How Old School Floppy Drives Worked
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.ค. 2016
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Back in the 90's, rather than buying floppy disks, I would call up companies like AOL & CompuServe. I would request their installation software, but on floppy disks, rather than cds. Then I would remove the labels and format them. Ah, those were the days...
I'd just grab handfuls from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or Circuit City.
relishgargler I worked for Circuit City, but back in '03. By then, floppy disks were already obsolete. What was annoying was how AOL paid to display their installation cds. Which nobody ever used, because AOL was also obsolete by then, too.
Yeah, and simply tape over the Write protection that was on those discs!
I used to dumpster drive at Conner Peripherals in Lake Mary Florida and
would get 3.5 inch floppies. They would toss out obsolete software
and packaging for their tape drives. I didn't bother peeling off their labels, would just write over them with a magic marker.
Me too. Crab a hand full. Then toss the CD. As cases where expensive.
c64: Hello XYZ?
drive: XYZ broke
c64: Understandable have a great day
Rayuko why is this so funny?
@@DerTodKommtImmer because he has a small mind
you have 48 hours to delete this
@@gavinexe7012 he hasnt deleted it
@@gavinexe70124 years has passed
It has been 5 years and you are almost correct on solid state drives.
I recently built my own computer, I got a 500GB SSD, and down the line got a 2TB HDD. They were around the same price, IIRC. SSD for the operating system and a select pair of games, HDD for everything else.
Solid states are still very expensive for their capacity. I think hard disks will stay a while longer.
I’ve also read that HDDs have greater durability than SDDs, so it would be a good idea to keep HDDs for storing files and SDDs for running programs
@@friendk422 ssds will last much longer if you barely write stuff to it, bunch of hdds fail because op mechanical parts after a while and solid state can last multiple decades or more
No magic. Its fast, small and enough space. What would you think
@@friendk422 HDDs are much more susceptible to physical damage than SSDs. For example bringing a magnet near an HDD may corrupt the data on it, or if the drive is moved while it’s spinning you can damage or destroy the platters by crashing the heads into their surface. If you dropped an HDD there’s a good chance you’ll damage it. None of the above things will really affect an SSD.
Apple II & floppy drive: Master and slave
Commodore 64 & 1541: Friend asking nicely
In Germany you can say both and it´s correct.
@@Kai-io6jn Don't say VIC in Germany. Sounds like a German curse word.
Well, the master/slave methodologiy wasn't just for floppies. Older HDDs that were the parallel type also had jumpers that had to be set to identify if the drive was a master or slave when attaching 2+ drives to a single ribbon cable (in some computers they were labelled as primary and secondary, but still the same concept). Serial ATA fixed this as there are no master/slave drives anymore.
Apparently master/slave terms are offensive now and are being replaced everywhere
The commodores were more like two networked computers instead of a computer and a peripheral drive.
8:32 "MADE IN W. GERMANY"
Ahh the 80's.
at least not made in the eastern block xd
When W. Germany was the "endboss-team" in Nintendo World Cup. :D
kek
They made it
W stands for West ;-)
"hey, get off the internet! i need to use the phone!!"
ezcondition Yes need
Ugg, that kind of thing brings out the rage from my child hood. Every kid in the house could use the phone, but if I used it for my computer I was yelled at, even if I used the thing in the middle of the night, because one of my stupid brothers might get themselves in trouble and need to call home. The kid that stays out of trouble is a jerk.
@@grandetaco4416 Yes jokes aside, Windows 98 SE wasn't bad probably my second favourite Windows after Windows XP.
or, "hey, get off the phone, i want to go on the internet"
That's why I added a second phone line just for my computer
razor knife, i always just used a normal hole punch. the notch didn't have to be square, round holes worked
you mean NOTCH FROM MINECRAFT????,
or that hole in floppy disks?
we just used a good old fashioned Hold punch/ same as three ring binder
Or even HALF-round ;)
That's my solution as well, even today, LOL.
@d R it was a fucking joke are you 9?
Oh, man! That brings me some serious nostalgia! 🥺
Right! I'm flashing back to tinkering with an Apple IIe and a Tandy "portable" briefcase with my grandpa! Good times.
Me too.
At the end of vid David says solid state drives will take over. 5 years ago I backed up My files on disks but since then most of My Data like photos, video and software all mostly saved on SD cards and SSD. I still used 5 portable disk hardrives.
7:03 "let me sing you the song of my people"
Frani298 Daisy, Daisy, give me an answer too!
Hal 9000 did it better, also A bicycle built for two was the first song ever sung by a computer th-cam.com/video/41U78QP8nBk/w-d-xo.html
As a 22 year old who has never seen a lot of this technology I found this to be exceptionally cool and informative. The only floppy disks I remember are the junk ones of the early 2000s. I remember thinking as a kid that flipping the metal tab and exposing the disc was a manual erase mechanism, because I never did that and put the disc back in to find it still readable...
10:10 This tip comes over 30 years too late.
Hihi
But things are improving. The next bit of useful data you get will only be 15 years late.
hahha so true
i could have used that in 1991
The interesting thing is that a 5.25" floppy is generally more durable than a 3.5" floppy. I don't know why but I've had a lot of 3.5" floppies fail for no apparent reason. Even the ones that were stored for longer periods of time and were never exposed to heavy usage.
Without being an expert, I guess it's the higher density of information in smaller space and the resulting, thinner and thus more fragile magnetized tracks. I wouldn't be surprised if 8"-disks are even more durable.
@@NuntiusLegis I would agree. As the density of the bits increased and the magnetic media became more fine-grained, the magnetic energy those particles held was weaker to begin with. I had an IMSAI 8080 with both a Micropolis 5.25 dual drive set and a pair of 8" Shugart drives I never had any issues with. Even the old DSDD 3.5" diskettes were able to retain data longer than any of my HD disks. Even now my 3.5 DSDD Amiga disks are all readable after being in non-environmentally uncontrolled storage for the last 25 years. None of the handful of my PC DSHD diskettes of either size can be read with any success and they've been in the house wherever I have lived all this time.
Yep smaller and more dense was the reason
In my country, we called them “Diskettes”...
Here in Brazil tey called it too hahah XD
They are called that all over the world, "floppies" is an alternate name. But "floppies" indeed never stuck around in that many places outside English speaking countries, if any.
So yeah, in Brazil, "diskette" is the only accepted terminology.
"Diskette" describes what they are. "Floppy" describes what type of diskette they are.
@@sixstanger00 I was about to say. Especially in the 90s, I heard them called "floppy diskettes."
