💾 The genius engineering of the 3½ inch floppy disk 💾

A look at the brilliant physical design and engineering of the 💾 3.5" diskette.
Correction: The first computer to use 3.5" diskettes was actually by Jonos, not HP. See Tech Tangents' video • Origins of the 3.5in F...
Contains clips from:
Datamaster Ease of Use: A Documentation Case Study (1982)
• Datamaster Ease of Use...
Create Macintosh Plus disks from downloaded disk images
• Create Macintosh Plus ...
HP-150 touchscreen computer with Bob Vila 1985
• HP-150 touchscreen com...
#floppy #diskette #retro

[@Foebane72]

At some point in the 1990s I bought a game on 3.5" floppy disk that my mother objected to, and she snapped the disk in two, threw it in the trash and considered the matter closed. Later on, I fished out the disk from the trash and simply transferred the floppy disk inside to a new floppy disk case, and it worked fine. She never found out.

[@huntermcclovio4517]

you were a kid in the 1990s?? you look like you were born in the 1940s

[@tomrogers9467]

Nothing like an overly protective mother to bring out our curiosity for the forbidden!

[@Foebane72]

@@huntermcclovio4517 I'm 50 this September.

[@c5mjohn]

@@Foebane72 if you were born in '72, your were 18 in 1990. Your mom was objecting to your video games when you were an adult? Or did you mean "late 80s"?

[@yocapo32]

@@c5mjohn No, I knew some people who use the "If you live under my roof, you'll do everything I say" mentality, even if they're talking to adults.

[@Henning_Rech]

A typical 3.5'' disk has a weight of 19 g. A cheap standard letter in Germany is allowed to weight 20 g. - You can use the disk label as an address label, put a stamp on it, and drop it without envelop into a mailbox. Worked several times for me in the 1990s.

lol

[@billgates3699]

Sliding a floppy into the slot is way more satisfying than plugging in any flash drive.

[@Ou8y2k2]

Nah. I'd rather use USB-C for everything and not have to care about the orientation. Floppies were cool for the time though.

​@@Ou8y2k2you still have to worry about the orientation

[@Ou8y2k2]

No, you don't. On USB-C cables/ports/drives, one side is flatter than the other and the internals are the same. With USB-A, both sides are flat, and the internals are different which makes plugging them in a guessing game without looking at the metal. Convenience is partly why USB-C was invented.

[@billgates3699]

@@Ou8y2k2 what is your ping, atm?

[@UKCougar]

One neat thing you missed - the eject mechanism used the shutter spring, it's the shutter snapping shut against a lever in the drive which pops the disk out.

[@44CT232]

1:18 Here in South Africa, 3.5" floppy disks were known as "stiffy disks" or sometimes just "stiffies", which is pretty hilarious. Saying you have a 3.5" stiffy is not something most people would want to brag about :P

[@dadecoza]

I came here looking for this comment.

[@timvanrooyen]

lol lotsa Saffas on here

[@AaronSmart.online]

Glad someone else mentioned this

[@krisluedke9557]

And yet you might brag about an 8 inch floppy....

[@44CT232]

@@krisluedke9557 Good point :P

[@ProjectPhysX]

Last time I used a floppy was 2019 at university, for transferring spectroscopy data from the ancient lab PC to a slightly newer PC that had USB 1.0. I understand why such old tech is still in use: The Turbo Pascal measurements software just works. None of that bugged LabView crap or automatic Windows Update killing the measurements over night.

[@8BitNaptime]

Labview! Awful. Try installing the gigabytes of convoluted garbage called VISA so you can talk to a scope over a 9600 baud serial link.

[@nickwallette6201]

This is my favorite thing about old tech. (Well, OK, it might also be nostalgia goggles, but... ) CDs, floppies, Laser Disc players, tape decks, DOS and Windows 95, NES and Game Boy ... You turn it on, do your thing. No cloud, no subscriptions, no license updates, no firmware updates, no region locking (well, OK, a little bit with NES/GB), no attempts to keep you out of the machinery...

[@8BitNaptime]

@@nickwallette6201 The Commodore 64 had a Programmer's Reference Guide with schematics (although you did have to buy that guide separately) and buying parts for the 64 was as easy as walking to the tech desk in the store.

[@gabe5109]

@@nickwallette6201 You will own nothing, and you will be happy!!!

[@tribemaster101]

@@gabe5109 you will eat the bugs

[@bertiesworld]

I use one at least once a week. Every time we boot up our CNC woodworking machines. :-) Not only does one of these disks, boot the machine but it also holds quite a lot of the programs that we run. All on 1.44Mb disk space. Amazing. The only problem we have is sourcing the disks. They don't like wood dust. We have 2 boxes of diskettes available which hopefully will do for the life of the machine (its getting on to 30 years old now). Some might say get a new machine but currently the machine runs 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. Extremely reliable. And not a windows logo in sight anywhere.

[@AaronOfMpls]

If that drive ever gets too flaky, they _do_ make floppy drive emulators that take USB thumb drives or SD cards.

[@BillAnt]

I have about 10,000 brand new generic blue 3.5 disks stashed away in my basement from my Commodore Amiga days. lol No idea if they are still good or went bad from the moisture.

[@BeachcomberNZ]

Search for a guy called Tom Persky, in California. He supplies floppies worldwide.

[@Ck87JF]

If it's FAT formatted, it's probably actually 1.38MB, not 1.44. 😉

[@brostenen]

As it is not a medical equipment. Then you dont have to follow strict guide lines, in regards to spare parts. The medical field is insane in this regard, when it comes to stuff like ultra sound scanner and more advanced stuff. But since you dont have those guide lines, how about looking into Gotek drives? You have everything on a USB stick. No mechanical parts in a Gotek. I am thinking about the wood dust and the mechanical drive.

[@imagesbyraphael]

I remember we used to "double-side" 5.25 inch floppies by using a hole puncher to cut a second notch on the other edge, allowing you to insert the disk upside down and use the second side. Most disks were usually good enough quality for you to use the second side although they never marketed that way, so we effectively doubled our storage capacity with this "one weird trick"!

[@Sgt_Glory]

That's rather brilliant! Did you ever wind up with corrupted data by using cheaply made brands or did it always work for you?

