$3.99 floppy disk grab bag
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ก.ค. 2024
- Is it a good idea to buy a bag of used floppy disks from the thrift store? Let's find out...
Time flow:
0:00 Introduction
1:13 Unbagging
2:10 IBM PS/2
2:57 What's on the disks?
9:41 Computer viruses
10:16 End result
#RetroTech #VintageComputer #FloppyDisk - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Oh, that homeopath disk is a heck of a find. Dunk it in a bucket of water and you'll come back to find a DVD-R.
I'm surprised they sold these. Most thrift stores toss used disks right in the trash.
There was a thrift store who refused to accept adding machines is an old calculators.
I wish I had thrift stores like the ones on Vwestlife's area.
They know their customer (yes, one customer).
I used to work at one, we used to throw them out along with VHS tapes. No one buys them
@@WilliamHollinger2019
Come again?
The CompactFlash memory card you showed as an example of new technology was first released 30 years ago (1994), only 8 years after the 3.5 inch floppy was released (1986).
After my short introduction to Yoruba (a language of Nigeria e.g.) and countries such as Kenya, the Christian names like Henry, Tammy, Richard and Carrie sound familiar - maybe the labels and files about Nairobi, Barclays bank in Kenya and possibly 'Kenyan States' are connected. Also that homeopathy, AA movement, the psychology of Carl Jung, the Boyds, etc could link to all those disks. Even when not, it's interesting to just see old disk material and imagine old connections between people and their affairs. Missionaries brought about that 'Love of God' terminology and made the ppl change their names into Christian ones, now many are changing them back to original African ones. As these countries were once colonies, the returning slaves had English names often that are being changed by the ppl.
*Labelled as "Housewares" probably they thought them as coasters..*
most of the young people working there are under 30 I bet, probably born in 2000 or 2005 lol
@@raymondleggs5508I was born in 2000 and I know what floppy disks are
They could also be used as wall decorations, especially if they don't work perhaps? Some people put records up on the wall, some may put floppy disks!
i work for the company these were sold from!! we mark almost all of our bagged items as housewares as usually we have a "bag wall" for miscellaneous donated items, like floppy disks! for example, i bought a Garmin NUVi GPS from the one i work for and it too was marked "decor/houseware bags"!!
@@raymondleggs5508i was born in 2005. ive never seen anyone my age working at a thrift store, but maybe
Bloody hell!
In the US you can find not only old computers but floppy discs in thrift stores?
Here in the UK the computers would end up recycled and discs would get shredded for data protection. I once tried to buy a floppy DRIVE from a charity shop that accidentally left it on the shelf, took it to the till and they looked at it and basically said they couldn't sell it because of data protection and it would be destroyed. I told them it was an empty drive and they just couldn't understand how there was no data on it.
I have storage boxes full of 3.5in mostly shareware programs I tried (that didnt work) will need to get to the end of the garage to find them. I am overrrun with CDs though
@@highpath4776 An Amiga I bought came with over 100 shareware floppies.
Back when when a CD-ROM drive cost £Hundreds a friend paid for his by buying CDs of shareware (at about £30 each) and running a shareware library selling the individual programs on floppies at £1 each.
Yes, this, and many second-hand electrical items are not permitted to be sold for "safety reasons", unless it can be examined and tested by qualified personnel, which is normally uneconomic to do. Also, charity shops tend to carefully value items by checking recently sold prices on eBay. The story about the empty drive really says it all.
5:38 I believe that label says Barclays, possibly the bank?
Is this the version of quicken skylar ised to help ted?
Before I even read your comment, I assumed barclays as well; so +1 on this.
I can read that as Barclays also. Just saying!
You mean it has nothing to do with Lt. Barclay from The Next Generation?
"Decor/houseware" because who wouldn't want a bunch of these Save File Icons to put up on the wall? 😊
So many programs these days get rid of the floppy icon as the save icon, they use some weird non-standdard graphic instead.
@@dlarge6502 Apparently programmers are dropping their save icons off at Goodwill 😄😄😄
Do you watch Michael MJD?
beer glass coasters?
