ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Floppy disk is out of retail

You can say that again.

Just for kicks and grins, I pulled out my old 8" "Special Maintenance Disk". It contained a "Sync Write" program that allowed other floppies to be formatted for character generator messages. I just spun it around to find the index and remembered all the holes in the older hard sectored disks. I don't remember if this one is DSDD or not but I do remember that they offset the indexing hole, dependent upon the disk type. I wonder if anyone is still using the character generators that this was used with. I'll bet that it has been 20 years since I fixed one.
Joe

This is an interesting thread! Brought up a few things from the past, that used to be rather common in my work... but not too soon forgotten.

Per the Archiving of Data, my current technique is to copy/paste Data to one (or more) CD-R's, then to each of the Machines on our LAN - which is currently made up of 5 Workstations.
Figure that should give me a fighting chance to retain at least one solid copy of Data, when a Fixed Disk Drive goes on a Permanent Vacation! **

( "**" Applying Murphy's Laws of Digital Data, odds of all Fixed Disk Drives failing at the same time - vs - having one Drive readable, are:

* All Fail Together... 2:1,
* At Least One Readable... 10:1

Compiled from past experiences!)

As to the Optical Disk Storage, still kicking myself for not seizing the moment, back in 1996 - 1997, when I had opportunities to bring home several external (via Parallel Port) Drives, and about 100 Disks total, from multiple locations.

When I was involved with the Integration / Conversion + Y2K Compliance Upgrades of some well known Banks (circa 1995 - 1998), there were many Branches with Optical Drives.
The original equipment was upgraded with "Common To All Locations" + "Y2K Compliant" Machines and Software.
(Hint: Machines + O.S. & Software were based on a well known Three-Letter Acronym / Initial).

C & D Staff asked me if I wanted to "Take Some Of These Drives With Me For Studying"..., but at the time, I was too busy to get to any Branches with the Optical Drives, during change-overs.
Ironically, all the Branches I was bouncing around to, had none of these items.

The PC Gods must had figured these Optical Devices would be dangerous in my hands

As to the 8" Floppies;
My TRaSh-80 Model 2 used them - and they were the DSDD ones! Something like 180KB Capacity?

Joe mentioned the Keyway being offset on either the low density ones, or the high density ones - which I found to be true!
The Drive on the TRS-80 would only read low density media, and when attempting to perform a Format routine on DSHD media, DOS would get upset and display a nasty text message.

Came across a bunch of the 8" Floppies at a Surplus Sale.
At Rockwell Autonetics Saturday Morning surplus sales of their "soon to be antiquated stuff"; in addition to the typical 10 or more Pen Plotters, Boxes full of Discrete Components + Vector Boards, Misc. Electrical parts, and a few Workstation Computers for sale, were a few boxes of various Floppy Disks.
Price per box was like $5.00, so I bought them all.

There were 3.5" low and high density floppies, 5.25" high density (have only seen 3 DSDD 5-¼" floppies before), and both low and high density 8" floppies.

Still come across a lot of the 3.5" ones, although I haven't used floppies since 2004.


Now there's a term I haven't heard of - or used, in a really long time!!!
(exception: to verify compatibility and readability of recently written data, on a CD-R... not truly Sneaker Net, but nevertheless is in the spirit of Nike Net - or in many cases for me, Redwing Net!)

The only Tape-type media Read/Write thing I ever dealt with was with the TRS-80, Model 1.
It used standard cassette tape (typical Audio Tape), and a 100% Cheese-Certified Player to dump or read data via CLOAD / CSAVE commands.
Speed of Data transfer was measured in Geological Time

Scott35