[@imagesbyraphael]

@@Sgt_Glory it was so long ago, I can't remember it ever being corrupted just on the second side only but there were probably all different other challenges, like viruses

[@MrStevemur]

I never noticed any lost data on the second side. It wasn’t an ordinary hole punch, it made a neat square hole in just the right spot, if we were careful.

[@haastigespoed]

I was looking for this comment, we used to drill holes in diskettes to double capacity 😄

[@davestewart8580]

I used the same trick to double side a single sided 5.25 disk. At first I used a hole punch and progressed to purchasing a square punch marketed for that single purpose. I experienced zero data loss on the other side and confirmed the opinion that companies were ripping consumers off with paying more for double-sided disk that were "certified" double sided. I used this trick for years with various manufacturers and they always performed as well. You could also do this with a 3.5 diskette with a drill bit but small particles could end up trapped and could damage the media. I preferred a soldering iron with a sharp tip so that the hole was sealed through the plastic. Once the hole was made a 720k disk became a 1.44 disk and formatted fine. Those were good times.

[@Crabby303]

Still use them every other day when backing up data from my Yamaha QY700 sequencer. I could install a usb floppy emulator but I love the nostalgic vibe of using the floppy. Thanks for the tribute to a great design :)

[@DustyGamma]

Eh, if it still works.

[@eekee6034]

I split the difference and use a USB floppy drive with my DOS machine. :) I don't have space for more than a couple of big boxes, so my DOS machine (along with several others) is a laptop. It's a Thinkpad x61; 2007ish. I don't think there's a floppy drive available for its docking station, but its BIOS supports USB floppy just fine, and I can transfer the whole drive to copy files. But it's not all roses. I tried to take care of my floppy disks, but they failed anyway. Maybe they were cheap. And I like to try hobby operating systems, some of which don't use the BIOS but also don't support USB because USB is a pain.

[@SpiritmanProductions]

Same here with a Roland JW-50 Workstation (bought in 1993!)

[@davidsotomayor8713]

My HS "band" (actually orchestra) teacher used to give me the MIDI files to the band songs on a 3.5 in. floppy from his Korg Triton. 2002-2006 era.

[@randalldudeman4373]

Thanks for sharing! Picturing that looks great!

[@itxofficial8281]

Funny coincidence: Around the same time this video came out, I found my grandfather's old Diskettes in a drawer and decided to buy an external drive on Amazon. It was surreal hearing that typical noise the drive makes when reading the disc, while also seeing my grandfather's ancient Word documents again after all these years!

[@tayzonday]

Then 100mb Zip disks came along and tried to establish themselves in 1997, but CDRW and USB flash memory tech grew too fast.

[@jlatala4655]

.. and were cheaper (the media) . Drives were still expensive, but you had 10 CD R of 650 MB for less price than 100 MB cartridges. Also, not everyone had their jaz and zip drives.

[@ElectricityTaster]

Did not expect a tech history lesson from you. I'm not complaining. Now, if only you could leak the roseta stone to your super-cryptic chocolate rain lyrics. Can't imagine what they could possibly mean.

[@Keithustus]

Those Zip drives were great. So reliable, could use same one writing and rewriting for years. Meanwhile if you sneeze hard near a CDR it’s dead.

[@Foebane72]

@@Keithustus Zip drives were great... really? Anyone remember the CLICK OF DEATH?

[@markylon]

Grew too "quickly" NOT "Fast." These terms are not interchangeable.

[@KeenyNewton]

I’ve used these for a decade or more. But this in-depth detail about the features of the 3.5” disk made me nostalgic. Love the detail here.

[@user-yr1uq1qe6y]

The ability to write on the label is undervalued. To this day, my dad saves files to thumb drives and tries to write on them like a label. He has never understood the concept of some invisible “hard drive” and was taught in the 1980s to “save his work to the drive”, which to him is a tangible thing to take in and out and put in a physical filing system. Dude has 16gb thumb drives with exactly one tiny WordPerfect file saved on them. He has hundreds of these despite me trying to teach him…he just can’t conceptualize a “file” that he can’t grab, put in, do some stuff to, then pull out and store. It is kind of like watching a caveman compute and he’s not really that old!

[@Gnenguin]

Maybe try explaining it like this: a CD can hold many songs, each of which is a separate file

[@freeculture]

Tell him that flash memory loses its data way faster than the magnetic media of old. You do NOT store files in thumbdrives for archival. I have been using personal computers since the 80ies, i still have some floppies and they still retain their data, at least before the magnetic formulation degraded late 90ies (the older floppies are better).

[@jamesmillerjo]

Vinyl record has multiple tracks....

[@Gnenguin]

@@jamesmillerjo yes but you can't write data to a vinyl record

[@Sinoeth]

Use a spreadsheet. Number the drives and use spreadsheet as a key. Spreadsheet can be in all the drives

[@joseppuig925]

We will always have for the save file function, an icon of a diskette to remind us of this iconic storage media.

[@orbtastic]

I used to work with someone who used to keep their 8" floppies stuck to the door with a magnet. I remember having to install Win3.1/3.11, it was horrendous but not as bad as having to install office from 43 floppies and getting a disk read error about halfway through.

[@huntermcclovio4517]

yes, I agree that was annoying!! lol

[@michaelbarry8373]

the good old day's

[@ikannunaplays]

I remember installing Doom using like 30 1.44mb disks and then the last one had bad sectors making the whole 4hr process a fail and having to borrow my friend's disk 30 to start all over again.

[@andscifi]

I have "fond" memories of loading windows on all of the computers in my school's computer room. You'd take the first disk out of a computer put it in the next one, then take the second disk, put it in that computer and so on down the line. By the time you had moved all of them the first one was loaded and you started over. I missed every class after lunch, but I got to be the first one to use them.

[@orbtastic]

@@andscifi Exactly, that's where I first learnt parallel tasking. I was so glad when W95 came out and CDs made the floppy more or less obsolete. Although I did hear of W95 on floppies I didn't see it too often. Bizarrely after that job I went to work somewhere else and it was like going back in time, arsing about with himem.sys and IPX/SPX. They even had some 8086s hanging around and on the network in the late 90s

[@tylerdurden639]

I still remember how ginormous 3.5" disks seemed when I first started using them. I started out working on a computer with 4K of RAM. Had to type in every program when you wanted to run something. Was so relieved and amazed when a cassette became available. Commodore 64 with 64K of RAM and a 5.25" drive with 144k of storage seemed like a bottomless vault of storage to write my programs with. Heck, it was so much space that I even left comments on my work! OMFG!

