How Old School Floppy Drives Worked

Sdílet
Vložit
  • čas přidán 16. 07. 2016
  • Support this channel on Patreon
    / 8bitguy1
    Thanks go out to my guest stars:
    Lazy Game Reviews
    / phreakindee
    Modern Vintage Gamer
    / jimako123
    Classic Gaming Quarterly
    / cgquarterly
    The Obsolete Geek
    / robivy64

Komentáře • 4,7K

  • @negative.infinity
    @negative.infinity Před 7 lety +669

    Back in the 90's, rather than buying floppy disks, I would call up companies like AOL & CompuServe. I would request their installation software, but on floppy disks, rather than cds. Then I would remove the labels and format them. Ah, those were the days...

    • @relishgargler
      @relishgargler Před 7 lety +56

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

    • @negative.infinity
      @negative.infinity Před 7 lety +85

      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.

    • @SuperSpetterpoep
      @SuperSpetterpoep Před 7 lety +21

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

    • @abergethirty
      @abergethirty Před 6 lety +19

      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.

    • @MasterChief-sl9ro
      @MasterChief-sl9ro Před 6 lety +8

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

  • @scoldscoldscol9
    @scoldscoldscol9 Před 6 lety +223

    c64: Hello XYZ?
    drive: XYZ broke
    c64: Understandable have a great day

  • @LegoWormNoah101
    @LegoWormNoah101 Před 5 lety +321

    Apple II & floppy drive: Master and slave
    Commodore 64 & 1541: Friend asking nicely

    • @Kai-io6jn
      @Kai-io6jn Před 4 lety +10

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

    • @LegoWormNoah101
      @LegoWormNoah101 Před 4 lety +10

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

    • @HR-wd6cw
      @HR-wd6cw Před 4 lety +5

      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.

    • @tardwrangler1019
      @tardwrangler1019 Před 3 lety +5

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

    • @YeOldeKamikaze
      @YeOldeKamikaze Před 3 lety +2

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

  • @pattaschner6377
    @pattaschner6377 Před 2 lety +423

    It has been 5 years and you are almost correct on solid state drives.

    • @Aldo-lq8fd
      @Aldo-lq8fd Před 2 lety +61

      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.

    • @friendk422
      @friendk422 Před 2 lety +20

      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

    • @yourick1953
      @yourick1953 Před 2 lety +17

      @@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

    • @SchweinchenHorst
      @SchweinchenHorst Před 2 lety +3

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

    • @calebbenedict5587
      @calebbenedict5587 Před 2 lety +16

      @@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.

  • @Zizumia
    @Zizumia Před 7 lety +439

    8:32 "MADE IN W. GERMANY"
    Ahh the 80's.

  • @ezcondition
    @ezcondition Před 5 lety +233

    "hey, get off the internet! i need to use the phone!!"

    • @tomypower4898
      @tomypower4898 Před 4 lety +1

      ezcondition Yes need

    • @grandetaco4416
      @grandetaco4416 Před 4 lety +11

      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.

    • @tomypower4898
      @tomypower4898 Před 4 lety +1

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

    • @und4287
      @und4287 Před 4 lety +11

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

    • @josephjones5972
      @josephjones5972 Před 4 lety +3

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

  • @yetidynamics
    @yetidynamics Před 4 lety +203

    razor knife, i always just used a normal hole punch. the notch didn't have to be square, round holes worked

    • @zkiller1236
      @zkiller1236 Před 3 lety +9

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

    • @williamhaynes7089
      @williamhaynes7089 Před 3 lety +6

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

    • @millomweb
      @millomweb Před 3 lety +3

      Or even HALF-round ;)

    • @derekchristenson5711
      @derekchristenson5711 Před 2 lety +2

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

    • @nothingclick2786
      @nothingclick2786 Před 2 lety +4

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

  • @Blubb5000
    @Blubb5000 Před 4 lety +70

    10:10 This tip comes over 30 years too late.

    • @petergianakopoulos4926
      @petergianakopoulos4926 Před 4 lety +2

      Hihi

    • @millomweb
      @millomweb Před 3 lety +6

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

    • @cs512tr
      @cs512tr Před 2 lety +2

      hahha so true
      i could have used that in 1991

  • @szoszaty
    @szoszaty Před 5 lety +404

    Teacher brought 3,5" floppy disk to class to show.
    "Wow, you 3D printed the save icon? Cool!"

  • @brodykent876
    @brodykent876 Před 5 lety +42

    As a 22 year old who has never seen a lot of this technology I found this to be exceptionally cool and informative. The only floppy disks I remember are the junk ones of the early 2000s. I remember thinking as a kid that flipping the metal tab and exposing the disc was a manual erase mechanism, because I never did that and put the disc back in to find it still readable...

  • @AAvfx
    @AAvfx Před 2 lety +139

    Oh, man! That brings me some serious nostalgia! 🥺

    • @JoemAmA-rb7cv
      @JoemAmA-rb7cv Před 2 lety +3

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

    • @WebcrawlerGal
      @WebcrawlerGal Před 2 lety +2

      Me too.

    • @HOLLASOUNDS
      @HOLLASOUNDS Před 2 lety +1

      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.

  • @warpspeedpower
    @warpspeedpower Před 5 lety +41

    The interesting thing is that a 5.25" floppy is generally more durable than a 3.5" floppy. I don't know why but I've had a lot of 3.5" floppies fail for no apparent reason. Even the ones that were stored for longer periods of time and were never exposed to heavy usage.

    • @NuntiusLegis
      @NuntiusLegis Před rokem +9

      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.

    • @electronicsworkbench
      @electronicsworkbench Před rokem +6

      @@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.

    • @MadScientist267
      @MadScientist267 Před 5 měsíci

      Yep smaller and more dense was the reason

  • @Frani298
    @Frani298 Před 7 lety +86

    7:03 "let me sing you the song of my people"

    • @fszabika123
      @fszabika123 Před 6 lety +6

      Frani298 Daisy, Daisy, give me an answer too!

