Flopys

What are you on about?
It was the same as today.
Why aren't you using paper today?

Floppy was just like a USB stick is used today.
You had files (drawings, wallpapers, excel spreadsheets, word files, txts, etc) you needed to take somewhere else, so you wrote them into a floppy.

You couldn't fit music, or movies into it. And programs usually took several disks. But it was pretty much the same.

I believe files were also more lightweight back then.

ODT rapes 1 MiB.
13 KiB from me alone saving this web page text.
Click embed fonts.
3MiB in size.
GG floppy.

Ok lets use TXT:
Save tfwiki.net/wiki/Optimus_Prime_(G1)
Its a wiki article represents a normal large sized document, no pictures pure TXT (UTF-8 however this is marginal).
in pure TXT format.
200 KiB.

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>1 floppy could hold dozens if not hundreds of texts
Ok tell me how you used them back in the day.

if not counting software and games, i used floppies to hold my midi files and pictures. later mp3 (split rars). propably other things too.

>Used to save school projects
What where these projects?
Text only?

>i used floppies to hold my midi files
Aww I forgot about MIDI.
So where your entire collection(music, games, programs etc ) on 1 floppy? Or did you have multiple floppy's for different activities?
How did you keep track of all the data you did have.

>You had files (drawings, wallpapers, excel spreadsheets, word files, txts, etc) you needed to take somewhere else, so you wrote them into a floppy.
I get this.

Only I was asking if people did hold their entire life collection on 1 floppy or how they organized them in their own archive.
Not talking about needing to take to X place.

>Program code is just text.
I know.
This is why i excluded games/programs.
I mean my scripts today are like 10 lines in bash.

I was wondering if people did store their diary or office documents on floppy's.

I basically hold everything I have on a handful of 8 TB HDDs and its great.

> Pictures were either not digital
i get it only the question is then what exactly did you keep on the computer?
I'm only wanting to learn about the good old days.

go find an old amiga guy, they had boxes and boxes of floppies for their pirated games

documents of all kinds, media, fucking everything that they needed to transfer.

Bunch of special devices like MIDI instruments and CNC machines accepted data from floppies

>And there were programs around like Zip, LZH, Arc etc
Did you have a separate file format that ziped your stuff?
Did the drive itself do it?
Or did you need to open a .zip and edit its contents and then save to it?

Tell me about the real life applications of floppy's and how you exactly used them.

You bought floppies in bulk, just like CDs.

Usually two or three boxes of floppies was enough for a casual user. Powerusers probably had several boxes like thiese.

Case in point, I was a 7 year old kid in 1995. I had a single box of 10 floppies to fool around and it was more than enough. My dad (a casual, not in IT) worked at an office and needed to move around programs, spreadsheets and shit, and he owned like 30 floppies.

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well, one 1.4M floppy couldn't handle all my precious data so i had bunch of floppies stored in a case. writings on stickers gave me hints what was stored on each floppy.

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>You bought floppies in bulk, just like CDs.
I know this.
>My dad (a casual, not in IT) worked at an office and needed to move around programs, spreadsheets and shit, and he owned like 30 floppies.
How did you/he organize it all?
Did you/he keep your stuff on the HDD and only used the floppy to swap between PCs?
Or did he seriously use floppy's to archive stuff?

>Case in point, I was a 7 year old kid in 1995
>Usually two or three boxes of floppies was enough for a casual user.
how exactly did you use these floppy's?
1 games floppy
1 ....
???
Did you write your own stuff in TXT and save it to the floppy?

i mean its not like a floppy can hold more then 10 pictures(actually photo not some computer generated stuff) even from that period.
And like pointed out above photos where not digital.

>Case in point, I was a 7 year old kid in 1995

And this is about the same experience for me only i mostly interacted with the HDD and did have games on it. And game CDs.

Needed to take over pictures over floppies and spiting the picture folder into separate floppies was always a pain back in the day, did not want to burn CD.

And now I start thinking how did people use them back in the day?
How did computer life look back in the day?
Especially office life.

