I stopped using floppy disks for my PC many years ago. However, there is still one application where I have to use them: Old organs and synthesizers. Back in the late 1980's up to early 2000's this was a common way to store presets, rhythms, and sequencer tracks on those instruments. Some of them even run an obscure formatting that no other device can read.
I wonder if some of them can be replaced with a Gotek; for weird formats, FlashFloppy alternative firmware perhaps? Greaseweazle can make interfacing with non-standard floppy formats possible, it's a magnetic flux capture device, so as long as the hardware is not too unusual, it should be able to dump the disks.
@@SianaGearz they can be in most cases.. which is great.. but it's expensive to do it in every bit of gear. A ton of synth gear has a floppy drive.. I lost count a long time ago on how many floppy drives I've got in various machines. Plus you also then have to digitise all your real floppies if you have any with content you can't find online.. and get them into the correct format etc.
@@bikkiikun Exactly. Unnecessarily portraying normal, neutral, expectable occurrences as a deliberate sickening misconduct only decreases the scoring of the portrayer.
hmm, according to a Japanese friend there is a ban on floppy disks for all national level gov't work. They are also trying to do away with fax machines.
@@cr-pol : It's not a ban, they're just phasing it out. There is a significant difference between stopping to use something and banning it. And as for Fax Machines, they are unlikely to go away any time soon. Unlike the not so floppy floppy disks, faxes are still being made. They are integrated into every modern office printer. And unlike floppy disks they are actually quite practical for quickly moving (the information on) a piece of paper.
@@_DanielPrieto probably a few more will be made experimentally but demand is so low you can't realistically turn a profit from making something like that. It's kinda like how a 100 year old steam train may cost less than what it takes to actually make a new one and the amount of people who would even could buy them are very small
@@Michael-j4l3d except if there's a retro-wave like its happening to vinyl. I would say that you could capture that and still be on business if the margins increase because people are collecting.
@@monad_tcp a vinyl is a far less complex thing to make, calibration of instruments is the tricky part, hell record players aren't that difficult to make from a technical standpoint. A floppy disk on the other hand has a thin plastic shell that cannot be 3D printed (a mould could theoretically be done with a metal 3D print, metal parts and springs, costly but doable. The actual disk though, requires some exotic materials and could produce toxic waste and requires some hyper obscure knowledge and specialist equipment costing who knows what. And a floppy disks capacity is less than 2 MB 200mb disks built to an obscure standard exist but those are rare and incompatible with the standard most people are familiar with
@@monad_tcp it would be easier to create a floppy disk emulator that could store thousands of files then to create thousands of floppy disks for one file. Like my cassette to aux device that I use to play music in my truck. They even have cassettes with Bluetooth 😅 why wouldn't they just do the same thing with floppy drives?
It doesn't exactly "Reserve" it like it used to. Windows will start lettering drives from C, but you can manually assign A to a drive if you want to use it.
I really enjoyed the interview. Admittedly I have a soft spot for floppy disks, particularly the 5¼" variety that were the lifeblood of '80s microcomputers. Tom is full of great anecdotes. It's nice to know that the supply of floppies is assured as long as Tom is with us! Thanks Lon!
Fun video. Often, it's said if you like retro computers and legacy systems, work in the aviation industry. With aircraft you want tried and true reliable over cutting edge and not fully tested. Unlike a bus, a Jetliner can't just pull over to the side of the road when a fault occurs.
Its for upgrading the firmware, the physical security is what matters, I don't believe any of the MCUs would actually require a floppy drive to be there all the times for its workings. Its not like a mainframe which actually stored firmware in the floppy. They can probably just swap the floppy drive to a floppy emulator that uses a sd-card instead and it would work totally fine. As long as no one gets any idea of updating the thing from the internet, otherwise I would not trust it.
Floppy discs are very prone to errors. Fungi is the most common cause of error in floppy disc. And fungi are vicious. It will spread to nearby discs. I'd rather bring two copies of flash sticks than a dozen copies of the same thing in floppy discs.
@@boulderbash19700209 this has been plagueing tapes too, there is still interest in using tape based backups for larger static storage so maybe newer materials have been found that mitigate this problem but who knows
@@boulderbash19700209 Simply do not store CDR and diskettes in moist environment. Crucial is if a diskette fails with scratched surface (grinding noise), always immediately use a cleaning diskette with isopropanol, else the debris will pollute and ruin the next inserted disks. Modern (MLC/TLC) flash/SSD are the most unreliable of all digital media, because they are basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die).
Some CNC machines used floppy disks 💾 If they still make cassette tape, they might still be able to make a few more floppy disks. A diskette is essentially iron on a plastic platter.
last (known) 5,25" machine was scrapped for metal, but they made some Cookies (the magnetic stuff inside the case) that maybe still "NOS". For 8" I see no way, no machien and no market at all. Problem is, cassette tape is today "Type 1" ferrit, that is the lowest possible quality. Later they used "Chrome Type II" which is currently not made, and not able to be made, cause of different environmental aspects, something that they used is not allowed any longer as far as I have heard. Not only that, it will not be a profit, and there is DD and HD magnetic surfaces, so there is no money in it. TAPE has never stopped to be sold, so there is no need to "re invent" it, tape albums and Audiobooks were always sold. Now the demand just went more to empty cassettes and the demand rose a bit, but with so many million floppy disks out there, and the drives dying, there is no need for any new floppy disc. You have to produce the metal layer, the case, the cover and test them properly for bad sectors, that is something that will never ever happen again.
@@mRahman92assembly would have to be done by hand because the equipment to automate it no longer exists minimum wage to do that already exceeds unit cost of new old stock floppies. it's going to be far cheaper to use hardware emulation with virtual floppies. Unless they already have surviving equipment to make floppies the cost of making that again would be cost prohibitive unless the objective is to create some new experimental standard. I mean if someone finds all the equipment in an abandoned storage unit and actually tries using it rather than scraping it maybe a disk will be made but even then per unit cost is pretty high
@@Michael-j4l3d high costs don't matter. There doesn't have to be mass production. Small batches are more than enough to meet whatever global demand there may still be.
@@mRahman92I don't think it would be possible to get the cost per disk under $400 USD ever again because the equipment to make them has likely been scrapped. (I say cost of making disk, old disks are way cheaper) When you had million dollar equipment spiting out thousands of disks a day you could offset the high initial investment by selling a large quantity. Also the capacity of a floppy disk is less than 2 Megabytes, You can probably make a toy floppy disk or an aesthetically identical model for cheap but an actual functional disk would cost thousands of dollars just to build the equipment.
@@WhiskeyNixon i beg to differ. I have some 20GB harddisks from 2000 which are surprisingly still working fine. I've volunteered to help handicapped people with their computer troubles in the past and a lot of them had systems that were OLD. DOS-era Windows 2.0 old! And those computers with harddrive are probably still working today.
No, really no… be them 3-1/2 or 5-1/4 floppy disks crap themselves if you look them sideways… horrible mobile medium. zip100 and 250 disk were so much better for strengh. But then… the zip drives were absolute garbage. (Don’t get me started on Jazz drives…) sony Magneto Optic were really good. But like unicorns outside of Japan….
Its shocking how many million/billion dollar companies still use floppies world wide. its a testament to their endurance and engineering, but still they are indeed bottle necking things. They'll probably still need floppy compatable options just in case
We are still using floppy disc on Airbus A330 to load software, these aircraft were built 2012. Other media types were around then. They have stayed with the 3.5 floppy
Well, if it ain't broke. Also probably good that Airbus used something that was known to work instead of experimenting with something that could fail when you need it the most. I mean, they're not Boeing, no?
Avionics should always be "air-gapped" (i.e. no connection to the internet or any other unsecured network). An upgrade from a floppy drive to memory cards requires a long certification process.
For anybody curious enough: The floppy diskette that he is holding in his hand at the begining, is DISK 6 of SIERRA's: "Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist".
Yea they should definitely start updating software on military planes over the internet, instead of floppy discs. That's never caused a problem in any way, putting vital infrastructure online, and hoping it stays secure.
Fantastic interview! When Tom said "at a reasonable temperature," I went "oh crap," paused this video, then moved my Fellowes container of floppy disks from the 90s to a cooler air conditioned room! I used to format free AOL diskettes and use them for myself.
The home computing scene in the UK back in the 80s mainly ran on cassette tapes rather than floppies. So many games were sold on cassette tape as it was a cheap format to both sell them by the truckload as well as to use. You could easily get them from the corner shop newsagent through specialist computer and video games shops all the way up to supermarkets, mostly at pocket money prices. Floppy disks and drives didn't come down in price enough to start becoming commonplace until around the 90s, as we switched from the likes of Commodores, Spectrums and Amstrads to Atari STs, Amigas & PCs.