Decorative 3D-Printed save icons
Goodwill and other thrift stores around here have no problem at all putting out all manner of computer media and even old disk organizers. They've even put out external hard drives for sale a time or two.
As recently as the early 2000s, 3M/Imation might still have been making new 720K diskettes. There was at least one Wal-Mart around here that continued to stock and apparently could sell them. I should have bought every box they had, until they had no more!
Yeah, but it's really dependent on who runs the local Goodwill branch in your area, because they all have different standards for what they do and do not accept for sale in their stores. For example, all the local stores in my geographical area (mid-Michigan), are very restrictive on most electronics they do accept, and thus have almost nothing at all in regards to computers and related equipment (same with the Salvation Army in my area, which I've never found anything really worth buying from them ever). They also don't sell online. But, from what I've seen on ebay and Goodwill's own websites (plural, they have two websites that stores who want to sell online use, with or without access to eBay on their own), some regions sell any manner of electronics at a range of prices and inspection practices, from the oldest audio equipment to brand new computers, all at usually rock bottom prices (with the catch being they all need to be assumed that they need some level of repairing to be fully functional, and paying for shipping and not being able to return the items).
Kevin, you are the only TH-cam channel that I have subscribed to. I really enjoy your videos. I can see the passion behind each of your videos and I also like you are not trying to make your videos look super cool with fancy graphics etc Your videos are simply interesting. Period.
Yes, that's true- good observation- his videos represent how TH-cam used to be before everyone went all commercial. I like this style- it's how it should be.
Old computers and hardware bring to me a sense of nostalgia for a time when you needed to have some knowledge of how to operate a computer, and manually manage your disks and files. When something didn't go right, a well paid and respected technician would come to your cubicle or office to address it. Now, it's all done remotely, no human contact and outsourced to India, where US minimum wage is a coveted salary there.
"We're gonna retry retrying"
Yo dawg.
X-hibit approved
Last month I was lucky to find multiple box of 25 floppy for 99 cent in the bargain bin of my local home hardware of all place. They are unbranded but so far they work.
C'mon man, we need to know what was on "Carrie the love of god"??? 🤔
5:44 Barclays, not Barcelona 😂
I think Barclays ( a bank) not Barcelona.
Yup Barclay
I love that your content has stayed the same over a decade.
I was so excited when I found a sealed box of floppy disks the other day at goodwill for $2.99, as well as a sealed box of DS/DD disks for $10. These days it felt like such a score which is kinda sad :/
I was at a flea market a few years back and a guy was selling boxes of floppies for $0.10/each. That's a good deal. ($0.10 each box, not per floppy.)
@@sbrazenor2 nowadays you're more likely to see someone selling no name boxes from the end of the floppy disk era for like $20 a pop because "I know what I got no low balls"
When I had to buy them new they were closer to $15 back in the day, so that's still cheaper than new :)
A few years ago I went to a car boot and stumbled across several 3" discs. Yes, 3 inch, not 3.5
@@dlarge6502That was a really short-lived format. I think it was mainly in one certain laptop.
Nice find! Always cool to see floppies saved, a lot of times they are just thrown out. Something just as common as CRTs is now becoming harder to find, again like CRTs. At least deals do appear and it’s nice that you got a good amount of older floppies! I do have a good amount of floppy disks but it’s always cool to find more. I can definitely use them with my Mavicas or an older PC setup. Great video!
VHS, Beta, cassettes, reel to reel, zip disks and more also can fall into the must saves too, as not only do you never know what could be on them, but they are becoming more scarce (of course) as people just dump them just because they are 'obsolete' in their eyes.
Definitely, CRTs are just an obvious example because they are large and “old”. But yeah, pretty much anything older that was super common is pretty hard to find. At least depending on what it is and when it was last really used.
@@TheOriginalCollectorA1303 Actually the same with cars. There are now more E Type Jaguars in the U.K. than some 1980s rep-mobiles that sold by the million.
I bought a vintage HP calculator from my local thrift store last week for 3 euros and they classified it as "household goods & antiques" on the receipt.
