Fifty years ago, IBM introduced the first-ever floppy disk drive, the IBM 23FD, and the first floppy disks. Floppies made punched cards obsolete, and its successors ruled software distribution for the next 20 years. Here’s a look at how and why the floppy disk became an icon.
It’s still amazing to me just how quickly they fell out of favour.
Well, the max capacity was 2.88MB for standard 3.5″ floppies, yet required latest drives and disks. The transfer rate was still almost as slow (around 100KB/s). It was at the time of the Floptical (optical tracked floppy disk) that reached something around 21MB (or 120-240MB for the Imation’s SuperDisk) and the magneto-optical drives (starting 128MB and up to 2.6GB).
But you just cannot beat a CD-R and then DVD-R in term of price (not longevity, as floppy disk and magneto-optical disk can still be read nowadays, not sure about CD-R from that era).
Pretty much immediately after the free disc that came with my first CD burner, I switched to those Kodak Gold CDs that are supposed to be archival grade before eventually landing on 50-disc and 100-disc cakeboxes of Memorex discs with known high-quality MIDs and burning hundreds.
I’ve still got them all in the closet, though I copied all the data to high-quality DVD+Rs, and I should try to find time to whip up a little test script and then feed them through to get some statistics on failure rates.
I’m very interested in the comparative result.
In 2006 I archived all my photography onto those gold archival CDs, last year I ran a script to compare them to the “originals” on my raid, and there were no errors, for what that’s worth
That is very good to know. Thanks for the info. I’m now more confident that my old photos on CDs, stored in a bank lock box, are going to be around after I’m gone. I’m not so confident that anyone will want to see them!
In tropical areas like where I live all floppies died many years ago. Even the special mould resistant ones that were available.
Floppy disks had many flaws. For starters, it was expensive and complicated to make drives read any denser than the max2.88MB of standard 3.5″ floppies, making denser storage financially unviable. Floptical got around this with laser tracking, but lack of interoperability lead to a small and fragmented market.
Secondly, much denser and faster means of data storage succeeded it. To start, CD data storage pretty soon eclipsed it as a means of software distribution, as the 650MB storage dwarfed the floppy’s puny 1.44mb/2.88mb storage. Floppy still had an edge as it was read/write, but that would soon disappear as CompactFlash and USB flash drives came onto the market, beating Floppy in capacity again, even when cards and sticks were still topping 256MB.
Thirdly, floppys were nowhere near as durable (at the time) compared to flash and optical media Whilst time has taught us that floppy disks are very long-lived, they still require careful storage and can quite easily be damaged beyond recoverability through poor handling. A CD (and even flash) could quite easily be washed in a dishwasher with very little ill effects, but even a bit of dampness could ruin a floppy disk. On top of that, even a very badly scratched CD can usually be restored through careful buffing and polishing, something you just can’t do for a scratched and damaged floppy disk.
IDK, that wasn’t my experience. I think I had maybe 1 or two floppy disks fail me, but cds. They failed all the time for me, especially the self recorded ones and the readwrite ones. They would work in some drives not others depending on the brand. it was mostly a mess. I preferred floppies until thumb drives became cheap enough. Even then, I had a few bad data loss events because I was dumb and didn’t eject the drive properly like I should have… It worked the first 30 times I did it with data I didn’t care about, but man that 31st with important data … blech.
This.
The only reliable medium I’ve found is magneto-optical, while “slow” (around 5-6MB/s write) until now it last.
But the disk I left in the drive to speedup boot time (SCSI drive) that both failed the drive and the disk. Lost important data there.
Reminder : always triplicate your important data (at least 3 copies to detect which one is corrupted in case of failure of one).
Ironically, the data loss I described was part of the process of my (very very flawed) photo backup at the time.
…or add integrity verification. Then you can get away with two copies as long as their failure modes are different enough… ideally something like dvdisaster which can ECC-protect the entire filesystem if you feed it an ISO, maximizing the chances of recovery.
…though I still prefer three copies when I can afford it.
PAR files always struck me as a good thing to use if you were backing stuff up.
PAR2 are good for individual files, but they don’t protect the filesystem structures.
dvdisaster applies basically the same kind of protection to the entire filesystem and supports padding out the ISO with the ECC so you can have a self-contained archival medium that can be dumped using something like ddrescue or even dvdisaster itself and then healed as long as the bad sector count doesn’t exceed what the ECC is capable of handling.
(dvdisaster can go up to 200% ECC. Beyond that, if you’re doing something like storing a backup of a couple of megabytes worth of floppies on a CD or DVD and then dropping it into the game box alongside said floppies, my approach is to stack protection techniques, ending with concatenating multiple copies of the ISO together before burning so that, if the drive can still track but the data is too full of bad sectors, I can write a tool which uses ddrescue’s log to overlay the copies back onto each other to hopefully close enough holes to reach what 200% ECC can fix… because, if the capacity was just going to go to waste anyway, I might as well find ways to pack in more recoverability.)
Higher capacity floppy derivatives weren’t much more expensive than the standard floppy drives. In 1987, the Kodak 3.3 MB was $150, 6.6 MB $200, and 12 MB $410. Compare that with the $100 for a 5.25 high density drive or $200 for 3.5″ high density drive. The problem was the floppy controller design which was closing on its limits with the 2.88 MB drive. 64KB DMA limits also limited maximum track capacity; the 2.88 MB needed 36K to handle a read track function. The other limit was on the number of tracks. Increasing tracks much past 80 would require embedding servo tracks (like the flopticals and Zip drive) which means using a controller based on ones for hard drives. The 2.88 MB drive and disks were always going to be very expensive because of the perpendicular read/write heads and the comparitively thick cobalt coating.
Still, for about 20 years (from 1982 when floppy drive prices dropped below $200 causing the demise of high speed cheap tape until 2002 when flash and optical writers hit the necessary price points), the floppy was the removable storage value leader. For 35 years, the 1.44 MB was either provided with or a inexpensive add-on to nearly every computer on the market. I doubt any other storage mechanism managed that level of ubiquity for that long.