German navy is looking for people who can implement a replacement for 8 inch floppies that their ships use to store measurements. There‘s also the interface between old embedded systems and the drive to consider.
It's amazing how we were warned decades ago that these magnetic media devices were so unreliable that we needed to create several copies for safe backups. It's ironic that they're still around. Edit: Outstanding interview with Tom Persky, Lon. Thoroughly enjoyed it! What a great guy.
Of course, people are gravitating toward online entertainment and that's turning out to have the lifespan of a premium cable show. Factory-pressed optical media are still working fine, however.
That was good advice back then and continues to be good advice, regardless of the medium. Back when they were new, I had the occasional floppy disk flop. I have a collection of 5.25 and 3.5" floppies, some readable, some not. Stored in room conditions. And like Lon, I have had a few home-written CDs and DVDs fail just as he described. They rot from the edge and are unreadable.
@@KameraShy what I always do when recording optical media is to only use about 80% of the disc, then fill up the rest with par2 parity files. if any parts go bad you can fix missing data to a certain degree. It’s saved me in the past and I still do it when I burn the occasional Blu Ray recordable disc. It gives you extra redundancy so the disc can tolerate faults. You can use even just small bits/portions of the par2 files to perfectly replace damaged/missing data and then recreate and reburn the disc contents to new media.
I just heard something on the radio this morning about the German navy is now going to start upgrading their ships from an old system that still uses 8” floppy’s. It’s funny how after I heard that on the radio that I happen upon this video
Flash memory actually has a much shorter lifespan for "cold" storage it can degrade to an unreadable state in as little as 8 months if it is left unpowered.
@@atomicskull6405: I have obsolete flash cards on them from the early 2000s that still has stuff on them that I only recently powered up to check. Of course I've archived that stuff to other media including optical, but when I'm not going to reuse the card anymore because it's too small to bother with by today's standard and it's not sort of specialized to a given camera (like an Olympus XD card for an Olympus camera that I really don't use anymore), then I just leave that data on there in addition. So yes, some flash cards retain their data for many years without being powered back up. Are you saying that's the exception? And if it is, and optical disks rot and stop getting made, and tape drives stop getting made too, then what do we have left: just the venerable hard disk that we hope and pray has a longer shelf life than the 5 years we often get told about (and, by the way, I have hard disks much older than that that still do have their data intact)?
Hard to say. Whatever the manufacturer guarantee may have been - it now has been well exceeded for both drives and media. Trying to get rid of all my old media I'm in the process of going through my old media. Commodore 64 (1541 drive that is) media has pretty low failure rate. With more modern 3.5" media I see many more problems. Certain batches of media are now reaching 99% failure rate. I found the lower the density, the lower the failure rate. 5.25" hold better than 3.5". More importantly however is how media has been stored. Low moisture, dark, cool at like 18°C, dust-free wins.
@@ralfbaechle: "Yes" or "no" is "hard to say," and it depends on a guarantee? NO. The question was simply IF there is a lifespan, which the answer to is yes, since everything in this mortal world has one. But besides that, why _would_ you want to get rid of your old media? And why is there a "try" factor to it, when you can just give or throw it away in a snap?
Does anyone remember the competitor to the Zip Drive. Caller Super Disc. Would run both 3.5 conventional floppies and 100 or 120 mb Super Discs. Came to market after Zips and lost out. Should have been the standard pre flash drive for movable storage.
@@mpetersen6 Yes, I put a Super Disk drive in my Apple Beige G3 desktop, along with a Combo DVD player/CD burner, a pair of 8 GB ATA drives (one OS 9.2.2, the other OS 10.2.8), and a UW160 SCSI controller, USB 2.0 + FW400 controller, and a video card + a Dell VRAM upgrade for the on-board video, for running a triple monitor setup.
In 1990th I had an Iomega Floptical in my Amiga, which was a 3.5'' diskette drive that formatted special 20MB diskettes. It had SCSI interface and I only got 5 diskettes for it of that 1 was dead on arrival. The thing was predecessor of the infamous Zip Drive.
I worked on the system that required those 8" floppies when I was in USAF (it was called something different back then; same equipment). The launch control facility had them, as well as all the way up the chain. Bigger command posts (possibly 8AF included) had mechanized loaders; the lower command posts had regular one-disk floppies they had to manually load. Tom's the reason I have 8" disks! I bought a load of 5.25" and some faulty 8" ones. No substitute for the real thing.
Don't throw away those NOS DD floppies if the USB drive can't write or even read them, some USB drives are only 100% compatible the IBM DS-HD 1.44MB floppies, if you format a 1.44MB floppy to 720kB on a regular internal floppy some USB drives won't be able to reformat it back to 1.44MB There's also a small adaptor PCB to convert internal 3.5" drives to USB for modern motherboards without the floppy header but I don't have it so I don't know if it supports all kinds of floppy formats or not. It does not work with 5.25" drives.
1. Formats - It all depends on the driver software. 2,. Types - There are simple hardware mods to the drive PCB to make (normal) 5.25" drives appear to be 3.5" drives.
This was wonderful! I've been a technician since the mid 1980's in a variety of roles and companies. I remember buying boxes of floppies at Radio Shack, along with fuses, resistors, etc. When I did field service Radio Shack was often a lifesaver.
macOS has no dedicated support for floppy disk drives, it works because that drive is reporting itself as a generic USB mass media drive in the subcategory of media reader (like an external SD card reader). The polling is done by the drive itself, not the OS.
Cool video, Lon! I've seen older interviews of this Tom here but it was still fun to see this latest one. But he's not the last floppy disk seller standing; obviously there are still the sellers that he buys from. The title could use an according adjustment of some kind. Thanks for sharing (this well-made sponsorship, even, maybe, heheh)!
I have a box of 8 inch church fan floppies I saved from the bin back in highschool our computer lab was TRS80 model 2's that used 8 inches.my last year, 92, they finally upgraded the lab to modern computers.
Just last week I read that the German Navy is looking for 8 inch floppy drives as replacement parts in certain ships that had been built about 30 years ago. Because these floppy drives are so rare, it is expected that they may not be able to buy some, and therefore they will probably write an emulator program that emulates an 8inch floppy drive, so that they will be able to connect a more modern storage device and use that for the old software which expects the old big floppy drive. I had never heard about 8 inch floppies before.
Lon, this episode was having definitely giving me flashbacks from Stuart Cheifet's "Computer Chronicles" back during the digital revolution of the 1980s! Between your topic on floppy disks, your beautiful space shuttle photo on the wall, and the reboot on an Apple IIe, my thanks for your work.
Ha, yeah the magic of the Amiga. You could get the ST to format at higher tracks, and sectors per track to squeeze more space onto them, but I think the max I ever achieved was 840kb. And they tended to become corrupted quicker than a good ol' 720kb formatted disk.
4:28 sorry but back in 1984 Apple was using servo ejectable floppy drives, which were famous for being faulty, although the sound they made when you dragged the disk icon to the trash was very robotic and cool in a way.
Another large group that's missing from the list is synthesizer users. Many have synths from the 80s and 90s that used floppy drives to load/save sounds, and sequences. HOWEVER many synthesizer users have replaced their floppy drive with a GoTEK USB floppy drive emulator which can be 100 or 1000 floppy disks on a single USB stick. That would be the easiest for those companies who still use floppy drives, but want USB reliability. p.s. The earlier floppy was 8 inches, not 8-1/4 inches.
Wow. I know the Japanese are frugal, but damn. Interesting to note that the US military still uses the 8 inch huge floppy disks, despite saying they are now done. This actually has a good side effect in that huge floppies are so uncommon, that it is added security via obscurity.
I remember in the early days of 5 1/4" floppy media. People I worked with quickly discovered the manufacture/seller was very important. Early Apple disks for the apple2 were fine... but if you put a Tandy/Radio Shack disk in the drive, the surface of the media was so rough it would actually grind away the magnetic head on the drive.. if left in spinning and loaded for too long a time.. Later media from Radio Shack was probably from a different supplier and was on par with other brands.
Thanks, Lon. And thanks also to Tom. Keep up the great work, both of you! I definitely do have a bunch of floppies in some boxes. I'm feeling inspired to inventory what's on them and try to recover. If I ever want to let the actual disks go, I'll get in touch!
I still use floppy disks for my various Commodore configurations. When I re-discovered these marveollous old machines, I had to find my old floppies from the first C64 we bought back in 1996. The floppies sat in the basement for more than a decade, and they still work. The only one that didn't was already marked as "faulty" in red pencil and we got it with the C64 stuff we bought back in '96. The rest are working like a charm!
