I'd just grab handfuls from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or Circuit City.

relishgargler I worked for Circuit City, but back in '03. By then, floppy disks were already obsolete. What was annoying was how AOL paid to display their installation cds. Which nobody ever used, because AOL was also obsolete by then, too.

Yeah, and simply tape over the Write protection that was on those discs!

I used to dumpster drive at Conner Peripherals in Lake Mary Florida and would get 3.5 inch floppies. They would toss out obsolete software and packaging for their tape drives. I didn't bother peeling off their labels, would just write over them with a magic marker.

Me too. Crab a hand full. Then toss the CD. As cases where expensive.

Rayuko why is this so funny?

@@DerTodKommtImmer because he has a small mind

you have 48 hours to delete this

@@gavinexe7012 he hasnt deleted it

​@@gavinexe70124 years has passed

I recently built my own computer, I got a 500GB SSD, and down the line got a 2TB HDD. They were around the same price, IIRC. SSD for the operating system and a select pair of games, HDD for everything else. Solid states are still very expensive for their capacity. I think hard disks will stay a while longer.

I’ve also read that HDDs have greater durability than SDDs, so it would be a good idea to keep HDDs for storing files and SDDs for running programs

@@friendk422 ssds will last much longer if you barely write stuff to it, bunch of hdds fail because op mechanical parts after a while and solid state can last multiple decades or more

No magic. Its fast, small and enough space. What would you think

@@friendk422 HDDs are much more susceptible to physical damage than SSDs. For example bringing a magnet near an HDD may corrupt the data on it, or if the drive is moved while it’s spinning you can damage or destroy the platters by crashing the heads into their surface. If you dropped an HDD there’s a good chance you’ll damage it. None of the above things will really affect an SSD.

In Germany you can say both and it´s correct.

@@Kai-io6jn Don't say VIC in Germany. Sounds like a German curse word.

Well, the master/slave methodologiy wasn't just for floppies. Older HDDs that were the parallel type also had jumpers that had to be set to identify if the drive was a master or slave when attaching 2+ drives to a single ribbon cable (in some computers they were labelled as primary and secondary, but still the same concept). Serial ATA fixed this as there are no master/slave drives anymore.

Apparently master/slave terms are offensive now and are being replaced everywhere

The commodores were more like two networked computers instead of a computer and a peripheral drive.

at least not made in the eastern block xd

When W. Germany was the "endboss-team" in Nintendo World Cup. :D

kek

They made it

W stands for West ;-)

ezcondition Yes need

Ugg, that kind of thing brings out the rage from my child hood. Every kid in the house could use the phone, but if I used it for my computer I was yelled at, even if I used the thing in the middle of the night, because one of my stupid brothers might get themselves in trouble and need to call home. The kid that stays out of trouble is a jerk.

@@grandetaco4416 Yes jokes aside, Windows 98 SE wasn't bad probably my second favourite Windows after Windows XP.

or, "hey, get off the phone, i want to go on the internet"

That's why I added a second phone line just for my computer

you mean NOTCH FROM MINECRAFT????, or that hole in floppy disks?

we just used a good old fashioned Hold punch/ same as three ring binder

Or even HALF-round ;)

That's my solution as well, even today, LOL.

@d R it was a fucking joke are you 9?

Right! I'm flashing back to tinkering with an Apple IIe and a Tandy "portable" briefcase with my grandpa! Good times.

Me too.

At the end of vid David says solid state drives will take over. 5 years ago I backed up My files on disks but since then most of My Data like photos, video and software all mostly saved on SD cards and SSD. I still used 5 portable disk hardrives.

Frani298 Daisy, Daisy, give me an answer too!

Hal 9000 did it better, also A bicycle built for two was the first song ever sung by a computer kzfaq.info/get/bejne/apeFapuCtZ7Scp8.html

Hihi

But things are improving. The next bit of useful data you get will only be 15 years late.

hahha so true i could have used that in 1991

Without being an expert, I guess it's the higher density of information in smaller space and the resulting, thinner and thus more fragile magnetized tracks. I wouldn't be surprised if 8"-disks are even more durable.