>i get it only the question is then what exactly did you keep on the computer?
You kept most of your stuff on the computer. When you needed to reinstall, you backed up your most important files into floppies (or moved them to another HDD if you had several).

Mostly, floppies were to move around stuff, keep backups of important files, system restore stuff, and so on.

Look up Word 6.0, install it in VM with Dos 6.22 and WinFW 3.11 and copy paste a document. See how much smaller the file is.

Thank you for this information.
What where the classifications you used on them?
did 1 flopy = 1 document?
Or did you have volumes of data?
What data did you generate(generate not copy so saving MIDI or games/programs is excluded) to these floppies?

I can only think of writing TXT files.

>Mostly, floppies were to move around stuff, keep backups of important files, system restore stuff, and so on.
Aha.
So keeping multiple floppies like some magical computer document you plug into the PC was mostly a myth (not having it on the HDD only in floppy version)?

>So keeping multiple floppies like some magical computer document you plug into the PC was mostly a myth (not having it on the HDD only in floppy version)?
I would say it depended on the user. Some would group their files into different floppies for clarity of storage. (ie. X program in this floppy, word docs in the other, and so on) Others would be more disorganized and just put stuff wherever.

But floppies were very cheap in the 1990s so there was an incentive to buy many and have your stuff organized and properly labeled.

Interesting can you give me the numbers that show up?
Because I work with raw TXT all the time and like pointed out in one normal article is about 200 KiB in pure TXT (UTF-8 however this is marginal).
So you can have 5 normal documents or so in 1 floppy.

The fact you're calling them ZIP "archives" points to their purpose: To save files using compression when you were going to backup or transport them elsewhere, while taking away the ability to use them directly without unarchiving them first.
There used to be software like DriveSpace or Stacker which could compress data on the fly, but you typically used it only on small hard drives because they sucked at interoperability - for example, of course there were ZIP archivers for Mac or Amiga too which meant you could exchange compressed files with them, but a floppy you had compressed with DriveSpace only worked with MS-DOS 6.22 or Windows 95.

It was the flash drive of the era, don't overmistify it. 1.44Mb was more than enough for most stuff, for bigger stuff there were tape drives, later ZIP drives and CD.

It's from memory, can just give you numbers off the top of my head.
I know I fit several important documents and spreadsheets on a single floppy (plus a couple more floppies for safety, magnetic things were not made for computer and data safety) back in the day.
The thin version of Warcraft 2 came on 10 floppies, Win95 and Office95 came on a whopping hundred! floppies, my uncle made a stupid decision when he ordered it on the more "reliable" medium

*can't

>Some would group their files into different floppies for clarity of storage
I can imagine this.
However my hierarchical file system organization is so precise and nice for me.

Maybe old people who where starting with computers got confused with it? And needed 1 physical thing you keep in 1 physical place?

>1990s
I remember the 1990s (I was a kid)
However I also remember needing to transport some pictures to another computer in like 2002 and the floppy's where a real pain.
The time needed to plug them in and out really was a pain.

Later we simply just unplugged the system HDD and mounted it in another computer to transfer files.

Then I got interested in thinking how people did it back in the day and 80s and what exactly they generated to these floppy's and their computers (no video, no pictures ,no movies.).
I started thinking how computing looked in the 1980s mostly.

i know you can write games and programs with handful of lines so I exclude them.

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Thank you for this insight.

Did anyone write their diary ro similar things in the PC? And/or did have this generated text on a floppy?

one floppy one document would have been waste of space, so several documents on one floppy (memos, school essays etc, cannot remember for sure).

not all of my midi files were copies from internet. i was just a kid back then but i used softwate bundled with sound card (midisoft recording session) to compose my own midis. i think i had two floppies for my own composes. too bad those floppies haven't survived.

while writing this, i remember i also used floppies to backup game data files like hi-score tables, game saves and other things like self made sound .wad files for doom and maps for some other games.

>was more than enough for most stuff,
I'm interested what stuff other then programs/games you did have/transfer on them.

