Believe it or not, I still have a client who sends me files on 3.5" floppies via snail mail! (He's 87 and wants nothing to do with the internet.) So I got a 3.5" USB floppy drive for about $20. It, and his 30-year-old floppies, work just fine on my Windows 10 machine.
@fartking2845
Жыл бұрын
Smart guy. Internet today is a minefield. trolls, hackers, spam, fake dating profiles that wanna 'hook up'.
@V77710
8 ай бұрын
What does he store on their documents to print?
@thomaskendall452
8 ай бұрын
@@V77710 He gives me text, which I then typeset using a DTP. Then I print them out and snail mail him the pages.
@bezoekers
7 ай бұрын
@@fartking2845Sounds just like real life then.
@Blackadder75
3 ай бұрын
@@fartking2845 what a BS, I have been using the internet for 30 years and nothing of that has ever bothered me , sure you need to take a few very basic precautions, but then it's perfectly safe to use the internet, only the rampart growth of advertising will bother you, and there are ways to avoid that too.
@scorch527
Жыл бұрын
SC2 files are SimCity 2000 save games. It looks like this person tried recreating Harvard in SimCity 2000.
@SvetCookie
Жыл бұрын
SUSIE was an industry standard gate-level logic sim by Aldec from the 80s that was generally used in conjunction with OrCAD (which is still maintained today). Looks like it's not archived anywhere on the internet, sadly
@TheRailroad99
Жыл бұрын
Interesting. He should archive it Edit: damn, already formatted. Too late :(
@Trekeyus
Жыл бұрын
@@TheRailroad99 That's one thing I hate about videos like this people think that stuff's archived and erase it without checking to see if it's archived first.
@FoxerTails
Жыл бұрын
I had a feeling one of those may have been unarchived. That's a shame.
@rager1969
Жыл бұрын
Also the Xilinx and VHDL would mean someone was doing FPGA work, perhaps at the EE Department at the University of Calgary.
@straightpipediesel
Жыл бұрын
@Rex Warden Somebody has a hoarding disorder...
@randyab9go188
Жыл бұрын
I'm glad to see you using the bulk eraser properly. So many people stick the disc under there turn it on rub it a little bit and while the disc is still under there turn it off. Depending on where in the cycle the current was you can actually magnetize the disc somewhat.
@labrat810
Жыл бұрын
Well, that answers my question: "Can you use a big rare earth magnet?" no. Your description implies the alternating current electromagnet is needed to 'null' the sectors.
@absalomdraconis
Жыл бұрын
@@labrat810 : Yeah, it's often a degaussing process in specific (so the power level is lower with each cycle- it "inches" the media's magnetization lower with each step).
@davidararar
Жыл бұрын
Until this video I never knew of a relationship between 3.5-inch diskettes and the highly esteemed Turbo Encabulator. Thank you again for another fine video.
@codebeat4192
Жыл бұрын
Like with recorded blank cassettes, it is always fun to find out what people put onto it. I watched the whole video seeing you changing disks to see what is on it. Funny to notice how curiosity keep people focused. 😄 Personal information is very attractive because of curiosity and to find out some info about the user. But also without personal information you can trace the origin of usage, names etc just by looking at filenames, filestamps, directory structures and labels. When you think about it, there is so much information in this general information of nothing special, it is actually really scary. Many people don't realize this. I have found harddrives with photos, videos, stories, ideas, documents, financial stuff and so on, it is unbelievable what people sell or thrown away without any care. I am not an evil guy (like many) so I don't do anything with this data but if you want to it is possible. The question is, why are people behave so irresponsible?
@flapweb
Жыл бұрын
Simple: They are stupid enough not to realize that a lot of information or personal traces will certainly be contained in that material. The diskette itself underwent modifications in order to be used as a mass consumption product, as the first ones were too fragile to be used by lay people without them giving up on computers for this reason. For this, everything in them would have to follow the Japanese methodology "poka yoke", which in short would be something like "idiot proof" products. But really, this type of behavior is intriguing, as a result of the immense amount of people that exist..
@marks-the-spot
Жыл бұрын
I still have a few 8" floppy disks (diskettes in IBM-speak). In 1975 we used them as a data entry replacement for the punch card using the IBM 3741 key-to-diskette machines that were the size of a desk. We were impressed that one disk held the equivalent of over 1,800 punch cards and a 14" hard disk held 2.4MB of data. We were also impressed with 16KB of core memory in the main computer. Alright, alright, my "I remember when..." flashback is over.
