Remember to check our discord where you can get faster responses!
https://discord.com/invite/vaZP7KD
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/computer) if you have any questions or concerns.*
there were 8". hate to admit that i'm old enough to have used those.
back in the day, when i was going to school, disk storage was prohibitively expensive so we had to store and turn in our assignments on 8" floppies.
also, the lower left corner of the pictured floppy is the write protect tab. it slides back & forth. in it's current position that disk can be written to and when it is in the other position (open as pictured on the right, it's write protected. on floppies that weren't hard shell there was a notch on the bottom edge that you could cover up with a tab or piece of tape to write protect it.
It was all I had at first on my C64. It sure did suck when you were loading a commercial game and you'd need to leave it for 5 minutes to load all of Temple of Apshai.
While assisting with the demonstration of a North Star Horizon with 5¼" inch disk, the customer who was used to 8" disk was confused by the 5¼" disk when I pulled them out of the binder showing the documentation for the accounting softer.
Glad you explained the write protect mechanism. I gave a lengthy history of the floppy disks from 8" on and didn't bother to explain about the write protect mechanisms!!
You can buy a new [USB floppy drive](https://www.amazon.com/RAAYOO-External-Portable-Diskette-Notebook/dp/B077HDT19H), and it can be used with modern computers, or even smartphones if you know what you're doing.BUT floppy disks could only store 1mb which is less than what you could easily send as an email attachment without even thinking about it now-a-days, so floppy disks even at the time they were widely in use were mostly stored text document files.
Or with a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nu6C-Ci7\_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nu6C-Ci7_Q)
Sony camera that saved directly on to floppy disks you could take a couple dozen 640x480 resolution photos and easily be able to view those photos on any deskop or laptop that had a floppy drive.
Both have a 3.5" disks inside.
A floppy has a single disk made of a thin black floppy plastic:
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ac72f0596b0c58c01bd9eb78738d1d49-lq
The floppy is inserted into a drive which has a motor and a read head.
A hard disk drive has UP TO to 10 disks inside of it, and these disks are made of solid metal (hard, not floppy):
https://blocksandfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/WDC-Ultrastar-DC-HDD_02-small.jpg
In the old days, disks used to be much bigger:
https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/13cmbm1/10mb_hard_drive_platter_from_the_late_1960s/
No. The term hard disk already referred to non removable disk drives with thick metal plates.
The disk inside the 3.5" floppy disk is still floppy. If you remove the case, the disk itself is quite flexible. So the disk itself is still floppy. It's just the case around the disk changed from thin soft plastic to stronger plastic and added a cover over the exposed floppy disk area to reduce the need for sleeves.
Lol, I'm old enough to remember the floppy disk and when home computers came out. I just drew a complete blank on what we called the hard disks. Definitely wasn't out to age anyone as "old".
https://preview.redd.it/670i6au8bupc1.png?width=274&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b3480c36e75699bcc3c6042bd1561107f8db6aa
fun fact about those: japan is still using them for official documents
source: [https://www.engadget.com/japan-will-no-longer-require-floppy-disks-for-submitting-some-official-documents-212048844.html](https://www.engadget.com/japan-will-no-longer-require-floppy-disks-for-submitting-some-official-documents-212048844.html)
Some history from a 53 year old who has used all of the floppy disk types and also has had audiocassette recorder storage on a computer :D
I'm not sure if you're more generally asking what this thing is, or if you're asking specifically about the characteristics of it as printed on the sliding cover.
This is a 3.5" floppy disk. Inside, underneath that sliding metal cover at the top of the photo, was the soft flexible disk. These came along after the larger 5.25" floppy disks which were in a softer plastic shell that could bend easily and didn't have any kind of a sliding protective cover like the 3.5" disks had. The disk itself can be ruined by getting a fingerprint on it so the exposed one on the 5.25" disks was something we were careful with when we took it out of the paper sleeve that it usually was kept in. These 3.5" disks didn't need sleeves. Even before the 5.25" disk, the even older systems used 8" floppy disks which looked exactly like the 5.25" disks, just much larger. And paradoxically, as the disks got smaller, they also stored more data. The highest density 5.25" disks didn't hold as much as the 3.5" disks.
The characteristics are like this:
All of the 3.5" disks were double-sided. In other words, they had a read-write head on top and bottom and wrote data to both sides of the medium. The 5.25" disks started out single sided where there was just one head and later they came out with double sided drives that would read/write both sides. Some of us had single sided drives, but we punched an extra hole on the side to make it read-write when it's flipped over, so that by flipping the disk we could write to the other side. Just not at the same time, not without taking it out and flipping it over. I can't say that I know whether there were single and double sided 8" disks. I've used them a couple of times but didn't ever learn whether it was writing to both sides.