Amiga users tended to mock about PC (up to the 486 age) still using those flimsy "cardboard" floppies. Often these disks failed by a dent or dirt So people used to make jokes e.g. that these diskettes are glued together in jails by inmates as forced labour (like they did with paper bags or carton boxes).
I used to take a lot of digital pictures at work of jobs. Damage to components etc. l bought my own floppies. Specifically the brand that came with their own clear plastic case. My camera was a Sony that used 3.5s. our CNC conversions on Bridgeports used 3.5s for program storage. Handy to move to a different machine. I kept a log book with the part #, program # and set up information for repeat jobs. With different discs for jobs from different depts. And then there was the accessory items for floppies. The plastic sleeves for loose leaf binders anyone.
So interesting that even airplanes have had floppy disk drives installed! I remember when I first saw music keyboards and cash registers -- things that aren't *full* computers -- with floppy disk drives on them, how weird! I wondered what those things would do with files that they couldn't use and how they'd show up. But when I got my MIDI keyboard with a floppy disk drive I saw that the keyboard would just ignore and not display files that it couldn't use. Same with those cameras you're talking about.
They changed the floppy disks and CD-ROMs that were attached to the documentation to SSDs? I wonder if they have read about such amazing performance of these devices: an SSD can retain your data for a minimum of 2-5 years without any power supply. Wow, two years!
One down side to the 80/90's 3.5" floppies in my collection that I discovered is that the glue holding the metal disc to the floppy has completely dried out and when you pop it in the drive the metal disc breaks free of the disc. Fortunately nothing of consequence on those discs, so never tried re-bonding them.
You can not read them if this happens, because if the sector hole on the metal part gets rotated against the magnetic data, it will completely confuse the drive. (I may be that techniques like Kryoflux readers ignore it once they get reattached in any direction.) I only had one diskette fall apart like this.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 AFAIK this is not true for the common PC-style formats because they are all soft-sectored. On these the index pulse is really only used when formatting.
@@eDoc2020 Nope. I had such a broken diskette and reglueing in random rotary position did no make it readable at all. So the hole position is crucial to make it find the 1st sector.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 Are you sure you got it installed perfectly concentrically compared to where it was originally? Each track is only .115mm so any slight distortion will throw off the alignment. Even if the index hole is in exactly the same rotational position it will be unreadable. Or your magnetic media was simply degraded. I still think the FDC doesn't need the proper index pulse but in the end it doesn't really matter to this discussion. No matter the specific cause if you reglue the cookie it probably won't work. I suppose the easiest way to test my claim about the index pulse is to punch a new hole in a 5.25 disk and cover the old one. Or disconnect the index line from the drive and connect it to a separate timer circuit.
@@eDoc2020 I only remember that manually readjusting 3.5'' drive heads was intricate. I had to wire the head cable of an old walkman to listen by headphone if the upper head was shifted or rotated against the other, but it can be done. (In a Citizen drive I even had ruined the screw threads and so eventually superglued the adjusted head into place, which was sufficient to make it work.) The round diskette metal core fits precisely into the center hole, so I doubt it was out of center.
Clicked on the video expecting click bait, was pleasantly surprised, turned out to be rather interesting. Surprised to learn that some corporations only recently got rid of them.
Ah yes, those "late years" when they in the end just pompletely cheaped out on production quality of the floppies. I remember buying like "no name" 100x DD floppies for only like 10-15 bucks total and the quality was so bad that like 40-45 of them would fail to format & immediately got trashed. But you simply accepted that remember how cheap it was compared to earlier on. I think my first dual 200kb 3" floppy cost a wopping 25 bucks for a single floppy.
I also had a bunch of a certain cheap late 3.5'' HD diskette brand completely fail after decades, while most others read well. Likely the magnetic layer was too thin to hold magnetism or even decomposed otherwise.
Lots of refurbished computers and floppy drives still are sold in Japan, some at high prices. They support older equipment at factories, hospitals, etc.
Around 2015 I did a project for a company that stipulated "No USB Ports Allowed". They didn't need to transfer a lot of data so they didn't want to take the risk of someone sneaking in a virus on a USB memory stick. I included an RS232 port on their hardware. I've heard of saboteurs leaving a USB stick laying around somewhere so an unsuspecting person will try to use it and thus infect their company's computers.
The clicking with that drive is a quirk of the TEAC USB floppy, which is what most of drives you get now are built on. It will poll the drive constantly until a drive gets inserted. If you get one of the older Sony USB 2.x floppy drives, the drive will inform the OS on media change, so it doesn't have to sit there and poll the drive. An added benefit is that unlike the TEAC, which to switch drives you have to unplug and replug the drive, you can just swap disks in the Sony and it'll inform the OS of every media change. Much nicer.
Cassette tapes are similar to floppy disks in that the best ones were made during the 80s and 90s when the manufacturing processes were at their peak. The new cassettes that you can buy today are junk compared to the old ones. Great video! I really enjoyed it!
Same with modern tape transports. The only one being made is a mediocre tape mech that some obscure factory in China has been pumping out since the 80's.. so any modern tape player uses this pretty crappy mech unfortunately. Even the nice looking TASCAM rackmount style ones
@@Wagoo Mediocre at the very best! I have some tape decks from the 80s and 90s that will absolutely walk all over any modern unit in build quality, features, sound, etc.
@@Wagoo Nakamichi in 1980th made crap drives too. They had reputation to be the best sounding cassette drives ever, but they were plastic trash and a nightmare to dismantle because wearing parts (friction clutch felt etc.) was intentionally buried in the middle where it could not be reached without taking all those cogs apart. I saw a TV docu that a company has started making new compact cassettes with a new tape formula that dynamic range is better than all tapes of the past.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 the best cassette audio quality uses HX but no modern deck will.. as I think to implement it you need a license from Sony and they're just not giving them out anymore
My wife has an older embroidery machine that has floppy disk or an older card reader on it. I had read where some would swap floppy drives out (if you could easily get to it and it was standard size/mounting points) with something like "GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black" for around $30.00. You would then format and use a USB drive as a floppy disk. I believe you could formate the USB to have several "floppy disks" on it and you would use the button on the Emulator drive to cycle through them.
@@koilamaoh4238 Are BD-R reliable? I guess it depends on the manufacturer. I have Fujifilm DVD-R and a bunch of them become unreadable in 1 or 2 y. Some work but have unreadable files. I haven't burned a DVD in years, except when I write Linux to it to do a fresh install. I use DVD-RW in that case. It is a Staples brand DVD-RW. Probably the best medium are HDD. They are magnetic. They are huge, cheap, fast enough.
@@louistournas120 Only don't impact or drop them. (My PC contains an 8TB mechanical HDD and absolutely no SSDs.) Modern (MLC/TLC) flash/SSD are the most unreliable of all digital media, because they are basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die).
A stop requiring them is not a ban and will still be accepted since japan has a lot of older people and especially old traditional commerces who wont change now , there is even one of the best cloth makers using an old automatic loom with all designs on floppy since the new ones don’t get the same quality.
@@SianaGearz as i said they don’t require it anymore (before it was not possible otherwise ) and will simply outphase them , but it is not a ban , that word means a more radical approach and would put swordmakers for example in trouble since most wont change to a newer system and they are obliged by law to declare every weapon they make and having a working system that would need getting all the data of perhaps 40 years moved to another system would be simply too much for most of them .
I use floppy disks for my Sony Mavica Camera, my Yamaha Keyboard w/Roland MIDI Recorder with floppy, and for my vintage PC games collection. In fact the Postal Annex in my town still sells floppy disks (Polaroid label) for a buck apiece. Many vintage technology collectors still use them to maintain their game collections and still store important documents on floppy as it is easy to remove and transport. But I can see why Japan would ban them. They can't move forward with USB, and portable SSD's for easy storage options. But this is similar to Europe up until the early 2000s using audio cassette storage for small computers. It was cheap, reliable, and while slow, it worked well enough due to the very high cost of floppy drives in the 80s and 90s. Floppy disks still have a place at least for the immediate future. They certainly are used in enough vintage technology.
Flash memory degrades if it is not used regularly magnetic storage can last for decades sitting unused on a shelf. It's why HDDs aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Flash/SSD is the most unreliable media. It is basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die). But early flash (SLC cells) can last long if not overwritten too often. However some types even lack a refreshing mechanism (with or without wearlevelling) and so loose their data even when occasionally connected to electricity.