Damn, what model?
@@themaritimegirl HP-32S
@@retro_tech That's a great find for pocket change!!
the what's on the disk is my favourite segment
A couple of years back I bought an unopened sealed box of diskettes and rest knowing I’ll never take the seal off. Probably my favourite display piece.
Rummaging trough old VHS tapes is rewarding. Lots of people is getting rid of thier stocks, but they don't know really what's on them. Most of them have recordings of late '70s and up til late '90s movies. Those from the '70s/'80s (most of the in Mono sound) are superb find. Smokey and the Bandit has majority of engine sounds recorded straight on the set. Thundering and roaring Pontiac V8 sound magnificent compared to DVD/Blu-ray 5.1/7.1 remixes!💪
Firearms discharging from original Mono (The Terminator) recording pack quite a punch compared to rerelease 💥💥💥
Tapes with recordings of Motorsports from '80s? Bingo!🏆
I've been converting all my home video to digital, there's loads of old TV on them too and it's very interesting. Watching the news from 2002 and it's almost exactly the same as they say now, immigration, war, taxes, rising costs etc... Nothing has changed at all.
Personally I find the adverts more interesting than most of the programmes. The latest car for £6999.
Man so many double density disks. Good buy!
omg, I totally forgot that in the DOS era you had to have drivers for every program and not just for the whole OS
Try using USB on Windows 95. You need a different driver for each brand of USB stick !
@@MrDuncl I never tried that because they weren't available yet when I used win95
When my sister-in-law's dad died, she let me go through his vintage stuff. I got *so many* boxes of DD 5.25 and HD and DD 3.5 floppies. A lot of them have old taxes from the '80s and whatnot, so I have a lot of work ahead of me before I ever put (some of them) up for sale.
Floppy disks are so hard to find in used stores nowadays. Because these go to e-waste due to privacy concerns, thankfully some stores are selling them. I wish I could find 5.25 floppy disks, because those are the ones I want for my IBM computer and my friend has a Tandy computer he got from school that closed down.
I have a few boxes in some places, and I think RMC The Cave has some
@@highpath4776 that’s nice, but I wish there’s more places to buy other than museums. Because I hate how there’s barely any places even online to find 5.25 inch floppy disks that you need to even operate these old 8 bit computers!
Try with the old Norton Disk Doctor (4.5) utility to recover the QLAN floppy.
I wouldn't delete all those personal data. If they didn't care about formatting or destroying it you should be free to go about exploring this stuff. It's half of the fun when it goes to retro computing.
I agree.
As long as you don't use it for personal gain you are free to own it all.
I like buying old Acorn computer HDDs off eBay to find old software and I've found a few good files too.
They were probably from someone doing a house clearance who didn't know any better.
I heard in the late 2010s that a young kid said "Ooh, someone 3D-printed the save icon!" when shown an actual floppy disk.
You can avoid potential virus problems by checking them with a Mac or checking them wit a modern PC (anything with windows 2000 or later) or even an amiga, at least for the 720k disks.
Ted beneke loves the quicken
That Tandy you have brings back memories.. playing with them in Radio Shak when at the mall. I still want one, im jealous of you lol .
I found a bunch of NOS DD disks in individual plastic sleeves in a disk storage box at Value Village, the price was just on the box so I got a good deal.
I still have the original 3,5" floppy disks
for my Amiga 500 😺👍🕹️.
I also have the original 5,25" floppy disks for my Commodore 64 😺👍🕹️.
A big retrospective like 👍🕹️
from Vantaa, Finland 🇫🇮.
I recently went through a couple hundred disks, Amiga and PC. Viruses are defiinitely a problem, I started running all disks through F-Prot first, because boot sector viruses are nasty.
As for formatting I do suggest writing an empty disk image on the floppies with VGAcopy. Doing that several times is really good for reviving dodgy sectors.
I'm in the same camp as you. I like a mix of both vintage and modern for the use of these old computers.
12:11 spinrite can often fix old floppies enough to read something.