    • @chinabluewho
      @chinabluewho Před 5 lety +3

      Hal 9000 did it better, also A bicycle built for two was the first song ever sung by a computer czcams.com/video/41U78QP8nBk/video.html

  • @TechDeals
    @TechDeals Před 7 lety +1442

    One of the benefits to the military using 1970's tech for nuclear missiles is that it isn't connected to anything and is really not hack-able from the outside.
    If you aren't standing at the physical computer, you aren't going to accomplish anything. Likewise, there are no USB ports, no wi-fi, etc. to be used to backdoor into those systems.
    If sounds stupid, but it works... then it isn't stupid :)

    • @robf93
      @robf93 Před 6 lety +275

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

    • @Maudio303
      @Maudio303 Před 6 lety +12

      Abort Key load error... launching

    • @1959Berre
      @1959Berre Před 6 lety +65

      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.

    • @n10cities
      @n10cities Před 6 lety +20

      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!

    • @Finnishmanni
      @Finnishmanni Před 5 lety +11

      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"

  • @Aikisbest
    @Aikisbest Před 5 lety +17

    I used diskettes to transfer smaller files like text-files when USB sticks where still uncommon and rather expensive, and it was pretty quick too ^w^

    • @OctoomyYTOfficial
      @OctoomyYTOfficial Před 5 lety +1

      AIKISBEST no joke I did to

    • @NuntiusLegis
      @NuntiusLegis Před rokem

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

  • @Tailspin80
    @Tailspin80 Před měsícem +1

    In my first job in the late 70s I was developing assembly code for the Texas Instruments TI9900, the first 16 bit processor, for passive sonar systems. We used the TI emulator, a desk sized thing with a built in 8 inch floppy drive. This was the only way to store your work between sessions and to release it to production so multiple backups were taken and locked away in filing cabinets, otherwise you could lose months of work. It was quite reliable and easily fast enough to store the small amounts of data for assembler. Stunningly primitive when you think you can buy 256gb removable storage for a few pounds today.

  • @checkp0int885
    @checkp0int885 Před 7 lety +161

    I love everyone saying "Nice Video" on a 15 minute long video that was uploaded 5 minutes ago.

    • @MateoIsLost
      @MateoIsLost Před 7 lety +1

      ikr

    • @RogerRHF
      @RogerRHF Před 7 lety +4

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

    • @Skull_Gun
      @Skull_Gun Před 7 lety +32

      Nice Comment

    • @steve24822
      @steve24822 Před 7 lety +4

      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.

    • @FunTheMentalist
      @FunTheMentalist Před 7 lety

      Maybe your just late

  • @Psychlist1972
    @Psychlist1972 Před 6 lety +17

    In school, we used paper hole punches to clear out the write protect notch when flipping disks.

  • @BillPytlovany
    @BillPytlovany Před 4 lety +12

    This was a great description of life with floppy drives. Every time I thought about something I could leave a comment on, you'd cover it. It was great to see one of our old Q-Link disks. When Quantum licensed the software from its developer one of the first tasks was to write a fast loader. The original software took four minutes to load and access a content area.
    The only thing you could have elaborated on was how those unsupported tracks were used for copy protection. I had to take my 1541 apart a couple times after EA locked up the head while I was exploring. ;)
    I recently took my C= equipment out of the attic (motivated by The 8-Bit Guy) and was equally surprised that my 30-35-year-old floppy disks still worked fine.
    BillP

  • @rebelrailz.
    @rebelrailz. Před 5 lety +29

    I recently had an Amiga 1000 (made in Oct. 1985, looked at the serial code) over at my house, and it had a disk drive problem, yet I could hear the drive clicking away. I loved that sound! We're gonna repair it soon though. Wish us luck!

    • @LegoWormNoah101
      @LegoWormNoah101 Před 5 lety +2

      Best of luck!

    • @godslayer1415
      @godslayer1415 Před 2 lety

      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.

    • @bengineer8
      @bengineer8 Před 2 lety +1

      How did it go?

  • @radughita1992
    @radughita1992 Před 5 lety +410

    In my country, we called them “Diskettes”...

    • @LevinoControle
      @LevinoControle Před 5 lety +24

      Here in Brazil tey called it too hahah XD

    • @RedHairdo
      @RedHairdo Před 5 lety +38

      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.

    • @sixstanger00
      @sixstanger00 Před 5 lety +31

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

    • @jesuszamora6949
      @jesuszamora6949 Před 5 lety +11

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

    • @donkmeister
      @donkmeister Před 5 lety +10

      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.

  • @TheAdatto
    @TheAdatto Před 6 lety +272

    Launching nuke.... 10...9.....8.... Read error occurred please try again

    • @kris_0520
      @kris_0520 Před 5 lety +30

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

    • @RedHairdo
      @RedHairdo Před 5 lety +8

      @@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!

    • @bean9333
      @bean9333 Před 5 lety +3

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

    • @exalented
      @exalented Před 5 lety

      Good

    • @johnwilburn
      @johnwilburn Před 5 lety +3

      Wasn't Shift F6 to nuke?

  • @theotherchannel2279
    @theotherchannel2279 Před 4 lety +9

    12:35 My daughter who is three was shouting Mario Mario! Considering I have never played the game, I think she was a gamer in her previous life!

    • @Pokarface7
      @Pokarface7 Před 3 lety +2

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

  • @scaper8
    @scaper8 Před 4 lety +52

    7:02 Of course it plays "Daisy Bell." Why would they have evef picked anything else?

    • @Hikikomorisama
      @Hikikomorisama Před 2 lety +4

      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.

    • @Fourrandomidiots
      @Fourrandomidiots Před 2 lety +1

      Pls read my comment about Daisy bell :)

    • @bill_thesciguy
      @bill_thesciguy Před 2 měsíci

      It was the first ever song played on computer

  • @Appleboy78165
    @Appleboy78165 Před 7 lety +282

    "I love em! Whether they're 8 inch, 5 1/4 inch, 3 1/2 inch..."
    I could make so many lewd jokes, but I won't.

