RIP floppy disk.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37310

What do you have as a memory with disks?

I still have a bunch of people`s personal details on one of my floppys at home.

I have just about every media they ever used, including 3 sizes of tape in several formats. My real favorite in the 3363 optical disk but, alas it is only 200 meg. It is a certified "archival" format that is supposed to last 100 years. The problem is there may only be a couple hundred working drives on the planet. It would take 10-15 cartridges to hold the music in my car.
I still put floppies in my machines but I agree there is less and less that they can be used for. You need a CD to carry the drivers for most hardware these days. I am starting to migrate to DVD but I do have fears about how stable they are. I have had plenty of CD-r's go bad on me. Certainly you don't want sunlight to hit the "burned" side for very long.

The only really permanent disk storage are gold plated CD's. All other forms of digital storage, including hard drives, must be thought of as temporary. This is why it is important to backup files on multiple storage formats. This is diffently a pain but it is the only way to make your information permanent.

I also have an audio tape recorder, I dunno what it is called. It had 2 large disks, round, and you had to lead the tape in front of the head, and fix it on the other disc.
Similar to mc but large.

I still have some 5.25-inch disks, both on an old IBM AT and an even older CP/M system (different formats, of course).

I have none left myself, but I well remember using 8-inch floppies and loading programs from 1-inch paper tape via the reader on an ASR33 teletype. I must be getting old!

I think you're probably talking about a reel-to-reel tape recorder with standard 1/4-inch tape. There were multiple tape speeds and several different formats for the tape for single/double/quad track, mono or stereo.

Yup Paul, that is what my Roberts 1725 8L uses. 7" reels of 1/4" tape, 4 tracks (2 in each direction). At 3IPS you get about an hour of stereo going each way. This machine also records/plays 8 track tape cartridges.
It was working the last time I played with it 10 years ago.
IBM had a lot of machines that used 8" floppies. They invented the thing in San Jose to load microcode on disk drive controllers but it showed up first on the console of the 370/135 CPU. Later that year it was in the 3830 disk controller.
That 23FD drive never went to far because of the limitations (fixed sector size, one side, low bit density) but when the 33FD came out with soft sectoring it became an industry standard. Eventually that became the dual density, dual side disk the world knows. It was still only 2 meg.
IBM tried to extend the life of the 3.5" floppy with the 2.88 meg drive but it never caught on.
Tape never really caught on in the consumer market. The QIC cartridge was a standard in commercial small systems for backups (topping out at 525meg) and that got replaced with the 8mm helical scan (mini VCR) cartridge that went up to 7 gig. The drives were too expensive for most homeowners.
Big systems still stuck with 1/2" tape well into the 90s and I suppose some still have a few drives. IBM had predicted the death of "round tape" in the 70s but it didn't really happen. The 3480 cartridge was really the tape standard for enterprise systems but people still had huge tape libraries they didn't want to part with.
They also dabbled with a couple other formats. Probably the worst was the "noodle snatcher" a machine that pulled a 3" wide strip of magnetic material on mylar out of a cartridge, wrapped it around a drum and read it. The problem was getting it back in the box without wadding it up.
The most interesting was the "mass storage" that used "bullets" which contained a long ribbon of mylar about 2" wide. These were stored in a honeycomb rack inside the machine and a robot reader would go find the one it wanted and mount it. They actually worked pretty well.
500 gig disk drives for less that $200 are making all of this obsolete. I have two 250s on this machine. It is enough storage that I can afford to "mirror" them. Now days with RAID controllers that is automatic and if one drive crashes you automaticly have a backup. Replace the bad drive and the system sychronizes in the new drive so you are mirrored again.

Depending, I use Flash, writeable/rewriteable optical disc, or network/portable HDD.

For just "sneaker netting" files from one PC to another a thumb drive seems to be the way to go. That is one of those keychain toy looking things that plug into a USB port. Some are "gig"s of storage these days.

The floppy disk is out of retail

[Pennsbury IT Guy] But, but, how will we get files between two Win95 computers when the oh-so-perfect WinNT network is down?[/Pennsbury IT Guy]

Oh boy, no more floppies, and a school full of Winblow$ 95 computers, so no USB Flash Drives. Now I gotta convince the IT Guy to let me bring in the iBook...

I will agree though, for sneaker-net around the house, flash drives (1GB for $20!) are the way to go, or home-networking.

Ian A.

Once you get a network running you will wonder how you ever lived without it.

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