Tell me how you used them.
Because on a flash drive I can save so many documents (ODT embedded fonts) that its never a problem.
Like my analysis shows a normal document would be about 200 KiB and limit 1 floppy to about 5 normal documents in TXT format.

>magnetic things were not made for computer and data safety)
This. I was also wanting to ask if people did not get paranoid since floppy's are considered to lose data a lot.

>posts bought programs
I understand that floppy's where used for games/programs where ideal it was 1 floppy = 1 game/program.

I'm more interested in user generated data.

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When we talk about typical office documents you stored back in the day, it was things like letters (with a few pages at most) and spreadsheets (with a few months of data per workbook at most); orplain text files with hints and cheats, savestates or BASIC programs when you were playing video games.
In fact, I'm at the office right now and most forgotten MS Office documents dated before 2006 are well within 50 KB limits, unless they're containing some embedded images which were usually not compressed.

Somebody interested in Transformers for example would most likely not have saved that whole article in one piece (because wikis weren't prevalent yet), but gathered and saved several cool facts about (and pixelated JPEGs of) Optimus Prime across the web.

>one floppy one document would have been waste of space
Only it would be easy to organize (see how games/software was distributed) and allow room to grow a lot.

Did you get confused and lose(not knowing on what floppy it is) your data a lot?

i seem to remember that a Win95 installation was around 20 floppies(3.5"). That was after PC's had hard drives. Before, you'd boot the PC from a floppy (5.25", Apple ][+) and anything you didn't explicitly save to a floppy was lost when you powered down.

>how exactly did you use these floppy's?
At first I used them to storage drawings I made in paint, videogame savegames, games like Prehistorik 2, Wolf3d, later some schoolwork at the tail end of the floppy era.

The first porn I ever watched was in a floppy. A schoolmate gave it to me, it had a powerpoint of naked grills. Pamela Anderson among them. This was in 1998 I think. Good times.

>And needed 1 physical thing you keep in 1 physical place?
No, nobody I knew of stored one file per floppy. That was a waste of space. You usually kept several files per floppy, usually grouped by categories (ie, "office stuff", "schoolwork", "games" or if the files were too big or too many for one single floppy, you had "schoowork I and II", "program I and II", etc.)

>lose your data
sometimes, yes. in the end, floppies weren't reliable media. sometimes it felt like floppies got bad sectors by just dropping them on the floor accidentally.

and as i mentioned my own midi composes, they became a victim of formatting wrong floppies. (dos undelete/unformat couldn't almost ever recover anything)

TurboCNC

would you install windows 8 from floppies?

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Are you high or just stupid or a troll?

>Disk 3 of 3711
Nightmare fuel.

English Windows 95 RTM came on 21 floppies + boot disk, with advanced formatting (21 instead of 18 sectors per track) that decreased to only 15.
If you really want, you can try installing those from Winworldpc, for example.

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Extremely. My friends and I even kept a blacklist of tramcar numbers that were more likely to corrupt your floppies.
Riding bikes was the safe method, or pestering parents to give a lift. Bus was too lowly, but sometimes had to swallow the pill.
We also used a method of storing things multiple times on a floppy since it was only a small part that was corrupted on the disk.

>Somebody interested in Transformers
The transformer thing is based on this little factoid
youtu.be/0RrgaVzzwnc?t=77
tfwiki.net/wiki/Afterdeath!
(the mind of OPTIMUS PRIME fits on 1 floppy )
I was thinking that its funny so I used the wiki article instead of wikipedias about sand or something else.

I started thinking what people generated on computers back in the day excluding games/programs and theorized if people started using floppies like some diary.
Where 1 file = 1 entry.
Only using the estimations form the experiment I say 1 normal page entry should be 70 KiB minimum.

So limiting the floppy to about
14 entries.
>and pixelated JPEGs of
pictures make everything worse here they eat lots of space.

>When we talk about typical office documents you stored back in the day, it was things like letters (with a few pages at most) and spreadsheets (with a few months of data per workbook at most);

Interesting and was it all stored in the HDD or on floppy only? If on floppy only how did the contents of this floppy look like? Where there multiple folders or did people simply throw their files in the root?