In a machine shop I work at we got a Haas vf5 CNC machine that used floppy discs, only a couple of years ago we replaced the floppy drive with a usb adapter unit for thumb drives
Lon (something I should have asked earlier): Why are these banned from the Japanese government just because the Japanese government was using a lot of them? So what?
@@HelloKittyFanMan Waste. Imagine you needed to submit something. You may buy a 5 pack or 10 pack, and borrow or purchase a floppy drive. Then every government computer that takes these submissions needs a drive. In an era when you could easily take a 6MB picture of any needed paperwork and instantly SMS it anywhere in the world it's wasteful. There needs to be factories making disks and drives somewhere if they are being used.
@@milescarter7803 you do know floppy disks are reusable right? Also we should focus on different waste (not using disposable plastic but materials that are easier to recycle, etc), not usable things, we deamed waste just cause we dont use them
Old technology isn't bad technology. I have an LG TV that's not smart from 2014 and it's just as responsive as the day I bought it and it still loads the channels and guide just fine.
Heh, it's funny to see a Macintosh using a floppy disk drive that only has manual ejection; I'm so used to Macs that have floppy drives always having the computer-controlled motorized ejection. So that confused me when I saw Mac emulators on computers like the Amiga and Atari ST, because I was like, "But how does it handle that auto-icon thing?" etc. However, now with plug-and-play USB storage like flash and hard disk drives, I'm used to seeing that respond to our manual ejection and the computer can't eject those; it just dismounts them from the system... I guess the same thing that those Mac emulators were doing.
I run my Amiga A500 (casemodded in big wooden cabinet) every day to write diary on diskettes, and it barely makes any problems (beside oxidizing contacts those need to be wiggled occasionally). They are not really unreliable. Crucial is if a disk fails with scratched surface (grinding noise), always immediately use a cleaning diskette with isopropanol, else the debris will pollute and ruin the next inserted disks. Also CDR are pretty reliable, but (like photographic film) they must be stored always away from light and ozone. Most of the CDR I burnt in 1990th were still readable. The most unreliable media is modern (MLC/TLC) flash/SSD, which is basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die).
It's 5.25" DS/DD disks that are getting really hard to find. I bought some off ebay twice, one order was not what I ordered, HD disks that don't work in a DD drive, and the other, only 1 out of the 10 disks successfully formatted.
Huh! I was playing around with Windows on ARM laptop a couple of years ago, to see if I could get used to it. The only thing I couldn't get going was my USB floppy drive. From what I could read, the driver was never ported over. I'm surprised MacOS beat Windows at backwards compatibility for once!
@@LonSeidman Not sure how the location of a fax machine would have any bearing here. As long as it doesn't hold onto a copy of the data being sent, it really doesn't matter. The bigger concern should be the digital switching infrastructure that is used today. We're a long way from the days of human operators or even electromechanical switching.
I recently bought a USB Mini Floppy drive. Not used yet but I figured it would come in handy at some point. I have a wee handful of 2000 ish minis both unopened and used. I have seen a couple cartons of nos unopened mini floppies in thrift stores but never bought (thinking they're still being made). I already knew the guests response when asked about disk quality "1985 vs 2005"- it's exactly the same situation with anything electronic. The cheapness began in around the mid 90s and gotten better or worse depending on your view ever since. Poor quality raw materials then add in bloating the software with buggy constant updates.
German high speed trains used floppy disk unt recently for the seat reservation data over the seats and it was quiet chaotic when the holy seat reservation floppy disk wasn't delivered in time to the train
I think I stopped using the 3.5 floppy in 2002. I still hae the drive in my subsequent PCs. I still have it in my current PC with Ryzen 3600. It is not connected. I still use the same ATX case that I bought in 2003. I was still using VHS up until 1 y ago. Now I use them more rarely. I used them to record TV.
Yeah, I still have some sealed _plastic_ boxes of 5 1/4" floppy disks, way back from when my dad was using them in his Digital Rainbow 100 at our family store!
Next on the chopping block in Japanese government - fax machines! Seriously though, I work in a Japanese university and until very recently we were given the option to submit class improvement reports on floppy disc. I found Windows 98 for sale on floppies in a local electronics store about 10 years ago too, lol
I kept a copy of system commander on floppy and a spare disk drive, ready to connect to any computer that still supported IDE cables, and I did more than once, connect it temporarily that way. I didn't need it anymore by the time I would have needed to get a USB driver, so I never have. But I still do have my old drives and disks.
I still have my old Commodore 64 diskettes & they still work today & they were single sided, single density. Some of mine were made my Maxell, TDK, Scotch, Nashua & Bonus which was the cheapest disks back then. I put a notch in them & use both sides of the disk.
Making a bootable floppy is still the easiest built-in method in Windows. For any other medium, you'll either need some third-party software or be limited in what kind of disk image/files you can use.
There are so many devices that use floppies, keyboards, midi hardware, embroidery machines, mavica cameras, old measuring equipment and probably much much more. I’m holding on to a small stash of new disks 💾
I'll forgive the very rare clickbait title, Lon - this was an amazing episode! Thank you so much for sharing this and taking the time to do the interview.
I still have some floppies I need to transfer their contents. Good to know about the floppy to USB drives on Amazon. I do have old Zip drives.. I don't remember them too much, but they were required when I was going to University back in the 90's.
Some of those disks you're having trouble reading might be ok physically speaking. There's various forms of magnetic entropy that act over decades rather than years. Consequently It's recommended to REFRESH all data on Harddisks EVERY 3-5 YEARS. This process is long & slightly more complex than described here. But essentially, the data is read off the disk cylinder by cylinder, then written back. As the media itself is often still good, only the formatting and user data has faded through entropy. Great Video !!!
I inherited hundreds of Floppies my brother used for 3-D Modelling and animation in Lightwave 3-D, all kinds of models and textures and other files he made in the 90s. Most of them are 3M he prefered them.
![โรงเรียนดัดสันดาน นักเรียนเถื่อน..!! [โรงเรียนไดเม่]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vRKPeXn4Fl4/mqdefault.jpg)
I stopped using floppy disks for my PC many years ago. However, there is still one application where I have to use them: Old organs and synthesizers. Back in the late 1980's up to early 2000's this was a common way to store presets, rhythms, and sequencer tracks on those instruments. Some of them even run an obscure formatting that no other device can read.
I wonder if some of them can be replaced with a Gotek; for weird formats, FlashFloppy alternative firmware perhaps?
Greaseweazle can make interfacing with non-standard floppy formats possible, it's a magnetic flux capture device, so as long as the hardware is not too unusual, it should be able to dump the disks.
@@SianaGearz they can be in most cases.. which is great.. but it's expensive to do it in every bit of gear. A ton of synth gear has a floppy drive.. I lost count a long time ago on how many floppy drives I've got in various machines. Plus you also then have to digitise all your real floppies if you have any with content you can't find online.. and get them into the correct format etc.
Floppies are still being used for updating obstacle databases on some airliners
My Casio loads MIDIs with floppy's too lol
@@shiroshine7227 what casio? casios don’t use floppies. 🤨
This is NOT a "BAN". But simply the requirement is being dropped.
Classic clickbait
@@glassowlie : And wholly unnecessary. Without it, the video would be much more interesting.
@@bikkiikun Exactly. Unnecessarily portraying normal, neutral, expectable occurrences as a deliberate sickening misconduct only decreases the scoring of the portrayer.
hmm, according to a Japanese friend there is a ban on floppy disks for all national level gov't work.
They are also trying to do away with fax machines.
@@cr-pol : It's not a ban, they're just phasing it out. There is a significant difference between stopping to use something and banning it.
And as for Fax Machines, they are unlikely to go away any time soon. Unlike the not so floppy floppy disks, faxes are still being made. They are integrated into every modern office printer. And unlike floppy disks they are actually quite practical for quickly moving (the information on) a piece of paper.
16:54 "Every floppy disk that ever will be made has been made"
Wow
@@_DanielPrieto probably a few more will be made experimentally but demand is so low you can't realistically turn a profit from making something like that.
It's kinda like how a 100 year old steam train may cost less than what it takes to actually make a new one and the amount of people who would even could buy them are very small
@@Michael-j4l3d except if there's a retro-wave like its happening to vinyl. I would say that you could capture that and still be on business if the margins increase because people are collecting.
@@monad_tcp a vinyl is a far less complex thing to make, calibration of instruments is the tricky part, hell record players aren't that difficult to make from a technical standpoint.
A floppy disk on the other hand has a thin plastic shell that cannot be 3D printed (a mould could theoretically be done with a metal 3D print, metal parts and springs, costly but doable.
The actual disk though, requires some exotic materials and could produce toxic waste and requires some hyper obscure knowledge and specialist equipment costing who knows what.