For some time now I've been trying to find a (not ridiculously expensive) degausser for floppy disks, the issue is that I need one that runs off 220/240V. I can see they're readily available on the US electronic bay website, but obviously these would all be 110/120V. I'm almost to the point where I'm tempted to get one, and use it with a step-down transformer, but it still wouldn't be a cheap solution.
I knew I should've picked up that brand new box I saw of them the other day. Think they were Memorex discs. It was just kinda strange seeing them still sealed in a box.
I've found packs of used floppy disks from Goodwill and other thrift stores quite a few times. Sometimes, the floppy disks still have files on them.
I have an old Brother Disk composer hardware sequencer (PDC-100) that uses double density floppy's. So I know what you mean. Very hard to find these days. Post Script : I have that same bulk tape eraser from Radio Shack! 😊
I never knew Brother made a MIDI sequencer, just reading about it now, interesting. Is yours still working ok?
I wish I had thrift stores like the ones on Vwestlife's area.
About 15 years ago I saw an online auction listing for two sealed 100 disc packs of BASF branded 3.5" 1.44mb floppies, came with brand new labels as well.
Got them for basically the price of shipping and still haven't run out of them! As for double density around the same time I also acquired some guys old Amiga floppy collection of some 300 odd discs of mostly pirated software, gotten some good re-use out of them as well.
That bulk tape eraser was the ultimate virus cleaner back in the day. Any infected floppy would be virus free in seconds.
That bulk tape eraser can only run for 1 minute before you have to leave it off for 30 minutes! Must get pretty warm inside 🔥.
Greetings from Florida I always enjoy your videos
Greetings from Nevada, I enjoyed your comment on his video!
If you really want to go the extra mile trying to recover that QLAN program, you could load up Spinrite and give it a try. I forget if Spinrite II will test floppies, or just the newer versions.
8:13 Please I must know what in the world is in that ROBOCOP file? 😂
Im sure once they phase out completely, there would be individual productions making their own floppy discs to satisfy the demand
There is a business in the US that acquires and resells old floppies all over the world
I already had trouble finding DD disks in the mid to late nineties when I was still using an Amiga. DD-formatted HD disks sort of worked but there was no guarantee that another double density drive would read them. They were also quite unreliable, but I felt the quality of disks in general declined noticably in the late nineties.
They most definitely were worse in the late 90s. A couple of years back now I went through about 50 or more floppy disks, these were from an amiga, mid to late 90s. Unbranded blue ones, and a at least 2/3 of them the glue had degraded to the point the spindle holding the floppy disk media in the middle had detached. I actually threw the rest of those away because it was only a matter of time before the working ones became effectively useless as well.
My Amiga 1200 is an escom model. Escom used HD drives, the OS only supports DD capacities but a HDD disc would work fine in that machine, just formatted to DD.
Escom modified the floppy port in a nefarious way. They short-circuited the ready signal with the disk change signal in order to use a standard PC drive (which does not provide a ready signal by itself). This way the Amiga accepted the drive, but unfortunately this rendered many game track loaders unusable. AmigaOS did indeed support HD floppy drives, but these had to run at half speed, otherwise the Paula chip could not keep up with the data rate.
@@dataterminal Those unbranded blue ones, the favourite of shareware libraries, were a fraction of the cost of branded discs from Sony or 3M.
HUGSR DIck Void -- In the late 80s I was trained to use the new '386 Daisy computer designe software which used these new small disks instead of the older 8" floppies to store schematics. These machines formatted the 3.25" floppies in their own special way which were not compatible with anything (such as IBM or clone PCs) as they ran on Unix. That or something similar may be your case here.
I have used Daisy as well. I believe the systems we had had one 80286 processor shared between two users !
Favorite channel. Pls next video :))
loved it
Bringing back memories of thumbing through my old disk rolodex. Pretty much all were hand labeled copies I made from friends who also copied from friends lol. Wolfenstein, Lotus, Duke Nukem, WinTrek, WP, After Dark, X-wing, Flight Sim, SimCity, Civilization, system discs etc. The original file explorer
I have quite a lot of both sizes of floppy discs. I should start checking them out.