>, it was things like letters (with a few pages at most)
Did people keep them in TXT or some word document format?

Office95 had close to 100 floppies, it had a protection system that allowed installation without a key, but it asked at every single file if you really really wanted to copy it.
Had to install it twice this way since my uncle misplaced the key card. Haha! It wasn't funny back then.

ODT didn't exist back then. Fonts were smaller (in both senses haha) and text was usually just ascii. Zip up a bunch of ascii text or html and you can fit a lot in 1MB. Images would have been very low res and possibly have a restricted color palette. Remember that many screens were only 640x480, so an image would likely be smaller than that, and it is also likely the image would only have 256 colors.

I have one of these. My rarest flopette zipdrive.

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>1.44 Mb
That is a 3.5'' floppy disk, not a zipdrive disk

>ODT didn't exist back then.
I know.
How exactly is the contrast between old word formats VS ODT?

I was using ODT for a word like format size.
>ascii text or html
I used a calculation for TXT this is raw UTF-8 and UTF-8 with no non-English symbols is basically ASCII

I used to turn in powerpoint assignments on floppys. Which was great because if you hadn't done yours, you could just pierce a tiny hole through the inside disc so it wouldn't work and you'd have an extra day to finish your shit.

>Interesting and was it all stored in the HDD or on floppy only?
If you had a large enough hard drive, you only used floppies for transfer and backups.
>If on floppy only how did the contents of this floppy look like? Where there multiple folders or did people simply throw their files in the root?
As there was limited space, nobody really gave much thought to organizing them most of the time, only if you hit some limits in organizing. For example, a typical FAT12 filesystem only has 224 entries for the root of the disk, much less if you're using long filenames on Win95 (which just stuffed the Unicode representation of long filenames into consecutive 8.3 entries with hidden dummy flags), so if you were saving a lot of tiny files you simply had to make a directory.
>Did people keep them in TXT or some word document format?
Most text processor file formats were either plain text, plain text with some textual/binary markup (RTF, WordPerfect) or pretty much a program's dumped memory in serialized form (Word 95 and earlier).

my dad kept floppys that were for like software, drivers, or system restore disks in his filing cabinet. floppies that got used often were organized in a drawer at his desk. floppies that got taken to work or exchanged with people usually floated around inside a little box (I think it was originally a box that printer paper came in which he started throwing floppies into)

Keep in mind, the "floppy" which was in the OP was actually the physically compact version of floppy disks. Where I'm from, everyone called these "diskettes." The older floppies were much bigger, which I think is what started my dad keeping them in a filing cabinet. The originals were 8-inch. Then they created 5 inch and eventually the 3 inch that's in the OP.

AFAIK, the reason Windows usually puts the system on C: is because for a good while, many computers had two floppy drives, one for the larger floppys and one for the smaller size.

I think usually people would just write stuff like that on the computer and back it up to a floppy. If you didn't have your own computer, then yeah you'd probably have a floppy you put in someone elses computer so you could write and keep your documents.

A:\ and B:\ was the two disk drives before HDDs become mainstream.
When the diskette drive came out a:\ became the new small disk format and B:\ stayed the 5.25'' format.
I remember running around with my C64 disks in my backpack :))

I used to burn a square hole opposite the write-protect tab in a 3.5" and use a single-sided disk in a double-sided drive

Don't you mean double sided disk in a single sided drive? The other way makes no sense

The extra notch fooled the drive into thinking the disk was double sided. Usually worked pretty well, though you needed to use quality disks.

back in those days sexting was a lot harder. I took a photo of my cock and had to store it on 28 floppy disks which I then sent to the recipient by snail mail. Then they posted me aphoto of their tits about 5 days later on 24 floppies

Don't copy that floppy.

I don't know the technical details of old word formats, but I'm sure they were much simpler and smaller than ODT.

