💾 Is it a good idea to buy used floppy disks? 💾

[@SvetCookie]

SUSIE was an industry standard gate-level logic sim by Aldec from the 80s that was generally used in conjunction with OrCAD (which is still maintained today). Looks like it's not archived anywhere on the internet, sadly

[@TheRailroad99]

Interesting. He should archive it Edit: damn, already formatted. Too late :(

[@Trekeyus]

@@TheRailroad99 That's one thing I hate about videos like this people think that stuff's archived and erase it without checking to see if it's archived first.

[@FoxerTails]

I had a feeling one of those may have been unarchived. That's a shame.

[@rager-69]

Also the Xilinx and VHDL would mean someone was doing FPGA work, perhaps at the EE Department at the University of Calgary.

[@straightpipediesel]

@Rex Warden Somebody has a hoarding disorder...

[@thomaskendall452]

Believe it or not, I still have a client who sends me files on 3.5" floppies via snail mail! (He's 87 and wants nothing to do with the internet.) So I got a 3.5" USB floppy drive for about $20. It, and his 30-year-old floppies, work just fine on my Windows 10 machine.

[@fartking2845]

Smart guy. Internet today is a minefield. trolls, hackers, spam, fake dating profiles that wanna 'hook up'.

[@V77710]

What does he store on their documents to print?

[@thomaskendall452]

@@V77710 He gives me text, which I then typeset using a DTP. Then I print them out and snail mail him the pages.

[@bezoekers]

​@@fartking2845Sounds just like real life then.

[@Blackadder75]

@@fartking2845 what a BS, I have been using the internet for 30 years and nothing of that has ever bothered me , sure you need to take a few very basic precautions, but then it's perfectly safe to use the internet, only the rampart growth of advertising will bother you, and there are ways to avoid that too.

[@ReyMysterioX]

The VHDL code might have been interesting. The disk labelled Xilinx, Susie and that VHDL code make clear that there was somebody involved with FPGA development.

[@LynxSnowCat]

or education. (edit: still would have been neat to see if they were working on/from a commercial design.)

[@thejoneseys]

Having grown up in the tape and floppy disk era I loved this! I still love the sound of a floppy disk drive 👍🏻

[@volvo09]

And the chunky clicking of old hard drives. Having an old computer with flash based storage takes away the charm.

[@OldAussieAds]

Especially the Mac Plus's (and subsequent Macs for the next 10 years) disk drive. It's like music.

[@millsyinnz]

I remember floppy disks as a student. Really fun working on an assignment and and then having it vanish from your PC and the disk because it is corrupt, having to redo it from scratch. Amazing how we could fit so much stuff on them, even though it was only 1.44MB. The text data files I worked with at my old job were generally larger than that. I left all that behind when I got a 64MB USB drive in 2003.

[@the_kombinator]

I think I only ever lost my work ONCE on diskettes. 3 years ago my work diagnostic diskette (Sysinfo, etc) FINALLY died - sector not found. Not a bad run for 20 years - I have CDRWs that are peeling apart vs diskettes going strong.

[@DanceDanceNorth]

I started with a 128 MB USB! The computers would reset to a save state after every reboot, so I also needed a CD to install a driver in Windows 98. These days, I have many drives with 128 _GB_ instead.

[@scorch527]

SC2 files are SimCity 2000 save games. It looks like this person tried recreating Harvard in SimCity 2000.

[@randyab9go188]

I'm glad to see you using the bulk eraser properly. So many people stick the disc under there turn it on rub it a little bit and while the disc is still under there turn it off. Depending on where in the cycle the current was you can actually magnetize the disc somewhat.

[@labrat810]

Well, that answers my question: "Can you use a big rare earth magnet?" no. Your description implies the alternating current electromagnet is needed to 'null' the sectors.

[@absalomdraconis]

​@@labrat810 : Yeah, it's often a degaussing process in specific (so the power level is lower with each cycle- it "inches" the media's magnetization lower with each step).

[@ericcarabetta1161]

I'm always impressed with how much code they were able to fit into such a small amount of memory.

[@tookitogo]

Well… it’s not that we store code less efficiently now, it’s that we have a TON more code. We have layer after layer of abstraction nowadays. The downside is that it consumes resources (both memory and CPU cycles), but what we get in return is far, far better code portability, as well as stability (by denying direct hardware access in most instances). Not to mention that modern software plain and simply does a lot more.