Here in the UK they were often labelled as "discettes".
Weirdly, media that is circular (WORM, CD, DVD, Blu-ray) was always a "disc" but floppies/Zip/MO were usually a "disk" in the UK. Perhaps it's because Compact Disc was a Dutch-Japanese invention but "disks" were American, I dunno.
Teacher brought 3,5" floppy disk to class to show.
"Wow, you 3D printed the save icon? Cool!"
That joke will never die...
twitter.com/bill_gross/status/920406104911233024
That child didn't say that
Father I cannot click the book
Dumb
@M Detlef We called them stiffies.
I used diskettes to transfer smaller files like text-files when USB sticks where still uncommon and rather expensive, and it was pretty quick too ^w^
AIKISBEST no joke I did to
I still do this to transfer small files between my retro PC and the newer one which has a USB floppy drive.
My first viewing of The 8-Bit Guy.
.
Informative and exciting.
Launching nuke.... 10...9.....8.... Read error occurred please try again
Launching nuke... 10 9 8 7 6
ERROR
BREAK IN 10
READY.
Government:SHIET
@@kris_0520 Then North Korea bombs USA before they do. Then Russia and China overthrow North Korea. Then Russia and China start taking over the world and bomb themselves till apocalypse.
Good job diskettes!
At least they have great background music...ahh the sound of old floppy disk drive...
Good
Wasn't Shift F6 to nuke?
One of the benefits to the military using 1970's tech for nuclear missiles is that it isn't connected to anything and is really not hack-able from the outside.
If you aren't standing at the physical computer, you aren't going to accomplish anything. Likewise, there are no USB ports, no wi-fi, etc. to be used to backdoor into those systems.
If sounds stupid, but it works... then it isn't stupid :)
Oh shit, it's World War Three!!!
C:\LNCHNUKE.EXE
Read error (A)bort (R)etry (I)gnore?
Son of a bitch!
Abort Key load error... launching
In Arizona you can visit the nuclear launch sites. Today those silo's are empty. You can make a tour in the facilities and hear the guides explain how things went in the old days. Launching the missiles was a matter of turning two keys in a panel by two operators sitting a couple of feet apart from each other, so one guy could not turn both keys by himself. When the keys are turned the missiles launch in 10 seconds and no force on Earth could stop them. Both keys have been in the panel once without being turned. We were 10 seconds away from world wide thermal nuclear war.
Impressive Robf93! You remembered the 8.3 character naming scheme! LOL. I had almost forgotten about that until I saw your post :) Even better, trying to boot the machine from a bad floppy (or hard drive for that matter)...."Non-system disk or disk error - replace and strike any key when ready" SHIT!
And if there would be some hackers on the computer. They will no know how to use it. I can imagine them saying "So where the heck is the windows button/command prompt"
In my first job in the late 70s I was developing assembly code for the Texas Instruments TI9900, the first 16 bit processor, for passive sonar systems. We used the TI emulator, a desk sized thing with a built in 8 inch floppy drive. This was the only way to store your work between sessions and to release it to production so multiple backups were taken and locked away in filing cabinets, otherwise you could lose months of work. It was quite reliable and easily fast enough to store the small amounts of data for assembler. Stunningly primitive when you think you can buy 256gb removable storage for a few pounds today.
12:35 My daughter who is three was shouting Mario Mario! Considering I have never played the game, I think she was a gamer in her previous life!
You should check your phone. She might have downloaded tons of games haha
In school, we used paper hole punches to clear out the write protect notch when flipping disks.
I love everyone saying "Nice Video" on a 15 minute long video that was uploaded 5 minutes ago.
ikr
Yup it's just because they want to be the first comment
Nice Comment
The time is when every format is ready.
Some people watch the video in reduced resolution much earlier. This is the reason for the disparity.
Maybe your just late
7:02 Of course it plays "Daisy Bell." Why would they have evef picked anything else?
i noticed that right away LOL. mostly because my gf brought up the song and one of my fav movies of all time, 2001: a space odyssey.
Pls read my comment about Daisy bell :)
It was the first ever song played on computer
I recently had an Amiga 1000 (made in Oct. 1985, looked at the serial code) over at my house, and it had a disk drive problem, yet I could hear the drive clicking away. I loved that sound! We're gonna repair it soon though. Wish us luck!
Best of luck!
Amiga 1000 ALL had disk problems. The Electronics store (Federated) had 5 units total - 1st demo died, 2nd demo died, 3rd demo died - and they would not put out the 4th one. Atari ST just worked.
How did it go?
"I love em! Whether they're 8 inch, 5 1/4 inch, 3 1/2 inch..."
I could make so many lewd jokes, but I won't.
Good
Do it do it do it.
That had to be intentional.
Size doesn't matter ;)
Lazy Game Re-lewds
Could you take this one step further and do a video on how ZIP Disks work? I had a college prof in 2010 who still wanted all assignments submitted on a certain ZIP Disk format!!!
I actually thought about mentioning ZIP disks.. but the darned video has taken too long to produce so I left it out.. along with LS-120
Zip drives and Jazz drives... The bane of my university years.
There's always time for a sequel :)
I still have a working ZIP 100 & a ZIP 250 SCSI drives. Great units. Sadly my LS-240 & LS-120 both died. Personally I always enjoyed the Syquest EQ44 & EQ88 drives. The EQ44 drives actually could be formatted down to 256byte sectors for use on the Tandy TRS-80 Color Computers.
I added a SCSI expansion on my A1200 so have a lot of old things on Zip 100 discs somewhere. I do have it all still so one day should try and recover it. Fun times.
The disk drive playing “Daisy Bell” is the best part of the vid!
Read my comment
Loving these new videos. The interviews with LGR and the other geeks give the video a feel like a high quality production!
do you prefer typing "GO64" or "GO64" on the C128 for 64K mode?
8:43 cat is lonely xdddd
I still have readable 8" and 5 1/4" discs but I cant find many 3 1/2" floppies that still read...
I have a set of 3,5 MS-DOS and Win 3.11 floppies that read in late 2011 - that's sure. I wonder if they read today, and if the old PC where I installed the MS-DOS still would work, for that matter....
One of the companies that I worked for back in 1987 - 1988 was using an IBM computer that used 8 inch disk diskettes. So you were right about the general user but I am sure that there were companies who might have still been using 8 inch disks back in 1983.
By the way, I used to have the little device to cut the hole to allow me to write to diskettes on 5 1/4 disk drives. It was much easier when I got an Atari ST to just move the little switch on the 3.5 disk drives.
