I wrote my first computer program on an 8" floppy. I had signed up for a course in BASIC at my high school, in 1981. The school had a computer facility with access to a mainframe operated by the county school district.
We had these machines made by IBM, that emulated a keypunch machine, but stored the data on an 8" floppy. They had the same keyboard layout as a keypunch, and a one-line alphanumeric display. The idea was that a skilled keypunch operator could start using floppies with no retraining.
You entered your program and handed the disk to the operator, and received your printout later. You could do one or two debug cycles during a class period, maybe three if you came in later during the day, after which the operator's patience wore out and you were told to write your program more carefully. In reality, they were probably doing this work as a favor for the math teacher who was teaching the class.
The next semester, the school got some CRT terminals, but there were five terminals for a class of about 15 kids, hand picked by the math teacher. I still remember my user name and password.
I wrote a program that generated mazes, and when I thought it was working OK, I set it to print out a maze the size of a sheet of green bar paper. Next day, I got a big scolding for creating an endless loop. But in reality, my program was OK and I learned a lesson about complexity -- my program probably had some insanely high order like O(n^3) or even worse.
I don't know of anybody remembers or noticed, but I remember taking some of my first plane flights, and the person behind the ticket desk was typing very quickly on their terminal, but with just their index fingers. That's keypunch technique.
I seriously got into computing in 1979, working for the Microbiology Department at Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, using Research Machines 380Zs, equipped with both 8 and 5.25 inch floppy drives. Here are a few of my observations on the beasts:
- They required quite a lot of strength to open and particularly to close - some of our students were scared they were going to break them (and the cost a lot back then) because of the force needed.
- One student did the classic "remove disk from envelope" thing where they took the actual mylar disc out of the floppy container. He may have been taking the piss, but if so he lost out, as we made students pay for the disks.
- Somewhat unrelated - when I was working in the Netherlands in the 90s, I noticed that supermarkets in Utrecht, a big university town, had floppy disk dispensers in supermarkets - students put in a guilder or whatever, and got a 3.5 inch floppy they could submit their coursework on.
- They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which I mostly was.
- They were horribly unreliable - we used to have to keep sending ours back to RML in Oxford to get them recalibrated or replaced every few months.
Still, all in all they were a million times better than my own personal computer at the time - a Dragon32 with a cassette deck for storage!
> They were incredibly noisy - the servos were banging away like mad, particularly if you were doing anything database-like, which I mostly was.
heck, even my 5.25" c64 drive was so noisy from knocking its head that I kept the cover unscrewed to realign it on a regular basis. especially after trying to use "copy protected" disks that causes even more knocking.
I was also confused when 3.5" floppies came out and were stiff, and people started talking more about "hard disks".
My Dad had a floppy on his C64 and it was terribly unreliable, but (once again) less unreliable than the cassette deck that I was stuck with. He loved gadgets, but really only used it to play "Hunchback" and similar games. I often thought "Shall I hit him over the head with a hammer and steal it, so I can create some truly brilliant software?", but I never did.
I wonder about these posts citing c64 and Amiga floppy reliability issues.
Was around both for 10 to 15 years, in computer clubs, ran a punter bbs, worked repairing/selling amigas for years, reliability was awesome, unless one had the rare a bad drive.
Were you lot running 1541s, 71s?
Were you living under power lines, beside a power station, and your mom loved fridge magnets? :P
My Mum detested fridge magnets for some not clear reasons. And no overhead power lines. There was a nearby power transformer though, which on one memorable day burst into flames.
But I remember Dad frequently complaining about reliability, and the drives keep on having to be taken down to a computer shop (back when such things existed) in down-town Lincoln (UK) to be fixed. The problems were entirely mechanical, not electronic.
mine was a 1541, but most everyone I knew who had one had the same problems. my amiga floppy (and the external clone drive I bought) was super reliable.