[@videotape2959]

They had talented programmers back then, unlike today.

[@tookitogo]

@@videotape2959 What nonsense. Of course we have talented programmers today, too. And there were lousy ones back then too. (Look up the Therac-25 disaster…) For sure, we don’t focus on compactness on the desktop CPU as much today, since resources aren’t as tight. But you bet those optimizations are done on microcontrollers and GPUs, for example. And of course there are entire swaths of complexity that PCs of the time didn’t have to deal with at all, like the layers of code that make our devices stable and easy to configure. A modern programmer has to know and use many things that simply weren’t around in the past.

[@Pingwn]

That's the thing, constraints are the source of creativity. It's not that modern programmers are worse than those of the past, or that technology used to be "better" but that when you have many constraints on what you can do you will have to find creative ways to go around it, today we don't have many constraints on how much data we can fit on our computers or how much of it we can transfer from one to another, so people don't come up with creative solutions to fit more data in an efficient way because people don't have to.

[@paulnicholas5452]

Blow your code

[@Rouxenator]

I had an original Lemmings disk, and it too had those weird directories on them. I believe it has to do with the copy protection, so who ever made that copy did a good job?

[@davidararar]

Until this video I never knew of a relationship between 3.5-inch diskettes and the highly esteemed Turbo Encabulator. Thank you again for another fine video.

[@TheSudsy]

Being an original Amiga user i found about 60-65 % of the DD 3.5 actually work reliably, bought as used.

[@BillyBlazeTheKeenest]

Doesn't help that the Amiga format, by virtue of trying to squeeze every last drop of space out of a DD disk at 880k, made the disks even less reliable in the long run, compared to MFM formats of the same disk.

[@sneekeruk]

I have maybe 1500 amiga disks and everything I got from my friends collection all works perfectly, but he used to buy disks every week, write 'stuff' to them and then they lived in his disk box. Then I have disks that Ive bought in bulk off people over the years and because people have used them a few times and wrote over them multiple times, theyre a lot less reliable then the ones that have just been written to once.

[@ObiWanBillKenobi]

Last year at a thrift store I found some Zip disks. One of them still contained the LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU virus from about 20 years earlier.

[@dukctape]

i got a used PC running windows ME with it! still havent deleted it, haha

[@fatalfallacy]

Misusing HD disks for DD usage was already a bad idea back in the 90’s days when DD disks already became harder to come by or for a premium and I was still using my Atari ST. Unreliable as hell. Thanks for pointing out.

[@TorutheRedFox]

they're unreliable because of a different amount of ferric oxide as the amount they used on DD disks made storing data at a high density highly unreliable because of some physics stuff i forgot the specifics about

[@andygozzo72]

@@TorutheRedFox yep, the HD material needs a higher magnetic flux density, some may well work ok as DD but can be hit and miss

[@mrnmrn1]

With the current availability (or lack thereof) of 3.5" DD disks, I am considering to modify drives in order to properly use HD disks in double density mode. One just have to increase the write current to the same level as HD drives. It's not rocket science.

[@TorutheRedFox]

@@andygozzo72 afaik to have that density they had to make the material weaker so it doesn't magnetize nearby material corrupting data

[@andygozzo72]

@@TorutheRedFox no it definitely needs a stronger magnetic field, its not a lot different, but enough to make hd use at dd unreliable in many cases, 660 oersteds for dd, 720 for hd, but hd also has smaller 'particle' size in the oxide coating, so tracks can be more densely packed, ed disks are over 1000 oersteds

[@antonnym214]

Scorch might be a game called Scorched Earth. It was a popular 2D (side-view) game of two tanks shooting at each other from opposite sides of hills and such. It was then evolved into a 3D perspective view with online play and was really awesome. That was called Scorch 3D.

[@MikeDS49]

A friend used to play that way too much in the mid 90s on his IBM PC with the fantastic buckling spring keyboard.

[@macktheinterloper]

Yep, that's what I'm thinking. Got my first virus with that game. I believe it was a variant of the Shark virus. Very nasty thing, at the time.

[@sickregret]

Scorched Earth was the shit.

[@marccaselle8108]

Scorched earth was the bomb. My friend and I played it on his Pentium 133 computer back in the day

[@discocrisco]

Scorched Earth was a standard. Truly The Mother of All Games.