2023, still have to use 3.5 floppies and PCMCIA cards on proprietary hardware and software for machines built and still running from the 90s.
@@cauldroneer2722DINOSAURS!!!😮 TREX GOTCHA!!😂😂😂
This was a great description of life with floppy drives. Every time I thought about something I could leave a comment on, you'd cover it. It was great to see one of our old Q-Link disks. When Quantum licensed the software from its developer one of the first tasks was to write a fast loader. The original software took four minutes to load and access a content area.
The only thing you could have elaborated on was how those unsupported tracks were used for copy protection. I had to take my 1541 apart a couple times after EA locked up the head while I was exploring. ;)
I recently took my C= equipment out of the attic (motivated by The 8-Bit Guy) and was equally surprised that my 30-35-year-old floppy disks still worked fine.
BillP
My friends and I would use a single hole puncher to make our discs double sided. Was a lot quicker than cutting grooves out :)
Epyx911 Nerd alert!
Jim Rowell Douche alert!
I would use nail clippers
We used to buy single sided disks, which were cheaper, then use that method to make them double sided which usually worked just fine.
That same trick was done all over the world. We did it in our programing class all the time.
My wife still prefers the 8" floppies
William Hetherington giggity
Said no woman ever.
Surely you mean `Harddick`
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
she prefers floppy to hard? that's odd...
It's 2023 and my C-64 and Amiga floppy's 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 still load just fine. Cool video!
Some random kid: “who is this weird man and why is he hiding DVD’s in a 3d-printed save icon?”
If someone did that, I'd direct them to this video.
Literally nobody would say that for the next 50 years
@@salade2760 Except Zoomers who were toddlers/not born in the 1990s. Floppies fell out of mainstream use in the 2000s. Unless you were still sticking with your old computer, most people had moved on to computers that could boot from compact disc. That means there are a significant amount of people alive on this planet who have never used or don't remember using a single floppy disk.
@@TANMAN9095 even if you haven't used one its still pretty common knowledge of what they are.
A kid like me would shut that one down asap
I had the Excelerator Plus drive for the c64 in the late 80's. It had a direct drive mechanism and a slightly faster load and format speed over the 1541 and was about 99.5% compatible. Out of the hundreds of floppies I had, perhaps one or two didn't work due to some obscure fast load routine. The Excelerator Plus was a great drive and extremely reliable and was an excellent companion to my Expert cartridge.
And yes I had floppies from the late 80s that still worked flawlessly thirty years later.
Yeah in the 1990's I owned the Amiga A500 which used the 3 1/2 inch Disks & I've still got it!!!
My dad had one when I was a kid. I remember playing a bunch of lucasarts games and a few others. All 3 1/2". He bought it when we lived in Greece in 89 or 90... Or something around there
I held on to mine, along with the Commodore monitor, for many years, but eventually gave it away to a thrift store about 15 years ago.
Just watched this episode and it brought back some great and some not so great memories. I do have to share at least this one:
One of the offices I worked at had a machine that was backed-up weekly to 5.25" floppies. The process took about 10 discs to hold the data. The person performing the backup had those great labels and would label each disk accordingly - would even go back and fill in the total number of diskettes in this back-up. One day I was in the office and commented on how great a job she did by typing out the labels for each disk. She thanked me, and then, to my horror, took a diskette out of the computer, and rolled it into a typewriter and begin to type the label.
I gasped and said "NO!" Astounded, she questioned my reaction. I informed her that by doing what she did, she rendered the diskette useless.
"Oh. Really? That's how I've been doing it for the last 8 weeks. How else can you type out the labels?"
She didn't believe that the diskettes were ruined, so we took one of the previous week's backups and tried to read the diskette. Of course, it was a no-go.
Ah, live and learn! Thanks for posting this video.
What did she said?
I take the entire 8.5x11 sheet of labels and roll it into my typewriter, and then after that put it on my floppy disks.
I had the original Apple II from 1977. One thing to keep in mind, we were using a device (consumer-grade tape recorder) to do a job it was never designed for. There was no secondary storage (this was way before hard-drives) so as 8BG said, we had to type the program from magazine/book into ram, then save it to audio tape, & many times when you went to re-load it, it didn't work which meant you had to do that all over again. Keeping programs organized on cassettes was a mess. Then the first consumer 5 1/4 floppy drives that came out were before IDE, so there was no intelligence in the drive at all. It was entirely controlled by the computer. So then you had to load DOS disk, boot the computer to load DOS into RAM, then remove the DOS disk, & replace it with the program disk. Load the program disk into RAM, then you could play the game. If you had money, you could afford a second floppy drive, that way you could leave the DOS disk in it all the time instead of constantly swapping floppies. It seems complicated now, but back then if you had dual floppies you were on the bleeding edge.
Sounds like you were playing the game from the start!!😮😮😂😂😂
A friend working at my local school asked me for help one day in the mid 90s. The school's "computer expert" was trying to scan some photographs "into the computer". But it wasn't working.
When I arrived I couldn't see any type of scanner; so I asked for a quick demo. The secretary started inserting a Polaroid print into the 3.5" drive; so I quickly stopped her! I took away the pictures and scanned them for her.
She didn't know about Tabs or justification in Word either; so I explained how they worked. Most little kids at that school ran rings around me. The "computer Expert" should have asked them for help.
That reminds me of a woman I worked with in the early 90's who thought you scanned 35mm transparencies by holding them up to the CRT monitor!
When the first ATMs (called TYME machines) came out, there were people who thought you could just insert your credit card into the drives to get money out. Watched a woman try it with an Olivetta.
@@Deathrape2001 South of the Northern border?
I agree.
Next time be more specific ;)
Mexi-$hit is not America, nor is N E thing below it. Those so-called 'nations' R mostly open sewers of chaos & corruption = much more so than the USA, & of course U already know all that, captain 'hit the return key pretending it makes U clever, because U have nothing useful 2 say' =))
Made my day laughing at that. No such since the 'drink holder' attached that of course was a CD-ROM drive. ROTFL.
*I remember installing Hexen through 4 discs..* ✅😀
Don't think i've ever had a game that required more than 2 disc...
I missed the days you could have software like games on floppies and CDs.
@@thegrays3303 and actually OWN the game instead of it being on somebody elses computer
@@sheilaolfieway1885 yes exactly.
@@sheilaolfieway1885 it was so much fun to go the computer store buy it in a box and bring it home and install it on your computer
Very informational, all these sounds bring back so much nostalgia. I remember the trips to the computer lab in the early 90s.