And a floppy disks capacity is less than 2 MB
200mb disks built to an obscure standard exist but those are rare and incompatible with the standard most people are familiar with
ik
@@monad_tcp it would be easier to create a floppy disk emulator that could store thousands of files then to create thousands of floppy disks for one file. Like my cassette to aux device that I use to play music in my truck. They even have cassettes with Bluetooth 😅 why wouldn't they just do the same thing with floppy drives?
Windows still reserves the A: and B: drives for floppy disks
As far as I know the Linux kernel still has floppy support built in as well
Windows has lot´s of baggage. Try creating a file named: con
@lucius1976 Hey now, I still use con from the command line.
Windows still has a dialer built in.
It doesn't exactly "Reserve" it like it used to. Windows will start lettering drives from C, but you can manually assign A to a drive if you want to use it.
I really enjoyed the interview. Admittedly I have a soft spot for floppy disks, particularly the 5¼" variety that were the lifeblood of '80s microcomputers. Tom is full of great anecdotes. It's nice to know that the supply of floppies is assured as long as Tom is with us! Thanks Lon!
Fun video. Often, it's said if you like retro computers and legacy systems, work in the aviation industry. With aircraft you want tried and true reliable over cutting edge and not fully tested. Unlike a bus, a Jetliner can't just pull over to the side of the road when a fault occurs.
Its for upgrading the firmware, the physical security is what matters, I don't believe any of the MCUs would actually require a floppy drive to be there all the times for its workings. Its not like a mainframe which actually stored firmware in the floppy.
They can probably just swap the floppy drive to a floppy emulator that uses a sd-card instead and it would work totally fine.
As long as no one gets any idea of updating the thing from the internet, otherwise I would not trust it.
Floppy discs are very prone to errors. Fungi is the most common cause of error in floppy disc. And fungi are vicious. It will spread to nearby discs.
I'd rather bring two copies of flash sticks than a dozen copies of the same thing in floppy discs.
@@boulderbash19700209 this has been plagueing tapes too, there is still interest in using tape based backups for larger static storage so maybe newer materials have been found that mitigate this problem but who knows
@@boulderbash19700209 Simply do not store CDR and diskettes in moist environment. Crucial is if a diskette fails with scratched surface (grinding noise), always immediately use a cleaning diskette with isopropanol, else the debris will pollute and ruin the next inserted disks. Modern (MLC/TLC) flash/SSD are the most unreliable of all digital media, because they are basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die).
Who knew floppy disks could be so interesting. I could've happily listened to Tom speaking for a lot longer
Not gunna lie: his tales kept me watching until the end.
Some CNC machines used floppy disks 💾
If they still make cassette tape, they might still be able to make a few more floppy disks.
A diskette is essentially iron on a plastic platter.
last (known) 5,25" machine was scrapped for metal, but they made some Cookies (the magnetic stuff inside the case) that maybe still "NOS". For 8" I see no way, no machien and no market at all. Problem is, cassette tape is today "Type 1" ferrit, that is the lowest possible quality. Later they used "Chrome Type II" which is currently not made, and not able to be made, cause of different environmental aspects, something that they used is not allowed any longer as far as I have heard. Not only that, it will not be a profit, and there is DD and HD magnetic surfaces, so there is no money in it. TAPE has never stopped to be sold, so there is no need to "re invent" it, tape albums and Audiobooks were always sold. Now the demand just went more to empty cassettes and the demand rose a bit, but with so many million floppy disks out there, and the drives dying, there is no need for any new floppy disc. You have to produce the metal layer, the case, the cover and test them properly for bad sectors, that is something that will never ever happen again.
Ran enough CNCs that used 3.5" floppies. Very convenient for moving programs from machine to machine.
@@mRahman92assembly would have to be done by hand because the equipment to automate it no longer exists minimum wage to do that already exceeds unit cost of new old stock floppies.
it's going to be far cheaper to use hardware emulation with virtual floppies.
Unless they already have surviving equipment to make floppies the cost of making that again would be cost prohibitive unless the objective is to create some new experimental standard.
I mean if someone finds all the equipment in an abandoned storage unit and actually tries using it rather than scraping it maybe a disk will be made but even then per unit cost is pretty high
@@Michael-j4l3d high costs don't matter. There doesn't have to be mass production. Small batches are more than enough to meet whatever global demand there may still be.
@@mRahman92I don't think it would be possible to get the cost per disk under $400 USD ever again because the equipment to make them has likely been scrapped.
(I say cost of making disk, old disks are way cheaper)
When you had million dollar equipment spiting out thousands of disks a day you could offset the high initial investment by selling a large quantity.
Also the capacity of a floppy disk is less than 2 Megabytes,
You can probably make a toy floppy disk or an aesthetically identical model for cheap but an actual functional disk would cost thousands of dollars just to build the equipment.
I feel like floppy disks have been much more reliable than any other storage medium I've used.
@@WhiskeyNixon i beg to differ. I have some 20GB harddisks from 2000 which are surprisingly still working fine. I've volunteered to help handicapped people with their computer troubles in the past and a lot of them had systems that were OLD. DOS-era Windows 2.0 old! And those computers with harddrive are probably still working today.
No, really no… be them 3-1/2 or 5-1/4 floppy disks crap themselves if you look them sideways… horrible mobile medium.
zip100 and 250 disk were so much better for strengh. But then… the zip drives were absolute garbage. (Don’t get me started on Jazz drives…)
sony Magneto Optic were really good. But like unicorns outside of Japan….
Its shocking how many million/billion dollar companies still use floppies world wide. its a testament to their endurance and engineering, but still they are indeed bottle necking things. They'll probably still need floppy compatable options just in case
We are still using floppy disc on Airbus A330 to load software, these aircraft were built 2012. Other media types were around then. They have stayed with the 3.5 floppy
Well, if it ain't broke. Also probably good that Airbus used something that was known to work instead of experimenting with something that could fail when you need it the most. I mean, they're not Boeing, no?
@@UltimatePerfectionsoftware updates are only installed in hangar when the plane is due for maintenance. It's not a critical system.
@@supermaster2012 Still, using something known to be reliable makes for faster maintenance than using something that could fail easily.
Avionics should always be "air-gapped" (i.e. no connection to the internet or any other unsecured network). An upgrade from a floppy drive to memory cards requires a long certification process.
For anybody curious enough: The floppy diskette that he is holding in his hand at the begining, is DISK 6 of SIERRA's: "Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist".
Yea they should definitely start updating software on military planes over the internet, instead of floppy discs. That's never caused a problem in any way, putting vital infrastructure online, and hoping it stays secure.
I remember how exciting it was, as a kid, simply to buy a new box of floppies.
Fantastic interview! When Tom said "at a reasonable temperature," I went "oh crap," paused this video, then moved my Fellowes container of floppy disks from the 90s to a cooler air conditioned room! I used to format free AOL diskettes and use them for myself.
@@dudeh9702 You could have waited until the end of the video. After decades in ambient temperatures, 10 more minutes isn't going to change anything 🤓
From experience - don't let your floppies freeze!
The home computing scene in the UK back in the 80s mainly ran on cassette tapes rather than floppies. So many games were sold on cassette tape as it was a cheap format to both sell them by the truckload as well as to use. You could easily get them from the corner shop newsagent through specialist computer and video games shops all the way up to supermarkets, mostly at pocket money prices.
Floppy disks and drives didn't come down in price enough to start becoming commonplace until around the 90s, as we switched from the likes of Commodores, Spectrums and Amstrads to Atari STs, Amigas & PCs.
German navy is looking for people who can implement a replacement for 8 inch floppies that their ships use to store measurements. There‘s also the interface between old embedded systems and the drive to consider.
It's amazing how we were warned decades ago that these magnetic media devices were so unreliable that we needed to create several copies for safe backups. It's ironic that they're still around.
Edit: Outstanding interview with Tom Persky, Lon. Thoroughly enjoyed it! What a great guy.
Of course, people are gravitating toward online entertainment and that's turning out to have the lifespan of a premium cable show.
Factory-pressed optical media are still working fine, however.
That was good advice back then and continues to be good advice, regardless of the medium. Back when they were new, I had the occasional floppy disk flop. I have a collection of 5.25 and 3.5" floppies, some readable, some not. Stored in room conditions. And like Lon, I have had a few home-written CDs and DVDs fail just as he described. They rot from the edge and are unreadable.
@@KameraShy what I always do when recording optical media is to only use about 80% of the disc, then fill up the rest with par2 parity files. if any parts go bad you can fix missing data to a certain degree. It’s saved me in the past and I still do it when I burn the occasional Blu Ray recordable disc. It gives you extra redundancy so the disc can tolerate faults. You can use even just small bits/portions of the par2 files to perfectly replace damaged/missing data and then recreate and reburn the disc contents to new media.
