If you remember a time when using floppy disks didn’t seem weird, you’re probably at least 30 years old. Floppy disks or diskettes emerged around 1970 and, for a good three decades or so, they were the main way many people stored and backed up their computer data. All the software and programmes they bought came loaded onto clusters of these disks. They are a technology from a different era of computing, but for various reasons floppy disks have an enduring appeal for some which mean they are from dead.
↫ Chris Baraniuk at the BBC
Articles such as these in more mainstream media are always incredibly odd to me. Nobody bats an eye at someone lovingly maintaining a classic car, or restoring an old house, or a group of people petitioning a local government to not demolish a beloved old building or whatever, but as soon as computer technology is involved, so many people find it incredibly weird that classic computer technology, too, can be worth saving.
It highlights how society views technology – disposable, replaceable, worthless, to be dumped and forgotten about as soon as something newer comes along. Even after at least two decades of articles like this, they keep being essentially republished with the same words, the same storylines about these weird people who keep using – get this! Look at these idiots! – older technology when faster, newer, shinier stuff is readily available.
I’m glad the retrocomputing community seems to be growing by the day, and there’s now definitely a large enough internationally connected group of people and organisations to maintain our old computers and related hardware and software.
Completely agree with your comparison to old cars, etc. I have both an old car (1986 VW Camper van) and a fairly large vintage computing collection. And, I have a TON of original disk drives that use original floppy disks. I happen to live on the West coast of the USA where the air is quite dry. As a result, I have a stunningly large collection of original games and productivity software to use with these systems.
And I may run across one disk per year that I need to say good-bye to. Out of *thousands* of disks.
I can’t say I am sold on the idea to hold floppy drives for active use.
For archiving, yes, there would be an obscure piece of history from early MS-DOS or Amiga employees in their basement when they pass away. And the grandkids will need that floppy drive to recover it.
However, if you just need a physical drive, modern solutions will give you better, more reliable results:
https://www.amazon.com/GoTEK-SFR1M44-U100-Emulator-Industrial-Embroidery/dp/B0762NCHC6
You can emulate the hardware and store them in a moden flash drive. The interface is the same, but the capacity and durability is much higher.
Reminds me that I should really did into my old floppy disks and check whether there’s anything worthy to be recovered there before it’s too late. :-/
And oh yeah, old hard drives too.
I still recall how great it felt going from the C64 with tapes to the Amiga with disks. It was quite liberating to no longer having to RW or FF to a specific counter and just being able to load any files even across multiple disks, Of course there was rather more the Amiga bought to make this possible (The gui for one).
I still have a large collection though I haven’t tried to use any in years. My Gotek keeps my collections in good order.
@intric8 Like you I also have classic cars, A 1972 VW Dormobile, 1990 Vanagon and 1994 Nissan Skyline. I personally have a fondness for 90’s tech, I feel like there was more variety in everything.
I can imagine some people wanting to keep files on floppies. I personally see not so much problem, as those are rather small devices, and having used those during decades, I know how to handle them. One big advantage I see of those from the USB keys we have: they have big enough labels we can write on. Imagine writing “Final term report – Java”. on a USB key. However, the danger of magnetic fields around those is completely forgotten. Just think about those notebooks that transform into tablet and have some magnet within their casing. The Chromebook I use to write this has magnets. Once, I took my fork and it was “stuck” to the device, I realized it was a magnetic field. Such fields are the worst ennemy of the floppy disks, as they will silently, invisibly destroy any and all information on those disks. Although their icon means “SAVE” on toolbars, they also mean “HANDLE WITH CARE” and the younger generations might lose more than they could save by using those floppies. The desk and office environment evolved in a not-so-floppy-friendly way. I only keep a handful of those, more for the labels of the old software I used to run every day, mainly games. My little museum of software…………………..
The concept of a museum is pretty apt, there are many industries that have to support redundant technologies to be able to refer to standards defined decades back and make comparative assessments. The nuclear missiles still using floppy until quite recently is a prime example, there is an industry full of technical people who could easily substitute a modern solution, cost not being an issue in that case.
I occasionally have to support legacy hardware, scanning microscopes, medical scanners, that run on maintained legacy hardware, and they want to be able to repeat stuff “exactly” how it was done 30 years ago! Including loading and storing data on floppy disk like the medium will change the digital information, it’s quite bizarre. But, they lack the confidence to commit to a modern technology solution without being able to replicate that which is already redundant.