They manufactured it starting 1979 -- but they were ready by 1975. It was just politics.
The Japanese visited Járosi for the prototype many times and made a gazillion photos. There's zero doubt where the idea came from. As far as I am aware, Sony have officially recognized the idea came from Járosi and Járosi have acknowledged Sony's actual drive has improved on his.
You know we say magnetic media dont last but my 5.25" Floppy Disk are still readable last time I tested it in 2020 during COVID when I was too bored at home. I have some 8" but the computer that had it wouldn't turn on anymore. The PC with 5.25" and 3.5" still does.
Not the same could be said about CD though. CDs that were pressed are still ok, not so much for burned CD-R. Most of them are full or errors when reading it.
> The drives I use from ASUS and LG report read errors from the CDs but verify the MD5s correctly. I didn't notice them reporting any read errors from the DVDs. An off-brand drive fails to read the CDs, but read one of the older DVDs with no read errors.
> Surprisingly, with no special storage precautions, generic low-cost media, and consumer drives, I'm getting good data from CD-Rs more than 19 years old, and from DVD-Rs nearly 17 years old. Your mileage may vary. Tune in again next year for another episode.
> Last year I found a NetBSD1.2 CD dating from October 1996 whose cksum(1) checksums all verified correctly despite a few read errors. That CD was still delivering good data after nearly 26 years, but this year a couple of the checksums failed.
- a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001
- my own collection of stuff downloaded or backed up around 2003-2004; most of it on Verbatim DVDs, but some on CD-R or CD-RW (likely also from Verbatim)
I had very few read errors, and it was impressive especially considering it's more than 50 CDs and that I never payed too much attention to how they were stored. Most of the computer magazine CDs were stored directly in a "cardboard sleeve", not even one of those plastic/paper ones...
>- a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001
I still have lots of those as well from the early 90s! Mostly PC Gamer ( UK ) and some other computer magazine. I need to find a weekend and archive those.
But a little sad as more than half of my CD-Rs have problems. May be I need to get a new external DVD reader just to test it out again see so many people have no problems with their CDs.
> a collection of CD-Roms attached to a computer magazine, 1999-2001
Please upload these disc images to Internet Archive if not included already, so that they can be preserved for the future. Downloads which used to be publicly available might be worthwhile too, but it could be more of a challenge to sort these out.
My 5.25" ones from the mid-eighties are still readable. As far as I can tell the 8" ones are as well, though I haven't tested many of them. But their density is low, which helps a lot. And that's also why none of my 3.5" 1.44MB floppies are readable - the density is a bit too high for what's feasible for that physical medium.
I don't know about later ones, but early CD-R easily failed after less than a year back when I tried to use them as backup media. I quickly abandoned the idea of using them as backup.
My 3.5 floppy disks from early 90's keeps being fine. I a few months ago, I installed the demo of Hallowen Harry, and the Commander Keen 4 copy that comes with the Gravis Game pad, in a 486 without issues.
:D Hah perfect, I can totally imagine that with the SA accent... and frankly more logical, I never got why they were called floppy disks in most of the world considering their predecessors.
They (and their 8" and 5¼" predecessors) were called floppy disks because of the disc of storage media within the outer casing, not because of the casing which was not particularly floppy for the 8” and 5¼” versions, and rather rigid for the 3½” version.
I thought the 5 1/4s were called floppy disks and the 3 1/2s were called diskettes, at least by the people around me, don’t know if that is a Dutch thing or not
"Type 1 Diskette" was the IBM product description for its first 8-inch one; "floppy disk" was used for the same technology in some places before the first commercially-available products. Both terms were general, neither was specific to any subset of the sizes they would later come in.
There were probably some times and places where local common usage made a distinction between some of the forms then in use by using the two terms differently, though.
Because by the time the 3.5s came out, "floppy" had become a word meaning "removable" instead of "bendy" - the alternative being "hard disks" which were fixed storage (internal or external).
Back in the 90s I was doing work at an NCR facility and one of the corporate culture bits I never could get the hang of was referring to a 3.5in floppy as a "flex."
Suppose I pick my 30+ year old Amiga floppies from the basement. Any chance that there are still readable? what would be the simplest way to copy the content on a modern storage so I could inspect them on an emulator.
I'm currently in the process of dumping all my old Amiga floppies too.
If your basement was relatively not too humid or hot, the disks should all still be readable.
There are two popular USB floppy drive controllers for archiving Amiga disks: KryoFlux and Greaseweazle. You need a standard disk reader to use along (not a USB one).
The KryoFlux is a bit more expensive but can create complete archival level images (called KryoFlux stream). Otherwise both devices will produce floppy images (ADF) that can be used in any Amiga emulator or written back to floppy to use on a real Amiga.
Here's an overview of the available tools, some of them are pretty old, you can't go wrong with the two I listed above: https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118
The Greaseweazle can directly read/write KyroFlux stream files as well. The KryoFlux files are my preferred "archival grade" backup format because they also store multiple reads of the disk tracks in each file to get a consensus on a "good" read.
You can easily convert to other formats with the HxC Floppy Software.
For the Amiga you have some really good options, I would personally recommend getting a standard PC 3.5in drive and a GreaseWeazle floppy controller which adapts it to USB with extreme low level control for reading disks.
This will also allow the WinUAE Amiga emulator to directly read the disks in the drive!
I can't speak to the Amiga, but my dad recently went through a box of 3.5s from the 90s, and they were all perfectly readable. I've got some 5.25s my C64 can read just fine, too (I could even play HHGttG if I wanted to wait a minute per command to learn I died an hour ago without realizing it).
