Any PC able to read one of those is too ancient to use.
Belongs in a museum!!!
As do most of us, who know what these are… and how to use them.
3.5" floppy disk. LOL. Remember 5.25" floppies, and how many varieties there were?
I have an “A” drive on a USB. Have not used it since I got it, but it’s there - an odd comfort.
Ken
I still have an 8" floppy disk… never used in the PC world and hanging on a wall, with some other main-frame “platters”. I suspect they are from the 70’s…
As do most of us, who know what these are… and how to use them.
… and where we have a few stored away.
–Peter
I have a USB A flash drive.
PSU
I still have a TEAC 5.25"/3.5" FDD that is HH (1/2 height). Yep, both in one slot. They didn’t fare well, after one drive would fail… but I still remember TEAC as a good/known name, back in the day! Their straight HH drives were awesome and reliable… both 5.25 & 3.5, they could read anything. Still have a few of them… somewhere in a box.
ww.remembersthegoololdays.pl/neverthoughtIwouldlivelongenuft…
An old stash of maybe 25 or 30 3.5" disks lives in a cabinet here, somewhere else an old USB floppy disk reader lives, maybe in the garage… Old backup files of files used in the day, maybe likely unreadable by today’s software… Should just recycle 'em all I suppose…
How long before CDs, DVDs go the same way… Already I’ve found files on my system that the current Office can’t read, even though they are old Word files…
Time marches on…
I still have an 8" floppy disk… never used in the PC world
I believe the Tandy Model 2 used those. Also used on at least one Xenix system (backup was 44 8" floppies).
I still have an 8" floppy disk… never used in the PC world
Not so fast. Back in the mid 70’s in the early days some of us started out with first with paper tape to load and store our programs, next were single cassette tape drives, Phi deck came out with controllable tape decks. By the 1977 west coast computer faire in San Francisco the big rage was 8” Shugart drives. In that time frame I bought two of their early models for ~ $1300 (almost $ 6,000 in today’s money). At the 1977 National Computer Conference, Commadore had two very crude mockup prototypes of their PET computer. Shugart was promoting their 8” floppies as the way of the future. Up until that time 8” floppies had mostly been used for booting up the big mainframes but Shugart said they already were seeing orders from PC startups. I as well as several other competitors designed a 8” disk controller for the S100 bus with a disk I/O CPM based system. There was a lot of history before the IBM PC and Apple.
RAM
I believe the Tandy Model 2 used those.
I am certain the TRS-80 used them. That was the first personal computer I actually got paid to use. Did spreadsheets on VisiCalc.
—Peter
I am certain the TRS-80 used them.
Model 1 used 5.25" FDD (SS and DS, densities all over the place: SD, DD, QD, hard and soft sector disks). Used these at work. Model 2 used 8" FDD. Don’t remember Model 3, might have used 5.25". Not sure when 3.5" FDD came out.
We built the first machine used to manufacture 5.25" FDDs in the US by a major brand name in early 1980.
I still have an 8" floppy disk… never used in the PC world
Not so fast. Back in the mid 70’s in the early days some of us started out with first with paper tape to load and store our programs, next were single cassette tape drives, Phi deck came out with controllable tape decks. By the 1977 west coast computer faire in San Francisco the big rage was 8” Shugart drives. In that time frame I bought two of their early models for ~ $1300 (almost $ 6,000 in today’s money). At the 1977 National Computer Conference, Commadore had two very crude mockup prototypes of their PET computer. Shugart was promoting their 8” floppies as the way of the future. Up until that time 8” floppies had mostly been used for booting up the big mainframes but Shugart said they already were seeing orders from PC startups. I as well as several other competitors designed a 8” disk controller for the S100 bus with a disk I/O CPM based system. There was a lot of history before the IBM PC and Apple.
Media formats are getting shorter-lived on average, and the lifespan of the format is occasionally less than the lifespan of the media… but not many have been THIS short-lived: http://www.sabrina-online.com/pages/SO-TS2-06.jpg
The Model 3 did have 5.25" drives built in.
I remember them as being same as the ones on the Apple IIe. (Not built-in, but the 5.25" drives were pretty standard fare for the IIe at the time I was fooling around with the Model 3 - I think my brother got it at an auction or something)