I found that 1.2MB 5.25" floppies were faster (they spun at 360 rpm vs the 300 rpm of 3.5" drives) and more reliable than 3.5" floppies in my experience. I had so many problems with 720KB (880KB on my Amiga) floppies, even with expensive media back then.
Ha, I pretty much got into computing around then as a kid when my dad would bring one of those very same QEC 380Zs home for the summer vacation. Or a Commodore PET, with the built-in tape drive.
Loved the mad clicking between the floppy drives when copying files around with pip.
Oh well, if he still around (I'm nearly not - heart) please remember me to him (he may well not remember - we didn't work very closely together) - I'm Neil Butterworth, used to work with Dr. Mick Bazin.
At my first full-time computer programming job in 1987, we had two NEC-APC computers[1], huge all-in-one units that housed a 10 or so inch screen and 2 8" floppy drives! One of them had a color screen and was connected to an equally enormous 10MB hard drive! My boss used that one. I got the monochrome green one. We had numerous plastic roll-top boxes of disks for various different programs, all written in dBase II: Clients, Employees, Billing and Payroll. As I was coming on they were just being upgraded to dBase III+.
After a couple years I talked them into getting PC clones, but the consultants overruled and convinced the agency to get us an IBM AT with a 60GB^H^HMB hard drive, 2 floppy-only XTs, and a Token Ring Network! The server software used so much space on the AT that you could barely run anything else on it.
Then we had the issue of transferring all of the data from 8" disks over to the IBMs. The consultants wanted thousands of dollars to put each disk into a "toaster" (they called it) that would transfer things to 5.25 disks. I knew it could be done much cheaper, so after a trip to the library to look up serial cable diagrams, a stop at Radio Shack to get some connectors, and a rummage in the office basement to find some old phone cord, I rigged up a transfer cable! The sending program on the NEC was written in their version of BASIC, and the receiving program was written in Turbo Pascal. After several hours at a low baud rate, all of the data was transferred. I got a decent $600 bonus out of it!
I had four 8" drives. Two (DSDD) were connected to my IMSAI (modified with CompuPro S-100 boards). The other two (SSDD) were connected to my Ferguson Big Board. I never tried using the 8" drives on systems that would normally interface to 5-1/4" drives, but I always assumed it would be a simple matter of adapting the 50-pin edge connector used for the 8" drives to the 34-pin edge connecter used for the 5-1/4" drives.
At one time I had a calibration disk and an "exerciser board" for 8" drives that could be used (along with an oscilloscope) to adjust the track positions and gain settings on the drive.
I gave away all of those old goodies after I purchased at 25MHz 386 PC clone that could emulate CP/M faster than the native Z-80 hardware.
It was fun tinkering with computer hardware in that era, but it was also frustrating because of the limitations of the technology. It's hard to believe that processors of today run three orders of magnitude faster, and have six+ orders of magnitude more RAM, with six orders of magnitude more disk storage with about five orders of magnitude faster disk I/O.
Embarrassed to be old enough to remember: 8" floppies were actually called disks, and the smaller 5.25" floppy drives were called diskettes because they were so compact
In Dutch, we always talked about 'diskettes', when talking about the rigid 3.5" disks. The large 5.25" were called floppies. Diskettes were called floppies too sometimes, but never the other way around.
I'm from the time frame in which I never saw 8 inch floppies.
The 5.25" were on the way out, many PCs had both 1.44 and 1.2 MB drives for a while.
At least in Poland, the PC culture seems to have ended up calling both 5.25" and 3.5" "dyskietka" (lit. "diskette").
"Disk" tended to be encountered in "official" names used by OS software (so, "disk A:" etc.) but at least I never encountered "disk" to refer to anything other than hard drive since ~1992 or so.
No. ALL floppies were called "diskettes" because they were tiny compared to hard disks, which were the usual sort of "disk" up until IBM devised the floppy format for loading boot code into their mainframes.