  • @dizee271
    @dizee271 Před 7 lety +364

    Could you take this one step further and do a video on how ZIP Disks work? I had a college prof in 2010 who still wanted all assignments submitted on a certain ZIP Disk format!!!

    • @The8BitGuy
      @The8BitGuy  Před 7 lety +95

      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

    • @n__m
      @n__m Před 7 lety +32

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

    • @danijelujcic8644
      @danijelujcic8644 Před 7 lety +25

      There's always time for a sequel :)

    • @PacoOtaktay
      @PacoOtaktay Před 7 lety +3

      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.

    • @n__m
      @n__m Před 7 lety +3

      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.

  • @evilengine9
    @evilengine9 Před 4 lety +35

    Loving these new videos. The interviews with LGR and the other geeks give the video a feel like a high quality production!

    • @Manny_OG
      @Manny_OG Před rokem

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

  • @robcat6377
    @robcat6377 Před 4 lety +1

    a minor correction: hard drives were made before floppy drives, just not for home machines. hard cartridges, that had platters 18 inches across and stored a whopping 5 meg per 5 platter cartridge (and when those things had a head crash, it really meant crash, bits of metal flying everywhere and watch out if you were nearby, the danger was real of being shot by the disintegrating cartridge!) were the precursors to floppy drives. for the rest a very nice presentation.

  • @plunder1956
    @plunder1956 Před 6 lety +47

    A friend working at my local school asked me for help one day in the mid 90s. The school's "computer expert" was trying to scan some photographs "into the computer". But it wasn't working.
    When I arrived I couldn't see any type of scanner; so I asked for a quick demo. The secretary started inserting a Polaroid print into the 3.5" drive; so I quickly stopped her! I took away the pictures and scanned them for her.
    She didn't know about Tabs or justification in Word either; so I explained how they worked. Most little kids at that school ran rings around me. The "computer Expert" should have asked them for help.

    • @sushimamba4281
      @sushimamba4281 Před 5 lety +5

      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!

    • @carlbruschnigjr1757
      @carlbruschnigjr1757 Před 5 lety +1

      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.

    • @LeoH3L1
      @LeoH3L1 Před 5 lety

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

    • @Deathrape2001
      @Deathrape2001 Před 5 lety

      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' =))

    • @TalkingBook
      @TalkingBook Před 5 lety

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

  • @roybixby6135
    @roybixby6135 Před 5 lety +39

    I still have readable 8" and 5 1/4" discs but I cant find many 3 1/2" floppies that still read...

    • @mysteriumvitae5338
      @mysteriumvitae5338 Před 3 lety +3

      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....

  • @ace942
    @ace942 Před 3 lety +5

    One of the companies that I worked for back in 1987 - 1988 was using an IBM computer that used 8 inch disk diskettes. So you were right about the general user but I am sure that there were companies who might have still been using 8 inch disks back in 1983.
    By the way, I used to have the little device to cut the hole to allow me to write to diskettes on 5 1/4 disk drives. It was much easier when I got an Atari ST to just move the little switch on the 3.5 disk drives.

    • @cauldroneer2722
      @cauldroneer2722 Před rokem

      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.

    • @leechjim8023
      @leechjim8023 Před 6 měsíci

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

  • @CARLiCON
    @CARLiCON Před 4 lety +1

    I had the original Apple II from 1977. One thing to keep in mind, we were using a device (consumer-grade tape recorder) to do a job it was never designed for. There was no secondary storage (this was way before hard-drives) so as 8BG said, we had to type the program from magazine/book into ram, then save it to audio tape, & many times when you went to re-load it, it didn't work which meant you had to do that all over again. Keeping programs organized on cassettes was a mess. Then the first consumer 5 1/4 floppy drives that came out were before IDE, so there was no intelligence in the drive at all. It was entirely controlled by the computer. So then you had to load DOS disk, boot the computer to load DOS into RAM, then remove the DOS disk, & replace it with the program disk. Load the program disk into RAM, then you could play the game. If you had money, you could afford a second floppy drive, that way you could leave the DOS disk in it all the time instead of constantly swapping floppies. It seems complicated now, but back then if you had dual floppies you were on the bleeding edge.

    • @leechjim8023
      @leechjim8023 Před 6 měsíci +1

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

  • @fordprefect80
    @fordprefect80 Před 5 lety +11

    I had the Excelerator Plus drive for the c64 in the late 80's. It had a direct drive mechanism and a slightly faster load and format speed over the 1541 and was about 99.5% compatible. Out of the hundreds of floppies I had, perhaps one or two didn't work due to some obscure fast load routine. The Excelerator Plus was a great drive and extremely reliable and was an excellent companion to my Expert cartridge.
    And yes I had floppies from the late 80s that still worked flawlessly thirty years later.

  • @Klip
    @Klip Před 7 lety +44

    Fun fact: I have had these floppies sitting on my desk for 6 years now. I still don't know why I keep them on my desk... They just kinda ended up being a permanent feature of my desk.
    -Dos 6.2 #1
    -Dos 6.2 #2
    -Dos 6.2 #3
    -Win 3.1 #1
    -Win 3.1 #2
    -Win 3.1 #3
    -Win 3.1 #4
    -Win 3.1 #5
    -Win 3.1 #6

    • @cougarhunter33
      @cougarhunter33 Před 7 lety +12

      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.

    • @Sander_Datema
      @Sander_Datema Před 7 lety +7

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

    • @Drakonadrgoragonis
      @Drakonadrgoragonis Před 7 lety

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

    • @Drakonadrgoragonis
      @Drakonadrgoragonis Před 7 lety

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

    • @Felamine
      @Felamine Před 7 lety

      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.

  • @jasminejohnston6393
    @jasminejohnston6393 Před 4 lety +14

    The disk drive playing “Daisy Bell” is the best part of the vid!