My point with saying ascii was just that you had a pretty limited character set in most documents, so when you had thousands of words you could compress it down pretty well with just a zip folder. Again, I don't know the details of word document formats, but I can imagine if you were writing a latex document for example, you'd get pretty good compression rates as well because the markup is a lot of repeated strings.

Mostly people didn't even need to compress stuff to fit it on a floppy, but I'm just saying, if you really wanted to fit some huge document or set of documents on a floppy back then, you could get decently far by compressing it. If you *really* *needed* to use floppys for some large document that was still bigger than a floppy, you could compress it and split it up for multiple floppies (software existed specifically for this purpose) and of course you'd have to copy that all off onto the next computer then combine the files and decompress them. I believe that back in the day when I had to do something like this I even put the .exe to decompress the floppies onto one of them so I didn't need to install it on the next computer.

In reality, if you were storing such large documents that a floppy couldn't handle, you'd use something more like a zip-disk (which originally held 100MB which was huge for removable media at the time) I never needed more than floppies back then, but I only used computers for school and learning a little bit of programming. Don't forget that we had disks that held a petabyte in 1999, so professionals that used tons of data had different stuff that had much more capacity. Most people didn't need much file space back then.

>Where people like saving their writings to a floppy's ?
Yes, and I actually know someone who lost their whole dissertation due to poor floppy management.

> like where was there 1 floppy for 1 document or how did this work?
No, they already had a filesystem; even pre-floppy machines already usually had.

One thing you'd notice with filesystems like FAT from back then is that they'd economize on file name length. So you had RES2S.TXT or whatever. Not very descriptive in all cases.

> Did people save pictures to it?
Yes... ish. You know, not that many had digital cameras until the CD-Rom age. That said some people did get some of their photos (from film) put on floppies, yes.

> What can you use 1 MiB for?
Operating system and a bunch of software.

Try some modern 64k demoscene demos, eh? Or actually, there are a bunch of Linux and non-Linux ASM operating systems that are still ~that small that you can try. These are more fun than the original software for the most part.

Also multi-floppy software was a thing.

Then your teacher placed a large magnet on the floppy disks so they wouldn't move and accused you of damaging the disks.

No. But putting your floppies near you big brick cellphones was a sure way of damaging them.

(cont'd)
BTW even older tricks like audio tapes as storage were bigger than 1MB, you got like 30MB or something with that. But tapes were just slow... a minute or more to get to a file and access it, floppies were comparatively fast. Only like 15-30s to load a game. It was like some cartridges but cheaper. Simpler software was loaded in 5 seconds or so, sometimes.

And well, even some time into the HDD age, HDD were pricey. I recall we had a 30MB drive or something first... only at the 300MB drive a while later the floppies started to become more useless.

>I don't know the technical details of old word formats, but I'm sure they were much simpler and smaller than ODT.
Did you know? ODT is basically a zip folder full of stuff. Open it with any archive program to see what is inside. It actually compress the txt strings in there.

> old word formats
Can someone take this TXT
pastebin.com/vgSJEAkS
and past it into old word formats to see how it compress?

I'm actually interested in the results.
TXT (UTF-8) 200 KiB
ODT 93 KiB

Mostly school assignments. With just one, without zipping, I could fit all the simultaneous unfinished ones. Zipped, I could go through a whole year without having to delete anything. But things are never as you'd like and the fucking things kept dieing randomly, progressively worse as they got cheaper.

>That is a 3.5'' floppy disk, not a zipdrive disk
True.
However we are talking about the old days of the 80s.
Tell me about it.

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I had to put my MSc Thesis on a 3.5'' floppy disk in 2000, 60 pages of formatted text and images, I remember I saved it 3 times on the disk to be sure.

>Operating system and a bunch of software.
I know.
This is why I exclude games/programs/scripts.
>Also multi-floppy software was a thing.
True.
However my obsession was about user generated content.

>Yes, and I actually know someone who lost their whole dissertation due to poor floppy management.
interesting are you talking about not knowing where the file or floppy physically is or data corruption?

>heir whole dissertation
Why did they write it on a floppy(/ computer file) in the first place?
I like to know about these people.

