Did you use Floppy Disk/Diskettes?

[SylverReZ]

I used the 3 inch, the 3.5 inch and the 5.25 inch, I never used the 8 inch, they were before my time.

Size doesn't matter.

 

[Xdqwerty]

I know what those are but no

 

[hippy dave]

Size doesn't matter.

Tell that to @AncientBoi - he prefers the smaller ones.

Hey AncientBoi here's a stiff 3 inches for you

 

[Armadillo]

Yes.

Still have a box of them somewhere.

 

[SylverReZ]

Tell that to @AncientBoi - he prefers the smaller ones.

Hey AncientBoi here's a stiff 3 inches for you

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I've seen them used on the Amstrad CPC and other French computers. Nintendo had a modified variant used for the Famicom Disk System.

 

[hippy dave]

I've seen them used on the Amstrad CPC and other French computers. Nintendo had a modified variant used for the Famicom Disk System.

Yeah we had them for the CPC, later Spectrums used them too after Amstrad bought them out (they were both UK brands). And yeah I remember reading the FDS ones were similar.

 

[SylverReZ]

Yeah we had them for the CPC, later Spectrums used them too after Amstrad bought them out (they were both UK brands). And yeah I remember reading the FDS ones were similar.

Only difference with the FDS, is that Nintendo press a watermark into the mould used to authenticate a legitimate disk by the drive, and would boot if the Nintendo logo was in the correct spot.

Here are a few examples of bootleg disks which bypassed this:

 

[hippy dave]

Only difference with the FDS, is that Nintendo watermark pressed into the mould used to authenticate a legitimate disk by the drive, and would boot if the Nintendo logo was in the correct spot.

Here are a few examples of bootleg disks which bypassed this:

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Turbo Dick was truly the long lost sequel that Moby Dick always deserved.

 

[Anxiety_timmy]

I used them genuinely to archive files I had lying around even when my laptop had a perfectly fine dvd burner. I did use them to install things, but I will admit to using one to make an infrared filter for an old digital camera I had

 

[Marc_LFD]

Want to know why the Windows Format Utility is limited to 32GB for FAT32? Because the guy who wrote it only had a 16MB memory card and figured it was enough for NT 4.0's lifetime.

I feel like I should hate this guy for making a temporary solution become permanent, but he seems pretty cool.

 

[SAIYAN48]

I love the sound of floppies seeking at startup! I have both a 5.25'' and 3.5'' drives in my mini tower, but my motherboard sadly died. Gotta find a new mATX mobo...

 

[Hayato213]

yes back in the day around 1998

 

[elm]

Yes, my SNES game copier used them

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[Roamin64]

My first real contact with a PC was using dos 3.0 on a 4 color pc. Games like Family Feud , Carmen San Diego, Double Dare and even a 4 color strip poker . Even before 3.5" floppies , everything was on 5.25" floppies which were reversible. There was also a tool that you allow you to make a notch in the floppy, making it writable. You would tape over the notch to write protect a floppy. Dos 5.0 was a huge upgrade when it came out.. I don't want to burst your bubble, but there's a big chance your floppies are corrupt by now and might not be salvageable.. You might be able to get a file listing, but if the files are somewhat big they could very well have a few bits corrupted.

Post automatically merged: Apr 5, 2024

Yes, my SNES game copier used them


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Nice! I never could get my hands on one but I did have a friend with one.. My first copier was a V64 for the N64 , which already used CDs or parallel port for transfers.. Did you keep it? I still have my V64 and it still works fine.

 

[hippy dave]

I love the sound of floppies seeking at startup! I have both a 5.25'' and 3.5'' drives in my mini tower, but my motherboard sadly died. Gotta find a new mATX mobo...

Ooh, if we're talking about the sounds made, I loved it on the Amiga - games could program the floppy drive controller directly, and the different copy protections used made different noises. You knew it was serious when it got all low and grindy

 

[ChibiMofo]

Want to know why the Windows Format Utility is limited to 32GB for FAT32? Because the guy who wrote it only had a 16MB memory card and figured it was enough for NT 4.0's lifetime.

NT 4, like the original version of NT (3.1), supported NTFS, which supported 256 TB volume sizes, though no BIOS of the time, let alone drives, supported that. FAT32 was a bandaid until we could get everyone running on NT and using a real filesystem, and 32GB should have been sufficient for the low-end consumer products in that timeframe. It still blows my mind that with how smart all these devices are that use 256GB SD/USB drives are that they don't take advantage of a far more robust and journaling file system, especially when power can be lost at any time. FAT32 should have been retired and forgotten decades ago.