[@raymondleggs5508]

VSD file format is the native format of Microsoft Visio application. This format is commonly known as Microsoft Visio Drawing File. VSD files contain advanced diagrams and vector graphics.

[@Dsun4456]

The program was mainly used for circuit board flow diagrams. It came with stencils that could be dragged and dropped into a template. The files would then be converted into a dxf or dwg file. In the early 2000's, I actually worked on a layout project using Visio. I was a very young contactor and they sent two guys from Japan over for a day to train me on how to use the software for that specific proect.

[@eDoc2020]

More likely Visio Visio. Microsoft didn't acquire it until the 2000s.

[@nickwallette6201]

@@Dsun4456 Visio is used everywhere. Unfortunately. It's awful, in that typical Microsoft Office "we cared until about 2005, but now we just change the color scheme, menus, and icons every now and then" kind of way.

[@nrdesign1991]

Whoever this person was, they probably were a college student in electronics/embedded technology engineering. VHDL is a programing language for "programming" a hardware onto CPLDs and FPGAs.

[@cheater00]

oh dude, i LOVED those dyson floppy disk labels! For some reason they were just so pretty to me, even though they were really plain. The colors on those labels were great. You could see the color of the label from the back, identifying it in a simple manner... And applying them was fun, after all they were stickers, and kids love stickers, haha.

[@marks-the-spot]

I still have a few 8" floppy disks (diskettes in IBM-speak). In 1975 we used them as a data entry replacement for the punch card using the IBM 3741 key-to-diskette machines that were the size of a desk. We were impressed that one disk held the equivalent of over 1,800 punch cards and a 14" hard disk held 2.4MB of data. We were also impressed with 16KB of core memory in the main computer. Alright, alright, my "I remember when..." flashback is over.

[@petevenuti7355]

I have an unopened box, but I no longer have a drive. Do you have a drive?

[@marks-the-spot]

@@petevenuti7355 I have not had one for a long time.

[@soremuss]

Thanks for taking me back to a better time once again!

[@agranero6]

16:02 probably the previous owner was into FPGAs: Xilinx is a manufacturer of FPGAs. 21:17 It seems to be a Harvard Graphics file a graphics presentation software used before PowerPoint existed, in fact I think it was the first presentation program ever.

[@AMDXplusplus]

3:33 LGR is hacking your video via floppy disks from a 256 kbps file with LGR "audio cassette tapes".

[@farhadinho9]

This was an excellent video. Reminds me of buying used memory cards then finding others save files on there. Also pre-owned Nintendo DS games would normally have the previous owners save files on the game card. Northing mind blowing but it was interesting to see how far people got with their progress

[@Iron_Tupsu]

I just found your channel, i gotta say as this technology is outdated and by the standards of today, im hooked on learning about the tech from the 80s and 90s! ill be sticking around from now on!

[@EgoShredder]

It's a fantastic channel. I've been watching it since around 2010 I think.

[@joshm264]

A friend gave me a box of floppy disks from her dad, and apparently he punched out the HD hole in some DD disks back in the day. Needless to say, they won't be used as HD floppies under my possession!

[@vwestlife]

You may need to bulk erase them as the higher coercivity 1.44MB format may make them difficult to reformat as 720K without errors.

[@Blackadder75]

I would buy batches like these not because I will ever need floppy disks, but just because it's fun to check those old files , finding old dos games or save files , or somebody's high school report from 1992 btw , amazing that you can still find these in 2023

[@kareno8634]

18:08 did i hear a Laugh? lol That was some spiked info supplied! "Sinusoidal Depleneration": Cautions Turbo-Encabulator enabling Dingle Arm - the least of Worries.

[@eionthegod]

You see my curiosity would’ve had me opening all those files

[@TheOfficialDorianelevator]

16:27 i like the sound the drive makes when it seeks (it seeks because it tries to find a file that is in a bad sector)

[@renegonzalez6755]

Thank you for this wonderful video. It brings back wonderful memories. I own the rare 144mb Caleb "it", 200mb Sony "HiFD" and 240mb "SuperDisk" floppy variants. The 240mb is my favorite.