@@NuntiusLegis I would agree. As the density of the bits increased and the magnetic media became more fine-grained, the magnetic energy those particles held was weaker to begin with. I had an IMSAI 8080 with both a Micropolis 5.25 dual drive set and a pair of 8" Shugart drives I never had any issues with. Even the old DSDD 3.5" diskettes were able to retain data longer than any of my HD disks. Even now my 3.5 DSDD Amiga disks are all readable after being in non-environmentally uncontrolled storage for the last 25 years. None of the handful of my PC DSHD diskettes of either size can be read with any success and they've been in the house wherever I have lived all this time.

Yep smaller and more dense was the reason

Here in Brazil tey called it too hahah XD

They are called that all over the world, "floppies" is an alternate name. But "floppies" indeed never stuck around in that many places outside English speaking countries, if any. So yeah, in Brazil, "diskette" is the only accepted terminology.

"Diskette" describes what they are. "Floppy" describes what type of diskette they are.

@@sixstanger00 I was about to say. Especially in the 90s, I heard them called "floppy diskettes."

Here in the UK they were often labelled as "discettes". Weirdly, media that is circular (WORM, CD, DVD, Blu-ray) was always a "disc" but floppies/Zip/MO were usually a "disk" in the UK. Perhaps it's because Compact Disc was a Dutch-Japanese invention but "disks" were American, I dunno.

That joke will never die... twitter.com/bill_gross/status/920406104911233024

That child didn't say that

Father I cannot click the book

Dumb

@M Detlef We called them stiffies.

AIKISBEST no joke I did to

I still do this to transfer small files between my retro PC and the newer one which has a USB floppy drive.

Launching nuke... 10 9 8 7 6 ERROR BREAK IN 10 READY. Government:SHIET

@@kris_0520 Then North Korea bombs USA before they do. Then Russia and China overthrow North Korea. Then Russia and China start taking over the world and bomb themselves till apocalypse. Good job diskettes!

At least they have great background music...ahh the sound of old floppy disk drive...

Good

Wasn't Shift F6 to nuke?

Oh shit, it's World War Three!!! C:\LNCHNUKE.EXE Read error (A)bort (R)etry (I)gnore? Son of a bitch!

Abort Key load error... launching

In Arizona you can visit the nuclear launch sites. Today those silo's are empty. You can make a tour in the facilities and hear the guides explain how things went in the old days. Launching the missiles was a matter of turning two keys in a panel by two operators sitting a couple of feet apart from each other, so one guy could not turn both keys by himself. When the keys are turned the missiles launch in 10 seconds and no force on Earth could stop them. Both keys have been in the panel once without being turned. We were 10 seconds away from world wide thermal nuclear war.

Impressive Robf93! You remembered the 8.3 character naming scheme! LOL. I had almost forgotten about that until I saw your post :) Even better, trying to boot the machine from a bad floppy (or hard drive for that matter)...."Non-system disk or disk error - replace and strike any key when ready" SHIT!

And if there would be some hackers on the computer. They will no know how to use it. I can imagine them saying "So where the heck is the windows button/command prompt"

You should check your phone. She might have downloaded tons of games haha

ikr

Yup it's just because they want to be the first comment

Nice Comment

The time is when every format is ready. Some people watch the video in reduced resolution much earlier. This is the reason for the disparity.

Maybe your just late

i noticed that right away LOL. mostly because my gf brought up the song and one of my fav movies of all time, 2001: a space odyssey.

Pls read my comment about Daisy bell :)

It was the first ever song played on computer

Best of luck!

Amiga 1000 ALL had disk problems. The Electronics store (Federated) had 5 units total - 1st demo died, 2nd demo died, 3rd demo died - and they would not put out the 4th one. Atari ST just worked.

How did it go?

Good

Do it do it do it.

That had to be intentional.

Size doesn't matter ;)

Lazy Game Re-lewds

I actually thought about mentioning ZIP disks.. but the darned video has taken too long to produce so I left it out.. along with LS-120

Zip drives and Jazz drives... The bane of my university years.