I could work around the computers nowadays, and I know you just showed us, but I still don't know anything about the old floppies, old drives and all the old parts. I only really knew the 3" plastic ones. 1.35mb (I think) wasn't that much space, but could sure hold some old games. But loading them off of the 3" floppy was like loading off of an hdd today; back then, hdd>floppy and now ssd>hdd
Another great video! There is a machine at my former employers that is still running on first generation fanuc software and has the machine parameters stored on punched tape. The tape would run through the reader in the front panel into a bin in the bottom of the panel door (!) then wind itself back up onto the spool.
In late 1988, I was pleased to get a job programming on an IBM System/36 business computers in 1989. All loading of programs and local storage was done with 8 inch floppies. (Wikipedia tells me that the System/36 was sold from 1983 to 2000.
At that particular job I did the 'Initial Program Load' of the operating system on our AS/400 successor. (It was the first such computer in Western Canada). The OS came on two or three large format tape cartridges. That initial software loading took something crazy like 18 hours!
Yeah 8" floppies were never really part of the consumer market. Main frame instals for example as well as those massive programmable typesetting machines and typewriters in the typing pool. 5.25" were the first real floppies the consumer encountered. This from an early 80's standpoint.
In 1987-88 my company chose to use Bailey Controls Net 90 and their color OIUs, Operator Interface Units on an installation. Those OIUs had the 8 inch drives. First and last time I've seen them.
Fun fact: I have had these floppies sitting on my desk for 6 years now. I still don't know why I keep them on my desk... They just kinda ended up being a permanent feature of my desk.
-Dos 6.2 #1
-Dos 6.2 #2
-Dos 6.2 #3
-Win 3.1 #1
-Win 3.1 #2
-Win 3.1 #3
-Win 3.1 #4
-Win 3.1 #5
-Win 3.1 #6
I used to keep a set of Win 3.1 disks at my store (Radio Shack) and would loan them out to customers all the time. I think a sizeable portion of Kansas City got Windows from me.
Great if you hate windows 10 and want to downgrade :P
I still have a win xp home oem disk. but do not have the serial number for it anymore.
apple tech geek I used to have a win xp ultimate iso.. but lost that when my backup drive died.
A few weeks back I randomly found two installer floppies while I was at my parents' house cleaning out their attic of my old junk from childhood. One disk was for the original SimCity, and the other was for a program called "Cosmi Paint Plus" which was basically a low-budget Photoshop knockoff, but still miles ahead of MSPaint from what I remember of it.
a minor correction: hard drives were made before floppy drives, just not for home machines. hard cartridges, that had platters 18 inches across and stored a whopping 5 meg per 5 platter cartridge (and when those things had a head crash, it really meant crash, bits of metal flying everywhere and watch out if you were nearby, the danger was real of being shot by the disintegrating cartridge!) were the precursors to floppy drives. for the rest a very nice presentation.
In the 1980s I had a CBM 600 calculator, which was sold cheaply by a surplus electronics mail order company at the time, together with an A3 type wheel printer in an 8 "double floppy disk drive, with the huge memory size of 1MB per disk at the time. I had used it in the plastics technology laboratory at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, and also made it available to students for the preparation of their diploma theses. The advantage was that we had a correct word processor that was very cheap, with quite usable spelling correction serial interface as well as via the IEC-625 bus, and a clean printout via the type wheel printer, which used very cheap ribbon cassettes.
I had a problem, however, to get 8 "floppy disks. The ones that I was able to clean in the house were hard-sectored and I needed the soft-sectored version. The formatting of these huge :-) large data carriers took over an hour by the way.
CRAZY,CRAZY,CRAZY!!!🤪🤪🤪😱🙃
I miss hearing the sounds of older computers, from the floppy disks to the old modem sounds.
There was just something that was somehow strangely comforting, at least in hindsight, about those kinds of things.
The same way many people love the old midi game sounds and things.
I like the sound of the 3.5" floppies best. I also love the sound of cassette loading data, especially the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K.
i would love a good quality recording archive of all the nuanced mechanical sounds of obsolete hardware
I want harddrives and even SSDs that come with some kind of sound emulation, like with those e-Scooters. o.o
I agree. I also had a 27MC connected to a packetmodem to my 80486.. Ah good old days. U can call it CB-internet lol. SLow as hell, cuz data goes 1 way only. But fun at the same time.
Yea, I always hated that sound, donno why.
I bought a 256GB USB flash drive today I find that an incredible thing only a few years ago 16GB was pretty large
My first computer i had, in 2000, had a HDD of 40GB, and i thought it was huge. Nowadays, i could go for several TBs to start feeling the same.
+Sankto Yeah I had a couple of computers in the mid 90s but I was very young started PC gaming at around 3 years old lol but my first MacBook which I had in 2006 included a 80gb drive and that was not to bad for the time either.
Bought my first flash drive in around 2005, it was a 2GB that was actually huge at the time, most flash drive were 256MB to 512MB. It cost me about $80. Now you can get a 32GB flash drive for about $20
Get on my level scrubs. I had a 2 MB hard disk. It was the size of a vacuum cleaner.
Then i had a 20 MB one. Then a 100 MB one. Then a 250 MB one.
I thought 1 GB was HUGE back when... And after that, things were progressing so fast that i just didn't have time to think about it anymore.
nope a 160gb for 10-15$ here
I remember in 1999 using these in my school and also playing the games on them in our after school club. Was really cool to think that experience was truly unique as no schools even use these anymore
Awesome video. I so remember how satisfying it was to handle these.
1:45 asiaton oleskelu kielletty 👌
The decline in quality of later floppy disks (and drives) leading to a bad rep for reliability reminds me of what happened to the audio Compact Cassette. Although originally a largely mono "voice" quality format (1963-1973ish) , With the introduction of Dolby and high bias tapes, Compact Cassette became a valid music format. From about 1975-1990ish, you could get really good tape decks and tapes. Once CDs were mainstream, tape was de-emphasized and the quality of both tape decks and tapes declined (A situation that I'm certain pleased the record labels). Transport mechanisms (even on "good" brands) became crap, as did the tapes themselves. This leads to folks who grew up with cassette in the 1990s (while nostalgic for it) thinking that it was a crap media for music. One needs to hear Cassette music on a good circa 1981 deck with circa 1984 tapes to understand how GOOD Cassettes could sound. No one is making a GOOD transport mechanism today. 😢
They make good record players tho ;)
@Christian Weissmuller Yes, but for years it wasn't a consumer recordable format. This limited its appeal to me. CD was just replacing my turntable, Not my Cassette or open reel gear. Mini Disc also had direct song access and WAS a consumer recording format. I adopted it for portable and car use. However the tight proprietary ship Sony was running meant it wasn't going to get the ubiquity of Cassette. The recording ability and size made Minidisc an valid idea for a cassette replacement (as one could perhaps claim CD-R was an open reel replacement). Everything is now solid state digital (and it's great!) But like shooting a revolver with six rounds VS a semiautomatic with 15 rounds, Or using a film camera VS a digital camera.,The very time limited nature of tape "forced" me to really give thought to recording. I kinda miss that. So, I'm not bashing CD, As a replacement for "vinyl" I'm ok with it. It's Just that the electronic companies de emphasized tape, And that sucked for the recording enthusiasts.