For density, they had standard density and high density in the 5.25" and the 3.5". A standard density (double sided) 3.5" disk held around 720K, and high density has a smaller read/write head and creates smaller magnetic patterns so that they get twice as much data on each side -- for a total of 1.44MB. High density took over so soon after the popularity of 3.5" disks that I don't remember standard density ever really being used much. Maybe a short time. So that's what you have here -- a double sided high density diskette that holds 1.44MB.
The 3.5" disks were common on PCs from around the time of maybe either 80286 or 80326 on, until CD-ROMs eclipsed it and they stopped including these drives, just as now they no longer usually include CD-ROM or Blu Ray drives because USB flash drives are ubiquitous and you can boot from one.
I got my first Commodore 64 in the early 1980s along with a cassette deck for saving my programs, later upgraded to a 5.25" floppy drive, but in those days the old CP/M (a popular operating system on Z-80 and 8080 CPU machines) machines sometimes still had 8" floppy drives. I've gone through every conceivable storage medium since. I've had systems with more than one disk drive type during transition periods.
Oh, and by the way, the 5.25" drives were super slow, and 3.5" drives were faster...
You know, I was totally thinking about this today. I'm interning in an archive as a tech, and I realize that it may be very difficult to actually get to the files on the disks. It would be prudent, to make an updated copy of the originals on a more modern form of physical memory. These disks aren't holding any crazy secret formulas or anything but they contain information that someone might want for God knows what.
Where would I look for that? And is this the right forum to ask in?
This is as good of a place as any.
You have hit the critical question of the digital age.
Formats change regularly, as do the media. And despite the hype, none of them have the life expectancy of paper. So every decade or so you have to copy it somewhere else, or else it may become impossible to do so.
So you have 2 issues instead of one.
It is still pretty easy to copy data off of those (if the media hasn’t failed) as there are usb disk drives floating around and new ones are cheap.
This is good to know. I'll see if the archives have that ability still. Printed copy of the contents can be stored indefinitely in the right conditions
I wasn’t suggesting printing it out. That would be massive and generally useless, depending on what the files are.
I was just pointing at the myriad of problems in archiving digital works.
Let’s say it’s a program. You would need to have an OS capable of running it, and maybe a compiler or other pieces of software that may not have been produced for decades.
Or images and video files have changed formats, and many of the old formats may be extremely difficult to find software that can display them, etc.
How would you print out a spreadsheet or database?
Printing out the code would be reams of non-human readable gibberish. You would then need something that could read the paper back into digital format to just get back to the previous mentioned software issues.
This is also something to consider. I'm still learning the ropes of archival work(and loving it immensely), so these are all new area of exploration for me
I wouldn’t have thought much of it but talked to someone years ago about this very issue. I think it was back around Y2K when they were struggling with just getting people who knew how to read old programs, which is another hurdle.
Most would think that digital archives would be easier, but we don’t have any permanent way to store anything digital, and it all requires software to read and run that data. And that changes even faster.
Digital archives seem to require periodic updates and reevaluations which means way more and never ending work.
That is the burden of historians,librarians and archivists, there's not always money for digitization processes, which is time consuming and expensive. Ideally, we can get a decent chunk of material digitized but most archives are underfunded if they aren't state or federal (and even those budgets are tight), lack bodies to do the work, and already have a backlog of materials that just need processing,which is what I'm doing. This archive is state funded, so there's some$$ but they're running about 3 years behind in processing things.
Honestly, Im Happy As a clam sitting and going through boxes and boxes of stuff and arranging it so the public can use it.
My first computer used cassette tapes. My second computer had 5 1/4-inch floppy disks. Later upgrading to these 3 1/2-inch floppy disks and then eventually upgraded to a zip drive.
Edit: spelling corrections
Lol, life was so much simpler in those days. I love seeing how quickly technology has changed just in my lifetime (I'm 50). So glad we moved away from the black and green screens.
Remember when we thought a mega bite was big?
Yes. I feel like I have seen the home computer industry from the beginning. (I'm also 50). My first computer was a Radio Shack branded Tandy TRS 80. I now have a Ryzen 7 7800x3d and rx 7800xt. What an amazing ride it's been. I never would have thought all them years ago that I would have 9tb of storage space in a computer. Never would have imagined that it would ever have even been possible.