@katrinabryce
Жыл бұрын
Back in the day, I found that formatting a PC disk in a Mac, then reformatting it in DOS would often recover a bad disk.
@KurticeYZreacts
Жыл бұрын
Please look at the BUTT zip file 😂😂😂😂
@KurticeYZreacts
Жыл бұрын
@@Heike-- nah... he looked at them...
@negirno
Жыл бұрын
It's only 256 bytes long, I doubt there is anything interesting in it.
@tirant_blanc
Жыл бұрын
@@negirno How can you say that? It says BUTT!!!
@TheOriginalCollectorA1303
Жыл бұрын
Can’t go wrong with floppies! Nice to see most of them still work well. They are considered obsolete, but then again, the same was said for the cassette when CD became the main format. Still great to use them on older machines!
@garypage1963
Жыл бұрын
Wow, back in the 80s UK you rich if you had a disc drive most of us had games on tape, until the atari st and amiga 500 became affordable. All the best.
@EgoShredder
Жыл бұрын
If you had a hard disk drive you were probably a family member of the Rothschild family.
@nberedim
Жыл бұрын
vhdl is a programming language for modelling integrated circuits, or something along those lines
@Iron_Tupsu
Жыл бұрын
I just found your channel, i gotta say as this technology is outdated and by the standards of today, im hooked on learning about the tech from the 80s and 90s! ill be sticking around from now on!
@EgoShredder
Жыл бұрын
It's a fantastic channel. I've been watching it since around 2010 I think.
@zach446
Жыл бұрын
I love buying used disks! At worst I'll find maybe 1 or 2 that don't work when I buy 30 or so
@rager1969
Жыл бұрын
I've never heard someone refer to it as "dot bump".
@soremuss
Жыл бұрын
Thanks for taking me back to a better time once again!
@idahofur
Жыл бұрын
My life was used 5.1/2" 360k floppies in bulk. You just spent hours formatting them while listening to rock music. Also due a visual inspection. Chuck the bad ones. Also keep a q-tip and rubbing alcohol around to clean off the heads. Never know when one of them like a reel to reel tape would leave gunk on the head.
@Space_Reptile
Жыл бұрын
its a shame you didnt back up some of those programs, as those will likely be lost to history now
@deathstrike
Жыл бұрын
The hardest is now 5.25in because there are NO portable versions of this drive. Especially if your a vintage computer collector (Have Atari 800XL w/1050 DD/Coleco Adam w/5.25in DD/Commodore 128 w/1541 DD and TI 99/4A with 5.25 DD) and they are a pain to manage! These old machines store between 80K and 170K on a 5.25 and finding functional disks are a chore and often expensive and a dice roll. Many are worn from grabbing them and "shoving" them into their respective drives. And some I've bulk bought used the old and very unreliable "notching" the reverse side of a single sided disk with a hole puncher. And yes, I know there are mass storage devices for all these computers (I have a NanoPEB flash card replacement for my TI 99/4A) but it's like VWestlife said, it's just not the same as its original storage media. And 1.2mb 5.25 floppies are not an option as vintage disk drives cannot read the higher density storage they offer. This is the downside of vintage computers. Sure you can invest in modern CF and SD card replacements ,and you can also invest in even hard drives. But it's like listening to an original album of an artist, and a CD. Sure the CD sounds great, no distortion or hiss, and it's crystal clear. But it just doesn't sound like the way the artist intended it to sound, flaws and all. Same for floppy disks. Many MANY games and productivity software were on floppies and there is just a nostalgic feeling hearing the disk spool up, the gentle clacking of the read/write head. But sadly, this will eventually fail as more and more floppies become either unusable, or can no longer be formatted. And those few left will also fail and by the middle of the century, most magnetic media will be unusable.
@ssalient
Жыл бұрын
I always used ARJ as my compression program back in the early 90's. Vividly remember when I wanted to uncompress some game that was spanned over 6 or 7 disks more than once one of these disks exhibited bad sectors :)
@Mrshoujo
Жыл бұрын
Would it be worth your time to archive the contents of those floppies to a burned CD ROM? I did that for over 1,500 floppies years ago. I used to buy 3.5" floppies at HAMfests years ago to reformat. You can still use a floppy with bad sectors because the format process locks them out and can't be used. The storage capacity is just less.