  • @Silly-g
    @Silly-g Před 4 lety +166

    Some random kid: “who is this weird man and why is he hiding DVD’s in a 3d-printed save icon?”

    • @duscarasheddinn8033
      @duscarasheddinn8033 Před 4 lety +9

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

    • @salade2760
      @salade2760 Před 4 lety +10

      Literally nobody would say that for the next 50 years

    • @TANMAN9095
      @TANMAN9095 Před 3 lety +6

      @@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.

    • @salade2760
      @salade2760 Před 3 lety +11

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

    • @superpokemonbros.9441
      @superpokemonbros.9441 Před 3 lety +3

      A kid like me would shut that one down asap

  • @jbcowherder6210
    @jbcowherder6210 Před 5 lety +290

    you ain't done nothin' till you've sat and loaded all 22 disks of Windows 95 and had to do it all over again because something happened to your fancy schmancy $500 5mb hard drive......

    • @DieHardjagged
      @DieHardjagged Před 5 lety +9

      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.

    • @HughHarding46
      @HughHarding46 Před 5 lety +7

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

    • @nicolegardner1710
      @nicolegardner1710 Před 5 lety +28

      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.

    • @jbcowherder6210
      @jbcowherder6210 Před 5 lety +5

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

    • @ninjagaro.
      @ninjagaro. Před 5 lety +3

      good luck trying to install office complete

  • @canadagood
    @canadagood Před 7 lety +8

    In late 1988, I was pleased to get a job programming on an IBM System/36 business computers in 1989. All loading of programs and local storage was done with 8 inch floppies. (Wikipedia tells me that the System/36 was sold from 1983 to 2000.
    At that particular job I did the 'Initial Program Load' of the operating system on our AS/400 successor. (It was the first such computer in Western Canada). The OS came on two or three large format tape cartridges. That initial software loading took something crazy like 18 hours!

    • @tarocalypse
      @tarocalypse Před 5 lety

      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.

    • @denniswalsh8476
      @denniswalsh8476 Před 5 lety

      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.

  • @robturner3065
    @robturner3065 Před 4 lety +3

    Another great video! There is a machine at my former employers that is still running on first generation fanuc software and has the machine parameters stored on punched tape. The tape would run through the reader in the front panel into a bin in the bottom of the panel door (!) then wind itself back up onto the spool.

  • @catfonts
    @catfonts Před 3 lety +1

    In the 1980s I had a CBM 600 calculator, which was sold cheaply by a surplus electronics mail order company at the time, together with an A3 type wheel printer in an 8 "double floppy disk drive, with the huge memory size of 1MB per disk at the time. I had used it in the plastics technology laboratory at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, and also made it available to students for the preparation of their diploma theses. The advantage was that we had a correct word processor that was very cheap, with quite usable spelling correction serial interface as well as via the IEC-625 bus, and a clean printout via the type wheel printer, which used very cheap ribbon cassettes.
    I had a problem, however, to get 8 "floppy disks. The ones that I was able to clean in the house were hard-sectored and I needed the soft-sectored version. The formatting of these huge :-) large data carriers took over an hour by the way.

    • @leechjim8023
      @leechjim8023 Před 6 měsíci +1

      CRAZY,CRAZY,CRAZY!!!🤪🤪🤪😱🙃

  • @wojiaobill
    @wojiaobill Před 7 lety +123

    My wife still prefers the 8" floppies

  • @VRShow
    @VRShow Před 6 lety +225

    My friends and I would use a single hole puncher to make our discs double sided. Was a lot quicker than cutting grooves out :)

    • @patsfan4life
      @patsfan4life Před 6 lety +7

      Epyx911 Nerd alert!

    • @TeaganD
      @TeaganD Před 6 lety +32

      Jim Rowell Douche alert!

    • @LocutusEnterprises
      @LocutusEnterprises Před 6 lety +3

      I would use nail clippers

    • @NeilRoy
      @NeilRoy Před 5 lety +7

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

    • @Duddie82
      @Duddie82 Před 5 lety +2

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

  • @KLegyyn
    @KLegyyn Před 4 lety +3

    My first viewing of The 8-Bit Guy.
    .
    Informative and exciting.

  • @sicorange3
    @sicorange3 Před 2 lety +1

    Very informational, all these sounds bring back so much nostalgia. I remember the trips to the computer lab in the early 90s.
    I could work around the computers nowadays, and I know you just showed us, but I still don't know anything about the old floppies, old drives and all the old parts. I only really knew the 3" plastic ones. 1.35mb (I think) wasn't that much space, but could sure hold some old games. But loading them off of the 3" floppy was like loading off of an hdd today; back then, hdd>floppy and now ssd>hdd

  • @gyloir
    @gyloir Před 7 lety +16

    I miss hearing the sounds of older computers, from the floppy disks to the old modem sounds.
    There was just something that was somehow strangely comforting, at least in hindsight, about those kinds of things.
    The same way many people love the old midi game sounds and things.

    • @EgoShredder
      @EgoShredder Před 7 lety

      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.

    • @dickheadrecs
      @dickheadrecs Před 7 lety +1

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

    • @BastetFurry
      @BastetFurry Před 7 lety

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

    • @Trancelistic
      @Trancelistic Před 7 lety

      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.

    • @geckoo9190
      @geckoo9190 Před 7 lety

      Yea, I always hated that sound, donno why.

  • @jamesslick4790
    @jamesslick4790 Před 5 lety +106

    The decline in quality of later floppy disks (and drives) leading to a bad rep for reliability reminds me of what happened to the audio Compact Cassette. Although originally a largely mono "voice" quality format (1963-1973ish) , With the introduction of Dolby and high bias tapes, Compact Cassette became a valid music format. From about 1975-1990ish, you could get really good tape decks and tapes. Once CDs were mainstream, tape was de-emphasized and the quality of both tape decks and tapes declined (A situation that I'm certain pleased the record labels). Transport mechanisms (even on "good" brands) became crap, as did the tapes themselves. This leads to folks who grew up with cassette in the 1990s (while nostalgic for it) thinking that it was a crap media for music. One needs to hear Cassette music on a good circa 1981 deck with circa 1984 tapes to understand how GOOD Cassettes could sound. No one is making a GOOD transport mechanism today. 😢

    • @vnyggi621
      @vnyggi621 Před 5 lety +2

      They make good record players tho ;)

    • @jamesslick4790
      @jamesslick4790 Před 5 lety +8

      @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.

