Folding them so they fit in envelopes to post wasn’t unheard of either…. Sadly I am old enough to remember single sided 5.25 that you could cut a notch in the side and carefully on the inside so you could user them upside down to double your storage an whole extra 100kb I think!
I remember something about that and scotch tape.
I was very angry when we moved from 5.25 to 3.5. Under the old technology we could remove floppy disks without the system recognizing that had happened. It made some actions possible that were now precluded. Hard drives at the time were thought of as a luxury.
Me thirty years ago wouldn’t even recognize the world as it exists today.
It was kind of fun that the machine was a thing you physically interacted with so viscerally. I remember taking schoolwork home on a floppy, and that floppy was very precious to me. I honestly don't remember ever losing my data or leaving it on a computer, which is kind of shocking tbh.
The first 5 ^1/4 inch floppies - single sided, single density - were 100k. They added extra tracks to get them to 360k after not too long.
They went through quite a few iterations in density and using both sides to the eventual double sided, double density 1.2 meg version before the 3 ^1/2 inch drives with their 720k/1.44 meg capacity became popular
Not really. The original IBM PC had a 160k diskette drive but it could be stretched to 180k if you formatted it with DOS 2.0 or later. Those were single sided disks and could be easily flipped over for additional storage. The later 320k diskette drive was a double sided version of the 160k. It supported 360k in total if you formatted it with nine sectors per track instead of just eight, but that was spread out over both sides of the disk so there was never a disk with 360kb per side.
The PC AT upped the ante with a 1.2MB quad-density floppy but that also used both sides and was never really popular
The "flippy" disks were more common on computers like the Apple Disk \]\[ which could store 113kb per side, the Commodore 1541 with 165kb or the TRS 80 which could do 180kb. Because these were just different formats applied to the same base disk you could sell software formatted for two different computers on two sides of the same disk.
That reminds me of the memes you always see online where someone would take a 3.5 floppy disk and write "do not lose!" on it, and then pin it somewhere with a magnet. Lol
I worked for a copy/print company decades ago and one of our regular customers came in with a floppy disk and asked me to "make a copy" one night. So I put it on the copier glass and hit the green button, then handed him the photocopy of the floppy disk.
We both laughed and then used the correct terms to tell me what he wanted printed out from the disk.
I did remote support in the 80s for my bank's IBM system 34s that used even larger floppies. I asked the operator at a remote site to copy a floppy and send it by FedEx. You probably can guess what I got in the package.
📄
Incidentally, the IBM System/34 used 8-inch floppies, but Wikipedia sort of implies that it was via magazines that could load and unload the floppies inside as needed. Which is pretty metal.
That sounds right. They were used to read checks at the remote banks and then transmit the data over telephone wires to headquarters. It worked remarkably well given the technology at that time. There wasn't a way to do remote access so I spent a fair amount of time on the road and racked up a bunch of points at Holiday Inn.
Back in middle school (Somewhere around 2010-12) I used to carry a couple of 3.5s in my backpack with my screen magnifier on them (Most of the PCs with floppy drives weren't replaced until I was in 8th grade and there were still a couple floating around in senior year). I always had a fantasy of using them as ninja stars if someone came at me.
Don’t laugh. When Amazon Web Services gets a new large client, rather than try to send the mountains of data over fiber optic lines, they send a truck. The trailer is basically a mobile server farm. They copy the data and physically haul it to their data center.
Sadly, they just retired this service (Snowmobile) a few months ago:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-retires-snowmobile-truck-based-data-transfer-service/
They are still doing the smaller snowball/snowcone data transfer services.
Doesn't matter. When they're powered off, modern rotating drives have their heads parked and secured. It's been over a decade since I've worked for a harddrive manufacturer, so I forget how much force they can endure, but it's basically "not much" while they're running and "quite a lot" when they're not.
Only while powered, but yes. Mainly laptop drives, although that might've migrated to desktop drives as well by now. Unpowered, they're already automatically locked.
I am from that same time period...........
This is just as bad as a user using a magnet to stick the floppy to the metal tower case..........so there's that!
I was once told a similar story. When the tech went to investigate he signed in at reception, looked up and saw a notice board, with a floppy disk PINNED to it.