Sauce: My dad had a Tandy Model 16 with 8" drives (of the Shugart Thinline variety, one of which is pictured in the article!). Tandy sold blank 8" media that were labeled as diskettes. In addition, when the computer booted, if it could not detect a boot disk it would turn the screen white (green) with the words "INSERT DISKETTE" in the middle.
In addition, IBM referred to the 8" floppy format as the "Type 1 Diskette", which nomenclature dates from 1973.
Haha, good one. I never used 8” disks but I do remember the diskette term going along with floppy disks late 80s/early 90s when I got my first PC. I never put one and one together
Fan fact: Shugart is today's Seagate, the name was changed because the founder, Alan Shugart Shugart, had two companies, one for HDDs (Shugart Technology) and another for FDDs (Shugart Associates), both named after him. Later the FDD company was sold to Xerox but kept the name, so the HDD company had to change its name to Seagate. The rename was quite clever, it still rhymes with the original word.
A few years ago I was looking at purchasing an IBM DisplayWriter from someone. I had a handful of devices with 5.25” drives but have never an 8” drive in person until then.
Unfortunately the machine was not in a working state. There was some suspicion that it was a simple issue, but I’m not an EE and I try to make sure my retro equipment works prior to buying it. Since the system wouldn’t boot, I was unsure whether the drives were even working. I ended up not buying it in part because of this and in part because I was moving soon, but I kinda regret not doing so, seeing how rare full DsiplayWriter systems are and how much a complete system will sell for (a lot more than I was going to pay for it).
At the time I had done a small amount of research on using the disk drives with a PC. I was mostly inconclusive with me finding maybe one person selling boards to adapt 8” drives. So it’s cool to see something like this now.
Not many people seem to know that there was a software version of DisplayWriter on the original IBM PC. I know this because IBM were desperate to get into the education market in the UK in the early 1980s and I was at the time working at Middlesex Polytechnic (in the UK, university now) and they gave us a PC and the software - and it was laughably crap. I was a WordStar user at the time, and I couldn't believe how inept DisplayWriter it was - and I was a big fan of VM/CMS they sold us and the 4381 super-minis that it ran on.
The first computer I ever used was a Heathkit H89 microcomputer kit running CP/M. Somehow my old man got ahold of an 8" floppy drive from somewhere. I don't recall that it ever saw much use, though. 5 1/4" floppies were simply so much more convenient.
Those were also the days when we still used acoustic couplers with our Hayes Micromodem 100's because god forbid we should ever attach anything directly to Ma Bell's precious phone lines. ALL HAIL THE PHONE COMPANY! BLESSED ARE THE DIAL TONE MAKERS!
Ha memories. Used to bike down to the local Radio Shack every weekend and fiddle around with their Model II display for hours. How far we've come in my lifetime.
I broke my 5.25" floppy disk drive attached to my Pentium 166MHz by putting in a rusty floppy disk. I didn't know enough about these drives to fix it. A real shame, as the 3.5" drive still works.
We had these machines made by IBM, that emulated a keypunch machine, but stored the data on an 8" floppy. They had the same keyboard layout as a keypunch, and a one-line alphanumeric display. The idea was that a skilled keypunch operator could start using floppies with no retraining.
You entered your program and handed the disk to the operator, and received your printout later. You could do one or two debug cycles during a class period, maybe three if you came in later during the day, after which the operator's patience wore out and you were told to write your program more carefully. In reality, they were probably doing this work as a favor for the math teacher who was teaching the class.
The next semester, the school got some CRT terminals, but there were five terminals for a class of about 15 kids, hand picked by the math teacher. I still remember my user name and password.
I wrote a program that generated mazes, and when I thought it was working OK, I set it to print out a maze the size of a sheet of green bar paper. Next day, I got a big scolding for creating an endless loop. But in reality, my program was OK and I learned a lesson about complexity -- my program probably had some insanely high order like O(n^3) or even worse.
I don't know of anybody remembers or noticed, but I remember taking some of my first plane flights, and the person behind the ticket desk was typing very quickly on their terminal, but with just their index fingers. That's keypunch technique.