I Hate replying to my own comment, But dig this! :th-cam.com/video/jVoSQP2yUYA/w-d-xo.html
@@jamesslick4790 what the hell? You had a MD car stereo? Never seen that in my life.
@@badmeme486 Yep, made by Sony, natch! They're hard to come by now, but they show up on eBay every once in a while.
My first floppy disk drive was 8 inch drives.
I had a Northstar Horizon in 1978 that had hard sectored 5.25 inch floppy drives. Which you didn't cover. Instead of one hole in magnetic media there were 16 holes.
CP/M days there was an utility called Uniform that would allow the user to read and writer to another computer type... i.e. from Epson QX-10 to Kaypro 10. I used it all the time.
George
fond memorys of floppys, Uniform & CP/M Kaypros still have some - gathering dust now ...
@@davidm.4670 My Epson QX- 10 fails the Y2K test so I set the year to match the calendar so that June 6 fall on Saturday. My North Star Horizon gave up the ghost in 1999. I miss them so much. I play with CP/M Emulator all the time.
Rev George
Pedantic point: despite what you had said - in 1983, some people were indeed using 8" floppies still.
I was down in Texas myself in '84-'85 and got to go to IBM's R&D facility at that Dallas trademart modeled after the old Crystal Palace (from London). It was a parent swap sort of deal, so I got to go with a classmate along with the mom of a pair of twins in my class - the two of us were already little übergeeklings in training, so we were the obvious choices to go and see the R&D facility (some classmates toured sticker factories and similar). i.e. they knew we could be trusted to not die in an industrial accident or electrocute ourselves
While I was there, they proudly showed us the PC AT training room and the soon to be released new version of DOS. We wandered through a room with minicomputers (single rack), "mainframes" (multiple racks with tape and disk arrays), removable cartridge drives (the big suckers where the media was in a clear container and it had a handle on top), several models of server they were working on, and even a prototype color inkjet printer in a small lab area next door. I was able to keep a few sheets of printout from that and for the next decade or so was able to shock people by showing it to them ("show and tell" in science class mostly), as it took nearly that long for color inkjet to make it to consumers with any real market penetration (B&W printing was the norm until the mid/late 90s for those too young to realize - inkjets even started out as B&W also).
One of the other rooms we visited was their print shop - a place where people would send down print jobs to be printed on greenbar paper (a wide format used a LOT by businesses back in the day rather than "letter" or "legal" sizes more often used these days). They could accept jobs via network shared drive of some sort (probably a mainframe hosting the queue) or you could deliver a floppy to them.
They did support the 5.25" floppy and even the new fancy 3.25" floppies - but most of the area was reserved for rack upon rack of 8" floppies, and they were a very integral part of that operation at least. It was really fascinating as the (dot matrix or similar) printers could run so fast that the paper actually hovered in the air above the output, and there was a device to stack it neatly without getting all tangled. But oh yeah, 8" floppies were very much a thing - first and only time I've ever seen them in corporate use (I was in 4th or 5th grade), but just because they may have passed their prime, they were very much in use by Big Blue still, and likely most of the Fortune 500, military, etc.
1:35 Asiaton oleskelu kielletty! TORILLE!!
ooks suomest ps n myöhässä
@@doodoofart729 kyll, emmä muuten toria huutais xD
terve
Oho, en katsoessa huomannu tuota :o Torille! :D
*ten years later*
how old school ssd works
QSS (Quantum State Storage) is the future.
Lawl
The future is DNA storage. I need that 1 petabyte storage!
Mr Vuck Fiacom Yeah, the term "thumb drive" will be redefined. Store 650 PB of data in your right thumb...
NewtoM "There were brave men aplenty, all well known to fame. Who served in the ranks of the czar." - Lore, Star Trek: TNG Brothers
Awesome video! Thank you for putting this together.
such a great video for the first day of 2022!
you ain't done nothin' till you've sat and loaded all 22 disks of Windows 95 and had to do it all over again because something happened to your fancy schmancy $500 5mb hard drive......
Dunno why but i once was tagging along when my family visited aomeone and their son would play Doom with me , which took around 45 minutes until all the Disks were read.
Netware v3.11 on 1.44MB diskette's. My copy was 73 diskette's I think. Yes it has been a while
You might wanna check your math. 22 diskettes (since Microsoft used a proprietary DMF format that used 1.6MB instead of the standard 1.44) would be around 35MB in compressed data.
A 40MB drive sounds more within the realm of realism.
@@nicolegardner1710 the sarcasm escapes you..........
good luck trying to install office complete
8-inch floppys are far more reliable than the 5 and a quarter inch ones, due to the lower density of the record. They were used to load patterns into industrial sewing machines up until pretty recently in my country. They're kept in dusty environment, they get scratched all the time but surprisingly still work after all those years.
gold star for Nikos
+Nikos Yiannos For sure they are, but both of them are now obsolete. I'm Saying this for the sake of history. I'm not trying to say, that one format is superior to another.
According to some iBM scuttlebutt I read once, the ORIGINAL reason IBM invented it was to load writable control store when powering up various pieces of a mainframe computer, such as the CPU, the I/O channels, and disk and tape controllers. Originally, the lower levels of IBM System 360 computers had a computer within a computer which was programmed by read-only storage (ROS in the documents; we would say ROM); the simpler-wired inner computer emulated the more complex outer computer's instruction set. But the ROS could only be upgraded or corrected by taking the ROS unit apart and replacing selected elements. But the larger models used pure physical wiring to make their CPU, channels and other parts run. As the architecture became more complex, even the larger units had to use ROS, now called control store, and it was made writable -- from one side of a "wall," before powering up, but not from the "user" side of the "wall."
