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- Hacker News
- Sadly they don't sell Amsoft 3 inch disks, I enquired a few years ago.
- In twenty years time, will there be a secondary market in random USB sticks?
I have a vast quantity of random USB sticks from clearing out my father's house, keeping them just in case something needed, nothing was. Rather than take the effort to dispose of them, I am thinking of holding on to them for the retro scene of 2050.
by Theodores - It's hard to say.
From a vintage computing perspective, possibly. The only question is whether they will work. Oddly, I have found USB sticks to be less reliable than floppy disks. (Odd because I would think that semi-conductor memory would last longer than a ferrous coating glued to a plastic substrate that is dragged along both the read/write head and the shell and is known to be susceptible to mould.)
Other uses, I just don't know. Floppy disks have a well defined appearance that means they are iconic. (Sometimes literally so!) USB sticks vary so much in size and appearance that it will be difficult to earn the iconic status. Floppies also have more to work with when it comes down to arts projects.
by II2II - I had a huge stack of ancient mixed floppies and sold them for a dollar each on eBay.
Interestingly most buyers didn't care about HD, DD etc. I suspect they went into art projects.
- With 46 of them you can make a nice bag https://www.instructables.com/Floppy-Disk-Bag/by soupspaces
- For a brief period of time, CD ROMs were already a thing, and people still had 5.25" diskettes lying around. So someone came up with the idea to put a self-burned CD into the plastic shell of a floppy disk, and I actually found that quite cool.
Also: wow, this shop still has 8" floppy disks!
by Cockbrand - My son told be today that he wants to buy a floppy disk drive because one of the bands he likes started releasing singles on 3.5" floppies.
What a time to be alive.
by grahamburger - What band is that? Also how do they do that? Just heavily compressed mp3?by jnovacho
- Looking through their website, it seems they are not recycling them in the usual sense of the word, but reusing them. That is, they reformat and resell them at a discount (66%) that of new ones. Which is fine, I guess, if they're just laying around your house, but it's not like they're making new things with the materials which is what the word recycling usually implies.by rbtms
- "Reuse" ranks higher than "recycle" in terms of best things to do with an item, if it's reasonable to do so.by cormorant
- This is correct. I have bought some disks from him before (also he is tomdotstar on EBay) and they come as ordinary used disks with a new label stuck on top. Supposedly each one is tested; all the ones I got worked and looked to be in good condition, so I guess so. It is interesting to see some of the old labels underneath the new one - most of mine were driver disks or "setup disk 5 of 19" or similar.by alnwlsn
- A couple years ago I got a bunch of recycled low density DS/DD disks here. It was a good deal; yeah I had to clean em off a bit, and I also re-labeled them with some newer labels. But a good deal nonetheless. I approve.by ayaros
- Now I've got a pack of old floppies that are outgassing :0
I have no other explanation.
This is an almost-full box of miscellaneous floppies in one of the original cardboard trays of 30 from Office Depot.
I've got kilos more floppies in different closets but these are good ones I selected a few years ago that all passed SCANDISK.
Now this one little box is in an old ziploc bag in the office and it keeps self-inflating. At first I thought it was unusually low barometric pressure one day but I keep squeezing out the air rain or shine and it keeps on puffing back out by itself.
Something I really didn't expect.
If I did still own my own laboratory, I'd tell you what kind of gas it was by now though ;)
by fuzzfactor - Hm, if there's anything of note in the floppies, maybe archive them? There are some USB devices that will read and store the actual magnetic flux values, for max fidelity.by stavros
- Are you sure it's not just the bag attempting to return to its original shape? They are also not truly airtight, so there might be some sort of osmosis effect too.
The possibility of mold growth may also be considered.
by userbinator - This is definitely not recommended but when I was a kid we also used floppy disk films to look at solar eclipses. That was far from the most dangerous thing we did in 90s in a post-Soviet country.
To this day, when I read or think about a solar eclipse, I have a visual image of floppies! My first instinct seeing this on HN was “is this because there is a solar eclipse tomorrow?”
by hs586 - These used to be 50 cents a piece at my high school library. What a joy it was to have a tiny simple way to transport essays (and pixel art and other fun things) to and from school and amongst all the school computers.by NickNaraghi
- Yes! But beware the one computer in the second row that wrecks your disk, learned one by one, the hard way.by mrkpdl
- Relatedly, I was recently digging through the attic at my family’s home and came across a 3.5" disk containing a bunch of QBASIC programs I’d written in the early ’90s. Despite sitting for decades in a non–climate-controlled attic, it loaded up just fine when I plugged it into a USB floppy drive. Honestly, looking back at code from 30+ years ago felt more like an archaeology expedition.
Also how many other kids also went around brandishing 3.5" floppies like a weird gun, "cocking them" by pulling back the shutter and letting it go with a satisfying snap?
by vunderba - Definitely can still feel the spring sensation.by recursive
- Looking back over any code older than 12 months is always like archaeology, at least if it is my poorly documented tech-debt ridden nonsense.by ColdStream
- If you loosen the metal cover just right you can make it go absolutely sailing across a computer lab (or any room, I bet).by Waterluvian
- A while ago I learned that very early versions of 3.5" floppies didn't have the auto shutter mechanism and you had to open and close the shutter manually. (I think that was probably just used on some Japanese Sony machines.)by qiqitori
- I definitely remember doing that as a kid, and I remember bending the thin metal off some broken ones. Whatever brand I was using allowed that metal to work a bit like a spring, you could launch it by compressing it. (Sorta like the frogs you find in Christmas bonbons.)by mister_mort
- I was pissed when I discovered that the cassette tape containing all of my c64 programs was gone. Most of them were crappy, but there was a D&D character generator I wrote when I was 8 that I'd made extensive use of for quickly generating randos for us to play one-offs with.
The oldest publicly released code of mine is SLIPShuttle, which provided pushbutton connecting to the internet on an Amiga (the cmdline interface was terrible). Written in AREXX https://aminet.net/comm/tcp/SLIPShuttle.lha
The second oldest was ringconnectd, which allows you to "ring knock" your (POTS connected) modem to make it connect to the internet and mail you your IP address. It was VERY handy while I was in college, and apparently it took off in Africa a few years later as their internet connectivity grew. https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/network/daemons/rin...
by kstenerud