@eDoc2020
Жыл бұрын
"Bad" floppies are certainly still useful, I even have one with a track or two physically obliterated (light shines through the disk). The downside is you can only use them for files, you can't write images to them.
@bumblesby
7 ай бұрын
I learned programming in the early 1980s. I worked on IBM Midrange systems - 32/34/38. They used 8 inch floppy disks for the OS and the OS updates. We'd get a stack of them and load them in one by one. Took quite a while to do an update. Thank the gods we had a tape drive to do backups!
@twocvbloke
Жыл бұрын
A few years back I bought a pack of 10x Double Density 3.5" disks, British Telecom (BT) branded (back when they also sold computers, mostly t businesses), went back to buy more, sold out, cos people are desperate for DD 3.5" disks, also got a bunch of BT branded 5.25" disks, some DD, the rest, Quad Density, which was handy as I had a Teac FD-55FR which is a Quad-density drive, which I set up and lightly modded to work as an Amiga drive, and it does indeed work, no point to it, I just like it... :P
@EgoShredder
Жыл бұрын
I tried selling mine back in 2015 but no interest. I did sell 50 or 100 to one guy, and he claimed none of them worked and demanded a refund. I'd been reliably using them all for years and my remaining ones still work fine in 2023. I need them again now so not going to sell the couple of hundred I have left.
@twocvbloke
Жыл бұрын
@@EgoShredder The disks I bought were brand new & sealed, probably just have said that, but yeah, I see used disks on ebay all the time and I just pass them by, given you never know what you're getting with them really... (and that guy claiming they didn't work probably was just a scammer or they didn't actually know what they were doing)
@EgoShredder
Жыл бұрын
@@twocvbloke Yeah he said none of them worked the day they arrived. I thought that was suspicious for that amount of disks.
@BennBirch
Жыл бұрын
This vid was such a tease. I thought we'd get some floppy archaeology, checking out random programs, but instead just blue balls. Also you never at any point made mention of the fact that the previous owner was a master of chaos. Who names 20 disks all called "zip files"? Like ok theyre zipped but what programs?
@vwestlife
Жыл бұрын
If I did that, I'd get people complaining that the video is too long, as it'd probably take at least an hour to go through all the contents of 30+ disks, especially since most of them were ZIP files that I'd need to extract.
@MM.
Жыл бұрын
Scorch15 must be Scorched Earth v1.50
@digitaldoc1976
Жыл бұрын
❤ hearing the BIOS boot with the floppy check sequence!!
@Retroaria
Жыл бұрын
Nice content, thanks. Depending on the size library you choose, it is possible to put the collection of most ATARI games on a single floppy diskette.
@uxwbill
Жыл бұрын
I saw some brand new Imation 3.5" low density diskettes for sale in a Wal-Mart sometime in the very early 2000s...so I bought them all and still have most of them. I'll admit I wasn't feeling dedicated enough right now to watch you go through all the diskettes, though I might later. I was wondering for a while if you might set the DIRCMD environment variable with the switches you wanted, or if you might use any of the command recall options to save a little time. (Wow, was that kind of a nerdy thing to say. It's probably even worse that I actually remember any of that.) I have had mixed results using a bulk eraser even on "known good" diskettes. I've wondered if some floppy drives just can't cope well with the "random" junk the bulk eraser leaves behind. For whatever reason, at least some of the LPCIO chips on the market today _still_ contain floppy disk controller logic...
@eDoc2020
Жыл бұрын
You might have better luck if you slowly move the eraser away from the disks before shutting off the power, as one would do when degaussing a color TV.
@AndrewTSq
Жыл бұрын
As someone with old synths and samplers, I actually even have a bunch of unused Maxel 8" discs still in its original box.
@coolelectronics1759
Жыл бұрын
I got kawai q80 and roland100 The roland takes a slightly smaller disk than the standard floppy diskette.
@tookeydookey
Жыл бұрын
I need to try doing this sometime! You've given me inspiration to do so!
@AerFixus
Жыл бұрын
I wonder if the metal dust cover is preventing the bulk eraser from working on the covered parts of the disk. What if you rotated them 180 degrees then used the tape eraser again? Maybe you have already tried this before, but I'm curious if that would help.
@MikeDS49
Жыл бұрын
At that strength, the field probably penetrates the dust shield, but it would be interesting to try, using a magnetic tape viewer (Techmoan demonstrates one) before and after.