[@h8GW]

You put metadata on your data??? You data-wasting heathen!

[@johnflux1]

I remember spending my birthday and christmas money on 4MB of RAM. Doubling what I had!

[@matiasortiz9014]

oh the DOS commands, how to forget them. i had to learn a couple back when i was just 5 years old since you had to run everything by comands, even games like prince of persia

[@rudyNok]

Things you own end up owning you....

[@nb9008]

Using the diskdrive 1541C was way better than using that ridiculous "Dataset" cassette unit.

[@chriswathen9612]

Always a shame that late-production disks from 2000s were so unreliable and gave the format a reputation for unreliability that it didn't deserve. Disks made in the 80s and 90s were usually flawlessly reliable unless worn to death. I have many from that era that still read perfectly today.

[@tookitogo]

Indeed. Out of dozens and dozens of 3.5” disks I had, I only ever had maybe 5 fail during the whole 90s. (I had already stopped using them entirely by 1999.) Every one of those 90s floppies that I have tried reading today has read flawlessly. (Of course, I only bought top quality disks back then, practically all 3M/Imation, Sony, or BASF.)

[@lordwiadro83]

The same happened with optical discs. Of those still buyable today most of them are low quality crap. Meanwhile I still own a 650 MB CD-R disc burnt in early 1998 and it is working fine despite some scratches.

[@absoleet]

I think the drives were still problematic back in the 90s, the lab PC drives sometimes couldn't read disks probably because the alignment of the stepper motor or something else got knocked off slightly. It was frustrating to do all your work and save it and then not being able to continue your work the next day. Then you'd have to try to read on the exact drive you wrote it on last and cross your fingers that it would work. You'd have to make several backups to be safe.

[@tookitogo]

@@stevesteve8098 I’m sorry they did _what_ to the coating? (And I assume you mean “sputter” not “spatter”, but I do not believe floppies used sputtered coatings.)

[@tookitogo]

@@absoleet There must have been different quality drives on the market. The drives Apple used right till the end (mid 1998, after which every new model had no more floppy drive) were extremely reliable and didn’t seem to commonly suffer that kind of alignment problem. But those drives also cost substantially more than a typical PC floppy drive. (On desktop Macs, they were all made by Sony, Mitsubishi, or Panasonic.)

[@AaronOfMpls]

Yah, there was a lot of clever engineering in the 3½" floppy. Plus the drives were rather satisfying to use, on PC or Mac. I always liked the way the disk *chunk*ed into place on a PC -- and how the eject button on our old 486 PC could almost launch a disk out of the drive! 😀 And I fondly remember the whirr of the Mac's super-cool motorized mechanism, either on my grandparents' Mac or on those at school. And while the plastic disk shutters did look and feel cheaper, I still preferred them, especially for shuttling files between school and home. The one flaw of a metal shutter was it'd get bent away from the disk over time if it got bumped around enough -- as happened with the disks in the outside pocket of my backpack. And it was almost impossible to bend the thing back into shape without ruining it. The plastic shutters _never_ permanently bent up like that.

[@2dfx]

That's what I always loved about the Macintosh manual inject floppy drives! You always got that positive tactile feedback the disk was inserted that you couldn't really replicate with the auto inject drives of previous years.

[@Kali_Krause]

The 3.5 inch diskettes are robust too!

[@CommodoreFan64]

I like the plastic shutters as well, but they where not a perfect solution either, because with some brands of disc(usually the cheap as chips clear cased multicolored disk from the late 90's/early 00's) if you accidently sat something heavy on them like a book, the shutters would crack, and the overall plastic was of a cheaper quality.

[@daishi5571]

The Mac auto-eject was awesome until it wasn't. I worked at a school and the number of times a disc got caught in the drive and the OS had a rage induced fit (with the eject grinding like crazy) because of it was far too often.

[@ironcito1101]

I do remember having disks launched by drives.

[@ClaudioBOsorio]

When I was a teen diskettes became obsolete. I only played with them a few times but this video is like going to an art museum of computer scientist and engineers. Really cool stuff. I'm sure this video will remain forever as a classic.

[@Durzel]

I never knew there was a 120MB version of these, that’s insane! I still have all of mine from my Atari ST days (as well as the computer of course). I think I’ll be genuinely sad when I stop seeing this be used as the save icon for games and apps.

[@katkatthecat]

Given the times a cloud may overshadow it

[@wa27]

What a great video. No wasted time, pretty much explained every aspect of a floppy disk. And it's great that you had all those props on hand to show, including the write-protect stickers and the plastic sleeves!

[@svennoren9047]

We used to call those plastic sleeves "diskette condoms". You won't catch a virus as long as you keep it on!

[@uxwbill]

I never knew there were 3.5" floppy drives that didn't automatically open the disk shutter. Learn something new every day...I have had a few diskettes where the shutter would stay open like that and I didn't realize it was intentional. I don't think it was so much cost cutting that led to some diskette makers using plastic shutters as it was a more forgiving solution than the metal ones. (I would have expected more makers to do so, and everyone to go that way eventually, if it saved manufacturing cost.)

[@mercuryoak2]

I know that the drive systems went cheaper when they took out the metal parts and replaced it with plastic gears and Sliders. I had a floppy drive that failed . ( heap dunes best buy drive) so when I had an old computer Gateway 2000 286 SX it had 5.25 drive and a 3.5 Drive. Both are made by Epson they both work perfectly and they are all metal internally for the gears and slider. The 286 couldn't be saved because it had more issues where it couldn't find the keyboard it was a free computer it also came with a b m c cable modem type thing for a card which had a transistor that was blown out on it. I still remember the famous quote that you said real computers have floppy drives and I actually agree with you 100% :)

[@vwestlife]

The platter shutters do have an advantage of not getting bent and stuck in the drive, as I talked about.

[@amigachris]

Yes, I have some of those....

[@mefirst4266]

YES THE 3.5 INCH DISK THAT DID NOT OPEN BY THEMSELFS WERE SO TO PEOPLE IN THE SOUTH THAT HAD LOTS OF TIME ON THEIR HANDS....

[@MarcosGarcia-kx4rb]

I always liked the little box to organise diskettes. Transparent case with a little key lock and obviously the white yellowed bottom so you could see all the diskettes in order.