I just heard something on the radio this morning about the German navy is now going to start upgrading their ships from an old system that still uses 8” floppy’s. It’s funny how after I heard that on the radio that I happen upon this video
Still have a few industrial machines at work in a food factory that use floppy drives to update the software.
"Is there a lifespan to a floppy disk?"
Of course, Lon. Everything based on mortality has a finite lifespan.
Flash memory actually has a much shorter lifespan for "cold" storage it can degrade to an unreadable state in as little as 8 months if it is left unpowered.
@@atomicskull6405: I have obsolete flash cards on them from the early 2000s that still has stuff on them that I only recently powered up to check. Of course I've archived that stuff to other media including optical, but when I'm not going to reuse the card anymore because it's too small to bother with by today's standard and it's not sort of specialized to a given camera (like an Olympus XD card for an Olympus camera that I really don't use anymore), then I just leave that data on there in addition.
So yes, some flash cards retain their data for many years without being powered back up. Are you saying that's the exception? And if it is, and optical disks rot and stop getting made, and tape drives stop getting made too, then what do we have left: just the venerable hard disk that we hope and pray has a longer shelf life than the 5 years we often get told about (and, by the way, I have hard disks much older than that that still do have their data intact)?
Hard to say. Whatever the manufacturer guarantee may have been - it now has been well exceeded for both drives and media. Trying to get rid of all my old media I'm in the process of going through my old media. Commodore 64 (1541 drive that is) media has pretty low failure rate. With more modern 3.5" media I see many more problems. Certain batches of media are now reaching 99% failure rate. I found the lower the density, the lower the failure rate. 5.25" hold better than 3.5".
More importantly however is how media has been stored. Low moisture, dark, cool at like 18°C, dust-free wins.
@@atomicskull6405: The question was simply IF there is a lifespan, which the answer to is yes, since everything in this mortal world has one.
@@ralfbaechle: "Yes" or "no" is "hard to say," and it depends on a guarantee? NO. The question was simply IF there is a lifespan, which the answer to is yes, since everything in this mortal world has one.
But besides that, why _would_ you want to get rid of your old media? And why is there a "try" factor to it, when you can just give or throw it away in a snap?
Does anyone remember the competitor to the Zip Drive. Caller Super Disc. Would run both 3.5 conventional floppies and 100 or 120 mb Super Discs. Came to market after Zips and lost out. Should have been the standard pre flash drive for movable storage.
@@mpetersen6 Yes, I put a Super Disk drive in my Apple Beige G3 desktop, along with a Combo DVD player/CD burner, a pair of 8 GB ATA drives (one OS 9.2.2, the other OS 10.2.8), and a UW160 SCSI controller, USB 2.0 + FW400 controller, and a video card + a Dell VRAM upgrade for the on-board video, for running a triple monitor setup.
In 1990th I had an Iomega Floptical in my Amiga, which was a 3.5'' diskette drive that formatted special 20MB diskettes. It had SCSI interface and I only got 5 diskettes for it of that 1 was dead on arrival. The thing was predecessor of the infamous Zip Drive.
I worked on the system that required those 8" floppies when I was in USAF (it was called something different back then; same equipment). The launch control facility had them, as well as all the way up the chain. Bigger command posts (possibly 8AF included) had mechanized loaders; the lower command posts had regular one-disk floppies they had to manually load.
Tom's the reason I have 8" disks! I bought a load of 5.25" and some faulty 8" ones. No substitute for the real thing.
I love Lon, he feels so much like a public access television show. ADORE you man.
Don't throw away those NOS DD floppies if the USB drive can't write or even read them, some USB drives are only 100% compatible the IBM DS-HD 1.44MB floppies, if you format a 1.44MB floppy to 720kB on a regular internal floppy some USB drives won't be able to reformat it back to 1.44MB
There's also a small adaptor PCB to convert internal 3.5" drives to USB for modern motherboards without the floppy header but I don't have it so I don't know if it supports all kinds of floppy formats or not. It does not work with 5.25" drives.
1. Formats - It all depends on the driver software. 2,. Types - There are simple hardware mods to the drive PCB to make (normal) 5.25" drives appear to be 3.5" drives.
OCD comment on your 1:48 mention : Those big 8 inch disks were not 8 1/4 inch, in fact they were just shy of 8 inches (203 mm).
This was wonderful! I've been a technician since the mid 1980's in a variety of roles and companies. I remember buying boxes of floppies at Radio Shack, along with fuses, resistors, etc. When I did field service Radio Shack was often a lifesaver.
macOS has no dedicated support for floppy disk drives, it works because that drive is reporting itself as a generic USB mass media drive in the subcategory of media reader (like an external SD card reader). The polling is done by the drive itself, not the OS.
Cool video, Lon! I've seen older interviews of this Tom here but it was still fun to see this latest one. But he's not the last floppy disk seller standing; obviously there are still the sellers that he buys from. The title could use an according adjustment of some kind. Thanks for sharing (this well-made sponsorship, even, maybe, heheh)!
I have a box of 8 inch church fan floppies I saved from the bin back in highschool our computer lab was TRS80 model 2's that used 8 inches.my last year, 92, they finally upgraded the lab to modern computers.
Just last week I read that the German Navy is looking for 8 inch floppy drives as replacement parts in certain ships that had been built about 30 years ago. Because these floppy drives are so rare, it is expected that they may not be able to buy some, and therefore they will probably write an emulator program that emulates an 8inch floppy drive, so that they will be able to connect a more modern storage device and use that for the old software which expects the old big floppy drive.
I had never heard about 8 inch floppies before.
Yeah they’re cool, they are always spinning, only store like 70-100 k at best we called them church fans
@@tobyk.4911 My 8" drive has failed. A one floppy disk z80 computer bios only uses 8" floppy.
Lon, this episode was having definitely giving me flashbacks from Stuart Cheifet's "Computer Chronicles" back during the digital revolution of the 1980s! Between your topic on floppy disks, your beautiful space shuttle photo on the wall, and the reboot on an Apple IIe, my thanks for your work.
The DD disks were also used witrh the Commodore Amiga (880k). Most people use a Gotek with their Amiga now.
Ha, yeah the magic of the Amiga. You could get the ST to format at higher tracks, and sectors per track to squeeze more space onto them, but I think the max I ever achieved was 840kb. And they tended to become corrupted quicker than a good ol' 720kb formatted disk.
4:28 sorry but back in 1984 Apple was using servo ejectable floppy drives, which were famous for being faulty, although the sound they made when you dragged the disk icon to the trash was very robotic and cool in a way.
Another large group that's missing from the list is synthesizer users. Many have synths from the 80s and 90s that used floppy drives to load/save sounds, and sequences. HOWEVER many synthesizer users have replaced their floppy drive with a GoTEK USB floppy drive emulator which can be 100 or 1000 floppy disks on a single USB stick. That would be the easiest for those companies who still use floppy drives, but want USB reliability.
p.s. The earlier floppy was 8 inches, not 8-1/4 inches.
Wow. I know the Japanese are frugal, but damn. Interesting to note that the US military still uses the 8 inch huge floppy disks, despite saying they are now done. This actually has a good side effect in that huge floppies are so uncommon, that it is added security via obscurity.
I remember in the early days of 5 1/4" floppy media. People I worked with quickly discovered the manufacture/seller was very important. Early Apple disks for the apple2 were fine... but if you put a Tandy/Radio Shack disk in the drive, the surface of the media was so rough it would actually grind away the magnetic head on the drive.. if left in spinning and loaded for too long a time.. Later media from Radio Shack was probably from a different supplier and was on par with other brands.
Wonderful video! Brought back a lot of memories for me and I loved the interview!
Thanks, Lon. And thanks also to Tom. Keep up the great work, both of you! I definitely do have a bunch of floppies in some boxes. I'm feeling inspired to inventory what's on them and try to recover. If I ever want to let the actual disks go, I'll get in touch!
I still use floppy disks for my various Commodore configurations. When I re-discovered these marveollous old machines, I had to find my old floppies from the first C64 we bought back in 1996. The floppies sat in the basement for more than a decade, and they still work. The only one that didn't was already marked as "faulty" in red pencil and we got it with the C64 stuff we bought back in '96. The rest are working like a charm!
The big 1.2MB was flimsy but this small factor is quite robust... but I am shocked some still work still today 😅
Amiga users tended to mock about PC (up to the 486 age) still using those flimsy "cardboard" floppies. Often these disks failed by a dent or dirt So people used to make jokes e.g. that these diskettes are glued together in jails by inmates as forced labour (like they did with paper bags or carton boxes).