Being an Amiga user is kind of a pain because the platform never really adopted HD disks. DD disks became quite scarce already in the 90s.
An Amiga I bought came with over 100. All of the Generic plain blue type used by shareware libraries though.
@@MrDuncl I prefer the ones without logos on the shutters, especially since most of them had the logo oriented for the label to be on the bottom despite the fact that it was the norm to have it on the top for Amiga disks.
0:20 - Agreed. Irreplaceable parts will inevitably break down. Better functional than a paperweight.
2:30 - I made a HUGE mistake back in the 1990s, using an IBM at work and saving on DD disks in 1.44MB drives. It wrote to 720KB disks as 1.44, and when I tried to read them on other machines, I couldn't. I had to pay for time on an IBM and copy stuff onto DD disks, which thankfully worked.
9:50 - Look for a copy of F-Protect on the Internet Archive. The last DOS only version (v3.16f) came out in 2009. That should adequately deal with any 1990s viruses.
This is the retro computer equivalent of buying blank VHS tapes (at a thrift store/on eBay) & just seeing what's on it
This is nice.
I agree with you on the floppy drive thing nothing beats the real deal I kinda roll my eyes when I see some TH-camrs using a floppy emulator. So far all my old floppies and drives work well with the exception of a 3.5 and 5.25 combo drive that is sadly dead if I recall correctly
I run FPROT on any uncknown diskettes I put into my rigs - You'd be surprised how many times I've found ancient viruses - formatting won't remove boot sector viruses.
Formatting a floppy will remove all boot sector viruses.
Formatting a hard drive partition won't remove viruses in the master boot record area, perhaps this is what you are thinking of. Floppies don't have an MBR.
@@eDoc2020 I'll have to try that - I have a bunch of infected disks, I'll copy one on a sacrificial hard disk and try to format the diskette.
Labeled "Decor/Houseware". The one who labeled it had obviously no clue, and said, "hey, some save icon shaped coasters".
5:50 - "Barclay's." Might refer to the UK bank?
Nice 👍 I've got 5 old 3.5" floppies that are still around from back in the day.
Edit
Come on do you really expect us not to snicker?
You've what 5 old floppies?
My mom bought one kislux and she loves it. It had been there for over 10 years when she went out with it.
airlines and the japanese would like a few of these --- true story, airplanes in the air with passengers are sometimes floppy disk supported
I'm always looking for DD Disks to use on the Amiga. But. like you say, they are getting really hard to find at a good price.
Good 👍
Unbagging therapy.
I did wonder for a moment if the DD disks giving General Failure errors could have been formatted as HD, which was possible with some drives that didn't use the sensing hole (such as on the first PC I ever used, a Compaq Deskpro 386/20e), but most other drives that use the sensing hole then couldn't read them.
I'm a bit of both too. I use my quad floppy controller on a few machines so I can have a 3 1/2, 5 1/4 and a gotek, but I use spinning rust for drives. The NuXT box is deliberately a monster, because it's a 'media converter', with a gotek, 1.2M, 1.44M and 360K drive and a scsi CD drive (because it's a NuXT v1 board, so no extra IDE connector).. sadly, can't burn on it because it's an 8088/V20 and cli tools need higher. Most of the rest of the machines (at least all the ones with "names" (IBM, Dell, etc) are all OEM'd as much as is possible).
I use some new stuff inside the computers, but the outside needs to look stock.
I used to format HD 3.5" floppies to Double Density to transfer data from my Commodore 64 using a 1581 drive and the program Big Blue Reader. Worked pretty good. The trick was to cover up that hole opposite the write-protect hole that told the floppy drive it was an HD disk. It had to be an opaque sticker, though. If it was Scotch tape, the light would shine through, and it wouldn't work. Write-protect stickers from 5.25" floppies did the job perfectly. If you didn't cover that hole, HD drives would think it was an HD floppy, and couldn't read from it.
I went the other way and drilled holes in my DD floppies to make them HD. it worked quite well for games, most lasted many years until we moved to CD-roms and then the interwebs. I think I still have a box full of them, but haven't tried them in 25 years.