[@tariqgh5948]

I watch these videos when I have something important to do, and I watch them till the end

[@nticompass]

As a kid, I never realized the icon on a floppy disk said "HD". I thought it was "CH" or something. Probably due to how labels were normally on these disks. Was always confused as to what that meant.

[@uxwbill]

So I wasn't alone in having thought that it was "CH" rather than "HD"!

[@Kali_Krause]

HD stands for High-Density diskette. Never heard it being calling "CH"

[@barryguff6893]

@@Kali_Krause Look at 1:20 and you'll see it looks like "CH" because of the way the disk is held (due to reading the label that way).

[@eekee6034]

I love/hated that logo. It was super-stylish but also kind-of stupid because it definitely reads as CH rather than HD. It's not joined up right! :)

[@Felamine]

As a kid I was always annoyed at people (adults included) who would refer to 3.5" floppies as "hard disks". That "HD" logo added to the confusion and people would point to it and say something like "See? The HD means hard disk!"

[@krashd]

I never considered the plastic-shutter disks to be cheap, to me they were the top-dog of the disk world and I took extra special care whenever I got one - a disk with a plastic shutter would never get jammed inside a drive because you hadn't noticed that the shutter was slack or bent. Honestly the amount of metal shutters I had to repair throughout the 80's and 90's meant I had a huge love for my plastic shutter disks.

[@RodrigoFernandez-td9uk]

Our first computer was an Atari 800XL with a cassette deck. One day we visited our cousins, who had the same computer, but with a floppy drive. The fact that you could instantly load programs seemed like magic to us. A couple of minutes is an eternity when you're six years old.

[@MobCat_]

write protection on 3½ inch floppy disk. If it's open, the data you wright falls through the hole. If it's closed, the data stays on the disk.

[@igorszamaszow171]

I still have my GTA III and VC save files from back in the day on some old floppies (saves after each mission), so I use them from time to time when I feel somewhat nostalgic. For some reason, I haven't copied them on an external HDD, where most of other really old stuff is as of yet.

[@1979starscream]

Also VC and VCS uses a floppy disc for save icon...

[@igorszamaszow171]

@@1979starscream I'm pretty sure that those were cassette tapes in VC and floppies in SA. I vaguely remember that older, actual floppy floppies were VCS' save icons (which would have made sense since it's setting is the oldest) but I can't really tell. GTA III had no save icons, you just walk in into an open door.

[@1979starscream]

@@igorszamaszow171 Oh, you're right. My mistake.

[@LapisandHamtarolover]

Vice City Stories floppy disks were either 8 inch or 5 inch.

[@igorszamaszow171]

@LabRat Knatz yes, I often take things literally

[@ynotw57]

yup. i was one of those who thought the 3.5" was a "hard disk" because it wasn't floppy. Then again, I didn't have a computer. It was my friend's family computer. That was a learning experience when we finally bought our own in '97.

[@schurki3942]

Insertion and removal into the drive was very satisfactory.

[@TechBaffle]

I remember using floppy disks for homework. The metal shutter was like a fidget toy! I can't remember which way I used to write the label though... 😀

[@davidshepherd265]

Lol - I used to (and still do) like to play with them :)

[@AaronOfMpls]

I always wrote with the label at the top, for better flipping through a box of disks.

[@screwthishi5thing]

loved the demonstration of "floppy" versus "hard" disk!

[@TheArtofGuitar]

I just felt like my data was more secure on one of these. When we started burning onto CD-r's it felt like I could scratch it too easily. 3.5" were tanks!

[@gregx5096]

You're kidding, right? The magnetic media inside a 3.5" floppy could be altered by almost any electrical field nearby, it seemed. A computer or other speaker? A magnetic bag or wallet closure? Pure ruin is the result!

[@robinhodgkinson]

Well that was a trip down memory lane! Nostalgia aside I’m quite happy those days have passed.

[@macdaniel6029]

Floppy disks are my favorite format ever. The sound, the nostalgia :)

[@Roxor128]

They're also a great size. Portable, but not easy to lose, unlike USB flash drives and SD cards.

[@Eyetrauma]

It’s interesting to imagine a world where the LS120 (or maybe a theoretical interim LS60, 64?) debuted well before Zip instead of concurrently. Also: “Micro disk” one of those things you type in a cold sweat.

[@LaurentiusTriarius]

I really bought a 120 back then to encourage the technology since I hated CDs, I won in a way but I'm not satisfied...

[@uxwbill]

It might have made for a better world. I've yet to see an LS-120 drive that wasn't still in working condition...and that's a lot more than I can say for any Zip drive.

[@bad.sector]

Actually this would have been possible. The Laser Servo technique has been developed at Iomega and was discarded in favor of Zip. I recently got used LS120 drives. One stopped reading LS120 disks shortly after, the other one never wanted to read them initially. I used the drive to quickly create backups of some old HD floppies, and it destroyed the shutter of at least 3 of them. WHile Zip had the click of death (I was affected, too), LS120 wasn't so good either.

[@krashd]

@@uxwbill Bingo! Zip drives broke far too easily for my liking while my two LS120 drives likely still work today (haven't used them for a while) but one of them doubles as the floppy drive in an old PC my kid uses. Another thing I liked about them, they could double as floppy drives :D

[@osmium6832]

I haven't heard the term LS120 in 20 years. I was in high school tech class and it was in a list of removable storage devices I had to memorize. I never saw one or knew anything about it, but it was in the list along with zip disks and 3 & 1/4" floppies. The memory of that class came flooding back when I watched this video. Makes me wonder what else is stuck in my head and just waiting for a trigger to rattle it loose.

[@westfield90]

Brings back good memories of a simpler happier time in the world

[@Shiro642]

I literally almost forgot about these things. Being a 90s kid, i had serious flashbacks on how these things felt and how i used to pull back the shutter for it snap back in place

[@5argetech56]

3.5-inch floppy disks being used in the Sony Mavica Digital cameras was amazing!

[@kittenastrophy5951]

I can recall that. I think the diskette shape dictated how the Mavica looks like.

[@MegaSunspark]

Had one of those Mavica cameras. God knows where it is now. I don't particularly remember throwing it out. Hmmmm, sigh... the good old days.

