drive and you can just copy files onto it. However, when you then plug it into the emulator on the device the emulator would then allow the FAT file system on the flash device to appear to be the floppy, so you can move things back and forth between a "device" and
"Oh floppy disks!!" - Neil (Score:1)
Floppywall (Score:2)
Back in the mid-90s when I was a consultant, I developed a tiny Linux system that booted from a floppy and set up iptables rules, acting as a firewall. The machine had no hard drive and the floppy disk was hardware write-protected with the little write-protect tab. The root filesystem was a ramdisk.
Even if someone compromised the machine, they couldn't do permanent damage. A nightly reboot would reset its state. Security updates and firewall rule updates were done by generating a new disk image.
I ha
Floppies (Score:2)
I remember predictions about the imminent end of floppy drives as far back as 1994, when Zip drives came out and writable CDs became available .. however these had their flaws so floppies hung on until the late 90s until around the time Steve Jobs got rid of it in the first iMac. The reason for the floppy's demise was USB thumb drives.
Re: Floppies (Score:1)
When there are no floppy disks (Score:2)
Just like the tape cassette adapters for MP3 players 20 years ago.
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There are already plenty of floppy disk emulators out there now for things like the Commodore computers, TRS-80's, IBM-compatibles, etc...
I purchase them to this day. (Score:2)
misdirected article (Score:1)
Was still using them... (Score:1)
... until two years go when I finally shut down our Nortel Option 81C PBX that backed up to floppy disk every night.
Shit... still have a drawer full of 'em.