I have aquired, for free, a bit of DOS software/games on 3.25 in floppies.

Time to see what works and what doesnt. Not sure if any of the disks need to be archived but I plan to just use my greaseweazel for dumping images.

Floppy commish for Ilirej!

Image is compressed 1024x1024 PNG in 8-bit (256 colour), on a 720K diskette!

Form will be available sooooon (these start at 60 AUD and include postage)

Flauntin' my wealth

Finally got the whole floppy family: 8", 5.25" and 3.5"
#retro #retrocomputing #floppy

A few years back someone came up with a standard that re-purposed the housing of 3.5" floppies as an enclosure and format for flash memory.

This included a pogo-pin standard pinout for SD, USB (or SATA?) interface accessed via the shutter hole.

Not like the "512GB floppy" which merely stores microSD cards. This formed a cartridge that could be loaded into a reader like a floppy.

Given you can fit 8GB+ on even budget MicroSD cards, such a format could store terabytes.

Does anyone recall that project?

My pet peeve:

these maxell #floppy disks.

They're trouble, even if the surface is clean, they don't read well. Sometimes they read after a few tries, sometimes not.

Hello fellow #floppy fans! Through some fiddling and optimisation I've freed up about 180KB of space on http://floppy.museum and need something to fill it with.

Since my brain is pretty much empty at the moment, I would be very grateful for any ideas the Fediverse could offer. Some ground rules:

• It needs to fit in the space given (duh!)
• It needs to be relevant to floppies and/or #retrocomputing
• It can be software (yet another service), in which case it must run under #MSDOS on a 286, and should have moderate memory requirements (some EMS and XMS is OK, but at most 380KB conventional..)
• It can be art (but don't expect me to create any, so the license must permit this usage)
• Should not require modern browsers of hardware to access/enjoy

Ideas floated so far:

• Gopher server (problem: how to convert html to gopher pages; yes I've tried, no it's not easy)
• Rmenu (a telnet server allowing running of commands on the machine)
• Samantha Fox GIFs

Spread the word and give me ideas! The sillier the better!

#Retrocomputing #286 #PerformanceArt

New #blog post: I miss the days of ubiquitous portable data storage

https://rldane.space/i-miss-the-days-of-ubiquitous-portable-data-storage.html

653 words

cc: my wonderful #chorus: @joel @dm @sotolf @thedoctor @pixx @twizzay @orbitalmartian @adamsdesk @krafter @roguefoam @solusspider @clayton

(I will happily add/remove you from the chorus upon request! :)

#100DaysToOffload #18

> Knitting Through Digital Decay: A Collection of Digital Preservation Jumpers No One Asked For (But Here They Are Anyway)

https://digitalpreservation-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/knitting-through-digital-decay-a-collection-of-digital-preservation-jumpers-no-one-asked-for-but-478c48009521

My first #PC was a 486 machine with two #floppy drives. A: was the little-used 5¼ DSHD drive, and B: was the 3½ HD drive that saw the vast majority of use.

I only learned decades later that this was the opposite of the usual setup, in which A: is the 3½ drive.

I wonder why the builder went with this arrangement?

When I was a kid, I didn't know what the “thump thump thump” sound coming from a #floppy #disk drive was.

It also made a buzzing sound, which I figured was the head moving back and forth, but the thump was a mystery.

I'm still not sure, but I'm guessing it's the stepper motor moving by a single track. Am I right?

I wonder if a sufficiently large #RAID 0 array of #floppy drives could match the throughput of an #SSD, and if so, how many drives it would take.

Let's see…

The Crucial T705 does sequential IO at 13387 MB/s, or 109666304 kbps. A floppy drive can do sequential IO at 250 kbps.

So, an array of 438665 floppy drives should be about the same speed, and would store about 602 GB. Not bad.

Now, how do I connect 438665 floppy drives to one computer?

It is the year 2025 CE. I have received a 5.25-inch floppy in the post (among other things).

Just found an "autoprotec" 5.25" #floppy disc - with protections slides to make them writable or write-protect it.

Did you know that many USB #floppy drives can’t read 720 KB #floppies? Well, I know it now.

The most annoying part is that the read/write head could read those floppies just fine. It’s just the silly #firmware of the external drive that messes things up!

My horribly old #desktop #PC is finally starting to die. Currently running a backup (using #zfs send/recv) to my server of one important local dataset.

Now I started looking for new hardware and to my surprise found a "modern" mainboard with a "real" parallel port (internal header, certainly good enough). This really helps with my retro hobby (#C64), years ago I soldered a simple interface cable that allows using a 1541 floppy on the PC, I even ported the #opencbm driver for that from #Linux to #FreeBSD. Without a parallel port, you'd need some complex USB interface instead including a microcontroller and "tons of shit", while the cable for the parallel port basically consists of a few diodes.

Now I wonder one thing: I'd also love to have a #FDC (#floppy drive controller) again. Is there any modern board coming with THAT as well or should I just forget about it?

Found one of the elder scrolls in my office.

It's times like these I have to remind myself I work for a 52 year old software company.

New video! I'm talking about boot selectors for the #Amiga showing off a DIY method and then trying out the #FireFloppySwap500, which is a super deluxe solution.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/FVRQ-UqaC3Y
PeerTube: https://makertube.net/w/fDDPnJfTC6uuPxMekEhNzK