There's always time for a sequel :)

I still have a working ZIP 100 & a ZIP 250 SCSI drives. Great units. Sadly my LS-240 & LS-120 both died. Personally I always enjoyed the Syquest EQ44 & EQ88 drives. The EQ44 drives actually could be formatted down to 256byte sectors for use on the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computers.

I added a SCSI expansion on my A1200 so have a lot of old things on Zip 100 discs somewhere. I do have it all still so one day should try and recover it. Fun times.

Read my comment

do you prefer typing "GO64" or "GO64" on the C128 for 64K mode?

I have a set of 3,5 MS-DOS and Win 3.11 floppies that read in late 2011 - that's sure. I wonder if they read today, and if the old PC where I installed the MS-DOS still would work, for that matter....

2023, still have to use 3.5 floppies and PCMCIA cards on proprietary hardware and software for machines built and still running from the 90s.

​@@cauldroneer2722DINOSAURS!!!😮 TREX GOTCHA!!😂😂😂

Epyx911 Nerd alert!

Jim Rowell Douche alert!

I would use nail clippers

We used to buy single sided disks, which were cheaper, then use that method to make them double sided which usually worked just fine.

That same trick was done all over the world. We did it in our programing class all the time.

William Hetherington giggity

Said no woman ever.

Surely you mean `Harddick`

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

she prefers floppy to hard? that's odd...

If someone did that, I'd direct them to this video.

Literally nobody would say that for the next 50 years

@@salade2760 Except Zoomers who were toddlers/not born in the 1990s. Floppies fell out of mainstream use in the 2000s. Unless you were still sticking with your old computer, most people had moved on to computers that could boot from compact disc. That means there are a significant amount of people alive on this planet who have never used or don't remember using a single floppy disk.

@@TANMAN9095 even if you haven't used one its still pretty common knowledge of what they are.

A kid like me would shut that one down asap

My dad had one when I was a kid. I remember playing a bunch of lucasarts games and a few others. All 3 1/2". He bought it when we lived in Greece in 89 or 90... Or something around there

I held on to mine, along with the Commodore monitor, for many years, but eventually gave it away to a thrift store about 15 years ago.

What did she said?

I take the entire 8.5x11 sheet of labels and roll it into my typewriter, and then after that put it on my floppy disks.

Sounds like you were playing the game from the start!!😮😮😂😂😂

That reminds me of a woman I worked with in the early 90's who thought you scanned 35mm transparencies by holding them up to the CRT monitor!

When the first ATMs (called TYME machines) came out, there were people who thought you could just insert your credit card into the drives to get money out. Watched a woman try it with an Olivetta.

@@Deathrape2001 South of the Northern border? I agree. Next time be more specific ;)

Mexi-$hit is not America, nor is N E thing below it. Those so-called 'nations' R mostly open sewers of chaos & corruption = much more so than the USA, & of course U already know all that, captain 'hit the return key pretending it makes U clever, because U have nothing useful 2 say' =))

Made my day laughing at that. No such since the 'drink holder' attached that of course was a CD-ROM drive. ROTFL.

Don't think i've ever had a game that required more than 2 disc...

I missed the days you could have software like games on floppies and CDs.

@@thegrays3303 and actually OWN the game instead of it being on somebody elses computer

@@sheilaolfieway1885 yes exactly.

@@sheilaolfieway1885 it was so much fun to go the computer store buy it in a box and bring it home and install it on your computer

Yeah 8" floppies were never really part of the consumer market. Main frame instals for example as well as those massive programmable typesetting machines and typewriters in the typing pool. 5.25" were the first real floppies the consumer encountered. This from an early 80's standpoint.

In 1987-88 my company chose to use Bailey Controls Net 90 and their color OIUs, Operator Interface Units on an installation. Those OIUs had the 8 inch drives. First and last time I've seen them.

I used to keep a set of Win 3.1 disks at my store (Radio Shack) and would loan them out to customers all the time. I think a sizeable portion of Kansas City got Windows from me.

Great if you hate windows 10 and want to downgrade :P

I still have a win xp home oem disk. but do not have the serial number for it anymore.

apple tech geek I used to have a win xp ultimate iso.. but lost that when my backup drive died.