    • @jamesslick4790
      @jamesslick4790 Před 5 lety

      I Hate replying to my own comment, But dig this! :czcams.com/video/jVoSQP2yUYA/video.html

    • @badmeme486
      @badmeme486 Před 5 lety +2

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

    • @jamesslick4790
      @jamesslick4790 Před 5 lety +2

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

  • @donaldhoot7741
    @donaldhoot7741 Před 6 měsíci +1

    It's 2023 and my C-64 and Amiga floppy's 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 still load just fine. Cool video!

  • @williamhaynes7089
    @williamhaynes7089 Před 3 lety +13

    The FREE AOL disks I got in the mail were appreciated as a kid.

  • @Jimyjames73
    @Jimyjames73 Před 5 lety +6

    Yeah in the 1990's I owned the Amiga A500 which used the 3 1/2 inch Disks & I've still got it!!!

    • @stinky817
      @stinky817 Před 4 lety

      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

    • @robs5688
      @robs5688 Před měsícem

      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.

  • @DogsBAwesome
    @DogsBAwesome Před 7 lety +39

    why would you go to the effort of clicking dislike on a video like this?

    • @DogsBAwesome
      @DogsBAwesome Před 7 lety +7

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

    • @jokerzwild00
      @jokerzwild00 Před 7 lety +4

      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.

    • @eng3d
      @eng3d Před 7 lety

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

    • @sbalogh53
      @sbalogh53 Před 7 lety

      Cut kitties or cute kitties? There is a difference.

    • @theactualnic
      @theactualnic Před 7 lety +1

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

  • @esotericnightmares
    @esotericnightmares Před 4 lety +107

    my gf literally just said, "floppy discs never really caught on tho, right?" my god.

    • @PauloConstantino167
      @PauloConstantino167 Před 4 lety +3

      so you are such an expert then huh ? dumb ass

    • @ooOmegaSupremeoo
      @ooOmegaSupremeoo Před 4 lety +53

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

    • @Preinstallable
      @Preinstallable Před 4 lety +14

      Please stop fighting in the replies

    • @BigboiiTone
      @BigboiiTone Před 4 lety +23

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

    • @Bruh-rj5vw
      @Bruh-rj5vw Před 4 lety +3

      Here, take this FUCKING SPELLING BOOK

  • @heikkint
    @heikkint Před 4 lety +2

    Awesome video. I so remember how satisfying it was to handle these.

  • @AcidGlow
    @AcidGlow Před 5 lety +191

    *I remember installing Hexen through 4 discs..* ✅😀

    • @sheilaolfieway1885
      @sheilaolfieway1885 Před 3 lety

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

    • @thegrays3303
      @thegrays3303 Před 3 lety +3

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

    • @sheilaolfieway1885
      @sheilaolfieway1885 Před 3 lety +7

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

    • @thegrays3303
      @thegrays3303 Před 3 lety

      @@sheilaolfieway1885 yes exactly.

    • @thegrays3303
      @thegrays3303 Před 3 lety +1

      @@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

  • @alien31ita
    @alien31ita Před 6 lety +4

    8:43 cat is lonely xdddd

  • @davidrmohr
    @davidrmohr Před 5 lety +2

    Just watched this episode and it brought back some great and some not so great memories. I do have to share at least this one:
    One of the offices I worked at had a machine that was backed-up weekly to 5.25" floppies. The process took about 10 discs to hold the data. The person performing the backup had those great labels and would label each disk accordingly - would even go back and fill in the total number of diskettes in this back-up. One day I was in the office and commented on how great a job she did by typing out the labels for each disk. She thanked me, and then, to my horror, took a diskette out of the computer, and rolled it into a typewriter and begin to type the label.
    I gasped and said "NO!" Astounded, she questioned my reaction. I informed her that by doing what she did, she rendered the diskette useless.
    "Oh. Really? That's how I've been doing it for the last 8 weeks. How else can you type out the labels?"
    She didn't believe that the diskettes were ruined, so we took one of the previous week's backups and tried to read the diskette. Of course, it was a no-go.
    Ah, live and learn! Thanks for posting this video.

    • @danek_hren
      @danek_hren Před rokem

      What did she said?

    • @vhfgamer
      @vhfgamer Před 11 měsíci

      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.

  • @tommisera3816
    @tommisera3816 Před 4 lety +1

    Listening to you guys is great, it takes me back to the early days with my apple IIe

  • @Edmundostudios
    @Edmundostudios Před 7 lety +24

    I bought a 256GB USB flash drive today I find that an incredible thing only a few years ago 16GB was pretty large

    • @soon7221
      @soon7221 Před 7 lety +2

      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.

    • @Edmundostudios
      @Edmundostudios Před 7 lety

      +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.

    • @HCkev
      @HCkev Před 7 lety +2

      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

    • @RealCadde
      @RealCadde Před 7 lety +3

      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.

    • @HappySlappyFace
      @HappySlappyFace Před 7 lety

      nope a 160gb for 10-15$ here

  • @lindemann316
    @lindemann316 Před 7 lety +8

    8-inch floppys are far more reliable than the 5 and a quarter inch ones, due to the lower density of the record. They were used to load patterns into industrial sewing machines up until pretty recently in my country. They're kept in dusty environment, they get scratched all the time but surprisingly still work after all those years.

    • @MikeDawson1
      @MikeDawson1 Před 7 lety +6

      gold star for Nikos

    • @lindemann316
      @lindemann316 Před 7 lety

      +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.