[@mikefellhauer3350]

The white material inside a 3-1/2 inch diskette (AND 5-1/4 inch, and presumably an 8 inch) is not only for keeping the disk clean, but also so it can rotate easily without being scratched (unless you get a piece of grit in the cleaning material...then you start to see grooves in the recordable material).

[@Kalvinjj]

That translucent blue at the end is a beauty. I absolutely love those kinds of stuff, the late 90s, early 2000s vibe is amazing.

[@YacoubSabatin]

You brought memories, I still sleep loads and loads of these disks in the storage, I used to distribute my software using them.

[@AmirZaimMohdZaini]

Floppy discs, such a great memories since childhood. Used to carry stuff from school to home and even a place for harvesting viruses...

[@DerekPower]

Interestingly, it just occurred to me that the same design principles found in the 3.5" disk could also be found in the MiniDisc. Not surprising given the source =]

[@dansmith3085]

I've wondered about that myself.

[@jamesslick4790]

I found the MiniDisc to be more reliable than the 3.5" floppy, (ALL of my MiniDiscs STILL play!) Oddly I had better "luck" with the 5.25" floppies DESPITE those having less physical protection!

[@Murderdogs]

That's not surprising, the 5.25" disks have less data which is encoded over a much larger area, so it makes sense there'd be more tolerance of errors. I've been going through some Amiga disks lately (3.5" obviously) and sadly found often only around 50-60% are readable. I'm going to see soon enough how my old 5.25" disks compare in reliability when I get the chance!

[@DerekPower]

@@Murderdogs Similar to how the optical drive discs work: the more data compressed on the side, the more prone to read errors if there's even the slightest of smudges. It's a wonder that Sony didn't design the UHD/4K Blus in a way where there's a protective casing around it. But then again, that would mean a package redesign as you couldn't use the cases that have been the standard for decades. Life's full of trade-offs =]

[@DFX4509B]

@@DerekPower PDs, which were a pro-grade recordable subset of original Blu-ray, or maybe predated it, used caddies as they wouldn't have survived daily use in the ENG field without them. CRD goes into pretty great detail about them in his DVD camcorder vid.

[@aaronboor2818]

Brought back some memories. Thanks.

[@kjrchannel1480]

I had a classmate in school. He for some reason opened one up and started to chew on the disk. It is the only time I ever saw a person do that.

[@lrochfort]

They still look modern to me. The 5.25 discs scream 70s/80s, but the 3.5 are timeless and contemporary somehow

[@Maciej-Komosinski]

Maybe due to their dimensions - quite handy, ergonomic, and similar to modern phones...

[@FudgeYeahLinusLAN]

Just like the BMW E39

[@CommodoreFan64]

I don't use them often, but I still have a floppy drive on my retro Win 98SE/XP gaming build, and a USB floppy drive just in case, and to me they are one of the most important inventions in computing history. 👍

[@Kali_Krause]

I have a fully backed up copy of Windows 98 SE

[@CommodoreFan64]

@@Kali_Krause Okay congratulations, what about it? want a cookie? I have have 4 official copies of Win98se, and 3 official copies of Windows XP pro on Disc, plus my Win9se, and XP SSD's(yes I run SSD's in my pentium 4 retro build for the boot drives as the board as SATA, and IDE), and the SSD's are both imaged, and backuped to my external 10TB USB 3.0 HDD, along with the 1TB HDD in the retro build imaged, and backed up, with the external HDD being formatted in Linux EXT4 Journaling file format. So what I'm saying is what you have is nothing special, nor is what I have, I'm just anal about my backups.

[@gandei100]

So much nostalgia. Thanks for the video.

[@ryanellis4474]

Someone transported from the 1990's to today to watch this video might think floppy disks both never went away and were never improved upon. That hilarious accidental anachronism is something up with which I will not put. Hahaha. You are lovely to make these videos. I would love to interview you, sir.

[@foxyloon]

5:42 I've disassembled 5 1/4" drives in the past, and sometimes found the cause of their malfunction to be one of those write protect stickers coming off the disk and falling into the drive.

[@tikkasen_urakointi]

From programmer's point of view, floppy disks are just simple and elegant. They are easy to write to (unlike optical disks), and in most computer systems the floppy controller is very easy to program. They support random access and the physical write protection is a very important security feature that modern storage devices don't have. A floppy disk itself is technically just a spinning plastic disk with magnetic material on its surface, so the disk itself cannot become permanently infested by viruses like a firmware in an USB stick can.

[@Roxor128]

Yeah, the design of optical discs was a step back. Understandable, given the origin of the CD as an optical replacement for the LP record which got repurposed for general data, but you'd think that by the time of DVD, they'd have realised the benefits of random access and made something akin to DVD-RAM the standard, especially for something writable.

[@mowogfpv7582]

@@Roxor128 it's just not physically possible with optical media. Optical media win for ruggedness and cost in mass production. Magnetic media wins for ease of rewriting and the number of write cycles it can go through. Think about how elegant and non destructive it is to magnetise and demagnetise portions of a disk surface and then think about how physically punishing it is to heat a disc to hundreds of degrees using a laser and force a state change in a dye.

[@eekee6034]

Speaking as a person with an interest in operating system design (although I'm not very good), I'm starting to think that floppy disks are easier to write to than RAM on modern systems! Cache, cache, cache, translation lookaside buffer SHOOT DOWN!

[@Roxor128]

@@mowogfpv7582 Of course it's physically possible to have random-access optical media. That's what DVD-RAM _is!_ It's right there in the name! No argument about the difficulty of writing to the phase-change medium it uses, though. Perfectly reasonable limitation to point out in comparison to floppies or hard disks.

[@mowogfpv7582]

@@Roxor128 well maybe not physically impossible but economically impossible. The physics is the root of the problem though. Rewritable optical media is just too hard to be worth doing or it would have taken off.

[@magmajctaz1405]

I actually liked the plastic doors on later diskettes. As you mentioned, the bends in the metal ones would open up sometimes and the disk would get stuck in the drive. But the plastic one tended to "hug" the case really well.

[@jedrula77]

Best way to use flopys is first check dors shape and if damaged dont use or dismount and correct. Easy to remove and install again.

[@magmajctaz1405]

@@jedrula77 You are correct if the door looks damaged. I wouldn't use one that appeared damaged. The problem was if the shape of the door changed where the 90-degree bends that allow the metal to wrap around the shell of the diskette opened up subtly. It's not obvious, but it can be enough to jam upon eject. This never happened with the plastic doors because the 90-degree was molded in their shape.