The problem was, what medium would they use to load the WCS every time a unit was powered up? It was not practical to put a full scale, OS-compatible tape drive or disk drive inside every cabinet, for the small amount of data that needed to be read, and only when first powering up. So they invented the floppy drive (8 inch). The default floppy could be left in the drive all the time with no harm to the disk; it would be powered up when the machine first powered up, the file read and copied to the WCS (this was called IMPL, or Initial Micro Program Load, as opposed to IPL, or Initial Program Load, when the OS was booted up), then shut down until the next power-up or operator-forced IMPL.
And inside the cabinet door, backup versions could be kept after an upgrade (delivered on a floppy disk, of course), and special diagnostic WCS loads could be kept for use by repair personnel, who could take a disk or tape string offline to test the hardware. Perfect for unattended input which is only needed rarely. Meanwhile, other makers of manufacturer-programmable accessories (such as Raytheon CRT terminal cluster controllers) resorted to such things as cassette tapes to load the programs for their devices on power-up. These cassettes (high speed digital, not audio like the hobbyist computers) were more vulnerable to failures caused by snags which destroyed the media than the floppy disks used by IBM.
The devices were so successful that they became the major way of sending files between computers, and acting as a substitute for hard drives on low-end personal computers.
And one reason critical military systems still use 8 inch floppies COULD BE that the recording formats are so old and thus proprietary that it becomes that much more difficult for anyone to read the data from a smuggled-out floppy than from a much more easily smuggled-out flash drive, and much more difficult for anyone to program a bogus floppy and smuggle it INTO a missile base, for example, than a bogus flash drive (remember STUXNET).
*5 1/4" or 3 1/2"
He likes touching them.
The FREE AOL disks I got in the mail were appreciated as a kid.
my gf literally just said, "floppy discs never really caught on tho, right?" my god.
so you are such an expert then huh ? dumb ass
@@PauloConstantino167 You must be an even bigger expert yourself, DIPSHIT.
Please stop fighting in the replies
@@PauloConstantino167 how does someone so dumb even find this channel
Here, take this FUCKING SPELLING BOOK
Actually if you have some high quality Ferrofluid you might be able to actually see the tracks, with that stuff you could see the magnetic lines on a credit card
Disk drives could be fun. The first non-school application I ever wrote (1983) was a sequential text to disk program for writing off-line replies on CompuServe forums, which then could be uploaded in one command from disk. This was on my VIC-20 and 1540 drive, a decade before packet mail like QWK.
4 years had passed, the last line at this video makes sense.... "It will be all solid state...." the rest is history.... Nice to remember.... Greetings from Portugal!
I can't see SSD's going very far
considering how it's literally impossible to retrieve data from a dead SSD, I really hope hard drives never die, but so far, considering their price per how much data can be stored, HDD is likely still going to be around for a while, as are blue-rays and dvd's... well, unless there's a huge shift from a corporation...
honestly, with how fast companies have been developing and trying to sell their cloud services, i am worried that physical media like dvds and blu-rays might disappear. streaming services like disney plus and netflix have been slowly killing movie disks. xbox game pass and even ps plus have cloud gaming available now. i wouldn't be surprised if in the future the next consoles are empty boxes that just connect to the internet. this is deeply unsettling because these companies can squeeze out as much profit as possible, and we will never actually own anything we buy
@@papyrus9183 hey, at least there's always piracy
@@thezipcreator ha ha, that is true my friend... or should i say me matey! aye aye captain 🏴☠️
THE CLOUD IS SIMPLY SOMEONE'S COMPUTER
Dvds and blu-rays are obsolete. I do not have a single device that uses them. DVDs simply cost too much for their capacity (not really, but I would rather pay 2 bucks more for a 32gb sd card than for 10 separate dvds) and blu ray drives cost too much. HDDs on the other hand are extremely cheap, 4TB for 80 bucks. Unlike what David said 6 years ago, I suspect HDDs will be in use for a long time, at least for 10 more years. Sure the noise is annoying but you can always build a cheap nas for less than 200 bucks and have all the hard drives in a closet. With the price of SSDs dropping every day, I think most people will simply buy a 1 or 2TB ssd for 50-130 bucks and only use that in their pcs. HDDs will be used by corporations and content creators, or people who are in need of cheap space in general for a long time.
Oh, the memories!
Started off on the family Apple 2e and the 5.25 floppies. I remember the Kaypro Computers that weighed 40 lbs and came with a 3-inch green screen monitor and two 5.25 inch floppies. Almost worked for Kaypro but they went bust before they hired me.
Eventually, I went with a PC Computer. My father liked to sell old electronic parts at the computer swap meets which gave me a chance to buy stuff. One of the things I would buy is 100 three floppy disks and sell them at my college for a buck a piece. It seemed like everyone came to me to get a floppy as the ones at the bookstore fell apart almost right away. Everyone had to use FTP to get files to and from home for large files.
I remember seeing those huge floppy disks at the swamp meets but never bought one
Then I graduated to 100 Mb zip disks and at college, not every computer had a zip drive and if it did you could not trust it so I had my own private USB zip drive. Everyone in the computer department soon followed suit and very quickly we all had pullable luggage with all of our books and computer gear. Now pullable luggage type stuff is common but not back then.
Now all those files can be carried on a thumb drive
Osborn had the 3 inch (or so) screen, Kaypro had a approx 80 char by 25 line display - but it was green ;-)
3:24 the sound us 80s babies remember and love. Number munchers. It’s like a wood pecker but it’s cyber heaven
Listening to you guys is great, it takes me back to the early days with my apple IIe
I loved learning about the track sounds
5:48 I just figured out why most of my dads old disks have hole punches on the left side.. (circular like you would use on paper to stick it in a binder)
I remember upgrading from a tape drive to a floppy drive and was amazed at the performance :-)
I remember upgrading from pen and paper to a tape cassette 'drive'.
Your channel is very informative and entertaining!
Oh man...... that knocking sound really brings back memories. Immediately activates some latent kernel embedded deep in my mind that primes me for the impending pleasures of Oregon Trail.
In my country we called the 3 and 1/2 "diskettes".
not sure where you are from, but in my country all sized of floppys were regularly called Diskettes too, but we also knew the term floppy (i think because the labels often said floppy disk)
Argentina. Here we just knew them as diskettes, the word floppy wasn't known outside of tech enthusiasts. Casual consumers only knew the term diskette.
+CreeperGuy555 LOL no silly! the word Disk is much older, diskettes is a newer word meaning something like smaller disks ;)
I believe the word applies to spinning media in a sealed caddie?
same
One aspect with respect to the reliability drop in floppy drive is tied to a similar effect seen in hard drive reliability.
