Within the last 5 years, we actually had a gentleman visit our office. His computer died, and all his worked was backed up on floppies and he needed a working drive to retrieve his files. We couldn’t help him despite our office containing a computer service department. Nobody had access to those type of drives.
Who still has a working 3.5" or 5.25" floppy drive? Well obviously these guys do, but do you actually have access to one of these historic devices that works?
Hi Bryan.
I remember that I have two 3.5" floppy units connected on two Military Honeywell-Bull Servers with multiple 486 processors on isolated warehouse, but securely need to substitute traction belts, For 5.25" and 8" I have reserved one unit each type, with vaccum packs, possibly need substitution for motor belt traction and other. All of my historic security replication images run on virtual floppy disk and image files.
I’m located on Tarragona, Catalonia, in Spain, Europe
Regards.
Santiago Frias Moreno
Tech Developer.
I learned something new today. When I was introduced to floppy disks it was the 5.25" disk. I did not know there were 8" disks as well. Wow.
I know some persons do not move off of old operating systems because the software that is required is not updated, and therefore these systems have to be secured and maintained so that operations can continue.
Is it the same in your case for the hardware that is attached to the drives and the 486 processors?
Seeing projects like floppinux running on a single disk is equal parts impressive and slightly terrifying. It’s a good reminder that “legacy” doesn’t mean “gone,” just forgotten until someone really needs it.
I am too young and I never saw nor used floppy disk 5.25’‘, I grew up with 3.5’, 1.44mb..
At home I just have some ot them with Windows 95 recovery and a copy of Turbo Assembler from late 80’s.
Nowdays they are museum pieces, I neither own a floppy drive anymore.. but at the same way they are component of my collection
While I don’t have a working floppy disk drive in any of my computers at this point in time, I was astounded to see that the 3.5" “not so floppy” disk drive is still available for sale on sites like Amazon and NewEgg.
I happened to be looking at things on NewEgg’s site, so I dug deeper. And I was surprised to see about a half-dozen inexpensive drives with a USB interface, as well as a drive specific to a laptop and a generic TEAC brand internal drive that might be usable in a computer if it has an IDE interface.
Those old drives might not be as “dead” as we think.