@JeffsTagtripp
3 ай бұрын
Back in the day I used to buy DD diskettes and drill a hole in them.
@atkelar
Жыл бұрын
I think the "techlib" folder one said "xilinx"? might have been a hardware chip programming tool, or at least part of one...? EDIT: it would fit in with the "VHDL" files, which are usually program style files for programmable logic chips.
@arekx
Жыл бұрын
From what I heard buying old stock and reselling them is a business for some people. There are still older industrial machines that are in use and only support floppy drives. Users of such machines are target customer for these businesses.
@TranscendentalAirwaves
Жыл бұрын
Well as a person who just bought 100 DD 720k disks for his Tandy 1000HX this is an oddly topical video. lol
@UpLateGeek
Жыл бұрын
Yeah, you do have to be careful of viruses on random floppies. I even found some of my own floppies were infected when I went looking through my old stash from back in the day! I never even knew they were infected!
@azoriusmage
Жыл бұрын
I guess policy is to never boot from them and make sure you format them before using them
@SPINNINGMYWHEELS777
Жыл бұрын
@9:45 "Julia's Resume' .. my last resume is on a 3.5 probably last accessed early 2000's. I still have the disc in my laptop bag.. haven't had a computer since the 90s that could access the disc.. it was for use at the Library - when the library would give you a floppy.
@daneberryman
Жыл бұрын
i remember first year of high school being issued with box of floppys and the last year being a usb Stick
@applegal3058
Жыл бұрын
I remember using both the smaller and larger floppy disks. I never realized that they weren't being made anymore! Our work office has a stash of old floppy disks in storage, and I'd be interested to pick through them, except our work computers doesn't have a reader in them. I tried inserting an old excel training program diskette from the office, but alas no disk reader. If those old diskettes are valuable, it's too bad we can't sell them (even the new one), as I work for a government office who operates with an abundance of security caution. Oh well.
@HappyBeezerStudios
Жыл бұрын
No old legacy system around that operates some ancient machinery?
@applegal3058
Жыл бұрын
@@HappyBeezerStudios haha, nope!
@nonsuch
Жыл бұрын
The group that still uses floppies regularly is the music keyboard/sampler community. Even though there are new ways to get samples/programs/sequences in and out of your hardware like USB and SD floppy emulators and of course, SCSI if your hardware supports it... there seem to be a love for floppies and their continued use. I still have a few 100 of them for this purpose. I also kept any retail software on floppies I bought back in the day before they came on CD-Roms like Adobe Photoshop 2.0 that is on 27 disks lol. I did pay a few hundred dollars for it back then.
@buckykattnj
Жыл бұрын
Those Harvard disks were probably Harvard Graphics... for making presentations. While the actual Harvard Graphics program took up 6 or more disks, I seem to remember students using a hacked up version that fit on one disk, space for the executable and their assignments. I worked in the computer labs at Stockton State College back then... and I recall Harvard Graphics being super finicky to run in the labs... especially in the systems with no hard drives. Worse... the professor knew I was one of the more, er... "talented" lab assistants... so he had all his students seek me out. Some even showed up at my on campus apartment... but I was pretty much the only person on campus who could save data off of folded up floppy disks and restore the needed binaries. 688 Attack sub brings back memories, as well. I can't recall for sure if it was 688 or some other naval warfare game, but one of my friends hated the copy protection scheme... so I edited the binary and I removed it for him. I doubt that ever got out in the wild... it was a terrible game.
@ropersonline
Жыл бұрын
21:07: Harvard Graphics was an early chart and slideshow program, whose functionality was somewhere between Excel and PowerPoint, but it could only do a subset of what those programs can do. See Wikipedia. And Scorched is basically guaranteed to be Scorched Earth - also see Wikipedia.
@mrnmrn1
Жыл бұрын
3.5" HD disks were a horrible experience to me. I used them for years, transferring downloaded files from the school and from net cafés to home, until 2004, when I bought by first (256MB) USB flash drive. I consumed at least 10 diskettes per month, and by consumed I mean they went to the bin. I was happy if a disk whitstood four data transfers before failing. No matter what brand I tried, but maybe Verbatim DataLifePlus were a bit more reliable. A large factor in this experience was probably the 8 years old, dirty drives in the Pentium 233 PCs at the high school's library - connected to the net via 50ohm coax rings up until 2005! If something was important, I copied it immediately to at least 2 disks, and if the file would fit one disk multiple times, I put on the disk as many copies of it as possible. The usual cause of failure was a corrupted track0, with a visible, circular scratch on the disk. Even with disks that I only used at home, and I kept my drives clean! I even had to replace my boot disks every second year, despite I used them only a few times per year. Yet, I never had any 5.25" floppy failing on me. Although I only used 5.25" disks ony C64, of which the data density is only a small fraction of 3.5" HD disks. I think the main issue with 3.5" disks is that they have a big gap between the disk and the enveleope, where dust and debris can fall in and cause scratches. 5.25" and 8" disks with their tight enveleope were less prone to this failure mode.
