Really interesting and wonderfully nerdy video about how floppy disks works. Kids, ask your parents what a “floppy disk” is.
How old school floppy drives worked
Really interesting and wonderfully nerdy video about how floppy disks works. Kids, ask your parents what a “floppy disk” is.
More wonderful nerdiness. Music! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk_XaJ7gE4Q
We never referred to the 3.5″ disks as floppy disks, and instead used the terms stiffy disk or stiffies. Don’t know if that was just a South African thing though.
Probably. I’d never heard that term before here in Canada.
A quick search has confirmed that it is a uniquely South African term. How weird – I always thought everyone called it that.
It’s funny the things and words we think are common that we find out are actually very local and specific to where we live. 🙂
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In Australia, a “stiffie” is a, well, um, it’s a, um, ah, you know…
Now I know, but I was very much unaware of it at that stage as I was still in primary school and English wasn’t our first language.
Same here in Canada. 🙂
Another fragile storage medium. Good thing they were relatively cheap.
The first Mergenthaler phototypesetting machines I learned to use stored document files on 8-inch floppies. Fonts were on strips of film that would mount onto a rotating drum, adjacent to a lens turret that would make sizing possible. Those were loud machines, and I don’t miss ’em.
The later CRTronic typesetters ran on 5.25″ disks, I believe. They were quieter—fonts were electronically stored, I believe—but you still had to run the phototypeset film through chemical processing. I don’t miss that.
It doesn’t feel all that long ago when J&R Computers in Manhattan had a whole aisle of brightly-colored packs of 3.5″ floppies. I miss J&R. 🙂