One of my first (toy) websites was a silly floppy disk size calculator. You could enter an amount of songs/movies/files/etc and it would tell you how many disks it would take: https://howmanyfloppydisks.com/
It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.
> It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.
And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.
I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in it (at most), now I can get an SD card with 1000 times that. It's amazing and truthfully I don't understand how it's possible.
> I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.
I worked in a personnel office in the Army for a bit in the mid-90s, and they had a Windows machine with a bunch of documents and spreadsheets on the hard drive. The Staff Sergeant who ran the office was paranoid about losing everything in a hard drive failure, so the first thing he made me do was move all of them off to floppy disks. (I remember he called A: "the alpha drive" if that gives you any hint on his level of tech savviness.) Maybe the disks were old. Maybe it was the humidity. At any rate, it was only a couple of weeks before half that stuff was unreadable.
At the same time, I remember one time I crumpled up one of those 5.25 inch floppies in my TRS-80 programming class in high school, then I realized there was something I wanted off of it and flattened it back out - and it worked!
Music is in theory replaceable, but finding and repurchasing everything I've collected over the decades is impractical. Just remembering everything is impossible.
Ha. I often think about modern file and drive sizes in terms of how much space it would take up if in stacked 3.5 floppies. Like a block x feet high by y feet wide by z feet long.
I once wrote a program to actually do this for me when that was all I had to migrate files off my computer. But that was like 25 years ago so the files weren't so big.
Coincidentally I just picked up a Greaseweazle[0] recently with the purpose of recovering data from some very old 5.25" floppies. A family member worked at a magazine and has given me some disks that should contain original digital docs from some of the earliest issues of that magazine (hopefully including the cover/title layout, based on one of the disk labels). Looking forward to seeing what I can dig up... Hopefully the disks are still vaguely-readable after ~40 years!
Interesting, I knew about *.wav files for data cassette images but not for floppies. Makes me wonder if there’s other ways to get the data off it that might be more accurate. Are hobbyist electron microscopes a thing yet? :)
I thought I remember reading somewhere that it is possible to retrieve deleted data on really old MFM hard drives with a electron microscope, hence the need for secure wiping/multiple passes in those particular drives, but would be impossible on modern drives due to the density.
The last time I used a floppy disk was in 2006, for a final project for college. I actually shaved a few lines out of my AutoCAD file to get down to the critical 1.44 MB file size. The professor gave me a long side-eye as I handed it in.
First, it's fascinating to watch newcomers discovering obsolete tech that was so current when I got into computers. I recall 8", 5.25" and 3.5" floppies very well. Most of this 'rediscovered' tech I'm already familiar with (it makes me feel like a dinosaur).
I recall aligning Shugardt SA800 8" floppy drives with an oscilloscope and it's described in the maintenance manuals along with the circuit diagrams—yes, there was actually a time when we automatically had the Right to Repair and manufacturers provided circuit diagrams and repair information as an accepted and normal practice (back in the 1980s the very notion of Right to Repair would have been foreign and ridiculous to us)!
(Incidentally, I still own two SA800 drives, they're still mounted side-by-side in their docking bay. I also have copies of the operation and maintenance manuals. They not only cover the theory of operation of the drive but also its maintenance and alignment procedures.)
As the linked article demonstrates (https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/recovering-l...), when one cannot read a floppy or gets data errors during a read the first thing to do is to try different drives as the read sensitivity and mechanical alignment can vary from drive to drive—even if one's drive is in perfect mechanical alignment the disk one is trying to read may have been recorded on a drive that was out of alignment (tiny alignment differences don't matter much in normal operation but those differences can matter with disks recorded on badly aligned drives, or when damaged or the surface partially demagnetized). I cannot overstress the benefit of having many floppy drives to hand before attempting more rigorous data recovery methods (I once recall using seven drives before I found one that would read a very marginal disk).
One of the more rigorous methods to recover data from a floppy was to use an oscilloscope. I've it to adjust a good, well-aligned drive so it would read (now track) an out-of-alignment disk which was otherwise unreadable. Afterwards, the drive had to be realigned using a calibrated disk.
One of the most important parts of both floppy drives and hard disks that's not much discussed these days is the data separator circuitry. This critical circuitry is needed to separate the data component from the noise. Most people don't think of modern hard disks as analog devices but they are at the point where data is read from the surface of the platter. Moreover, in hard disks where high packing density is paramount, the data in the signal read from the tracks is often below the noise level so in effect even a normal read operation is actually a sophisticated data recovery operation. Needless to say, in modern hard drives that much of the data separator technology is both secret and highly proprietary.
There is still considerable misconception about the reliability of floppy disks. I recall attending a data recovery seminar late into the floppy era when other storage was becoming more prevalent (when HDs started to vastly outstrip floppy storage capacity). The lecturer went to considerable effort to emphasize that whilst floppies were often considered as inferior storage media and maligned as being unreliable but this view wasn't necessarily supported by the facts (his evidence changed my perception and decades later he was proved correct).
In fact, floppies could be very reliable, especially so if they were well treated (in reality, the more justifiable claim was that their storage capacity was very limited). There's however a caveat here, very early floppies were little more than rust in a binder medium that could flake off or easily wear loose. That was definitely not so with the much more resilient high coercivity coatings of later floppies. In fact, I still have programs recorded on such disks and those that I've accessed in recent years have all been readable (and I'm talking of some hundreds of disks that were recorded over 30 years ago which I transferred to HD storage for convenience). Thus, when referring to floppies it's very important to be specific about the type of disk and that also includes the manufacturer, as some brands were much better than others).
The article was enlightening from a different perspective, I was particularly interested in the Greaseweazle reader as I'd not come across it previously. In recent years I've not had the need to recover data from a floppy but having done in the distant past I'm very curious about the device's operation. Reckon I'll try to acquire one more out of curiosity than from necessity.
One of the links in this article leads down a heck of a rabbit hole for those of you who love ultra-tiny keyboards: Plover, the open-source stenography engine, which uses what is essentially a 15% chording keyboard and a very dense shortcut expansion dictionary to let you type at ~200-300 wpm vs. the 40-120 wpm of QWERTY.
> this document was handed back to the court system, and Maryland has now exonerated not one but two individuals from wrongful accusation … These men did time in jail, their permanent records impacted.
Writing tip: this should be the first or second sentence in the article to draw people in. Instead, it’s at the end.
If that's what the main thrust of the article was about, I'd say yes.
This one, though was far more about the journey than the destination.
(This isn't always the case, and is arguably far less often the case than authors tend to think. But I feel it's more than fairly applied in this instance.)
I almost stopped reading several times. I definitely would not have stopped if I read that first. As it is, it’s buried somewhere near the end and not called out in any way. Skimmers will miss it, too. Many more people will finish the article if they understand what’s at stake from the beginning.
It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.