[@jedrula77]

@@magmajctaz1405 The risk of deformation of the metal window of the 3.5 "floppy disk cover is greatest when the floppy disks are stored in a different way in the box, once with the metal cover up and then down, and then when removing the cover of the pull-out floppy disk can go under the other and with a fairly quick removal of the 3.5 floppy disk can be left permanently deformed. The risk of such damage increases if there are more disks in the box, e.g. 11 instead of 10. In fact, with a plastic window there is no problem because even if it is temporarily deformed (to certain limits) it returns to its original position obtained through casting. It is very durable and flexible material despite a very small thickness below 1mm, I think about 0.5mm.

[@broncofun5636]

Remember holding the disk in my hands for the first time when I got my Amiga in 1986. It was an amazing feeling I will never forget and my kids will never know.

[@Markimark151]

The 3.5 floppy disk is like the 45rpm record of computers, it’s small and convenient, we used it a lot before CDs took over as the medium for computers!

[@Beatboxerskills]

intersting how CDs replaced both the floppy and the 45 record

[@Markimark151]

@@Beatboxerskills CDs are still being made, because they’re for both music and data.

[@MegaSunspark]

Yep, remember back in the day, these 3-1/2 disks were everywhere and used for everything and by everybody. It was THE mode of portable data. Had drawers and drawers and storage cases full of these wonderful disk at home and at places I worked. Pretty resilient too, hardly had any trouble with them.

[@Markimark151]

@@MegaSunspark 3 1/2 floppy disks were so ubiquitous, they were even sold at drugstores like Rite Aid, I remember buying them for school and to record audio on MIDI keyboards. I have a box of them from TDK and Memorex, they were like finding smartphone adapters at the front of the store’s checkout!

[@michaelbarry8373]

@@Beatboxerskills I don't know, I think it was the USB drive that really put an end to the 3.5

[@jfh400]

Great timing! I just this week picked up a USB floppy drive to go through my last old box of 3.5" floppies.

[@Osprey850]

I've been meaning to pick up one for the last 15 years. I should probably do that while I can. A quick look on Amazon suggests that most available are the same presumably Chinese model rebranded, so the selection and quality is going down. I don't need one, but I like the idea of being able to read all of the old game disks that I'm keeping for nostalgia purposes.

[@leica_sl2]

Brings back soooooooooooooooooooooo many memories.

[@தமிழோன்]

I'm a 90's kid. I'm happy that I've seen, touched, and used these before they went extinct. RIP Floppy Disks! 💐

[@rich_edwards79]

I love the sound of that little metal shutter sliding open, especially when loaded into the drive. Memories of playing pirated Amiga games (complete with cracktro chiptunes) and later, saving University essays to print off using the laser printers on campus rather than our slow, noisy Panasonic dot matrix unit.

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

The sound is the spindle catching, the shutter opens as it’s pushed in

[@timf-tinkering]

The action of sliding the disk into the drive is what opens the shutter. The "schlick" sound you hear when a newly-inserted disk is first accessed is the drive spindle sliding around the central hub of the disk until it falls into the notch and starts rotating the disk.

[@PongoXBongo]

Up until just a few years ago, I always kept a 3.5" floppy drive in my desktop builds. No real day-to-day use for it, so I mounted it internally, backwards facing in a 5.25" bay, as a sort of "technician's drive".

[@Agarwaen]

I only stopped doing this as new mobos just didn't come with floppy controllers (and 1-2 upgrade cycles later, the same happened to optical drives when IDE controllers became defunct)

[@DonaldDucksRevenge]

USB emulation floppy drives exist. BIOS/UEFI detects it. Great retro option

[@hexagonist23]

Do modern motherboards support floppy drives? I want one in my threadripper 3990x build

[@DonaldDucksRevenge]

@@hexagonist23 USB only. Modern mobos will only have FDD slots if they are industrial basically

[@hawsrulebegin7768]

That sound of a disk being pushed in and the click brings back surprisingly vivid memories.

[@vivekgovekar6342]

HP had a touchscreen PC in ‘83. Respect!

[@fartking2845]

I know some versions do exist, but I really wish it was standard for all CDs, DVDs, and even bluray's to have a protective casing like the 3.5 floppy disc had. As someone who worked at blockbuster for over 4 years I've seen an arsenal of damaged discs that could have really used it. So many people and kids leaving discs upside down on the player too lazy to put back in the case, or even the Xbox 360 causing physical damage to the disc from poor disc drive design. I think companies preferred it this way so people would go out and buy another copy to replace the original damaged one.

[@nickwallette6201]

Wait... what? The 360 damages discs? How so? Haven't heard of that...

[@steviebboy69]

I had a CD rom drive in my old Commodore Amiga that I added , and it had a caddy that you had to put the CD into and then push it into the drive. It wasnt motorized either a push button with spring returned the caddy from the drive.

[@AttilaTheHun333333]

@@nickwallette6201 Mostly when people moved it from vertical to horizontal orientation while running. Should be self explanatory to not do that, but yeah.

[@AttilaTheHun333333]

BluRays have a very hard coating due to the data being very close to the surface in comparison to CDs or DVDs. They are nearly impossible to scratch during normal use.

[@fartking2845]

@@AttilaTheHun333333 @Attila TheHUN Thank you for mentioning that about blurays, but the same logic could be applied to CDs and DVDs, and yet children and inept people still manage to turn them into expensive coasters. I would personally find use in a protective case for bluray discs, as a long term storage option for very important data files that are sentimental. I hate to use the word 'idiot proof', but having extra protection is always a comfortable feeling when lending your personal property to others that I would have doubts about. I suppose we could 'agree to disagree' but this is more about 'better safe than sorry'.

[@c90s_tech]

I had a lot of floppies back in the day. CD Burners where too expensive for me, but an LS-120 seemed like the perfect fit for me. I got the cheaper 7x Sony LS-120 and loved it. Great video as always. Cheers.

[@smallbluemachine]

Spent a long time with these types of storage media back in the day. Thanks very much for going over the engineering. Very cool.