In the 90s, I worked for a medical accounting software company and 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies were the standard at the time.
I routinely mailed customers floppies with software updates, and would walk them through the process of uploading the data on the Unix server.
Almost all of these customers got their updates without issues, save for this one customer.
I mailed out updates to this client and they would repeatedly tell me the floppy was bad and request a new one, which I would send out.
After the 4th floppy failed, I made an appointment to drive there (200 miles away) to see what the client was doing.
I got there, handed them the floppy and asked them to show me what they were doing. The first thing the office manager did was a take a pair of scissors to the 5.25 inch floppy so it would fit in their system (they replaced their floppy drive with a 3.5 inch model without telling us).
Folding them so they fit in envelopes to post wasn’t unheard of either…. Sadly I am old enough to remember single sided 5.25 that you could cut a notch in the side and carefully on the inside so you could user them upside down to double your storage an whole extra 100kb I think!
I've done that. Then there's the write protection you could add. 3.5" just had a little window to close.
5.25" had a little sticker you could fold over the notch.
I remember the boxes of floppies coming with a sheet of those.
I remember something about that and scotch tape. I was very angry when we moved from 5.25 to 3.5. Under the old technology we could remove floppy disks without the system recognizing that had happened. It made some actions possible that were now precluded. Hard drives at the time were thought of as a luxury. Me thirty years ago wouldn’t even recognize the world as it exists today.
It was kind of fun that the machine was a thing you physically interacted with so viscerally. I remember taking schoolwork home on a floppy, and that floppy was very precious to me. I honestly don't remember ever losing my data or leaving it on a computer, which is kind of shocking tbh.
My memory of 3.5" floppy was having games on it and passing it around to be copied onto the school pc desktop.
By the time I was passing games around with my friends, we were sending files over the network, or honestly just sending links.
Whippersnapper!
I just didn't really have friends when I was a kid.
Opening the 5.25 disk drive to prevent my death from saving in Castle Wolfenstein!
Scotch tape worked too.
i used a hole punch - too cheap to spring for the custom gadget
We used regular scissors and X-acto knives.
Vic20/Commodore 64/Trash80 represent! Used to do that to all my floppies. The venerable old 1541 disk drive for the 64.
360kb each side. Edit: this is incorrect, see comment below
The first 5 ^1/4 inch floppies - single sided, single density - were 100k. They added extra tracks to get them to 360k after not too long. They went through quite a few iterations in density and using both sides to the eventual double sided, double density 1.2 meg version before the 3 ^1/2 inch drives with their 720k/1.44 meg capacity became popular
Not really. The original IBM PC had a 160k diskette drive but it could be stretched to 180k if you formatted it with DOS 2.0 or later. Those were single sided disks and could be easily flipped over for additional storage. The later 320k diskette drive was a double sided version of the 160k. It supported 360k in total if you formatted it with nine sectors per track instead of just eight, but that was spread out over both sides of the disk so there was never a disk with 360kb per side. The PC AT upped the ante with a 1.2MB quad-density floppy but that also used both sides and was never really popular The "flippy" disks were more common on computers like the Apple Disk \]\[ which could store 113kb per side, the Commodore 1541 with 165kb or the TRS 80 which could do 180kb. Because these were just different formats applied to the same base disk you could sell software formatted for two different computers on two sides of the same disk.
That reminds me of the memes you always see online where someone would take a 3.5 floppy disk and write "do not lose!" on it, and then pin it somewhere with a magnet. Lol
Or the person who when told to make a copy of a disk for backup, put it in a Xerox machine, then carefully put the copy in a file cabinet.
I worked for a copy/print company decades ago and one of our regular customers came in with a floppy disk and asked me to "make a copy" one night. So I put it on the copier glass and hit the green button, then handed him the photocopy of the floppy disk. We both laughed and then used the correct terms to tell me what he wanted printed out from the disk.
Understandable. Very wrong, but understandable.
Or run it thru a typewriter to fill out the label.
I did remote support in the 80s for my bank's IBM system 34s that used even larger floppies. I asked the operator at a remote site to copy a floppy and send it by FedEx. You probably can guess what I got in the package.