@@Blackadder75 I did that as well... and then discovered I didn't have any DD disks to copy programs from my C64 to my PC to run on an emulator. So I wound up having to cover up the holes I had drilled. I was a bit surprised that the C64 could format the HD disks to DD with the hole uncovered, no problem, as the 1581 was a DD drive. But the PC couldn't read the disk at all unless the hole was covered. I'd have thought the HD drive would be able to recognize the formatting on the disk, and adjust accordingly, but apparently not.
@@FlopsyHamster I didn;t know any C64 disk drive could read any 3'5 inch disks... I thought it was 5¼ only
@@Blackadder75 The standard floppy drive for the C64 was the 1541 drive which was a 5.25" drive. But, near the end of its life, Commodore released the 1581 3.5" floppy drive. The drive was virtually useless to most people as there were no games or other commercial software released on 3.5" disk. It was really only for enthusiasts. It also had it's own proprietary formatting, so it couldn't read MS-DOS formatted discs... unless you had the program Big Blue Reader.
I'm in both camps too, I try to use original hardware as much as I can, unless I really have no other solution... Like on the Compaq Deskpro EN I restored last week, had to shoehorn in a 1TB SATA HDD, and a PCI SATA card..
Who'd have thunk that disks would give a sneak peek into another persons life, like finding an old desk jotter pad. Question about the disks you erased - do you risk peeling the labels off or do you leave them on so they keep their "character"?
I miss the good old days
A Tandy 1000SX had an afterburner - oh it was s PSU's fan. ;-)
A directory usually shows up as 0 Bytes....
I thought that too but might want to check as on the next floppy which was also a Quicken one the QS folder was 34 bytes. It all depends on how FAT works, probably FAT12 in the case of these floppies.
Seems like not that long ago that I had hundreds of these. I'm sure there are some in the garage somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find them.
Plus the old technology cards are beautiful.
How do you store floppy disks so they don't get damaged over time? I've been trying to get a batch like this but almost every time I buy some they seem to have small patches of mold or moisture damage on the magnetic tape
I wonder if AOL will still send a floppy version if you ask?
Maybe they were labeled as home decor because the person doing the labeling thought they were drink coasters 😅 also can I use the bulk tape eraser on my brain? So many bad sectors up there.
I think that's actually a trendy thing to do with them...idk if that's better or worse! 😂
I might still have a flaky 2.88 IBM drive , depends where the box it was in is.
I don't know if the current version of SpinRite still allows it but you could run it on a floppy disk it might be enough to get the data?
You MUST! insert Volume L: into drive DF0
Error validating disk
Key 880 checksum error
[Retry] [Cancel]
When you read something like this in the olden Workbench 1.x days, you knew you were in trouble.
You could maybe try cleaning those disk with a disk cleaning tools and isoprop before testing and deciding if they are salvable or not?
2:11 What a PS/2 gem!
I think I'd try Scandisk (or similar) on that floppy whose data you can't read.
Superbe video. Thrift stores do not exist in Argentina...
Could.you post the contents of the doc fikes, but change the names?
The Matt McCarthy of Floppy Disks!
Since these were probably made by business age adults they are now all retired in Florida now or passed away.
wowowow
6:50 that's a directory, cd d3 [enter] dir [enter]
I fell for it myself, but on second view it appears to be a file with the extension .dir.
I have a lot of old computer stuff, floppies 5 1/3 and 3 1/2 but mostly HD. I have an original 10MB Winchester hard drive, which was working when I removed it from the old XT. Let me know if any of this is of use to you. I am not looking to sell, just want to pass this on to someone who may use it.
I live NW of Allentown, PA, so we can meet up somewhere between our location.
Dave.
I thought I was old, but I have never called them "diskettes"
I've found boxes upon boxes of disks at the local dump's recycling area. Haven't had to pay for any that way. Also where I found a box with five dirty VIC-20s and a C64 (just the base units, but all mint inside and all still work).
my house got struck by lightning while watching this video,