This has been showing up in my feed for ages and I've been ignoring it. Finally watched it, and it is surprisingly interesting.
I used to take a lot of digital pictures at work of jobs. Damage to components etc. l bought my own floppies. Specifically the brand that came with their own clear plastic case. My camera was a Sony that used 3.5s. our CNC conversions on Bridgeports used 3.5s for program storage. Handy to move to a different machine. I kept a log book with the part #, program # and set up information for repeat jobs. With different discs for jobs from different depts.
And then there was the accessory items for floppies. The plastic sleeves for loose leaf binders anyone.
Japan did NOT ban floppy disks, just for the government, so why the hell it is not stated in the tittle???
I hate clickbaity tittles ....
And they mostly talk about "diskettes" 💾that had a hard casing. We only see true floppies at 12:45.
So interesting that even airplanes have had floppy disk drives installed! I remember when I first saw music keyboards and cash registers -- things that aren't *full* computers -- with floppy disk drives on them, how weird! I wondered what those things would do with files that they couldn't use and how they'd show up. But when I got my MIDI keyboard with a floppy disk drive I saw that the keyboard would just ignore and not display files that it couldn't use. Same with those cameras you're talking about.
They changed the floppy disks and CD-ROMs that were attached to the documentation to SSDs? I wonder if they have read about such amazing performance of these devices: an SSD can retain your data for a minimum of 2-5 years without any power supply. Wow, two years!
One down side to the 80/90's 3.5" floppies in my collection that I discovered is that the glue holding the metal disc to the floppy has completely dried out and when you pop it in the drive the metal disc breaks free of the disc. Fortunately nothing of consequence on those discs, so never tried re-bonding them.
You can not read them if this happens, because if the sector hole on the metal part gets rotated against the magnetic data, it will completely confuse the drive. (I may be that techniques like Kryoflux readers ignore it once they get reattached in any direction.) I only had one diskette fall apart like this.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 AFAIK this is not true for the common PC-style formats because they are all soft-sectored. On these the index pulse is really only used when formatting.
@@eDoc2020 Nope. I had such a broken diskette and reglueing in random rotary position did no make it readable at all. So the hole position is crucial to make it find the 1st sector.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 Are you sure you got it installed perfectly concentrically compared to where it was originally? Each track is only .115mm so any slight distortion will throw off the alignment. Even if the index hole is in exactly the same rotational position it will be unreadable. Or your magnetic media was simply degraded.
I still think the FDC doesn't need the proper index pulse but in the end it doesn't really matter to this discussion. No matter the specific cause if you reglue the cookie it probably won't work.
I suppose the easiest way to test my claim about the index pulse is to punch a new hole in a 5.25 disk and cover the old one. Or disconnect the index line from the drive and connect it to a separate timer circuit.
@@eDoc2020 I only remember that manually readjusting 3.5'' drive heads was intricate. I had to wire the head cable of an old walkman to listen by headphone if the upper head was shifted or rotated against the other, but it can be done. (In a Citizen drive I even had ruined the screw threads and so eventually superglued the adjusted head into place, which was sufficient to make it work.) The round diskette metal core fits precisely into the center hole, so I doubt it was out of center.
I haven't used a floppy disk in almost 20 years, used Zip-drives for my last undergrad years until 1GB thumb-drives became affordable.
grest episode. I really like the TV news anchor style you have here with the interview.
That was a fabulous interview, Lon!
Clicked on the video expecting click bait, was pleasantly surprised, turned out to be rather interesting.
Surprised to learn that some corporations only recently got rid of them.
Ah yes, those "late years" when they in the end just pompletely cheaped out on production quality of the floppies. I remember buying like "no name" 100x DD floppies for only like 10-15 bucks total and the quality was so bad that like 40-45 of them would fail to format & immediately got trashed. But you simply accepted that remember how cheap it was compared to earlier on. I think my first dual 200kb 3" floppy cost a wopping 25 bucks for a single floppy.
I also had a bunch of a certain cheap late 3.5'' HD diskette brand completely fail after decades, while most others read well. Likely the magnetic layer was too thin to hold magnetism or even decomposed otherwise.
Lots of refurbished computers and floppy drives still are sold in Japan, some at high prices. They support older equipment at factories, hospitals, etc.
There's vintage musical hardware like synths and drum machines that use 3.5" floppies. Very odd move.
Hey vinyl records came back!!! I can see floppies maybe resurging in the future! The thing is you need the drives to read the floppies!
cds being mentioned as an obsolete disc format in that article makes me feel old
I'm using floppies on my Sony MSX2 computer
Still have new ones in their boxes sealed. I need to check all the ones that I used of they are still working.
Around 2015 I did a project for a company that stipulated "No USB Ports Allowed".
They didn't need to transfer a lot of data so they didn't want to take the risk of someone sneaking in a virus on a USB memory stick.
I included an RS232 port on their hardware.
I've heard of saboteurs leaving a USB stick laying around somewhere so an unsuspecting person will try to use it and thus infect their company's computers.
What a unique interview Lon. Good show old bean!
That was a great interview. That owner has a nice sense of humor. Especially when he said he might kick the bucket before the disks will.
The clicking with that drive is a quirk of the TEAC USB floppy, which is what most of drives you get now are built on. It will poll the drive constantly until a drive gets inserted.
If you get one of the older Sony USB 2.x floppy drives, the drive will inform the OS on media change, so it doesn't have to sit there and poll the drive. An added benefit is that unlike the TEAC, which to switch drives you have to unplug and replug the drive, you can just swap disks in the Sony and it'll inform the OS of every media change. Much nicer.
Cassette tapes are similar to floppy disks in that the best ones were made during the 80s and 90s when the manufacturing processes were at their peak. The new cassettes that you can buy today are junk compared to the old ones. Great video! I really enjoyed it!
Same with modern tape transports. The only one being made is a mediocre tape mech that some obscure factory in China has been pumping out since the 80's.. so any modern tape player uses this pretty crappy mech unfortunately. Even the nice looking TASCAM rackmount style ones
@@Wagoo Mediocre at the very best! I have some tape decks from the 80s and 90s that will absolutely walk all over any modern unit in build quality, features, sound, etc.
@@Wagoo Nakamichi in 1980th made crap drives too. They had reputation to be the best sounding cassette drives ever, but they were plastic trash and a nightmare to dismantle because wearing parts (friction clutch felt etc.) was intentionally buried in the middle where it could not be reached without taking all those cogs apart. I saw a TV docu that a company has started making new compact cassettes with a new tape formula that dynamic range is better than all tapes of the past.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 the best cassette audio quality uses HX but no modern deck will.. as I think to implement it you need a license from Sony and they're just not giving them out anymore
My wife has an older embroidery machine that has floppy disk or an older card reader on it. I had read where some would swap floppy drives out (if you could easily get to it and it was standard size/mounting points) with something like "GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black" for around $30.00. You would then format and use a USB drive as a floppy disk. I believe you could formate the USB to have several "floppy disks" on it and you would use the button on the Emulator drive to cycle through them.
Wow! I haven't used a floppy disk in years!!
Yea no kidding.. I used to use BD-r's ... Lately I just buy 10-20TB HD.. and mirror them . solves my issues lol
@@koilamaoh4238 Are BD-R reliable? I guess it depends on the manufacturer. I have Fujifilm DVD-R and a bunch of them become unreadable in 1 or 2 y. Some work but have unreadable files. I haven't burned a DVD in years, except when I write Linux to it to do a fresh install. I use DVD-RW in that case. It is a Staples brand DVD-RW.
Probably the best medium are HDD. They are magnetic. They are huge, cheap, fast enough.
@@louistournas120 Only don't impact or drop them. (My PC contains an 8TB mechanical HDD and absolutely no SSDs.) Modern (MLC/TLC) flash/SSD are the most unreliable of all digital media, because they are basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die).
I still use them to install Win XP Pro into Computers meant for Win 95 . MS Made these 5 Disk Images and they still Work .
A stop requiring them is not a ban and will still be accepted since japan has a lot of older people and especially old traditional commerces who wont change now , there is even one of the best cloth makers using an old automatic loom with all designs on floppy since the new ones don’t get the same quality.
Nobody will force a loom or any other business to upgrade, but the idea is to ban them from government internal use.
@@SianaGearz as i said they don’t require it anymore (before it was not possible otherwise ) and will simply outphase them , but it is not a ban , that word means a more radical approach and would put swordmakers for example in trouble since most wont change to a newer system and they are obliged by law to declare every weapon they make and having a working system that would need getting all the data of perhaps 40 years moved to another system would be simply too much for most of them .