@EgoShredder
Жыл бұрын
I had excellent reliability using floppies both DD or HD. I did buy TDK, Maxell and Fuji brands though.
@mrnmrn1
Жыл бұрын
@@EgoShredder I mosty used TDK, and Verbatim, and some Fuji, too. Maxells were not easy to get in the late '90s - early '00s where I live. I had horrible experience with each of these brands. As I said, maybe Verbatim was the best for me.
@electronicsfixer
16 күн бұрын
2:14 i did this and put an old bee gees song on it in horrible quality left it hanging out in my pile of other stuff and it still worked played the entire thing fine
@davidrmcmahon
Жыл бұрын
I got rid of hundreds when I gave away my Atari ST... Stupid
@HappyBeezerStudios
Жыл бұрын
There is a thing about buying old floppies on purpose. The late productions are often done super cheaply and tend to corrupt more. Going to 80s and early 90s floppies can have better results, but ymmv because they're already used.
@DjResR
Жыл бұрын
I used to have a electronic schematics archive on couple of the 3,5 floppys I got somewhere._
@Fezzler61
Жыл бұрын
Tandy 1100 FD, is Desk Mate in ROM? I have an NEC MultiSpeed PC-16-01 with two floppies. I wonder if I can swap B: for a GoTek? I would love to find the schematics for my NEC because it has two empty ROM sockets.
@vwestlife
Жыл бұрын
Yes, see my video about it.
@Fezzler61
Жыл бұрын
@@vwestlife Will do!
@danielktdoranie
Жыл бұрын
Well you can transfer data over a network. I use an SMB share to save files I make on my Amiga computers
@BilisNegra
Жыл бұрын
I'm guessing 720K used disks are a good bet thanks to their being manufactured at a time when quality standards were better than in the final days of the floppy. At the end of the day, you get what you pay for, of course, as in the latest leg of their existence disks were clearly cheaper than in the late 80s or up to the mid-90s.
@sfurta
4 ай бұрын
Diskettes with bad sectors on top side can still be used as single sided Atari ST disks.
@killerbee2562
Жыл бұрын
Julia, if she were around 20 in 1997 she's 46-47 now I feel old.
@airplaneengine
Жыл бұрын
Pull the disks (and tapes) about arms length away before turning the bulk eraser off. The collapsing magnetic field could possibly magnetize the media (which could result in "whooshing" sound effects in terms of audio tape).
@capolaya
Жыл бұрын
.vsd files are Visio documents. The Harvard files are from Hardvard Graphics software.
@Kumimono
Жыл бұрын
Oooo, cheats for Mechanized Assault & Exploration. Good game, that. I wonder if that "Julia Final" refers to mathematical imagery, Mandelbrot-like stuff. (Edit: OK, person named Julia. :D ) I wonder if Scorch 1.5 was Scorched Earth, a fun artillery game.
@ethnicstyledotca
Жыл бұрын
Wow this guy was into FPGA's in the 90's. VHDL and Xilinx what a champ.
@ocsrc
Жыл бұрын
I fixed and upgraded a 1.5 GHz pentium IBM Thinkpad. I was shocked how few drivers for a Machine this old were in Windows 7. I had to use 32 bit version of Windows 7. The machine told me not a 64 bit CPU. So many drivers listed on IBM's site under this model and windows 7 were wrong. Same experience with a Samsung and an HP The HP is 6 years old and Windows 10 was missing 10 devices I couldn't believe Windows 10 would not have so many common drivers for common hardware I noticed that the newer HP and Samsung and IBM had almost every single component the same manufacturer and HWID. I think almost every laptop is now made at the same factory using the same hardware.