[@Space_Reptile]

its a shame you didnt back up some of those programs, as those will likely be lost to history now

[@fhwolthuis]

Nice to hear and see this old stuff again 😁👍🏻

[@kotto7877]

Hehe.. A few months ago, I set about to go through my boxes of floppies and test format each.. I discovered that my oldest brother, who died in 1994, had taken a couple dozen 720k floppies, drilled a hole in each (actual drill -- the holes are perfectly round), and had successfully formatted and used them as 1.44MB. Half or so of them were still readable (archives of Windows 3.0 or somesuch) and were successfully reformatted.. but I covered the holes and formatted as 720k to make them usable with my PCjr's 3.5" DD drive (yes, 720k floppy drives were made by third parties for the jr).

[@bsanchez3563]

Makes me feel young that I only remember seeing the computers with the built in floppy or 3 inch sized diskettes of the early 00s altjough nowdays from at least the 1997ish era the use of data is with most stuff.. cd or even dvd drives or dvd slot/trays nowdays for reader/writer or for a cd rip with witch music is made freely within the realm of passed around music etc etc. But not remembwring the site unless once at a thriftshop fwiw the presence of diskettes themselves or really anybody USING those.

[@nberedim]

vhdl is a programming language for modelling integrated circuits, or something along those lines

[@TheOriginalCollectorA1303]

Can’t go wrong with floppies! Nice to see most of them still work well. They are considered obsolete, but then again, the same was said for the cassette when CD became the main format. Still great to use them on older machines!

[@Dave01Rhodes]

I’ve used one of those bulk erasers to demagnetize a CRT. It made some fun patterns, and worked a treat!

[@JeffsTagtripp]

Back in the day I used to buy DD diskettes and drill a hole in them.

[@codebeat4192]

Like with recorded blank cassettes, it is always fun to find out what people put onto it. I watched the whole video seeing you changing disks to see what is on it. Funny to notice how curiosity keep people focused. 😄 Personal information is very attractive because of curiosity and to find out some info about the user. But also without personal information you can trace the origin of usage, names etc just by looking at filenames, filestamps, directory structures and labels. When you think about it, there is so much information in this general information of nothing special, it is actually really scary. Many people don't realize this. I have found harddrives with photos, videos, stories, ideas, documents, financial stuff and so on, it is unbelievable what people sell or thrown away without any care. I am not an evil guy (like many) so I don't do anything with this data but if you want to it is possible. The question is, why are people behave so irresponsible?

[@flapweb]

Simple: They are stupid enough not to realize that a lot of information or personal traces will certainly be contained in that material. The diskette itself underwent modifications in order to be used as a mass consumption product, as the first ones were too fragile to be used by lay people without them giving up on computers for this reason. For this, everything in them would have to follow the Japanese methodology "poka yoke", which in short would be something like "idiot proof" products. But really, this type of behavior is intriguing, as a result of the immense amount of people that exist..

[@TheOfficialDorianelevator]

3:33 7 months later i came back to this video and now i cant stop laughing at the audio cassette tape thing

[@fireconvoy2301]

after all this years I still enjoy watching this channel videos, 🔥

[@nirobunny]

You were right, that bulk eraser is scary!

[@katrinabryce]

Back in the day, I found that formatting a PC disk in a Mac, then reformatting it in DOS would often recover a bad disk.

[@ScoopexUs]

Absolutely. Unless they have been physically damaged inside, you can clean them and they will work as new in a clean drive. Do inspect them before potentially adding dirt to your drive heads. Some that have been stored incorrectly may have gotten dirt or mold transferred to the sleeve inside. That sleeve is in fact what determines whether a specific disk can be used: a little dirt that will not transfer onto the coating or drive heads is fine - that's what the sleeve is for - but you cannot and should not use a disk where the dirt on the sleeve may transfer onto the coating, because it could transfer onto the drive heads.

[@rager-69]

I've never heard someone refer to it as "dot bump".

[@kingforaday8725]

I have about 500 of the HD 1.44K floppys still in sealed 10 count boxes that I picked up at a thrift store for $4. Ive not found any new 720K floppys in several years. I have found used ones like you did here.

[@TorontoJon]

Another great in-depth video, VWestlife, and I think I still have a sealed box of 10 floppy disks and an open box and several used disks as well as an external floppy disk drive with a USB connection that I can connect to a laptop or desktop computer. I also still have the larger original floppy disks from the early 1980's that were actually floppy and they contain all sorts of video games for my still-working Commodore 64. :)

[@kotto7877]

Speaking of unreliable, did anyone else back in the day use the DOS "800k" tool to reformat their 5.25" DD 360k floppies to 800k on their 5.25" HD drives? I remember having a field day with it after upgrading from a PCjr (with 5.25" DD drive) to a 286 clone (with 5.25" HD drive). Much to my chagrin, such floppies didn't last long before getting bad sectors.