    • @allanrichardson1468
      @allanrichardson1468 Před 7 lety +6

      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).

    • @Saboteur709
      @Saboteur709 Před 7 lety

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

    • @JimGiant
      @JimGiant Před 7 lety

      He likes touching them.

  • @chouseification
    @chouseification Před 4 lety +1

    Pedantic point: despite what you had said - in 1983, some people were indeed using 8" floppies still.
    I was down in Texas myself in '84-'85 and got to go to IBM's R&D facility at that Dallas trademart modeled after the old Crystal Palace (from London). It was a parent swap sort of deal, so I got to go with a classmate along with the mom of a pair of twins in my class - the two of us were already little übergeeklings in training, so we were the obvious choices to go and see the R&D facility (some classmates toured sticker factories and similar). i.e. they knew we could be trusted to not die in an industrial accident or electrocute ourselves
    While I was there, they proudly showed us the PC AT training room and the soon to be released new version of DOS. We wandered through a room with minicomputers (single rack), "mainframes" (multiple racks with tape and disk arrays), removable cartridge drives (the big suckers where the media was in a clear container and it had a handle on top), several models of server they were working on, and even a prototype color inkjet printer in a small lab area next door. I was able to keep a few sheets of printout from that and for the next decade or so was able to shock people by showing it to them ("show and tell" in science class mostly), as it took nearly that long for color inkjet to make it to consumers with any real market penetration (B&W printing was the norm until the mid/late 90s for those too young to realize - inkjets even started out as B&W also).
    One of the other rooms we visited was their print shop - a place where people would send down print jobs to be printed on greenbar paper (a wide format used a LOT by businesses back in the day rather than "letter" or "legal" sizes more often used these days). They could accept jobs via network shared drive of some sort (probably a mainframe hosting the queue) or you could deliver a floppy to them.
    They did support the 5.25" floppy and even the new fancy 3.25" floppies - but most of the area was reserved for rack upon rack of 8" floppies, and they were a very integral part of that operation at least. It was really fascinating as the (dot matrix or similar) printers could run so fast that the paper actually hovered in the air above the output, and there was a device to stack it neatly without getting all tangled. But oh yeah, 8" floppies were very much a thing - first and only time I've ever seen them in corporate use (I was in 4th or 5th grade), but just because they may have passed their prime, they were very much in use by Big Blue still, and likely most of the Fortune 500, military, etc.

  • @AndreasInGreer
    @AndreasInGreer Před 4 lety

    Awesome video! Thank you for putting this together.

  • @Sb129
    @Sb129 Před 6 lety +9

    Actually if you have some high quality Ferrofluid you might be able to actually see the tracks, with that stuff you could see the magnetic lines on a credit card

  • @PrinceJimi
    @PrinceJimi Před 7 lety +361

    *ten years later*
    how old school ssd works

    • @LiezerZero
      @LiezerZero Před 6 lety +37

      QSS (Quantum State Storage) is the future.

    • @memebois9764
      @memebois9764 Před 6 lety

      Lawl

    • @MrVuckFiacom
      @MrVuckFiacom Před 6 lety +33

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

    • @newtom80
      @newtom80 Před 6 lety +33

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

    • @MrDalek2150
      @MrDalek2150 Před 6 lety +1

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

  • @georgeworley6927
    @georgeworley6927 Před 4 lety +4

    My first floppy disk drive was 8 inch drives.
    I had a Northstar Horizon in 1978 that had hard sectored 5.25 inch floppy drives. Which you didn't cover. Instead of one hole in magnetic media there were 16 holes.
    CP/M days there was an utility called Uniform that would allow the user to read and writer to another computer type... i.e. from Epson QX-10 to Kaypro 10. I used it all the time.
    George

    • @davidm.4670
      @davidm.4670 Před 4 lety +1

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

    • @georgeworley6927
      @georgeworley6927 Před 4 lety

      @@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

  • @nokelclaa6291
    @nokelclaa6291 Před 3 lety +33

    considering how it's literally impossible to retrieve data from a dead SSD, I really hope hard drives never die, but so far, considering their price per how much data can be stored, HDD is likely still going to be around for a while, as are blue-rays and dvd's... well, unless there's a huge shift from a corporation...

    • @papyrus9183
      @papyrus9183 Před 2 lety +9

      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

    • @thezipcreator
      @thezipcreator Před rokem +2

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

    • @papyrus9183
      @papyrus9183 Před rokem +1

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

    • @danek_hren
      @danek_hren Před rokem +3

      THE CLOUD IS SIMPLY SOMEONE'S COMPUTER

    • @splatink
      @splatink Před rokem +1

      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.

  • @jaakko200987654321
    @jaakko200987654321 Před 6 lety +10

    1:45 asiaton oleskelu kielletty 👌

  • @adamgilbert8321
    @adamgilbert8321 Před 5 lety +6

    5:48 I just figured out why most of my dads old disks have hole punches on the left side.. (circular like you would use on paper to stick it in a binder)

  • @VoidloniXaarii
    @VoidloniXaarii Před 2 lety +1

    such a great video for the first day of 2022!

  • @hypo-critical
    @hypo-critical Před rokem

    Your channel is very informative and entertaining!

  • @ChristopherUSSmith
    @ChristopherUSSmith Před 5 lety +4

    Disk drives could be fun. The first non-school application I ever wrote (1983) was a sequential text to disk program for writing off-line replies on CompuServe forums, which then could be uploaded in one command from disk. This was on my VIC-20 and 1540 drive, a decade before packet mail like QWK.

  • @GamerGee
    @GamerGee Před 5 lety +5

    3:24 the sound us 80s babies remember and love. Number munchers. It’s like a wood pecker but it’s cyber heaven

  • @eurologic
    @eurologic Před 4 lety +2

    Really cool. I loved the feel and sound of putting in The Last Ninja into my C64 which I might add, was all the more enjoyable after putting up with the cassette player for most of my C64 lifespan. The floppy drive was only for rich people and the one I got was still second hand

  • @AutisticAl
    @AutisticAl Před 4 měsíci +1

    I remember in 1999 using these in my school and also playing the games on them in our after school club. Was really cool to think that experience was truly unique as no schools even use these anymore

  • @thakingis
    @thakingis Před 5 lety +33

    1:35 Asiaton oleskelu kielletty! TORILLE!!