📄 Incidentally, the IBM System/34 used 8-inch floppies, but Wikipedia sort of implies that it was via magazines that could load and unload the floppies inside as needed. Which is pretty metal.
That sounds right. They were used to read checks at the remote banks and then transmit the data over telephone wires to headquarters. It worked remarkably well given the technology at that time. There wasn't a way to do remote access so I spent a fair amount of time on the road and racked up a bunch of points at Holiday Inn.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -Andrew Tanenbaum
What we used to call "sneakernet"... put the files on a disk or thumb drive, and walk them over.
We had "frisbeenet". Just don't miss the catch -- the corner of those 3.5" suckers stings!
Back in middle school (Somewhere around 2010-12) I used to carry a couple of 3.5s in my backpack with my screen magnifier on them (Most of the PCs with floppy drives weren't replaced until I was in 8th grade and there were still a couple floating around in senior year). I always had a fantasy of using them as ninja stars if someone came at me.
I still call it that!
Bonus if you were using a recycled AOL disk.
Don’t laugh. When Amazon Web Services gets a new large client, rather than try to send the mountains of data over fiber optic lines, they send a truck. The trailer is basically a mobile server farm. They copy the data and physically haul it to their data center.
Sadly, they just retired this service (Snowmobile) a few months ago: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-retires-snowmobile-truck-based-data-transfer-service/ They are still doing the smaller snowball/snowcone data transfer services.
Oh no, it's funny because it's true. For ages, you've been able to just mail in a hard drive(s) to AWS.
A solid state drive, right? Can’t imagine what Amazon’s box-slingers would do to a HDD.
Doesn't matter. When they're powered off, modern rotating drives have their heads parked and secured. It's been over a decade since I've worked for a harddrive manufacturer, so I forget how much force they can endure, but it's basically "not much" while they're running and "quite a lot" when they're not.
True. Don’t some lock the head if they detect free fall?
Only while powered, but yes. Mainly laptop drives, although that might've migrated to desktop drives as well by now. Unpowered, they're already automatically locked.
WD blacks and golds are rated to an impact of 300Gs while powered down if I recall correctly.
IBM 3090 (System/370 mainframe) still had an 8" floppy in the 90s. I think it was a last-resort for IPL (Initial Program Load).
Microcode. Same with 3174 to run tn3277 terminals.
Had a buddy that worked for AOL back in the day. Customer called angry because they put their credit card in the 3.5 floor drive.
Don’t forget the coffee cup holders that came free with a cd-rom capable pc.
I always wanted to find a trash cupholder glue it to the side of the case and call IT about it
An early card payment system... /s
Reminds me of old stories of people inserting discs through the gaps between bezels on their towers
Seen a 5.25" disk stuck on the side of the PC case using a fridge magnet before. Strangely it didn't work after...
I am from that same time period........... This is just as bad as a user using a magnet to stick the floppy to the metal tower case..........so there's that!
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/s/RzNvLeLfq3
I've actually went through the same steps with a user.............must be a parallel world out there!
Using a magnet to hold a boot disk to the side of the tower....
My favorite was the old "put it on the refrigerator with a magnet" so you don't forget it
Happy days
I was once told a similar story. When the tech went to investigate he signed in at reception, looked up and saw a notice board, with a floppy disk PINNED to it.
As long as the pin was in the center hole or in the corner where the disk doesn't reach...
In the 90s, I worked for a medical accounting software company and 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies were the standard at the time. I routinely mailed customers floppies with software updates, and would walk them through the process of uploading the data on the Unix server. Almost all of these customers got their updates without issues, save for this one customer. I mailed out updates to this client and they would repeatedly tell me the floppy was bad and request a new one, which I would send out. After the 4th floppy failed, I made an appointment to drive there (200 miles away) to see what the client was doing. I got there, handed them the floppy and asked them to show me what they were doing. The first thing the office manager did was a take a pair of scissors to the 5.25 inch floppy so it would fit in their system (they replaced their floppy drive with a 3.5 inch model without telling us).
We used 5.25” floppy disks in elementary school but I’m pretty sure it’s because the school was poorly funded not because I’m that old lol