@Meepcity534
5 ай бұрын
EXTREMELY RANDOM FACT: I have the exit sign at 0:16 (see top right corner) but red
@KRAFTWERK2K6
Жыл бұрын
Old Floppies are still wayyy supperior than last gen manufactured Floppies because the last batches were HORRIBLE and had such an insane high error rate. I was still using freshly produced floppies back in 2002-2003 before i got myself a CD-RW / DVD-ROM combo drive and my very first 32MB USB stick. And the exess-deathrate of these floppies was insane. Both from Verbatim and Sony. The Sony ones were even worse. I think i even had some from TDK. Same thing....
@UnderEu
Жыл бұрын
18:12 that engineering reference 😆
@HR-wd6cw
11 ай бұрын
No I would not recommend ever buying used storage media, especially disks (UNLESS it is still a sealed box from the mfr, then maybe...) But regardless, I am so glad that we have flash media storage now (optical recording was good but it was pretty much write-once in most cases). It's more rare to get a corrupted flash drive (unless you buy a counterfeit/fake one perhaps, but if you stick to a reputable brand it's almost a non-issue these days and far less likely than with a floppy or tape drive). Granted magnetic storage is still king when it comes to cost (for large quantities of storage like terabytes) and it has a longer storage lifespan than flash media (although some people are saying that they are able to use SSDs that are 10+ years old, and that's about as long as I would store anything on a drive before replacing it, although I did have one HDD from about 20 years ago that I had for about 14 years just to see how long it would work -- I didn't store anything of use on it, mostly games I could re-install). I got scared though about possible random failure one day, after about 14 years and destroyed the drive and replaced it but it had a good run.
@vincemajestyk9497
Жыл бұрын
Most of that old magnetic media has just succumbed to effects of time. Just the other day I tried to play an old VHS tape (old rental) on my combo VHS/DVD player connected to my smart TV by component inputs and it wouldn't play. The screen just kept going to 'no signal'. The DVD player worked. Then I tried another tape and that worked fine. It was just that the tape had degraded so much that the signal was too low. I tried playing with the tracking and every now and then it would pop up going up and down. The tape was from the early '80's, not in bad shape otherwise. I was able to play it a few years ago on a 'non' smart TV/VCR. I've got boxes and boxes of old compact cassette tapes that sound horrible now (from the '80's-'90's). Maybe they always sounded a little 'off' compared to digital music. Although Digital music sounds 'dead' compared to any decent vinyl album if anybody can still play them. Especially compared to the 'volume' or 'sound wars' CD's of the '90's. Back in the '90's I got so much vinyl for practically free. Thrift stores were practically giving them away.
@app0the
Жыл бұрын
inre: vinyl, mostly it's the case of modern day mastering treating their job like "both things are digital, so just plop the audio file onto the disc" without considering what people will be listening on and where...
@vwestlife
Жыл бұрын
Modern TVs don't deal with analog video signals as well as older ones did. Try an old CRT TV, then I bet the picture will show up fine.
@vincemajestyk9497
Жыл бұрын
@@vwestlife The one that I used that it worked on was an 'older' LG HD 1080 led set (non-smart) from 2012. And that's the oldest TV I have. I believe you are correct, if the TV has any video processors to upconvert or otherwise process the signal like the so called 'smart' TV's it's sketchy. Most thrift shops and charities around me stopped accepting CRT TV's about 13-14 years ago.
@MagikGimp
Жыл бұрын
They're your disks but it wouldn't have hurt to back all of these up just in case. You never know what lost media you might have had.
@videotape2959
Жыл бұрын
Very few people understand the significance of data archival. It's a niche inside of a niche..
@supermasterPIK
Ай бұрын
14:34: remember that symbol "_"afther the extension means compressed and only extracted in windows with its Setup program
@sebastian19745
Жыл бұрын
I bought sometimes on second-hand used marked and once I got them with mold. Maybe they were stored in a humid place. Since then I always ask the seller to smell them. If they smells funny, I pass. SUSIE logic simulator may be a simulator for logic ICs. I saw bus.tst, mpu48.tst, pal lib, ttl.lib. That makes sense. It would be nice if you archive those because for sure most of these programs/games ar lost. I had on floppy Electronic Workbench from Interactive Image Technologies, the first two versions that worked under dos and could be ran on a 268/386 and I lost them. Now they are nowhere to be found. The oldest version to be found online is ver 4.1 for Windows 9x. That person was in EE, the VHDL and Xilinx floppyies make me think that it was into programmable logic devices.