  • @kimopuppy
    @kimopuppy Před 5 lety +4

    Oh, the memories!
    Started off on the family Apple 2e and the 5.25 floppies. I remember the Kaypro Computers that weighed 40 lbs and came with a 3-inch green screen monitor and two 5.25 inch floppies. Almost worked for Kaypro but they went bust before they hired me.
    Eventually, I went with a PC Computer. My father liked to sell old electronic parts at the computer swap meets which gave me a chance to buy stuff. One of the things I would buy is 100 three floppy disks and sell them at my college for a buck a piece. It seemed like everyone came to me to get a floppy as the ones at the bookstore fell apart almost right away. Everyone had to use FTP to get files to and from home for large files.
    I remember seeing those huge floppy disks at the swamp meets but never bought one
    Then I graduated to 100 Mb zip disks and at college, not every computer had a zip drive and if it did you could not trust it so I had my own private USB zip drive. Everyone in the computer department soon followed suit and very quickly we all had pullable luggage with all of our books and computer gear. Now pullable luggage type stuff is common but not back then.
    Now all those files can be carried on a thumb drive

    • @davidm.4670
      @davidm.4670 Před 4 lety +1

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

  • @CLS2086
    @CLS2086 Před rokem

    until 2000, the 8 inch "HD" were still used in some professional audio recording studio. I used them with SSL 4000E studio console, backups were also done in 3"5 HD disks too. The floppies brand used was Basf/EmTec.

  • @PeterArnold1969
    @PeterArnold1969 Před rokem +2

    At 14:39, his prediction about solid state drives has turned out to be correct. 😲

  • @InterCity134
    @InterCity134 Před 7 lety +5

    One aspect with respect to the reliability drop in floppy drive is tied to a similar effect seen in hard drive reliability.
    The medium the data is written on - the plastic floppy disc core that is coated with iron oxide or similar chemistry to store magnetic states, did not vary too much from the 1970s through the 2000's .. the chemistry and physics of it are somewhat fixed. What happened is that as time went by, engineers figure out ways to fit more and more bits of storage on each square inch of that material. So as the floppy disk went from a 5 1/4 inch Atari drive of 720 sectors storing 128 bytes per sector (90KB per side), to the IBM PC drives that stored 1.2MB per disk (600MB per side), much more data is stored in the same space. 600MB is 614,400 KB, which is 6826x as much data on a square inch of that IBM 5 1/4 floppy as was on a similar square inch of the Atari floppy. That increased density doesnt come without a cost... so more error correction and less room for mistakes are allowed, and bleeding of magnetic data to adjoining space, or the need that the magnetic signal stored on the iron oxide material had to be much lower amplitude... all of this meant more data, but the data was much more fragile. And over time as the already weak, highly dense packed magnetic signals weakened and shifted... the high density floppies start showing read errors, while those old ones with lots of room and much stronger signals on the disk, they are still legible.

    • @Deathrape2001
      @Deathrape2001 Před 5 lety +1

      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.

    • @henke37
      @henke37 Před 5 lety +1

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

    • @Daniel_Klugh
      @Daniel_Klugh Před 5 lety

      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?)

  • @StereoBucket
    @StereoBucket Před 7 lety +13

    Apple used a different way of writing data to the floppy which allowed them to get away with not having any dedicated expensive controllers.
    Thanks to the genius of Steve Wozniak.
    More on Computerphile's channel.

    • @Outfrost
      @Outfrost Před 7 lety

      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.

    • @DMahalko
      @DMahalko Před 7 lety +1

      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.

    • @StereoBucket
      @StereoBucket Před 7 lety

      +turbo pascal I know.

    • @StereoBucket
      @StereoBucket Před 7 lety

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

    • @hamandwine
      @hamandwine Před 7 lety

      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...

  • @Frostie3672
    @Frostie3672 Před 5 lety +1

    Speaking of how fast the disc drives were, I loved how fast the action replay mk6 cartridge made the 1541 dive run, talk about night and day transformation.

  • @ormirian7364
    @ormirian7364 Před 2 lety

    One of the first desktop computers I used had Sirius format 5.25” floppies, and they got more data on by varying the spindle speed depending on how far in the head was, which was musical. In fact, we had a weird hybrid desktop that could boot switch between c/pm in Sirius mode, and ms-dos in ibm mode. We were very excited because we had the first 20mb hdd in the building! (a museum) - this was in 86

  • @MrWesleymoon
    @MrWesleymoon Před 5 lety +5

    I remember upgrading from a tape drive to a floppy drive and was amazed at the performance :-)

    • @millomweb
      @millomweb Před 3 lety

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

  • @garydunken7934
    @garydunken7934 Před 5 lety +8

    Feeling nostalgic. I've used them (8", 5.25" and 3.5") all.

    • @harleyme3163
      @harleyme3163 Před 5 lety +1

      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..

  • @DanielaGarcia-li1pg
    @DanielaGarcia-li1pg Před 3 lety

    Very informative video. I showed it to my kids so that they appreciate the technology now. Thank you!

  • @johntomik4632
    @johntomik4632 Před 4 lety

    I loved learning about the track sounds

  • @samus88
    @samus88 Před 7 lety +25

    In my country we called the 3 and 1/2 "diskettes".

    • @raafmaat
      @raafmaat Před 7 lety

      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)

    • @samus88
      @samus88 Před 7 lety +4

      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.

