Collaborate Disseminate
With the last manufacturer of 3.5″ floppy disks (FDs) having shut down in 2010, those who are still using this type of storage medium for production and/or retrocomputing purposes have …read more Continue reading Checking Out and Reviving a Batch of Used Floppy Disks
Floppies may be big in Japan, but nostalgic and/or needful Stateside floppy enthusiasts needn’t fret — just use AOL keyword point that browser toward floppydisk.com. There, you can buy new …read more Continue reading Floppy Disk Sales Are Higher-Density Than You Might Think
Ahh, floppy disks. Few things carry nostalgia quite like a floppy — either 3 1⁄2 or 5 1⁄4, depending on which generation of hacker you happen to be. (And yes, …read more Continue reading Magnetic Maniac Manages Mangled Memory
There are times when a technology goes almost overnight as if in a puff of smoke, and others when they fade away gradually over time to the point at which …read more Continue reading The 512 Gigabyte Floppy Disk
On [Jan Derogee]’s desk is something that wouldn’t look out of place for many of us, a pile of computer magazines with a case of 3.5″ floppy disks on top …read more Continue reading It’s Always Floppy Time!
There was a time when booting Linux from a floppy disk was the norm, but of course, those days are long gone. Even if you still had a working 3.5 …read more Continue reading Running Modern Linux from a Single Floppy Disk
We remember the floppy disk as the storage medium most of us used two decades or more ago, limited in capacity and susceptible to data loss. It found its way into a few unexpected uses such as Sony’s Mavica line of digital cameras, but outside those who maintain and use …read more
Holding on to a cache of old floppies because nostalgia? Us too, and this might be the coolest possible use for ’em. While it’s fun to imagine that he wrote a compression algorithm to fit a lossless copy of Coltrane’s Blue Train on a 1.44Mb coaster, or somehow rolled his …read more
About a week ago, Linus Torvalds made a software commit which has an air about it of the end of an era. The code in question contains a few patches to the driver for native floppy disc controllers. What makes it worthy of note is that he remarks that the …read more
Continue reading Retrotechtacular: The Floppy Disk Orphaned by Linux
So you spent your youth learning your craft in front of an Amiga 500+, but a quarter century later all you have left is a broken computer and a pile of floppies you can’t read any more. What’s to be done? This was the position [Rob Smith] found himself in, and since some of the commercial solutions to ripping Amiga floppies were rather expensive, he decided to have a go at making his own.
His write-up makes for a fascinating read, as he delves into the physical interface of the PC floppy drive he used, and into the timing required …read more
