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Retrotechtacular: The Floppy Disk Orphaned By Linux
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 floppy driver is now orphaned. Its maintainer no longer has working floppy hardware upon which to test the software, and Linus remarks that "I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint", though he does point out that active support remains for USB floppy drives.
It's a very reasonable view to have arrived at because outside the realm of retrocomputing the physical rather than virtual floppy disk has all but disappeared. It's well over a decade since they ceased to be fitted to desktop and laptop computers, and where once they were a staple of any office they now exist only in the "save" icon on your wordprocessor. The floppy is dead, and has been for a long time.
Still, Linus' quiet announcement comes as a minor jolt to anyone of A Certain Age for whom the floppy disk and the computer were once inseparable.
Next thing, someone will be removing punched card and paper tape reader support. Where does it end?
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday July 27 2019, @11:04AM (8 children)
Even back in the '90s I always avoided using floppies unless there was no other way. They are so unreliable that just about any other method of transferring data seems likely to succeed sooner. Burning an EPROM, punched cards, typing in some base64, maybe even a cassette tape...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @12:30PM (3 children)
I'd put cassette tape at a similar realibility level than 3-1/2 floppies.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:33PM (1 child)
I'm with GP. I think cassette is superior to floppies. I never lost data on a cassette, but I've lost a lot of data on floppies. But, floppies pushed cassette aside, because floppies were blazing fast, in comparison.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:23AM
There were vast reliability differences among floppies. 1.44mb were pretty good; 720k were horrible. 360k were very stable; 1.2mb not so much. (This is perhaps a little better than anecdotal, since it's the result of reading several hundred of each, all of similar history and vintage. Well, some of the 360k were a lot older.) Also varied wildly by brand... I got to where I'd only buy Sony for archival use, tho I'd also use TDK for daily stuff. Those Sony disks almost never failed.
And of course who can forget the super-durable AOL disks. (Out of floppies? Call up AOL and ask for their software! You'd soon have a regular supply arriving by mail.)
See above about the main cause of 'failed' floppies since WinXP... the volume track function, which renders them unreadable on older systems.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:00PM
You may be right there. Of course the floppy holds much more data than a cassette, but I still don't know why back in the 8 bit days there wasn't more use of (cheap) compression and error correction. I remember I used somebody's RLE library in the 80s to provide illustrations for a text adventure, but never saw compression in any loader of the time. The fancy loaders did put a lot of effort in getting cool color banding effects based on the audio though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:37PM (1 child)
It would have helped if you had not stored your floppies in a sandbox.
Somehow, the idea of storing and using things in a cool, dry, clean environment is just to complex for people.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 27 2019, @04:04PM
Life isn't always ideal. Over 30 years, I've crossed oceans multiple times (with and without media), graduated university, moved, sometimes had to put my classic computer equipment in storage. Great if you have a climate controlled data center that you can keep a box of disks in over 30 years, I agree. I didn't though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday July 27 2019, @03:47PM (1 child)
I figured out early on (late 80s?) that I had to format new floppies at least 2 times, preferably 3, and then they'd become reliable. Not sure if the media needed some polishing (likely) or some other phenomenon. Same for pre-formatted ones. Very unreliable unless that was done. Linux fdformat was much better because it didn't verify after each format. I'd run it several times, then run verify once, then DOS format if needed.
Also, I had gotten some Norton Tools, and one was a floppy repair. It would save data and reformat and re-write tracks. I used it a few months ago, and when I remember the name I'll post it. I think SpinRite will do that for floppies too, but I don't think I ever tried it. Saved / rescued my butt too many times to count.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday July 28 2019, @03:28AM
Buy Sony diskettes, and this problem goes away. Never had to reformat new disks, and rarely had one fail. (Also, don't use Mitsumi floppy drives.)
Was same with QIC80 tapes. They had to be formatted for your drive. and 40-50 bad blocks was considered normal. But my Sony tapes never had more than 8 bad blocks, and sometimes none.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.