Crazy to think that a floppy drive used to be a big expense back then. Well, at least for my family. Now you can get a big mac meal for the price of a floppy drive.
However, considering you have to build your own custom Arduino board or be on the waiting list to buy one, it's a bit more complicated than "Just buy a simple USB floppy drive for 15 bucks online".
It's a shame that he glosses over 3" disks. They were widely used in the UK of all places throughout the 1980s because Amstrad selected them for their Z80-based office systems. I'd love to know what cheap deal Alan Sugar got with Hitachi to offload old stock that made this happen.
The focus was more on how the Sony drive became the standard and less about all the competing formats. The CFD was the only serious competition and, in the US at least, it never reached the levels of putting up a fight like the ZipDisk vs. SuperDisk or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD.
The Amstrad was the only system OEM I found that really used it, so while it did have some market it definitely wasn't wide spread to other systems like the BBC Micro, Acorn, or (Proper) Sinlcairs.
I heard that 3.5" disks were originally marketed as "stiffies" to help differentiate them from "floppies", the older 5.25" and 8" disks. But, as the story goes, someone pulled the plug for obvious reasons. Not sure if that's true; I want it to be true because it's hilarious, though.
This format was great initially, but it was hopelessly undersized after around ten years. It was a shame there was never a proper successor. The 1.44 MB double density were simply too little after many years, it wasn't even enough for a single DOC file with a few images. This created the situation where for a long time, it was a major pain to exchange small-to-medium sized files. A successor format with 10 to 50 MB capacity would have alleviated a lot of this pain.
There were eventually "Zip disks" with 100 megabytes, but I think those were proprietary Iomega products and rather expensive, so normal PCs didn support them by default. Only when CD recorders became common, there was a replacement for floppy disks. But even these were suboptimal. They required cumbersome special software just to "burn" your CDs, since Windows didn't support them natively for several years. Moreover, it wasn't a format you could arbitrarily read and write data on. So it wasn't possible to just edit a file and save the changes, like on a floppy disk.
And of course USB sticks often weren't a good solution either, since you wouldn't simply give your expensive thumbstick completely away without having to expect it back.
Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments. To send and receive data, the smaller value of the sender/receiver was the bottleneck. (I think even today, Gmail only supports something like 50 megabytes.)
Much later there was the so-called DVD-RAM, which worked similar to a floppy disk (arbitrary read/write), but it wasn't really a "DVD" -- normal DVD drives couldn't read it. So again no standard PCs supported it. I think it was also not exactly cheap, no doubt due to its unnecessarily large capacity of over 4 GB.
Eventually the problem of exchanging files was solved again, after having been temporarily solved in the 80s with the 3.5 inch floppy. The solution today is uploading files to a free cloud provider like Google Drive, sharing the link, and deleting the file afterwards. It only took a few decades.
The real problem was the cost - the real key to floppies is you didn't care if you got it back (at the time people used them, very early on they were more pricey). So CDs did eventually replace them for sneakernet, and USB sticks have finally become cheap enough to be disposable.
According to https://goughlui.com/2013/05/02/tech-flashback-iomega-zip-10... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggWW67iPgXI (which shows a comparison table from a contemporary magazine article), the SuperDisk LS-120 was slower than the Iomega Zip. It was a pretty cool idea to make the drive backward-compatible with 3.5" floppies. As a child reading computer magazines I kind of wanted one—or a Zip drive. However, the lower speed combined with launching after Zip (1997 vs. 1994) really explains why the LS-120 did not succeed on par with Zip. According to the video I linked, iMac owners bought USB SuperDisk drives for their regular floppies. (I ended up eventually getting a CD-RW.)
What I think might be a bigger shame is that some version of FD32MB (maybe less dense and less slow) did not arrive earlier and as an industry standard. In 2001 it was far too late for it. Here is an article announcing the FD32MB technology: https://www.theregister.com/2000/10/23/32mb_on_a_humble_flop.... The Wikipedia page for the Superdisk also mentions it. Might it have had a chance if it had launched with the SuperDisk LS-120 in 1997? I am not sure. (And how would the reliability have been with mass adoption? Worse than 1.44 MB floppies'? Maybe it was for the better.)
There was also the (quite hard to find) 2.88 MB floppies, which actually had software support in the various OSes at the time.
LANs themselves had also come down in costs so even ad-hoc computers near each other often had Ethernet or similar, so the demand never really picked up.
Those who needed big transfers offsite used Zip (or Jaz, those things died like flies) until CD-Rs became cheap enough.
> Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments.
Pretty much every ISP provided an email address for each account. Some email clients supported the MIME multipart/partial subtype which allowed for large attachments to be split up amongst multiple emails.
Writing off the Zip disk as a footnote is incredibly weird to me. They were massively popular and everywhere, especially before CD-Rs got cheap. I probably have more Zip disks in my closet than 3½" floppies.
In my experience you couldn't assume that a person had a Zip drive. My family didn't have one, but given some effort/motivation I'm sure I could have found a way to read a Zip disk I was given.
What was the percentage of PCs sold that came with a Zip drive by default? In Germany it was approximately 0%. So most people didn't have one. It was purely used as an external drive for backup purposes.
I can recollect possessing over 3,000 5.25-inch floppy disks, containing my entire software collection and files. Subsequently, my father procured a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, and I distinctly remember the considerable expense associated with these acquisitions. Nevertheless, their exceptional convenience for storage was undeniable. I believe I had the original Windows 95 and IBM OS/2 Warp on 3.5-inch disks; each installation required approximately 20 disks.
The rigid floppy was invented in Hungary in 1973, patented in 1974 but only in Hungary and Sony have stolen the idea.