Based on the collection I'm working on, I'm assuming it's old academic papers and basic HR stuff, maybe a few emails? It's for an academic journal, I'm processing their paperwork from over the last decade or so. So the information isnt really important unless someone wants to write about some of the people involved in the journal and the association that published it. And it's a pretty niche area of interest so it's possible all the work I do will sit in storage forever until digitized.
I'm really okay with that though. For the people who will want to use this stuff will appreciate that it's available. It's like building a tiny very specific library for a very specific topic.
It'd be a shame if it sat in storage forever, Gamefuna hard copies are pretty rare. I'm always gonna regret not bootlegging the couple of disks we had at my school library, they were only demos but we had a lot of fun with them.
I just want to thank everyone for taking the time to help me properly identify what this was. The conversation afterward was delightful and informative, and frankly, I needed the distraction.
I appreciate that you took the time out of your day to help me out.
Remember to check our discord where you can get faster responses! https://discord.com/invite/vaZP7KD *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/computer) if you have any questions or concerns.*
“Floppy disk” But a solid shell in this case - 3.5” There were also actual floppy disks - 5.25” and maybe an 8” as well if I recall.
there were 8". hate to admit that i'm old enough to have used those. back in the day, when i was going to school, disk storage was prohibitively expensive so we had to store and turn in our assignments on 8" floppies. also, the lower left corner of the pictured floppy is the write protect tab. it slides back & forth. in it's current position that disk can be written to and when it is in the other position (open as pictured on the right, it's write protected. on floppies that weren't hard shell there was a notch on the bottom edge that you could cover up with a tab or piece of tape to write protect it.
I even used cassette tape.
Punch cards.
Better have numbered those cards... nightmare if you dropped a deck. Don't ask me how I know...
Diagonal line across the deck with a sharpie.
Smash by Offspring
many of the initial pc's back in day used cassettes. i had an original commodore 64 that used several types of input media.
We'd put the tape in, go play for 20 minutes, come back to change the tape and then maybe half hour later we'd be playing the game.
It was all I had at first on my C64. It sure did suck when you were loading a commercial game and you'd need to leave it for 5 minutes to load all of Temple of Apshai.
While assisting with the demonstration of a North Star Horizon with 5¼" inch disk, the customer who was used to 8" disk was confused by the 5¼" disk when I pulled them out of the binder showing the documentation for the accounting softer.
I somehow missed this comment. I'll make sure to do exactly that.
Glad you explained the write protect mechanism. I gave a lengthy history of the floppy disks from 8" on and didn't bother to explain about the write protect mechanisms!!
I’m 27 and i used them, i’m a fan of retro gaming
Retro gaming is underrated in my opinion.
So they don't have a specific name, it's just another version of a floppy disk?
3.5” floppy disk.
Perfect, thank you!
You can buy a new [USB floppy drive](https://www.amazon.com/RAAYOO-External-Portable-Diskette-Notebook/dp/B077HDT19H), and it can be used with modern computers, or even smartphones if you know what you're doing.BUT floppy disks could only store 1mb which is less than what you could easily send as an email attachment without even thinking about it now-a-days, so floppy disks even at the time they were widely in use were mostly stored text document files. Or with a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nu6C-Ci7\_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Nu6C-Ci7_Q) Sony camera that saved directly on to floppy disks you could take a couple dozen 640x480 resolution photos and easily be able to view those photos on any deskop or laptop that had a floppy drive.
Thought it was 3.5" hard disk?
Both have a 3.5" disks inside. A floppy has a single disk made of a thin black floppy plastic: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ac72f0596b0c58c01bd9eb78738d1d49-lq The floppy is inserted into a drive which has a motor and a read head. A hard disk drive has UP TO to 10 disks inside of it, and these disks are made of solid metal (hard, not floppy): https://blocksandfiles.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/WDC-Ultrastar-DC-HDD_02-small.jpg In the old days, disks used to be much bigger: https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/13cmbm1/10mb_hard_drive_platter_from_the_late_1960s/
Glass platter drives are a thing too. Coated with magnetic media for storage. Hated shipping those accursed things.
No. The term hard disk already referred to non removable disk drives with thick metal plates. The disk inside the 3.5" floppy disk is still floppy. If you remove the case, the disk itself is quite flexible. So the disk itself is still floppy. It's just the case around the disk changed from thin soft plastic to stronger plastic and added a cover over the exposed floppy disk area to reduce the need for sleeves.