A few weeks back I randomly found two installer floppies while I was at my parents' house cleaning out their attic of my old junk from childhood. One disk was for the original SimCity, and the other was for a program called "Cosmi Paint Plus" which was basically a low-budget Photoshop knockoff, but still miles ahead of MSPaint from what I remember of it.

CRAZY,CRAZY,CRAZY!!!🤪🤪🤪😱🙃

I like the sound of the 3.5" floppies best. I also love the sound of cassette loading data, especially the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.

i would love a good quality recording archive of all the nuanced mechanical sounds of obsolete hardware

I want harddrives and even SSDs that come with some kind of sound emulation, like with those e-Scooters. o.o

I agree. I also had a 27MC connected to a packetmodem to my 80486.. Ah good old days. U can call it CB-internet lol. SLow as hell, cuz data goes 1 way only. But fun at the same time.

Yea, I always hated that sound, donno why.

My first computer i had, in 2000, had a HDD of 40GB, and i thought it was huge. Nowadays, i could go for several TBs to start feeling the same.

+Sankto Yeah I had a couple of computers in the mid 90s but I was very young started PC gaming at around 3 years old lol but my first MacBook which I had in 2006 included a 80gb drive and that was not to bad for the time either.

Bought my first flash drive in around 2005, it was a 2GB that was actually huge at the time, most flash drive were 256MB to 512MB. It cost me about $80. Now you can get a 32GB flash drive for about $20

Get on my level scrubs. I had a 2 MB hard disk. It was the size of a vacuum cleaner. Then i had a 20 MB one. Then a 100 MB one. Then a 250 MB one. I thought 1 GB was HUGE back when... And after that, things were progressing so fast that i just didn't have time to think about it anymore.

nope a 160gb for 10-15$ here

They make good record players tho ;)

@Christian Weissmuller Yes, but for years it wasn't a consumer recordable format. This limited its appeal to me. CD was just replacing my turntable, Not my Cassette or open reel gear. Mini Disc also had direct song access and WAS a consumer recording format. I adopted it for portable and car use. However the tight proprietary ship Sony was running meant it wasn't going to get the ubiquity of Cassette. The recording ability and size made Minidisc an valid idea for a cassette replacement (as one could perhaps claim CD-R was an open reel replacement). Everything is now solid state digital (and it's great!) But like shooting a revolver with six rounds VS a semiautomatic with 15 rounds, Or using a film camera VS a digital camera.,The very time limited nature of tape "forced" me to really give thought to recording. I kinda miss that. So, I'm not bashing CD, As a replacement for "vinyl" I'm ok with it. It's Just that the electronic companies de emphasized tape, And that sucked for the recording enthusiasts.

I Hate replying to my own comment, But dig this! :kzfaq.info/get/bejne/oLyfhrSBl9-5iXU.html

@@jamesslick4790 what the hell? You had a MD car stereo? Never seen that in my life.

@@badmeme486 Yep, made by Sony, natch! They're hard to come by now, but they show up on eBay every once in a while.

fond memorys of floppys, Uniform & CP/M Kaypros still have some - gathering dust now ...

@@davidm.4670 My Epson QX- 10 fails the Y2K test so I set the year to match the calendar so that June 6 fall on Saturday. My North Star Horizon gave up the ghost in 1999. I miss them so much. I play with CP/M Emulator all the time. Rev George

ooks suomest ps n myöhässä

@@doodoofart729 kyll, emmä muuten toria huutais xD

terve

Oho, en katsoessa huomannu tuota :o Torille! :D

QSS (Quantum State Storage) is the future.

Lawl

The future is DNA storage. I need that 1 petabyte storage!

Mr Vuck Fiacom Yeah, the term "thumb drive" will be redefined. Store 650 PB of data in your right thumb...

NewtoM "There were brave men aplenty, all well known to fame. Who served in the ranks of the czar." - Lore, Star Trek: TNG Brothers

Dunno why but i once was tagging along when my family visited aomeone and their son would play Doom with me , which took around 45 minutes until all the Disks were read.