I used single-sided 5.25" 160K floppies on my C64 (though I used a three-hole punch to use the other side too, which worked best on Maxell floppies), 880K 3.5" diskettes on my Amiga, 1.4M HD 3.5" floppies on my PCs and Macs in the 90s, 2.88Mb floppies on a NeXTStation I owned from '94 to '96 (which also had a notoriously unreliable 256MB magneto-optical drive, a floptical 20 MB on my SGI Indy from 96 to '99, and a 20MB Bernoulli on my PCs even as the rest of the world was using Iomega's Zip drives. I bought a box of 8" floppies from the Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley in the mid-90s out of curiosity, but I never bought the accompanying drive to use with my Seattle Computer Products 8086 S100 card. (How I wish I still had that.)

Post automatically merged: Apr 5, 2024

Ooh, if we're talking about the sounds made, I loved it on the Amiga - games could program the floppy drive controller directly, and the different copy protections used made different noises. You knew it was serious when it got all low and grindy

Or that you were about to have a read error and have to pirate the game all over again.
At 300 baud.

 

[tech3475]

I feel like I should hate this guy for making a temporary solution become permanent, but he seems pretty cool.

I would describe as being more short sighted if anything. He retired in 2003, so if anything I'd blame whoever decided to keep that limitation in place.

NT 4, like the original version of NT (3.1), supported NTFS, which supported 256 TB volume sizes, though no BIOS of the time, let alone drives, supported that. FAT32 was a bandaid until we could get everyone running on NT and using a real filesystem, and 32GB should have been sufficient for the low-end consumer products in that timeframe. It still blows my mind that with how smart all these devices are that use 256GB SD/USB drives are that they don't take advantage of a far more robust and journaling file system, especially when power can be lost at any time. FAT32 should have been retired and forgotten decades ago.

FAT32 is effectively a universal FS, even the Amiga can support it via an FS driver on Aminet.

MS did later introduce exFAT, although I suspect it's licensing fee combined with 'FAT32 is good enough' has hampered adoption. Reportedly (as in Wikipedia, but no citation), MS didn't include Journaling on exfat to reduce potential wear on flash storage.

If MS and Apple start to natively support the Linux EXT FSs, maybe that might spur companies/people to move on, but even then expect FAT32 support to stick around for a while.

 

[Skelletonike]

I stilll have plenty.
In my highschool the stationary store used to have floppy disks for sale, each box had one translucent red and they always saved those for me. Each one cost 0,45€, still have plenty with Duke Nukem 3D and several Mega Drive roms.

 

[mrgone]

Remember when floppy disk boomboxes were a thing? They were often used for practicing music rather than something for a consumer to use.

WTF is that?
ah, expensive Roland equipment



i still have a small stack of 5,25" floppies lying around, in various color
i'd like to make some kind of pixel art with it

i never had a 5,25" drive, always had to go to friends to copy over to 3,5"
but they were cheaper so they were used for magazines

 

[InsaneNutter]

I used floppy disks in the 90s / early 2000's.

The first computer we got was an Amiga 500 that used 3.5" 720k floppies for everything. You could get hard drives for the Amiga, however that was not something we had. Games were loaded from floppies, sometimes multiple depending on the game.

Our family got our first PC in 1998, floppies were the only way to transfer data between PC's back then as most people did not have a CD or DVD writer yet, or even the internet.

I remember going to a cyber cafe in town and downloading a text guide from for Tomb Raider 2, saving it to a floppy, then printing it off at home and trying to get past the part on the opera house level my brother and I we're stuck on. We are totally spoiled today with video guides on YouTube

We got the internet at home in 2000, however it cost per minute to be connected so our time was limited on it. My friend had heard from someone at School you could download something called an emulator and play a partially translated Pokemon Gold (the game was only out in Japan back then) We somehow found this online and managed to download it, then saved everything to a floppy, walked down the street and copied it to his grandads PC so he could play also.

He would then use a floppy to bring his save game to my house on weekends and we'd use the link feature on NO$GMB so we would both play at the same time and trade Pokemon with each other. Needless to say when a shop in our town would import the US version of Gold / Silver for you, long before it was released here we did just that!

It sounds so primitive reading that back, however times were totally different times back then