[@sfurta]

Diskettes with bad sectors on top side can still be used as single sided Atari ST disks.

[@janodebeer2074]

In South Africa, we call 3.5 inch disks “stiffies” to distinguish them from 5.25 inch floppies

[@VOLTRONDEFENDER4440]

that's surprising the seller sent you a couple of HD floppy's you must thank the seller for that!

[@vetar3372]

PLEASE remember to inspect the disks for possible dirt as well!!! They can get dusty or dirty if it isn't rot

[@thevacdude]

Thanks for the video, Kevin.

[@SPINNINGMYWHEELS777]

@9:45 "Julia's Resume' .. my last resume is on a 3.5 probably last accessed early 2000's. I still have the disc in my laptop bag.. haven't had a computer since the 90s that could access the disc.. it was for use at the Library - when the library would give you a floppy.

[@ericdunn8718]

I remember a similar thing when I was in the fifth grade elementary school, the teachers paid for us each to get USB drives back when they were cheap so we could all write an assignment and save it, I kept that one for many years until I lost it, along with an orange one my mother bought for me when I was doing other writing assignments. Strangely all the computers I used from kindergarten to that year exactly still had floppy drives, I just thought it was a weird slot to play with then, using the same 30 or so Compaq PCs with Windows XP, and somehow they upgraded them with no issues to Windows 7 (apart from some CRT monitors going bad over the years). In that grade, the principal came into class and said "Say goodbye to these computers!" I was happy about it then, but now that I look back I wish I could've taken one of the old ones home and put XP back onto it, I miss using Kid Pix and the whole early 00s aesthetic back in kindergarten, and I would've liked to see whatever the computer was really capable of (probably not much but it is sentimental to me).

[@SPINNINGMYWHEELS777]

@@ericdunn8718 haha awesome thanks for sharing your throwback Eric !

[@spitalul2bad]

Opening used floppy disks. Peak content.

[@garypage1963]

Wow, back in the 80s UK you rich if you had a disc drive most of us had games on tape, until the atari st and amiga 500 became affordable. All the best.

[@EgoShredder]

If you had a hard disk drive you were probably a family member of the Rothschild family.

[@akmmonirulislam3961]

I feel very emotional to see these floppy disks. I used both types in 80s with my desktop computer. Those were the days my friend...

[@brianbuddy2ACP]

Not that this is at all related to the topic of this video, but, the Wikipedia page at 12:12 misspelled the word "defense".

[@vwestlife]

"Defence" is the British spelling.

[@raccoon874]

@@vwestlife And *Canada*

[@zach446]

I love buying used disks! At worst I'll find maybe 1 or 2 that don't work when I buy 30 or so

[@coondogtheman]

I had a bunch of floppy disks kicking around so I bought a USB floppy drive and did what you are doing here. Some of them worked but were slow but files showed up and many had read errors. I had some songs on a couple of them that were compressed into lo-fi wav files but were really mp3s at a low bit rate so they would fit on the disk yet sound reasonably good. Could fit maybe 2-3 songs on one disk depending on the audio quality used. Higher quality songs would barely fit yet sound better. The filename was changed from .mp3 to .wav because these songs were used in the AOL chat rooms back in the late 90s. Could fit maybe 2-3 songs on one disk depending on the audio quality used. Higher quality songs would barely fit yet sound better.

[@SPINNINGMYWHEELS777]

@17:25 we say "cal-gry' around these parts 😎

[@THEtechknight]

VHDLs are FPGA design files. probably lost to time ones as well

[@kpjVideo]

Yeah that explains the one labeled Xilinx as well.