The medium the data is written on - the plastic floppy disc core that is coated with iron oxide or similar chemistry to store magnetic states, did not vary too much from the 1970s through the 2000's .. the chemistry and physics of it are somewhat fixed. What happened is that as time went by, engineers figure out ways to fit more and more bits of storage on each square inch of that material. So as the floppy disk went from a 5 1/4 inch Atari drive of 720 sectors storing 128 bytes per sector (90KB per side), to the IBM PC drives that stored 1.2MB per disk (600MB per side), much more data is stored in the same space. 600MB is 614,400 KB, which is 6826x as much data on a square inch of that IBM 5 1/4 floppy as was on a similar square inch of the Atari floppy. That increased density doesnt come without a cost... so more error correction and less room for mistakes are allowed, and bleeding of magnetic data to adjoining space, or the need that the magnetic signal stored on the iron oxide material had to be much lower amplitude... all of this meant more data, but the data was much more fragile. And over time as the already weak, highly dense packed magnetic signals weakened and shifted... the high density floppies start showing read errors, while those old ones with lots of room and much stronger signals on the disk, they are still legible.
LOL!! U R completely ignoring the difference in the quality & precision of the read/write hardware & focusing only on the surface density =)) It's like pretending a clay blob is more durable & reliable than a knife edge because one occupies more space LOL!!! NEWS FLASH! Atoms R very small, & as long as U R @ 1 or more, U can orient a 'magnetic charge' on it, & if U got a 'read head' that is 1 atom wide, with a thousand atom 'buffer track' between the written areas, that's gonna' B super-reliable even though it's super-thin & tiny overall.
Ignoring the quality of the discs themself I see. Those coatings did vary. Maybe not in chemical composition, but certainly in density.
Wha......???? Both Atari and IBM gave you exactly 360K per double density disk and 180K for single density. The difference is that IBM drives are all double density so they never bothered with single density. That and you can format IBM disks with bigger sectors so as to get over 400K (1920K for quad density micro-disks).
You really thought that you could store 600MB on a 1980's floppy disk?
(and that 600+600=1.2?)
Very informative video. I showed it to my kids so that they appreciate the technology now. Thank you!
Really cool. I loved the feel and sound of putting in The Last Ninja into my C64 which I might add, was all the more enjoyable after putting up with the cassette player for most of my C64 lifespan. The floppy drive was only for rich people and the one I got was still second hand
why would you go to the effort of clicking dislike on a video like this?
*****
It makes more sense than clicking dislike for no reason, or you replying to my comment.
It's probably because of the guest speakers. On the last video a few people were complaining about the guests, and I've seen one person doing it on this one. Personally I don't mind the guests because they're some of my favorite youtubers, but people like different things and their opinion is just as valid as mine.
i saw videos with cut kitties with some upvotes. i bet that some people is always grumpy
Cut kitties or cute kitties? There is a difference.
+ChaoticCHRIS22 I'm 13 and LOVE old computers. I have an IBM Thinkpad 1996.
"Nobody was using 8" disks in 1983". Well, I have to correct you there. My father's business had several PDP-8s which all used 8" drives for data storage, program storage, word processing, etc. We used those 8" floppies well into the 80's!!
Well.. When I used the word "nobody" I wasn't being literal. That's like saying nobody is using 5.25" disks in 2016. For the most part that's true.. but I still use them, along with other enthusiasts..
Ok, I'm sorry for taking you so literally! (I really thought that's what you meant, like it was a dead tech like punched cards). How about a followup on how floppy disk copy protection worked back then, when companies would use "half-tracking" and other schemes to prevent simple disk-to-disk copy programs from working? And then programs like Locksmith which defeated these schemes!
+The 8-Bit Guy In an 1985 episode of the TV series Tales From The Dark Side called Word Processor of God, by Stephen King, the homemade computer there used an 8 inch floppy to boot it up.
I worked a data processing job just after high school, back in 1989...they had IBM mainframes that used 8" floppies, as well as mag tape reels, as well as a 'hard drive' that was this *biiig* stack of platters. They were working on switching to a much smaller AS/400 when I left.
My junior high school had a TRS-80 Model 1 (had separate components, rather than the 'all-in-one' case you usually think of with TRS-80s. It had a 8" floppy drive.
I was always fascinated with the cassette tape drives as a kid.
I would like to see an episode about the very brief Zip Drives.
The episode would probably just degrade into clicking sounds and end in static
LGR did an excellent video on Zip drives and other IOMEGA formats that was very thorough and did, indeed, cover the Click! drive and its click of death.
For myself, I fondly remember being liberated from the constraints of floppy disks by Zip disks between roughly 1997 and 2003. I had the original, 100MB version, and I found them extremely reliable (100% for the twenty or thirty Zip disks I had), used them as backup disks (some of which I used to recover old, old files I had thought lost until I found the Zip disks in the back of a cabinet, just a year or two ago!), and also used them a fair bit to scan color photos at school, save them on the Zip disks, and then incorporate them into reports and slides made at home in MS Office.
Their popularity may have been brief, and their sequels (the 250MB and 750MB versions, as well as the Click!) may have been far less reliable, but they filled an important niche for many people for a few years around the turn of the century. :-)
11:07 A E S T H E T I C
Macintosh Plus 420
radical420gnarly
+Taels Doll I ironically liked your comment.
11:7
In 11:7?
Apple used a different way of writing data to the floppy which allowed them to get away with not having any dedicated expensive controllers.
Thanks to the genius of Steve Wozniak.
More on Computerphile's channel.
Back when Apple put some thought into making things properly...
BTW "Computerphile" is the name of the channel, it's not a person ;) It's also not run by a single person.
I believe the story is, Shugart executives didn't think much of this hacker kid Woz. He asked for some drives to experiment with, and Shugart instead gave him a bunch of broken junk drives. Woz made them work anyway, ignoring the bad index hole sensors and the track zero sensors.
+turbo pascal I know.
+Dale Mahalko. Now that's an interesting story.
You are right. The Apple systems did use a small glue logic that made the stepper and head amplifiers directly available to the CPU. So the CPU could either read or produce the magnetic phase change of the head by software. The complete sector header and manchester encoding / decoding was done in software and all of it was done by the DOS inside the Apple itself without any additional specialized hardware.
In my young days I even programmed a lot of alternative DOS options or protection algorithms making use of the fact, that you can almost freely turn the steppers and magnetic fields as needed. My friends an me used some adopted 80 track floppies after modifying Apple DOS to use half-stepping.