I use floppy disks for my Sony Mavica Camera, my Yamaha Keyboard w/Roland MIDI Recorder with floppy, and for my vintage PC games collection. In fact the Postal Annex in my town still sells floppy disks (Polaroid label) for a buck apiece. Many vintage technology collectors still use them to maintain their game collections and still store important documents on floppy as it is easy to remove and transport.
But I can see why Japan would ban them. They can't move forward with USB, and portable SSD's for easy storage options. But this is similar to Europe up until the early 2000s using audio cassette storage for small computers. It was cheap, reliable, and while slow, it worked well enough due to the very high cost of floppy drives in the 80s and 90s. Floppy disks still have a place at least for the immediate future. They certainly are used in enough vintage technology.
Flash memory degrades if it is not used regularly magnetic storage can last for decades sitting unused on a shelf. It's why HDDs aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Flash/SSD is the most unreliable media. It is basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die). But early flash (SLC cells) can last long if not overwritten too often. However some types even lack a refreshing mechanism (with or without wearlevelling) and so loose their data even when occasionally connected to electricity.
In a machine shop I work at we got a Haas vf5 CNC machine that used floppy discs, only a couple of years ago we replaced the floppy drive with a usb adapter unit for thumb drives
Nice to see Japan are finally ready to embrace Zip disks
Lon (something I should have asked earlier): Why are these banned from the Japanese government just because the Japanese government was using a lot of them? So what?
@@HelloKittyFanMan Waste. Imagine you needed to submit something. You may buy a 5 pack or 10 pack, and borrow or purchase a floppy drive. Then every government computer that takes these submissions needs a drive. In an era when you could easily take a 6MB picture of any needed paperwork and instantly SMS it anywhere in the world it's wasteful. There needs to be factories making disks and drives somewhere if they are being used.
@@milescarter7803 you do know floppy disks are reusable right?
Also we should focus on different waste (not using disposable plastic but materials that are easier to recycle, etc), not usable things, we deamed waste just cause we dont use them
Charming and interesting!! At age 76, I used all those disks. Regards from Baltimore.
Old technology isn't bad technology. I have an LG TV that's not smart from 2014 and it's just as responsive as the day I bought it and it still loads the channels and guide just fine.
Heh, it's funny to see a Macintosh using a floppy disk drive that only has manual ejection; I'm so used to Macs that have floppy drives always having the computer-controlled motorized ejection. So that confused me when I saw Mac emulators on computers like the Amiga and Atari ST, because I was like, "But how does it handle that auto-icon thing?" etc. However, now with plug-and-play USB storage like flash and hard disk drives, I'm used to seeing that respond to our manual ejection and the computer can't eject those; it just dismounts them from the system... I guess the same thing that those Mac emulators were doing.
I run my Amiga A500 (casemodded in big wooden cabinet) every day to write diary on diskettes, and it barely makes any problems (beside oxidizing contacts those need to be wiggled occasionally). They are not really unreliable. Crucial is if a disk fails with scratched surface (grinding noise), always immediately use a cleaning diskette with isopropanol, else the debris will pollute and ruin the next inserted disks. Also CDR are pretty reliable, but (like photographic film) they must be stored always away from light and ozone. Most of the CDR I burnt in 1990th were still readable. The most unreliable media is modern (MLC/TLC) flash/SSD, which is basically DRAM with 1 year refresh rate, i.e. data fades away if left unpowered for only few years (the newer/higher density and the more worn, the quicker it will die).
PC's haven't even been sold with even Blu-Ray burner's here for over a decade as disc died back in 2014.
It's 5.25" DS/DD disks that are getting really hard to find. I bought some off ebay twice, one order was not what I ordered, HD disks that don't work in a DD drive, and the other, only 1 out of the 10 disks successfully formatted.
So older disks are probably better.
I was also so proud when I bought my first pack of Verbatim 3½-inch floppy disks, I didn't even have a disk drive or PC for them. 😊
Huh! I was playing around with Windows on ARM laptop a couple of years ago, to see if I could get used to it.
The only thing I couldn't get going was my USB floppy drive. From what I could read, the driver was never ported over.
I'm surprised MacOS beat Windows at backwards compatibility for once!
Wow, this brings back memories. I remember making runs to Fry's Electronics to pick up 100 packs of floppy disks.
I thought they went out in the 2,000s?
Japan also is famous for it's extensive use of fax machines. I wonder there is an effort for phasing those out as well.
I had to fax some medical info to my kid’s doctors office the other day. The only way they would take it !
@@LonSeidman Yup. A lot of doctors still have a fax number. I guess they still consider it more secure than email.
@@kumarp3074 And the crazy thing is that these fax machines are generally in places open to the public like a print & mail shop, etc. Far less secure!
@@LonSeidman Not sure how the location of a fax machine would have any bearing here. As long as it doesn't hold onto a copy of the data being sent, it really doesn't matter.
The bigger concern should be the digital switching infrastructure that is used today. We're a long way from the days of human operators or even electromechanical switching.
German gov decided to eventually ban fax machines in national bureaus. Likely it will still take time to change all the technology.
I recently bought a USB Mini Floppy drive. Not used yet but I figured it would come in handy at some point. I have a wee handful of 2000 ish minis both unopened and used. I have seen a couple cartons of nos unopened mini floppies in thrift stores but never bought (thinking they're still being made).
I already knew the guests response when asked about disk quality "1985 vs 2005"- it's exactly the same situation with anything electronic.
The cheapness began in around the mid 90s and gotten better or worse depending on your view ever since.
Poor quality raw materials then add in bloating the software with buggy constant updates.
German high speed trains used floppy disk unt recently for the seat reservation data over the seats and it was quiet chaotic when the holy seat reservation floppy disk wasn't delivered in time to the train
I haven't had any floppies in 20 years. Many old VHS tapes are rotting away too
I think I stopped using the 3.5 floppy in 2002. I still hae the drive in my subsequent PCs. I still have it in my current PC with Ryzen 3600. It is not connected. I still use the same ATX case that I bought in 2003.
I was still using VHS up until 1 y ago. Now I use them more rarely. I used them to record TV.
Yeah, I still have some sealed _plastic_ boxes of 5 1/4" floppy disks, way back from when my dad was using them in his Digital Rainbow 100 at our family store!
Next on the chopping block in Japanese government - fax machines! Seriously though, I work in a Japanese university and until very recently we were given the option to submit class improvement reports on floppy disc. I found Windows 98 for sale on floppies in a local electronics store about 10 years ago too, lol
I kept a copy of system commander on floppy and a spare disk drive, ready to connect to any computer that still supported IDE cables, and I did more than once, connect it temporarily that way. I didn't need it anymore by the time I would have needed to get a USB driver, so I never have. But I still do have my old drives and disks.
Great content dude, FD are probably still the most loved media by us retro nerds
I still have my old Commodore 64 diskettes & they still work today & they were single sided, single density. Some of mine were made my Maxell, TDK, Scotch, Nashua & Bonus which was the cheapest disks back then. I put a notch in them & use both sides of the disk.
Making a bootable floppy is still the easiest built-in method in Windows. For any other medium, you'll either need some third-party software or be limited in what kind of disk image/files you can use.
Nooo, I don't want firmware to be updated via the web.
There are so many devices that use floppies, keyboards, midi hardware, embroidery machines, mavica cameras, old measuring equipment and probably much much more. I’m holding on to a small stash of new disks 💾
I used one of these digital cameras with 3 1/2 floppy disk at work around 1995-1996.
I'll forgive the very rare clickbait title, Lon - this was an amazing episode! Thank you so much for sharing this and taking the time to do the interview.
It's good bait though.
Diskettes are only good for legacy systems. But legacy critical systems will be in operation for very long .
The ETC lighting console that we have at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is so antiquated, it still uses floppies 🤦🏻♂️
I still have some floppies I need to transfer their contents. Good to know about the floppy to USB drives on Amazon. I do have old Zip drives.. I don't remember them too much, but they were required when I was going to University back in the 90's.
Some of those disks you're having trouble reading might be ok physically speaking. There's various forms of magnetic entropy that act over decades rather than years. Consequently It's recommended to REFRESH all data on Harddisks EVERY 3-5 YEARS. This process is long & slightly more complex than described here. But essentially, the data is read off the disk cylinder by cylinder, then written back. As the media itself is often still good, only the formatting and user data has faded through entropy.
Great Video !!!
I inherited hundreds of Floppies my brother used for 3-D Modelling and animation in Lightwave 3-D, all kinds of models and textures and other files he made in the 90s. Most of them are 3M he prefered them.