    • @raafmaat
      @raafmaat Před 7 lety +3

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

    • @sumosushi7571
      @sumosushi7571 Před 7 lety +1

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

    • @axelrandm2262
      @axelrandm2262 Před 6 lety

      same

  • @tiagobandeira125
    @tiagobandeira125 Před 3 lety +3

    4 years had passed, the last line at this video makes sense.... "It will be all solid state...." the rest is history.... Nice to remember.... Greetings from Portugal!

  • @thomasuglyasfuck
    @thomasuglyasfuck Před 4 lety +1

    That disk drive music is really creeping me out. I am afraid that drive will cause an air lock failure and fling me into space.

  • @crackedmagnet
    @crackedmagnet Před 2 lety

    14:37 and 5 years on you were pretty well right about that prediction. Spinning discs are still around but mainly for high capacity requirements like video.

  • @911Salvage
    @911Salvage Před 7 lety +6

    30 years from now, a 30-something year old guy will make a video about USB flash drives. In it, he will be saying that USB flash drives from late 1990s to mid-2000s were much more reliable than the newer ones.

  • @robjeanbras1130
    @robjeanbras1130 Před 4 lety +38

    I would like to see an episode about the very brief Zip Drives.

    • @DrewLevitt
      @DrewLevitt Před 2 lety

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

    • @derekchristenson5711
      @derekchristenson5711 Před 2 lety +2

      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. :-)

  • @alwanrosyidi2772
    @alwanrosyidi2772 Před 3 lety

    Very informative and valuable channel. I subscribed.

  • @mikebarnacle1469
    @mikebarnacle1469 Před rokem

    Oh man...... that knocking sound really brings back memories. Immediately activates some latent kernel embedded deep in my mind that primes me for the impending pleasures of Oregon Trail.

  • @hank44
    @hank44 Před 7 lety +62

    "Nobody was using 8" disks in 1983". Well, I have to correct you there. My father's business had several PDP-8s which all used 8" drives for data storage, program storage, word processing, etc. We used those 8" floppies well into the 80's!!

    • @The8BitGuy
      @The8BitGuy  Před 7 lety +25

      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..

    • @hank44
      @hank44 Před 7 lety +5

      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!

    • @Jeffrey314159
      @Jeffrey314159 Před 7 lety +2

      +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.

    • @VulpisFoxfire
      @VulpisFoxfire Před 6 lety +2

      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.

    • @VulpisFoxfire
      @VulpisFoxfire Před 6 lety

      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.

  • @AgnostosGnostos
    @AgnostosGnostos Před 7 lety +4

    A serious omission is the 100 Mbytes magnetic Zip drives of the early 90's. They are not floppy disks but neither hard drives.
    Hard disks won't be obsolete for at least a decade because they can store economically enormous amount of data. However as a storage method for the operating system and programs, they have already been obsolete.
    Also during the mid 90s at the era of CD-ROM and hard disks there were data controllers with RCA video input and output for video cassettes. A 180 minutes VHS tape could store 4 GBytes in 1996 which is very impressive for that time. Certainly was not a fast but a very cheap backup solution.
    Floppy disks until 1997 were very common because CD recordable drives were very expensive. Zip drives were quite affordable but Zip disks weren't popular and a common method for sharing data with friends. So despite the enormous read only 650 Mbytes of CD-ROM the 1.44 MBytes of floppy disks were the only way to share data between users without internet.
    By the way the read/write capability of floppy disks was a way of viruses spreading. With the advent of affordable CD-ROM drives during 1994 virus couldn't spread easily until the internet became ambiguous.

  • @Spikejwh1
    @Spikejwh1 Před rokem +2

    In the (early) eighties IBM used only 8" floppies for the microcode disks in the mainframe computers.

  • @raymondflowers2167
    @raymondflowers2167 Před 4 lety

    I repaired computers starting in '82 and we still had several customers with 8" floppy based computers. I think I had a couple of them myself. The 8" drives with a magnetic voice coil to move the head was super fast. Could travel the head from track 80 to 1 in a few milliseconds. I think they were Persci brand. Shugart was another big drive brand back then.
    As for sectoring, Apple used software sectoring, it ignore the sector hole in the media. Some were hardware sectoring and the floppy had 17 holes in the media so the drive knew were sectors started. One thing I did quite a bit was adjusting the head alignment on drives using an oscilloscope and the Dysan Alignment disc. Ahhh, the good old days.

  • @KohuGaly
    @KohuGaly Před 6 lety +100

    I do not think SSDs will fully replace hard-drives. SSD works by trapping charge in electric curcuits. However, that charge dissipates over time and needs to be periodically refreshed. If you leave SSD unplugged it will loose data after 2-3 years (maybe sooner if the room is hot). This makes them utterly useless for archiving - if the electric grid drops out for over a year (due to massive solar storm or nuclear war) nearly all data on SSDs is gone.
    By comparison, a few years back I've found my old computer when we were moving stuff from our old cellar after we moved. The data on the disk was still there even after spending over a decade in a room that basically had outdoor temperature all year around (4°C in winter to 40°C in summer). If that were an SSD it would be completely blank, if it worked at all...

    • @UnderEu
      @UnderEu Před 6 lety +26

      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.

    • @gallowsgryph
      @gallowsgryph Před 6 lety +36

      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.

    • @mapesdhs597
      @mapesdhs597 Před 6 lety +3

      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.

    • @mapesdhs597
      @mapesdhs597 Před 6 lety +2

      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.

    • @mapesdhs597
      @mapesdhs597 Před 6 lety +3

      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.

  • @TAELSDOLL
    @TAELSDOLL Před 7 lety +41

    11:07 A E S T H E T I C

  • @cDayz
    @cDayz Před 4 lety

    So cool seeing other people talk about the Amiga & older machines of that era, as my dad tought me loads. I thought all of this would be lost in time because everything is always about the SNES or the Mega Drive. I grew up on Amiga 500 games (Walker, F-18 Intercepter, Humans) & learning D-Piant.

  • @rhetz1562
    @rhetz1562 Před měsícem +1

    The fact that u even brought up the idea of making a video on CDs makes me feel old