[@lucasenfoco]

I am from Argentina. Here we call "diskette" all the floppy disks. I am in love with the 5 1/4" disks. In the school days, I used to have disks in my folders, between the pages🥰

[@Flyingbrickyard]

I came to prefer the later plastic slide versions specifically because they were less prone to having the shutter ripped off in the drive (or just in general) compared to the metal ones. Though I was also geeky enough (and had friends with similar interests) to keep a small five 3.5" floppy clamshell storage case stocked with disks in my backpack in high school, because you never knew when someone would come across some neat bit of software you wanted a copy of.

[@jamessmith1652]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I have a greater fondness for the 5-1/4 in disk. They were cheaper, lighter and I liked the delicate nature and having to take it out of its sleeve. I remember taking double density 3.5 in disks and using a screwdriver to bore a hole to "double the capacity". I also recall in the last throes of floppies a utility that could format a 3.5 in disk to 1.6 meg (instead of 1.44), it needed a TSR to work. Funny how "DOS formatted" became something worth spending 5-10% more on, simply for the convenience and time saving!

[@Roxor128]

I never had any luck drilling holes in DD disks and reformatting them as a kid. I just got an error out of the DOS FORMAT utility. I suspect actually doing so needed some special program I didn't have access to. I know it was possible, because I saw such a disk at someone else's place, but I could never get it to work.

[@cdl0]

@@Roxor128 The capacity hole is only a signal for the operating system, so can be overridden in software without modifying the plastic case.

[@koyaanisqatsi316]

Back in the days you could buy a notching tool for 5 1/2 floppies to make these holes.

[@VideoNOLA]

2:47 Don't forget the time my 95-year old client succeeded in inserting TWO 3.5" disks into the same drive slot. That was a fun afternoon!

[@rodbain69]

Thank you so so much for not describing the engineering as 'insane'. Thank you.

[@13thFlProductions]

Hi. There was actually a medium inbetween the 2.88 mb floppy and the LS120 drive. They were called "Floptical" disks and used a form of magneto-optical technology. They held 21 megabytes. I think they were basically only used in Silicon Graphics (especially the Indy that was a more general purpose SGI), and were backwards compatible with regular floppies. There may have been floptical drive accessories for the Amiga too. Also with the 2.88 mb floppy, NeXTStation computers were the other users of 2.88 mb floppy.

[@13thFlProductions]

Also for what it's worth, I think LS 120 had moderate popularity in Macs between the time when the floppy drive was removed but before CD writers and USB 2.0 were the norm in Macs. Sometimes Power Mac G3s and early G4s and Powerbook G3s have them!

[@tookitogo]

@@13thFlProductions As a third party add-on. Apple never sold LS120 drives, though they did sell internal Zip drives in many Power Mac models. (The internal Zip drives for PowerBooks were a third party accessory.)

[@JVHShack]

One thing that comes to mind is a story that I heard in recent times. A girl saw her dad using 3.5" floppies and remarked, "You 3D printed the save icon! Neat!"

[@apollion888]

Great video, I had a Sound Blaster card in my Gateway machine, thanks for the memory

[@rpmcanada1971]

As a Computer Scientist, I love all 3 sizes of diskettes, but each for different reasons. 5.25" disks are the first ones I ever saw and worked with. Their somewhat fragile concept teaches us how to take care of them, and I often read and thought about the 9 "Do's and Don'ts" logos on the back of the sleeves of my first TANDY box of 10. Carefully inserting the floppy in the drive and closing the door, and then listening to the clicks and whirr sounds of the drive while watching the brilliant LED going on is part of the joy of working with computers. The sound the drive makes lets me know where my file is on the disk and whether it's fragmented or not, etc... It's also true for 3.5", but it's quieter, and harder to hear if there is noise around, or is covered by the fan on a big machine. The tradition has always been to have A: as 5.25" and B: as 3.5" when both are installed on any given PC, and one of the reasons is to boot my old OSes on 360KB double density disks, the oldest being 160KB or 180KB. All of the above also apply to the 8" disk, which I only got to use on my interest of digging in the past, alive since the mid 90s, with CP/M and 86-DOS, and to study the internal data structure of such old and simple OSes using ANADISK on a DOS PC. These 2 classic sizes use sleeves, company sleeves, just like 7" records 45rpm! They feel more "collectible" because of that look and "vintage" feel, but 3.5" are also collectible for having many fancy color shells and company-printed shutters. Finally, I totally agree with your video that 3.5" disks is a revolutionary format, and it's possible to slip it in your pocket without fear of damaging it or losing data. That's why I equally like all 3 sizes and I'm glad they all exist. The bonus for 3.5" floppies is that you can have a USB drives with NO need of external power, and on a modern totally silent computer, this floppy drive can easily become the center of attraction, and is the real "bridge" between vintage and modern computing...

[@alexsutton85]

I loved the access sounds of these disks/drives

[@cujoedaman]

1:50 is a perfect example of something I read about needing to explain everything in great detail so the masses understand how to do something properly. It's the reason why we see instructions on candy bars or a box of cereal that tells us how to open them (those aren't the best examples, but you get my point). People will always interpret something you tell them to do as they read it in a way that you never intended. It's just how our minds work.

[@AaronOfMpls]

Heck, I've heard of teachers _intentionally_ misunderstanding such instructions from students, when trying to get across the need for clear instructions in things like programming.

[@cujoedaman]

@@AaronOfMpls I watched an old IBM video that's floating around here about how they developed a spreadsheet program and how to use the books, detailing how they went through a whole process to ensure that the books told you exactly what to do and when to do it and how to do it so you weren't left wondering what to do. It was very interesting to watch :D

[@kaitlint3987]

A teacher in highschool found one of the really big ones in a shelf like in 2011. I hadn't realized there'd been bigger ones than the one we all think of

[@JohnnyMcMenamin]

Thanks for explaining in clear terms the history of the floppy disks. A trip down memory lane.

[@ceruchi2084]

What a wonderful nostalgia trip. My favorite part was when you thumbed through the box of floppies like a Rolodex. CDs were never so well organized. The jewel cases were chunky and inelegant, and (at least in my house) we would mysteriously lose some cases and have to deal with wrapping a CD in paper and taping it up. It was such a mess. But I would have hated to use one of those CD binders with the rubbery plastic. Floppies were sturdy, serious, had a magical air about them. They had the weight and presence of a miniature book, not like these fragile, scratchable CDs, or the little nothings that are modern USB sticks. I'm sad that we save data in the cloud now. It's all so immediate and insubstantial. When you were a kid and saw a lost floppy on the side of the road, you would fantasize about what secrets might be held on there (even though it was probably just someone's tax documents). Thanks again for the nostalgia!