@doublycorrinaditties
Жыл бұрын
Oh, cool! Didn't know you were a fellow New Jerseyan!
@atarimuseum_nl
Жыл бұрын
In my experience, re-using 5.25 inch floppy disks is a good option too. But if you buy them, make sure that the disks were stored dry and in a box. I have seen many 5.25 inch disks that can not be re-used because of dirt and moisture. If you cannot see their condition well in a picture, my advice is don't buy them.
@SPINNINGMYWHEELS777
Жыл бұрын
@1:20 cool product in general though.. for ALL SCSI Computers? that's a bold claim! I could always trust my SCSI chain !
@ralphmcmahan2139
Жыл бұрын
the noises sure are satisfying
@Shmbler
Жыл бұрын
I've been laughed at in the past for doing exactly what you did here ("not worth it..."). But just listening to floppy drives is time well spent for me.
@dagobertkrikelin1587
Жыл бұрын
I once bought a couple of boxes of floppy disks and they all came with DOOM installed from the factory. It was advertised on the boxes so no surprise, just a lot of formatting. :)
@proletariennenaturiste
7 ай бұрын
I want to buy and use floppy disks. Maybe I ought to manufacture some too despite a lack of money or equipment?
@HelloKittyFanMan
Жыл бұрын
"The older floppy disks that actually _were_ floppy." They were, but so are standard 3 1/2" ones and other hard-cased ones like Zip disks! It's not the jacket that we named them "floppy" after, it's the actual _disk._ ALL floppy disks actually ARE floppy because of how the _disk_ itself is.
@supermasterPIK
Ай бұрын
So there`s not a "dummy" floppy disk which has a cable on the bottom part and and USB end on the other? Or a TF card on a fake floppy disk?
@bloxyman22
Жыл бұрын
At least with my amiga system, I have never noticed any kind of reliablitiy issues using HD floppies as DD.
@guessundheit6494
Жыл бұрын
I have a USB floppy drive and disks with DOS 6.22 and will keep them around as long as possible. Convenience isn't the issue, being able to recover a system is why I have them. When all else fails, DOS doesn't. 1:55 - One reason to prefer double density over high density is quality. Like everything else, newer often means lower quality of manufacture. Some retro channels are using 5.25" floppies from the 1980s that still work. Judge disks by physical wear as much as anything else (e.g. scratches, bends, multiple labels). 4:36 - CV would be worth making a copy of. You never know if it could be useful. 12:20 - Pronounced "denny paw-van", it's a French name. Potvin STILL sucks. Someone should have done to his ankle what he did to Ulf Nilsson's ankle in 1979. Ahem. 15:10 - There's also HJ Split for windows. Splitters were very handy for moving large files in the days before USB flash drives and/or writing to CD wasn't an option. 27:30 - Download F-Protect v3.16b, released in 2006. It was the last DOS only virus checker. It should be able to handle any viruses from the 1980s or 1990s.
@Wok_Agenda
Жыл бұрын
I find it stupid that companies stopped manufacturing floppy disks , there is a whole market out there
@videotape2959
Жыл бұрын
Imagine an utopia where they never stopped manufacturing them...
@Wok_Agenda
Жыл бұрын
@@videotape2959 I imagine utopias all day
@Retroaria
Жыл бұрын
I recently bought an unopened box of hundreds of blank mini CD laser discs for only 10 bucks and I have no idea what to do with them.
@purpleghost4083
Жыл бұрын
Then why did you buy them?
@TilmanBaumann
Жыл бұрын
I started treating Floppies as single use back in the 90's because the quality of new drives and disks was already horrible. Any disk that ever showed any sign of wear got immediately cracked in half so it can't hurt anyone else.
@Toxis374
8 ай бұрын
I have always wondered if the warning about using an HD micro floppy as a DD floppy only applies if you use it in a DD drive (which I doubt even exists). I was wondering if an HD drive would really alter the signal strength when you insert a DD disk, which would be a reason for an HD disk to ultimately fail. I havn't come to any final conclusion, yet, because all the HD floppies which were used as a DD floppy and which passed my hands could be read without an error, even after 30 years. These disks were all written to in an HD drive, I believe.
@vwestlife
8 ай бұрын
That only applies to 5.25" disks, not 3.5".