Netware v3.11 on 1.44MB diskette's. My copy was 73 diskette's I think. Yes it has been a while

You might wanna check your math. 22 diskettes (since Microsoft used a proprietary DMF format that used 1.6MB instead of the standard 1.44) would be around 35MB in compressed data. A 40MB drive sounds more within the realm of realism.

@@nicolegardner1710 the sarcasm escapes you..........

good luck trying to install office complete

gold star for Nikos

+Nikos Yiannos For sure they are, but both of them are now obsolete. I'm Saying this for the sake of history. I'm not trying to say, that one format is superior to another.

According to some iBM scuttlebutt I read once, the ORIGINAL reason IBM invented it was to load writable control store when powering up various pieces of a mainframe computer, such as the CPU, the I/O channels, and disk and tape controllers. Originally, the lower levels of IBM System 360 computers had a computer within a computer which was programmed by read-only storage (ROS in the documents; we would say ROM); the simpler-wired inner computer emulated the more complex outer computer's instruction set. But the ROS could only be upgraded or corrected by taking the ROS unit apart and replacing selected elements. But the larger models used pure physical wiring to make their CPU, channels and other parts run. As the architecture became more complex, even the larger units had to use ROS, now called control store, and it was made writable -- from one side of a "wall," before powering up, but not from the "user" side of the "wall." The problem was, what medium would they use to load the WCS every time a unit was powered up? It was not practical to put a full scale, OS-compatible tape drive or disk drive inside every cabinet, for the small amount of data that needed to be read, and only when first powering up. So they invented the floppy drive (8 inch). The default floppy could be left in the drive all the time with no harm to the disk; it would be powered up when the machine first powered up, the file read and copied to the WCS (this was called IMPL, or Initial Micro Program Load, as opposed to IPL, or Initial Program Load, when the OS was booted up), then shut down until the next power-up or operator-forced IMPL. And inside the cabinet door, backup versions could be kept after an upgrade (delivered on a floppy disk, of course), and special diagnostic WCS loads could be kept for use by repair personnel, who could take a disk or tape string offline to test the hardware. Perfect for unattended input which is only needed rarely. Meanwhile, other makers of manufacturer-programmable accessories (such as Raytheon CRT terminal cluster controllers) resorted to such things as cassette tapes to load the programs for their devices on power-up. These cassettes (high speed digital, not audio like the hobbyist computers) were more vulnerable to failures caused by snags which destroyed the media than the floppy disks used by IBM. The devices were so successful that they became the major way of sending files between computers, and acting as a substitute for hard drives on low-end personal computers. And one reason critical military systems still use 8 inch floppies COULD BE that the recording formats are so old and thus proprietary that it becomes that much more difficult for anyone to read the data from a smuggled-out floppy than from a much more easily smuggled-out flash drive, and much more difficult for anyone to program a bogus floppy and smuggle it INTO a missile base, for example, than a bogus flash drive (remember STUXNET).

*5 1/4" or 3 1/2"

He likes touching them.

so you are such an expert then huh ? dumb ass

@@PauloConstantino167 You must be an even bigger expert yourself, DIPSHIT.

Please stop fighting in the replies

@@PauloConstantino167 how does someone so dumb even find this channel

Here, take this FUCKING SPELLING BOOK

I can't see SSD's going very far

honestly, with how fast companies have been developing and trying to sell their cloud services, i am worried that physical media like dvds and blu-rays might disappear. streaming services like disney plus and netflix have been slowly killing movie disks. xbox game pass and even ps plus have cloud gaming available now. i wouldn't be surprised if in the future the next consoles are empty boxes that just connect to the internet. this is deeply unsettling because these companies can squeeze out as much profit as possible, and we will never actually own anything we buy

@@papyrus9183 hey, at least there's always piracy

@@thezipcreator ha ha, that is true my friend... or should i say me matey! aye aye captain 🏴‍☠️

THE CLOUD IS SIMPLY SOMEONE'S COMPUTER

Dvds and blu-rays are obsolete. I do not have a single device that uses them. DVDs simply cost too much for their capacity (not really, but I would rather pay 2 bucks more for a 32gb sd card than for 10 separate dvds) and blu ray drives cost too much. HDDs on the other hand are extremely cheap, 4TB for 80 bucks. Unlike what David said 6 years ago, I suspect HDDs will be in use for a long time, at least for 10 more years. Sure the noise is annoying but you can always build a cheap nas for less than 200 bucks and have all the hard drives in a closet. With the price of SSDs dropping every day, I think most people will simply buy a 1 or 2TB ssd for 50-130 bucks and only use that in their pcs. HDDs will be used by corporations and content creators, or people who are in need of cheap space in general for a long time.