>Thesis
In what format?
Word?
TXT?
Something else?

Did you not keep the file on the computer HDD?
> I saved it 3 times on the disk to be sure.

Of course it was Word. Word 97 to be precise. Pirated, because fuck everything.

> I saved it 3 times on the disk to be sure.
What did you mean by this

ODT intended to be "limitless", old formats were really restrictive because of the then-available hardware (although sanely so, the average person didn't need 5000 pages, 250 worksheets or 1000000 columns and those who did would come up with a specialized format for their use case).

>old formats were really restrictive
semi true.
TXT is limitless.
all hail TXT.

They saved 3 copies of their thesis to the floppy for redundancy, in case one of them got affected by disk corruption.

>Did you not keep the file on the computer HDD?
Dude, are you mentally retarded? How did you hand in your thesis? You had to print it in 3 copies, bind them, hand it in electronically on a disk.
Of course I would keep it on my HDD, and a couple of CD-RWs for backup.

Did the old formats lag if you did use a lot of pages?
Because i remember making my thesis and the idiot professor was surprised everyone split his work into separate chapters on separate word files.

you try making 100 pages including graphics in a over 100 MiB word document and see what happens.

Good luck trying to work with anything more than 5MB on old raw-text editors (or even current Notepad)

A interesting thanks for this info.
>for redundancy,
People who say "remove redundancy" are idiots.

I'g getting excited to try to open a 20 MiB TXT file in one of my loonix text editors to see what happens.

Want to provide this TXT file?
>even current Notepad
Notpad like all MS software is not developed and actively crippled.
Did you know? MS removed the edit program in their windows command line after win XP.

not froppi - THIS froppe!

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AFAICT, current MS Office is still a big hack-job. I guess there's no escape without breaking backwards compatibility, but they also bloated the thing to hell since 2007, adding insult to injury. Office '97 is still my favorite...

This.

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>Did you know? MS removed the edit program in their windows command line after win XP.
They removed all DOS programs in 64bit versions. 32bit windows still has them.

> However my obsession was about user generated content.
Databases and text mostly? Most of the "user generated content" other than the entertainment kind was just office paperwork and business calculation type of stuff. Or scientific calculations if you did that.

Art and music and games and so on were of course also around by that time, but it was hardly the focus of what you could buy in stores and on mail order overall.

> interesting are you talking about not knowing where the file or floppy physically is or data corruption?
It was some crappy file format and a document on many floppy disks, some broke or went missing. Either way, same story as on Jow Forums every second day with people's non-redundant HDD/SSD, the data was lost.

> Why did they write it on a floppy(/ computer file) in the first place?
Because that's what had enough storage on that machine.

If it follows sane development models, it should stream the file as you go and pre-buffer while idle, you shouldn't even notice the difference opening a 10K vs a 10G file.
Just run 'for i in {1..10000000}; do echo "Hello World!"; done'

>for i in {1..10000000}; do echo "Hello World!"; done
Thanks.
It worked* while it also loded the rest of the file.

i was hoping someone did have a obscenely large TXT file with different text.
i was to lazy to write a C program to generate it.
And C is my first love programming language.

Works under loonix for 130MiB TXT files.

I remember having a 20 mb hard drive in one of my earliest PCs. 1MB used to be a lot of space.

when floppy drives were actually being regularly used, computers weren't really used to display pictures. you had to get the images from somewhere and digital cameras were not common until the early 2000s. so it was mostly artwork and graphics that were in bmp or gif with less than 16 bit color.

computers were not really multimedia devices until like 2005, and even then, they were not like they are today where they can do everything without question

>So excluding programs and games. What did people use floppy's for back in the day?

Floppies were used pretty much the same way that flash drives and SD cards are used today. At the time 1.4MB was a decent amount of space, you could store dozens of JPEG images or hundreds of documents. Media files were a little more difficult to store so a lot of the shit had to be compressed way down and had bad quality but it was passable in those days. After CD burners became commonplace there was no longer any reason to use them.

I had a mini version of windows 3.1 running off a single floppy as my main os for over a year.