@Toxis374
8 ай бұрын
@@vwestlife Hey, I feel sorry for the confusion but I was really referring to 3-1/2-inch floppies and the trick of covering the media-sense hole. I was wondering what exactly it is that makes a 1.44M disk fail when it is used as a 720k disk in a 1.44M drive. Does the drive really lower the signal strength for a disk what it thinks is a 720k medium? This would indeed lead to flaky magnetic information, but as of my knowledge, the magnetic strength used to write both types of disks is similar enough that no manufacturer of 1.44M drives has ever bothered building in a logic to change it upon detecting the particular type, and you can in practice use the stronger field to write to both types of disk. It would only apply to a drive that is not supposed to write with a magnetic field strong enough for a 1.44M disk, for instance a 720k drive. But then again, I don't know of any pure 720k drive for 3-1/2-inch floppies...
@garyhart6421
Жыл бұрын
I have 37 recycled DD disks in front of me. I would not say they were cheap --- but Supply & Demand I guess.
@itsamyau
Жыл бұрын
I had a disk come will a book, kind of "how to fix virus infected PC" something like that It include 30 famous viruses in the disk for practice, and just have book name on label I plug it to windows many times because forgot viruses inside Lucky, Antivirus know vintage viruses
@ThexthSurvivor
Жыл бұрын
If anyone wants 720KB floppys, I'm willing to trade/sell some. I have quite a bit of them. I'm looking for certain older storage media.
@NanoBurger
Жыл бұрын
Harvard graphics? That was the government's standard slide presentation program before PowerPoint.
@BRBTechTalk
11 ай бұрын
17:21 You had it right the first time, sounds like kal gr ee not Cal-Gary
@qrsx66
Жыл бұрын
What forgotten trasures still live on a floppy somewhere ?
@Sb129
Жыл бұрын
Nice haul
@thecountrysheriffacp4524
Жыл бұрын
Kevin, can a 1 inch neodymium magnet be used to also bulk erase the disks?
@vwestlife
Жыл бұрын
It'll definitely make the data on the disks unreadable, but the strong magnetic field it leaves might cause errors when attempting to format the disks again.
@thecountrysheriffacp4524
Жыл бұрын
@@vwestlife Facts, Kevin
@Linkolnverse
8 ай бұрын
4:30 what is that gorgeous chunky laptop?
@tomekrv942
Жыл бұрын
If there was mold on them, it wouldn't be so easy. You can never be sure there is no mold.
@HelloKittyFanMan
Жыл бұрын
If the seller didn't have the means to test something used with, then why would he even have them in the first place?
@8BitNaptime
Жыл бұрын
Tell me about it, I've been looking for ED disks for a good price...
@uxwbill
Жыл бұрын
That's going to be a tall order. I'm sure you already know well that the format never caught on. Many computers didn't have a floppy disk controller that could handle the format either. For whatever it's worth, there was a company operating as recently as the mid-2000s or so known as Windsor Sales Group that claimed to have thousands of ED diskettes already manufactured and the materials to make many more. I ordered a few boxes back then and even at that time, their web site was quite broken. The product quality was fair at best. The company is long gone now, though you might be able to track down someone once affiliated with them and see if your luck holds in regard to getting any of those diskettes.
@8BitNaptime
Жыл бұрын
@@uxwbill I know, the perpendicular recording mode used on ED disks makes them unique. It seems almost easier to get a drive than the media for it. But there's always the off-beat memory card to floppy disc interface cards to boost storage on old computers.... if you can interface to the card...
@OldAussieAds
Жыл бұрын
Why would you name so many disks "ZIP files"? That doesn't explain what's on the disk any more than a disk called "Files". It just tells us those files were compressed. But why would you need to write if they were compressed or not?
@777anarchist
Жыл бұрын
Just got my second Gotek recently. Just in case.
@richardbrobeck2384
Жыл бұрын
I am lucky I have couple packages of unused ones !
@andygozzo72
Жыл бұрын
i've set up batch files on some of my machines to do that same format command easier, so just have to enter FMTDA for it ,
@5.56x45mm-cartridge
11 ай бұрын
and some boxes are unopened or if its an imation its filled with imation disks
@5.56x45mm-cartridge
11 ай бұрын
i also bot 2 boxes of floppy disks in 5 months one is actually working
@G7VFY
Жыл бұрын
On Hackaday now.
@G7VFY
Жыл бұрын
Keep up the good work. Stephen in the UK
@poofygoof
Жыл бұрын
wouldn't appletalk be the easiest way to move data between a mac and the rest of the world?
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