Osborn had the 3 inch (or so) screen, Kaypro had a approx 80 char by 25 line display - but it was green ;-)

I remember upgrading from pen and paper to a tape cassette 'drive'.

not sure where you are from, but in my country all sized of floppys were regularly called Diskettes too, but we also knew the term floppy (i think because the labels often said floppy disk)

Argentina. Here we just knew them as diskettes, the word floppy wasn't known outside of tech enthusiasts. Casual consumers only knew the term diskette.

+CreeperGuy555 LOL no silly! the word Disk is much older, diskettes is a newer word meaning something like smaller disks ;)

I believe the word applies to spinning media in a sealed caddie?

same

LOL!! U R completely ignoring the difference in the quality & precision of the read/write hardware & focusing only on the surface density =)) It's like pretending a clay blob is more durable & reliable than a knife edge because one occupies more space LOL!!! NEWS FLASH! Atoms R very small, & as long as U R @ 1 or more, U can orient a 'magnetic charge' on it, & if U got a 'read head' that is 1 atom wide, with a thousand atom 'buffer track' between the written areas, that's gonna' B super-reliable even though it's super-thin & tiny overall.

Ignoring the quality of the discs themself I see. Those coatings did vary. Maybe not in chemical composition, but certainly in density.

Wha......???? Both Atari and IBM gave you exactly 360K per double density disk and 180K for single density. The difference is that IBM drives are all double density so they never bothered with single density. That and you can format IBM disks with bigger sectors so as to get over 400K (1920K for quad density micro-disks). You really thought that you could store 600MB on a 1980's floppy disk? (and that 600+600=1.2?)

***** It makes more sense than clicking dislike for no reason, or you replying to my comment.

It's probably because of the guest speakers. On the last video a few people were complaining about the guests, and I've seen one person doing it on this one. Personally I don't mind the guests because they're some of my favorite youtubers, but people like different things and their opinion is just as valid as mine.

i saw videos with cut kitties with some upvotes. i bet that some people is always grumpy

Cut kitties or cute kitties? There is a difference.

+ChaoticCHRIS22 I'm 13 and LOVE old computers. I have an IBM Thinkpad 1996.

Well.. When I used the word "nobody" I wasn't being literal. That's like saying nobody is using 5.25" disks in 2016. For the most part that's true.. but I still use them, along with other enthusiasts..

Ok, I'm sorry for taking you so literally! (I really thought that's what you meant, like it was a dead tech like punched cards). How about a followup on how floppy disk copy protection worked back then, when companies would use "half-tracking" and other schemes to prevent simple disk-to-disk copy programs from working? And then programs like Locksmith which defeated these schemes!

+The 8-Bit Guy In an 1985 episode of the TV series Tales From The Dark Side called Word Processor of God, by Stephen King, the homemade computer there used an 8 inch floppy to boot it up.

I worked a data processing job just after high school, back in 1989...they had IBM mainframes that used 8" floppies, as well as mag tape reels, as well as a 'hard drive' that was this *biiig* stack of platters. They were working on switching to a much smaller AS/400 when I left.

My junior high school had a TRS-80 Model 1 (had separate components, rather than the 'all-in-one' case you usually think of with TRS-80s. It had a 8" floppy drive.