[@deathstrike]

The hardest is now 5.25in because there are NO portable versions of this drive. Especially if your a vintage computer collector (Have Atari 800XL w/1050 DD/Coleco Adam w/5.25in DD/Commodore 128 w/1541 DD and TI 99/4A with 5.25 DD) and they are a pain to manage! These old machines store between 80K and 170K on a 5.25 and finding functional disks are a chore and often expensive and a dice roll. Many are worn from grabbing them and "shoving" them into their respective drives. And some I've bulk bought used the old and very unreliable "notching" the reverse side of a single sided disk with a hole puncher. And yes, I know there are mass storage devices for all these computers (I have a NanoPEB flash card replacement for my TI 99/4A) but it's like VWestlife said, it's just not the same as its original storage media. And 1.2mb 5.25 floppies are not an option as vintage disk drives cannot read the higher density storage they offer. This is the downside of vintage computers. Sure you can invest in modern CF and SD card replacements ,and you can also invest in even hard drives. But it's like listening to an original album of an artist, and a CD. Sure the CD sounds great, no distortion or hiss, and it's crystal clear. But it just doesn't sound like the way the artist intended it to sound, flaws and all. Same for floppy disks. Many MANY games and productivity software were on floppies and there is just a nostalgic feeling hearing the disk spool up, the gentle clacking of the read/write head. But sadly, this will eventually fail as more and more floppies become either unusable, or can no longer be formatted. And those few left will also fail and by the middle of the century, most magnetic media will be unusable.

[@andrew-dunai]

That Clint-roll was totally unexpected!

[@idahofur]

My life was used 5.1/2" 360k floppies in bulk. You just spent hours formatting them while listening to rock music. Also due a visual inspection. Chuck the bad ones. Also keep a q-tip and rubbing alcohol around to clean off the heads. Never know when one of them like a reel to reel tape would leave gunk on the head.

[@retroaria]

Nice content, thanks. Depending on the size library you choose, it is possible to put the collection of most ATARI games on a single floppy diskette.

[@The8bitbeard]

Any time I find a box of floppy disks at a thrift store, I'm sure to grab them. I don't expect them to be around forever.

[@Markimark151]

Absolutely if those used floppy disks are cheap, also I found a used 10 pack of 5.25 floppy disks at a record store for $5, they’re the Fujifilm brand! Too bad no company is reproducing floppy disks, because there’s lots of old computers and even new USB floppy drives still available online!

[@IanThatMetalBassist]

Loved the Retro Encabulator clip, that's a classic video

[@daneberryman]

i remember first year of high school being issued with box of floppys and the last year being a usb Stick

[@dimitrioskalfakis]

these are hard times for vintage enthusiasts so if you find them cheap enough and you need them do it. it helps if you have the hardware variety and software tools to test and refresh/revive some of them i you have to.

[@FurryRaverSparky]

Could you possibly take a qtip of isopropyl to the disk that still bad sectors after the bulk erase or would the isopropyl just make them worse?

[@DreQueary]

90s baby. But i remember being mad when they started removing floppy drives from laptops. I don't know why, but I freaking loved floppy disks. I had like a box of 50 with different colors. They were like baseball cards to me.

[@videotape2959]

That happened in the early 2000's. For desktops it happened in the late 2000's. There's a lot of reasons to like diskettes. They are extremely satisfying to use.

[@ssalient]

I always used ARJ as my compression program back in the early 90's. Vividly remember when I wanted to uncompress some game that was spanned over 6 or 7 disks more than once one of these disks exhibited bad sectors :)

[@rock-steadi-cam5058]

I bought some DECtapes today!

[@bumblesby]

I learned programming in the early 1980s. I worked on IBM Midrange systems - 32/34/38. They used 8 inch floppy disks for the OS and the OS updates. We'd get a stack of them and load them in one by one. Took quite a while to do an update. Thank the gods we had a tape drive to do backups!

[@ShihammeDarc]

We shouldn't just lose the capability to manufacture old outdated technology. They need to be archived properly.

[@beakytwitch7905]

Store your diskettes in an airtight container with silica gel dessicant bags inside as well. Diskettes do absorb atmospheric moisture, which can cause the coating to smear and clog the drive heads.

[@JamesSmith-ix5jd]

Very low humidity can be equally bad to different materials, it can become brittle. 20-30% RH is the sweet spot. I would advice against storing them with silica gel, or at least only do it in very humid climate areas.

[@uxwbill]

I saw some brand new Imation 3.5" low density diskettes for sale in a Wal-Mart sometime in the very early 2000s...so I bought them all and still have most of them. I'll admit I wasn't feeling dedicated enough right now to watch you go through all the diskettes, though I might later. I was wondering for a while if you might set the DIRCMD environment variable with the switches you wanted, or if you might use any of the command recall options to save a little time. (Wow, was that kind of a nerdy thing to say. It's probably even worse that I actually remember any of that.) I have had mixed results using a bulk eraser even on "known good" diskettes. I've wondered if some floppy drives just can't cope well with the "random" junk the bulk eraser leaves behind. For whatever reason, at least some of the LPCIO chips on the market today _still_ contain floppy disk controller logic...