Oh man.. this is so long ago...
Very interesting info, i grew up with the 3½ inch floppy disks, never knew about the older larger ones.
14:37 and 5 years on you were pretty well right about that prediction. Spinning discs are still around but mainly for high capacity requirements like video.
I do not think SSDs will fully replace hard-drives. SSD works by trapping charge in electric curcuits. However, that charge dissipates over time and needs to be periodically refreshed. If you leave SSD unplugged it will loose data after 2-3 years (maybe sooner if the room is hot). This makes them utterly useless for archiving - if the electric grid drops out for over a year (due to massive solar storm or nuclear war) nearly all data on SSDs is gone.
By comparison, a few years back I've found my old computer when we were moving stuff from our old cellar after we moved. The data on the disk was still there even after spending over a decade in a room that basically had outdoor temperature all year around (4°C in winter to 40°C in summer). If that were an SSD it would be completely blank, if it worked at all...
Not to mention, there's a whole conversation about Data Density about these units. OK, SSDs are evolving in terms of capacity/cost however our good old-fashioned HDDs still has a higher growth rate in these terms than SSDs does, nowadays. Even if we start to see in a near future, for example... 1TB... 2TB... 4TB SSDs for cheap, I presume we'll still have 10-15x the capacity on HDDs for about the same cost - not so far away to today standards.
Solid State is the future? Yes, totally agree but I believe we're going to see our 'spinning friends' coexisting for a long time, yet.
That's what makes SSDs a great complementary technology to spinning drives. Spinning drives are great for archive usage, SSDs for quick read/write times and portable access. Combine them together, and you get something that's great for everything.
Teradyne Ezeri sums it up nicely; I have a 960 Pro for a system drive, various Enterprise SATA rust spinners for general data and backup. Although I clone the 950 Pro regularly as a backup (to an 850 Pro via front hot-swap bay), I also image the system drive to a rust spinner as a single image file.
Too early to tell how robust Intel's Optane technology is in this regard, Intel hasn't yet fully explained how it works.
Btw, the 950 Pro is an excellent upgrade choice for older motherboards because it has its own boot ROM, ie. the mbd does not need to have native NVMe boot support.
Dylan, what kind of hard disks? They vary enormously. Consumer drives are not designed to last, whereas there are plenty of SCSI disks out there still running ok after 30 years.
Not an argument. Old SCSI disks are often still working ok simply because they were built to last. They don't do that anymore, warranties are shorter. You're talking as if all drives are the same, but they're not. There's a reason old IDE was cheap, while SCSI was not. Having said that, certain models of SCSI disk were not built to the same standards. I own maybe a thousand SCSI disks, I've been working with and testing them for a long time.
i was born in 2004 and i am yet to see a floppy in person and i want to, i love old tech
360Games my friend born in 2003 (i was born in 2004) found sealed disks in a trash can and they work fine
I'm born in 1999, and I've seen lots. (all 3.5")
360Games I was born in January 2001
Get some on eBay
I was born in the year 2000 so my dad has some spares from when he had old computers back in the day. Never used one tho
Very informative and valuable channel. I subscribed.
Speaking of how fast the disc drives were, I loved how fast the action replay mk6 cartridge made the 1541 dive run, talk about night and day transformation.
Feeling nostalgic. I've used them (8", 5.25" and 3.5") all.
I missed the 8" I started with an 8088 and 5.25" and a weird tape drive that was louder then anything I ever heard pc wise..
I remember touring an air force base back in the early 2000's and they showed me their flight simulator. I was shocked by how out dated it was. The military was using those old school 80's hard drives that were the size of washing machines and held like 5 megs. Then they had racks of computers and one isle was missing and the guy showed us a laptop and said this whole isle was replaced with this Toshiba laptop. The A/C bill for this setup was so big I can't remember anymore but I want to say at least $25,000 a year in electricity to the point that it would have paid for the replacement hardware. And on top of that it looked worse than Microsoft flight simulator. The government is incredibly incompetent and wastes money like crazy.
So cool seeing other people talk about the Amiga & older machines of that era, as my dad tought me loads. I thought all of this would be lost in time because everything is always about the SNES or the Mega Drive. I grew up on Amiga 500 games (Walker, F-18 Intercepter, Humans) & learning D-Piant.
always fun to learn about old but cool tech.
In 1986, I burned my parents house down. (Shut up, it was an accident.)
When I noticed the fire, the first thing I grabbed was my trusty C-64 and my 1541 floppy drive. Well dammit... I forgot all about the box of disks. They were soaked with 120,000 gallons of water and severely smoke damaged. I opened the casings and cleaned 'em up the best I could. And wouldn't you know it... MOST of them still read flawlessly - even without the casing. I had to leave the top off of the 1541 and repeatedly clean the read head, but even after being through a house fire, the data still held.
How did you start the fire? Genuinely interested.
he let the smoke out
Rick Davidson yesterday i smashed a floppy disk many times and it still read
Wow, talk about next level data protection ._.
Well that was stupid.
A serious omission is the 100 Mbytes magnetic Zip drives of the early 90's. They are not floppy disks but neither hard drives.
Hard disks won't be obsolete for at least a decade because they can store economically enormous amount of data. However as a storage method for the operating system and programs, they have already been obsolete.
Also during the mid 90s at the era of CD-ROM and hard disks there were data controllers with RCA video input and output for video cassettes. A 180 minutes VHS tape could store 4 GBytes in 1996 which is very impressive for that time. Certainly was not a fast but a very cheap backup solution.
Floppy disks until 1997 were very common because CD recordable drives were very expensive. Zip drives were quite affordable but Zip disks weren't popular and a common method for sharing data with friends. So despite the enormous read only 650 Mbytes of CD-ROM the 1.44 MBytes of floppy disks were the only way to share data between users without internet.
By the way the read/write capability of floppy disks was a way of viruses spreading. With the advent of affordable CD-ROM drives during 1994 virus couldn't spread easily until the internet became ambiguous.
One of the first desktop computers I used had Sirius format 5.25” floppies, and they got more data on by varying the spindle speed depending on how far in the head was, which was musical. In fact, we had a weird hybrid desktop that could boot switch between c/pm in Sirius mode, and ms-dos in ibm mode. We were very excited because we had the first 20mb hdd in the building! (a museum) - this was in 86
My Amiga 500 and diskettes were my attic, in the Florida heat and humidity for 15 years. It still works, and ALL of the diskettes are still readable.