[@Keithustus]

Don’t forget the wonderful clack sounds when you drop a stack of diskettes out of your hand onto a tabletop. Jewel cases…icky icky noise.

[@theseob]

Still remember buying our first box of 10 3.5” hd disks, costing about 45 euro in todays money. Later i bought 720 k disks and used a soldering iron to burn a hole so you could format it at 1.44mb, or when using VGA-copy formatting it at 1.7mb. Still have those disks, abd they still work.

[@cdl0]

Same here: my first pack of 3.5" floppies cost a fortune, but did come in a nice, hard plastic case. The capacity hole is only a signal for the operating system, so can be overridden by software.

[@78flex]

I tried making ED disks out of a couple of my HD disks, but it never worked :-/

[@Dtoolman]

I can't believe I just watched something about a technology I don't even use any more. But I actually not only learned a lot, but don't regret watching it. Thank you very much sir for the video. :-)

[@npharkes]

Beautiful. That unmistakable sound of ejecting a 3.5" - brings back memories :D

[@peacearchwa5103]

Like most of you, I have at least one hundred 3.5" used and unused floppy disks in a box somewhere in the garage. Think of all those old resumes, cover letters, notes to self, spreadsheets and so forth on those antiques which I used quite a bit in the early 2000s. Somewhere in the garage, I also have an external 3.5" floppy drive which I bought in 2013 to connect to a newer computer (I don't recall actually finishing the setup).

[@patrickcardon1643]

In Europe we also had the 3" diskette, very popularon british 8bit machines, either to use yourself or for store-bought software

[@stevesstuff1450]

Yeah...If I remember correctly, Sinclair/Amstrad used a 3" diskette on a late version of it's Spectrum, and also so-called 8-bit business computers were using a 3" diskette in around '83...I remember a Tatung computer using them for it's proprietary software... 😉

[@patrickcardon1643]

Correct, Amstrad and Sinclair were the biggest users, and Tatung was the odd one out (collectable machine). They did try to make third party drives for other computers but that never really took off. I think Cumana who made drives for the Acorn computers (BBC, Electron, Archimedes) did make a 3" drive for them.

[@keltiquewood]

I started my computer progrsmming career saving to tape and 5 1/4" floppy disks. I retired last year saving to the cloud. We've come a long way in 40 years! 🙂

[@TheJosep70]

I still have an Amiga A1200 and recently fired it up. I didn't think many of the games I have on diskettes would work but, lo and behold, they did.

[@albinklein7680]

My last floppy disk experience was an unpleasant one. I had some very, very important data, which I backed up twenty-five years ago on a multipart WinRAR-File on twenty 1,44MB floppies. I also had those files on a Quantum tape. The tape disintegrated. So I had to use those floppies. Of course one of them was unreadable. I tried to dd it on more than fifteen different disk drives and I was finally successful reading it with an old external dell drive. Damn, was I happy!

[@nickwallette6201]

What made this particularly frustrating was how quick to give up most decompression engines were. If _one byte_ of the file were corrupted, it would fail a checksum, and just stop. Really frustrating when an installer had its own proprietary archive format and would fail to extract a readme file, and refuse to even try copying anything else.

[@DarkGT]

I like this video, very informative and hilarious.

[@Mumbamumba]

Brings back memories.

[@ytisfinggarbagenow8028]

Amiga memories emerging, good times.❤️

[@Smashmilk]

Probably still a box of these hidden in my childhood closet full of "class projects" Wink 😉 Wink. Kids these days do not get the struggle of waiting for a folder of jpegs to load.

[@nickwallette6201]

Well, at least there won't be enough room for all that many JPGs on a single disk. ;-)

[@Smashmilk]

@@nickwallette6201 yea there was a shoe box full of disk use ti hard have alittle side job at school lol.

[@baronvg]

Back when I was a kid, the floppy/hard disk made perfect sense to me hahaha. But I did know what a hard disk was. Btw, that auto sliding shutter was PERFECT as a fidget toy for people in the 80s & 90s.

[@THECOMPANY2014]

Still remember using these in junior high, using so many floppies to use Wordstar, Lotus and Dbase. Cool stuff.

[@VintageAudioTech]

Thanks for another great video!

[@gregsmith9183]

I remember the days days before double sided drives were popular. You physically had to cut a read slot in the the opposide side of the 5.25"" disk to use the other side of the disk. Popular on early computers like Apple II and Commodore. Where a game or app would prompt for side two. Where you had to remove the disk, flip it over and reinsert to continue.

[@h8GW]

Oof. That couldn't have been a data-friendly process.

[@JohnFourtyTwo]

I never called them floppy disks, that's what I called the larger 5.25 and 8-inch disks because the case was much sturdier than the larger disks and didn't flop around. I've heard the little plastic sleeves caused static electricity sometimes which is why they stopped providing them with new disks.

[@rocktigerdesign]

I remember using these disks myself as a kid and installing Windows 3.11 back in he days. Five or ten disk an operating system and during the process I was praying that every disk will work properly in order for a successful installation. I had fun using them as kid until we got Windows 95 on a CD... that was about 25 years ago for me, but never the less I have never really thought of these little details you have mentioned in the video at all. I think kids of the 90's remember using these disks at home and in school, even seeing them in movies, but at the same time CD's were getting introduced with CD writer getting a high price tag on them only the rich could have afforded. Today we giggle about 3.50 MB or even a 100MB when we send files to each other largen than that through the air and digital clouds... but there are days when I miss the simplicity of the era. Anyhow, great video and it was a such nice way to travel down memory lane - thanks for making this. :)

[@Locutus]

Great video. Simple explanation of everything.

[@andy_rulz2000]

I've always enjoyed the sounds a 3½" floppy drive made when reading or writing to a disk.

[@psychedalek]

Except when it finds a bad sector!

[@jaberwoky_]

Bet you loved the sounds of a dot matrix printer and 2400 baud modem too. 🙂

[@andy_rulz2000]

@@jaberwoky_ Not so much with a Dot Matrix printer but definitely the sounds of a Dial Up Modem, when it's trying to connect lol.