[@eDoc2020]

You might have better luck if you slowly move the eraser away from the disks before shutting off the power, as one would do when degaussing a color TV.

[@dumitruionica2224]

Hey, neat video! Something else than the floppies caught my eye, though... Can you please tell me which version of DOS this is? I've been looking for the very first DOS I've ever used, it was on an IBM PS/2 computer, back in about 1997 or so, and it had a white text on a blue background just like this. Since it also booted in that mode, I can't tell if that's how the monitor actually displayed text mode, or if it was the PS/2 system's default mode, or if it was the DOS system.

[@vwestlife]

I was using the MS-DOS mode of Windows 98 SE.

[@dumitruionica2224]

​@@vwestlife I see. In that case, setting the screen this way may be possible with any version. Have you added some specific configuration for it? I'm feeling really nostalgic about it, I want to have it like that as well. I was literally a kid (about 9 years old) at the time...

[@vwestlife]

@@dumitruionica2224 The COLSET utility can be used to make DOS text mode any color you want.

[@Wok_Agenda]

I find it stupid that companies stopped manufacturing floppy disks , there is a whole market out there

[@videotape2959]

Imagine an utopia where they never stopped manufacturing them...

[@Wok_Agenda]

@@videotape2959 I imagine utopias all day

[@FranklyPeetoons]

When you bulk-erased those disks at the end, it was like those movies about Nazis in which the German soldiers walked down a line of bound prisoners, shooting them once each in the back of the head

[@nonsuch]

The group that still uses floppies regularly is the music keyboard/sampler community. Even though there are new ways to get samples/programs/sequences in and out of your hardware like USB and SD floppy emulators and of course, SCSI if your hardware supports it... there seem to be a love for floppies and their continued use. I still have a few 100 of them for this purpose. I also kept any retail software on floppies I bought back in the day before they came on CD-Roms like Adobe Photoshop 2.0 that is on 27 disks lol. I did pay a few hundred dollars for it back then.

[@ropersonline]

21:07: Harvard Graphics was an early chart and slideshow program, whose functionality was somewhere between Excel and PowerPoint, but it could only do a subset of what those programs can do. See Wikipedia. And Scorched is basically guaranteed to be Scorched Earth - also see Wikipedia.

[@FlyingSucuk]

If u show this to the kidds they say : "Why did someone Print the Save Button on an 3D Printer" hahahaha

[@twocvbloke]

A few years back I bought a pack of 10x Double Density 3.5" disks, British Telecom (BT) branded (back when they also sold computers, mostly t businesses), went back to buy more, sold out, cos people are desperate for DD 3.5" disks, also got a bunch of BT branded 5.25" disks, some DD, the rest, Quad Density, which was handy as I had a Teac FD-55FR which is a Quad-density drive, which I set up and lightly modded to work as an Amiga drive, and it does indeed work, no point to it, I just like it... :P

[@EgoShredder]

I tried selling mine back in 2015 but no interest. I did sell 50 or 100 to one guy, and he claimed none of them worked and demanded a refund. I'd been reliably using them all for years and my remaining ones still work fine in 2023. I need them again now so not going to sell the couple of hundred I have left.

[@twocvbloke]

@@EgoShredder The disks I bought were brand new & sealed, probably just have said that, but yeah, I see used disks on ebay all the time and I just pass them by, given you never know what you're getting with them really... (and that guy claiming they didn't work probably was just a scammer or they didn't actually know what they were doing)

[@EgoShredder]

@@twocvbloke Yeah he said none of them worked the day they arrived. I thought that was suspicious for that amount of disks.

[@dennisp.2147]

The magnetic coercivity of the 720K media is different from the 1.44 disks. It was notorious back in the day to lose data after a few months,

[@AMDRADEONRUBY]

I really loves floppy disks still have a box full of them brand new Sony mainly really interesting thanks for the video Kevin just in time for lunch!.

[@KurticeYZreacts]

Please look at the BUTT zip file 😂😂😂😂

[@KurticeYZreacts]

@@Heike-- nah... he looked at them...

