:-D
Iomega's awesome Zip drive disk (100MB, 250MB, 750MB capacities) , I think I still have a 250MB zip drive somewhere in my home attic.
They required a dedicated zip drive (took up same sized slot/bay as a floppy disk drive), but (if I recall right) that drive was backward compatible standard 3&1⁄2-inch 1.44MB floppy disks.
Interestingly, these drive also came in variants to work with different types of interfaces: IDE, ATAPI, USB, SCSI, FireWire.
Zip drives filled the portable storage niche, until CDs and DVDs replaced their need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
I found it cool that floppies and superfloppies had label stickers on which we can write (with a sketch pen) to remind the user of what content the disk is intended for.
There were some nice cameras that used Zip disks for storage! Very convenient for photographers working on multiple projects or sessions.
https://www.digitalkameramuseum.de/en/prototypes-rarities/it...
Zip was a completely unique physical format, and had no backwards compatibility with standard 3½" disks.
SuperDisk, on the other hand (in both the LS-120 and LS-240 variants) was backwards compatible with standard floppy disks in the same drive.
One of these was used to load the microcode into the VAX-11/780 upon boot.
Building an RT11 system disk onto an RL02 off another RL02 made the downstairs neighbours complain quite a lot, even though the floor slab in my flat was about 40cm thick concrete. They didn't muck about with these 1960s tower blocks but it was no match for a pair of pint glass sized head actuators and a pair of washing machine motors.
:))
"1.44" is a horrible mix of binary kilo and decimal mega which makes no sense.
Is it useful? Perhaps not, but you can use it to translate "1.2 floppyMB", "1.44 floppyMB" into other units.
My big secret for those of us still using floppies (USB floppies are a steal!) --- get Maxell NOS; they're about $3 per diskette now, but I have beat them hard and they keep going. Of course, I also had a batch of poorly-stored floppies that would not even turn (!) from one vendor (cheap, tho...) and they almost ruined one drive.
My rule now is: once a single sector goes kaput, make a new working copy from your backup (you HAVE a backup, right???), mark the bad sector of the failed disk, and put it in the 'BAD' pile. I have not yet had a sector on a Maxell 1.44 diskette go bad. Several SONY diskettes however are in that pile.
Note that the head drags on the surface of a floppy, so you're always losing a little; what that closeness does, tho, is allow phenomenal bits-per-square-inch. The coatings are very good, binders are good, magnetic properties are excellent. And the head widths (both sides, after all) are small. So you get formatted 80 cylinders of 18,432 bytes per cylinder MSDOS-compatible capacity, at that 5 revolutions per second ( 300 RPM, but gosh, RPS is a better unit here...) speed.
The floppy drive is an incredible chunk of engineering. It's unfortunate that Zip 100 and Zip 250 arrived so relatively late in the game.
I was partial to Verbatim because those seemed to be pretty consistently good from the early 80's through the mid 90's.
Zip drives sold like absolute mad mid/late 1995.*
* In 95, I placed around the top for the high school virtual portfolio investing contest ROI with 90% in IOMG +150% (2.5x) in 2 weeks. I also happened to be selling Zip drives at my night/weekend job as fast as they came in. My high school econ teacher mentioned his investing club invested and sold it before sales took off stonks-style and so they lost money on it. These floptical/-alikes went poof as soon as CD+/-R(W) drives and discs came down in price.
To my surprise I discovered today that FREESCO was still releasing updates all the way until 2014.
Archive link incase people want to see the page but can't load it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129015513/http://floppy.ddn...
The userspace was all in the initramfs, linux booted directly without any LILO or GRUB (this was back in the days the kernel included its own boot loader), and the floppy drive was totally out of the picture once the system was up and running from RAM.
Prior to adding the dial-up aspect for my gf to share my internet from her home, the init was deliberately exited which technically panicked the kernel. Basically it was a /linuxrc shell script setting up the networking then deliberately breaking userspace - not even PID1 existed while it was just my firewall. The kernel keeps doing networking stuff even if panicked.
Fun times.
I mean hey these days you dont necessarily need some external bootloader either, on uefi systems the kernel can boot itself thanks to the efi stub.
You can still do that if your machine supports coreboot.
I'm a big fan OP, cool project!
Over the phone, he instructed the guy to download this floppy disk firewall, specify the ports, traffic direction, basic stuff. Boot the computer and voila, the university network was up again giving the teams hours to get things sorted out.
I forgot its name now but many business would run this floppy disk firewall coz it just worked, once booted it would run "forever".
[1] https://www.employees.org/univercd/Feb-1998/cc/td/doc/prod_c...
Back in the day, I did try inducing errors into 3.5" HD floppies by waving a cheap, small voice-coil speaker magnet over a floppy and comparing its contents sector-by-sector to a disk image stored previously. I was only able to do this after opening the shutter and touching the magnet directly to the diskette surface.
PSA: Never write to 5.25" 360K floppies using 1.2M drives because the created track width is too small to be picked up by 360K drives.
ActionRetro•1w ago
armenarmen•6d ago