The episode would probably just degrade into clicking sounds and end in static

LGR did an excellent video on Zip drives and other IOMEGA formats that was very thorough and did, indeed, cover the Click! drive and its click of death. For myself, I fondly remember being liberated from the constraints of floppy disks by Zip disks between roughly 1997 and 2003. I had the original, 100MB version, and I found them extremely reliable (100% for the twenty or thirty Zip disks I had), used them as backup disks (some of which I used to recover old, old files I had thought lost until I found the Zip disks in the back of a cabinet, just a year or two ago!), and also used them a fair bit to scan color photos at school, save them on the Zip disks, and then incorporate them into reports and slides made at home in MS Office. Their popularity may have been brief, and their sequels (the 250MB and 750MB versions, as well as the Click!) may have been far less reliable, but they filled an important niche for many people for a few years around the turn of the century. :-)

Macintosh Plus 420

radical420gnarly

+Taels Doll I ironically liked your comment.

11:7

In 11:7?

Back when Apple put some thought into making things properly... BTW "Computerphile" is the name of the channel, it's not a person ;) It's also not run by a single person.

I believe the story is, Shugart executives didn't think much of this hacker kid Woz. He asked for some drives to experiment with, and Shugart instead gave him a bunch of broken junk drives. Woz made them work anyway, ignoring the bad index hole sensors and the track zero sensors.

+turbo pascal I know.

+Dale Mahalko. Now that's an interesting story.

You are right. The Apple systems did use a small glue logic that made the stepper and head amplifiers directly available to the CPU. So the CPU could either read or produce the magnetic phase change of the head by software. The complete sector header and manchester encoding / decoding was done in software and all of it was done by the DOS inside the Apple itself without any additional specialized hardware. In my young days I even programmed a lot of alternative DOS options or protection algorithms making use of the fact, that you can almost freely turn the steppers and magnetic fields as needed. My friends an me used some adopted 80 track floppies after modifying Apple DOS to use half-stepping. Oh man.. this is so long ago...

Not to mention, there's a whole conversation about Data Density about these units. OK, SSDs are evolving in terms of capacity/cost however our good old-fashioned HDDs still has a higher growth rate in these terms than SSDs does, nowadays. Even if we start to see in a near future, for example... 1TB... 2TB... 4TB SSDs for cheap, I presume we'll still have 10-15x the capacity on HDDs for about the same cost - not so far away to today standards. Solid State is the future? Yes, totally agree but I believe we're going to see our 'spinning friends' coexisting for a long time, yet.

That's what makes SSDs a great complementary technology to spinning drives. Spinning drives are great for archive usage, SSDs for quick read/write times and portable access. Combine them together, and you get something that's great for everything.

Teradyne Ezeri sums it up nicely; I have a 960 Pro for a system drive, various Enterprise SATA rust spinners for general data and backup. Although I clone the 950 Pro regularly as a backup (to an 850 Pro via front hot-swap bay), I also image the system drive to a rust spinner as a single image file. Too early to tell how robust Intel's Optane technology is in this regard, Intel hasn't yet fully explained how it works. Btw, the 950 Pro is an excellent upgrade choice for older motherboards because it has its own boot ROM, ie. the mbd does not need to have native NVMe boot support.

Dylan, what kind of hard disks? They vary enormously. Consumer drives are not designed to last, whereas there are plenty of SCSI disks out there still running ok after 30 years.

Not an argument. Old SCSI disks are often still working ok simply because they were built to last. They don't do that anymore, warranties are shorter. You're talking as if all drives are the same, but they're not. There's a reason old IDE was cheap, while SCSI was not. Having said that, certain models of SCSI disk were not built to the same standards. I own maybe a thousand SCSI disks, I've been working with and testing them for a long time.

360Games my friend born in 2003 (i was born in 2004) found sealed disks in a trash can and they work fine

I'm born in 1999, and I've seen lots. (all 3.5")

360Games I was born in January 2001

Get some on eBay

I was born in the year 2000 so my dad has some spares from when he had old computers back in the day. Never used one tho

I missed the 8" I started with an 8088 and 5.25" and a weird tape drive that was louder then anything I ever heard pc wise..

How did you start the fire? Genuinely interested.

he let the smoke out

Rick Davidson yesterday i smashed a floppy disk many times and it still read

Wow, talk about next level data protection ._.

Well that was stupid.