[@negirno]

It's only 256 bytes long, I doubt there is anything interesting in it.

[@tirant_blanc]

​@@negirno How can you say that? It says BUTT!!!

[@James_Ryan]

Out of the handful of 720K disks I own, they all say 'Made in England' on the back! Just started using HD disks again last year when I bought a used Sony Mavica for $10.

[@_GALLINA]

I suggest to get one of those disc driver cleaning kit (felt disk with propylene liquid)

[@AnthonyChopra]

i used to think they was CDs when i was 6yrs old. ill say this i may not use them floppys but id want someone to make new real ones again even old HDDs now those id use for the old Win2000pc i have

[@Madness832]

The bad sectors have been marked as unusable, but the rest of the space is probably fine. I had such disks, way-back-when.

[@uxwbill]

The only problem with that, at least in my experience, was that DOS appeared to would blithely write data in the bad sectors anyway. Even if it didn't, more might fail soon enough.

[@Mrshoujo]

Would it be worth your time to archive the contents of those floppies to a burned CD ROM? I did that for over 1,500 floppies years ago. I used to buy 3.5" floppies at HAMfests years ago to reformat. You can still use a floppy with bad sectors because the format process locks them out and can't be used. The storage capacity is just less.

[@eDoc2020]

"Bad" floppies are certainly still useful, I even have one with a track or two physically obliterated (light shines through the disk). The downside is you can only use them for files, you can't write images to them.

[@Eddies_Bra-att-ha-grejer]

I have a degaussing wand normally intended for CRTs that I use to bulk erase disks.

[@BennBirch]

This vid was such a tease. I thought we'd get some floppy archaeology, checking out random programs, but instead just blue balls. Also you never at any point made mention of the fact that the previous owner was a master of chaos. Who names 20 disks all called "zip files"? Like ok theyre zipped but what programs?

[@vwestlife]

If I did that, I'd get people complaining that the video is too long, as it'd probably take at least an hour to go through all the contents of 30+ disks, especially since most of them were ZIP files that I'd need to extract.

[@segarallychampionship702]

As someone who gets their blank cassette tapes from used lots, in maybe 90% of the cases you're going to be fine. I have around 100 cassettes and only a dozen of them are brand new. Of course I can't compare things like signal degradation over time, but most tapes sound fine. The worst I've seen was some cassettes from the 1970s that were shedding the particles and caused dropouts. You can't fix a part of a tape that got eaten, but that's only a part of it and to me it's a little charming, to the point where I listen to that same music digitally and I expect that dropout to be there :D. Anyways, since floppies are magnetic tapes in a different form, they should physically last a very long time, but I have no idea if the data will last as long, since they're not an analog medium..

[@SandcastleDreams]

You do know that you can still buy brand new cassettes, right? And a company called Dominion sells them retail.

[@VicTheVicar]

@2:30 Re: Taping a HD floppy to make it a DD floppy. If your format it on a Mac, with its variable disk speed, it will loose its signal even after a few months.

[@KRAFTWERK2K6]

Your Compaq Laptop reminds me of my good old trusty Compaq Evo N610c, which i had back in 2009. Always loved this Semi-Thinkpad design and the dedicated hotkeys for volume and all the LED indicators. Love your docking station for yours!! I wonder, have you ever tried blank Commodore Amiga Diskettes and re-formating them? They should be Double Density.

[@vwestlife]

Yes, Amiga disks are double-density, except for the high-density 1.76MB disks which the Amiga 4000 supported.

[@AndrewTSq]

As someone with old synths and samplers, I actually even have a bunch of unused Maxel 8" discs still in its original box.

[@coolelectronics1759]

I got kawai q80 and roland100 The roland takes a slightly smaller disk than the standard floppy diskette.

[@applegal3058]

I remember using both the smaller and larger floppy disks. I never realized that they weren't being made anymore! Our work office has a stash of old floppy disks in storage, and I'd be interested to pick through them, except our work computers doesn't have a reader in them. I tried inserting an old excel training program diskette from the office, but alas no disk reader. If those old diskettes are valuable, it's too bad we can't sell them (even the new one), as I work for a government office who operates with an abundance of security caution. Oh well.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

No old legacy system around that operates some ancient machinery?

[@applegal3058]

@@HappyBeezerStudios haha, nope!