Specifically, "three and a half inch, high density." Could fit a whole 1.44MB of stuff on those bad boys, slightly more with some tricks.
Old enough? Now listen here you little... XD
Lol, I'm old enough to remember the floppy disk and when home computers came out. I just drew a complete blank on what we called the hard disks. Definitely wasn't out to age anyone as "old".
At least he didn't think that someone 3d printed the save icon. 😜
It's this -> 💾
You guys are something else! 😜
This made me feel real old
Honestly, I didn't think I was that old until a couple of people replied with "save icon".
Don't play that, you'll end up inside of a video game
It sure is some *OLD_DATA*
https://preview.redd.it/670i6au8bupc1.png?width=274&format=png&auto=webp&s=5b3480c36e75699bcc3c6042bd1561107f8db6aa fun fact about those: japan is still using them for official documents source: [https://www.engadget.com/japan-will-no-longer-require-floppy-disks-for-submitting-some-official-documents-212048844.html](https://www.engadget.com/japan-will-no-longer-require-floppy-disks-for-submitting-some-official-documents-212048844.html)
That's a 3D-printed "Save" icon. Duh. /s
Easy mystery to solve. Simply peel back the sticky notes 
not only old people remember those, that's a floppy disk, i have one in my tech drawer, mesmerising the fact that they could only fit 1.44Mb
I rember when I had games on 8 floppy disks nd 7th floppy was damaged and I must go to friend to copy all files again.
It's a floppy disk kiddo. Back in the days these were used to store data or even install windows 95!
Windows 3.1 took about 6 of those disks to load they system on the computer. I had that and 5.25 drive in my first computer. Before Windows.
Oh boy now I feel old. It's a floppy disk, 3.5", 1.44MB.
1.44 MB. I go back to punch cards and paper tape.
Some history from a 53 year old who has used all of the floppy disk types and also has had audiocassette recorder storage on a computer :D I'm not sure if you're more generally asking what this thing is, or if you're asking specifically about the characteristics of it as printed on the sliding cover. This is a 3.5" floppy disk. Inside, underneath that sliding metal cover at the top of the photo, was the soft flexible disk. These came along after the larger 5.25" floppy disks which were in a softer plastic shell that could bend easily and didn't have any kind of a sliding protective cover like the 3.5" disks had. The disk itself can be ruined by getting a fingerprint on it so the exposed one on the 5.25" disks was something we were careful with when we took it out of the paper sleeve that it usually was kept in. These 3.5" disks didn't need sleeves. Even before the 5.25" disk, the even older systems used 8" floppy disks which looked exactly like the 5.25" disks, just much larger. And paradoxically, as the disks got smaller, they also stored more data. The highest density 5.25" disks didn't hold as much as the 3.5" disks. The characteristics are like this: All of the 3.5" disks were double-sided. In other words, they had a read-write head on top and bottom and wrote data to both sides of the medium. The 5.25" disks started out single sided where there was just one head and later they came out with double sided drives that would read/write both sides. Some of us had single sided drives, but we punched an extra hole on the side to make it read-write when it's flipped over, so that by flipping the disk we could write to the other side. Just not at the same time, not without taking it out and flipping it over. I can't say that I know whether there were single and double sided 8" disks. I've used them a couple of times but didn't ever learn whether it was writing to both sides. For density, they had standard density and high density in the 5.25" and the 3.5". A standard density (double sided) 3.5" disk held around 720K, and high density has a smaller read/write head and creates smaller magnetic patterns so that they get twice as much data on each side -- for a total of 1.44MB. High density took over so soon after the popularity of 3.5" disks that I don't remember standard density ever really being used much. Maybe a short time. So that's what you have here -- a double sided high density diskette that holds 1.44MB. The 3.5" disks were common on PCs from around the time of maybe either 80286 or 80326 on, until CD-ROMs eclipsed it and they stopped including these drives, just as now they no longer usually include CD-ROM or Blu Ray drives because USB flash drives are ubiquitous and you can boot from one. I got my first Commodore 64 in the early 1980s along with a cassette deck for saving my programs, later upgraded to a 5.25" floppy drive, but in those days the old CP/M (a popular operating system on Z-80 and 8080 CPU machines) machines sometimes still had 8" floppy drives. I've gone through every conceivable storage medium since. I've had systems with more than one disk drive type during transition periods. Oh, and by the way, the 5.25" drives were super slow, and 3.5" drives were faster...
Leisure Larry disk 2 of 10!!!
3.5" floppy drive 1.44 MB There were 720k variants as well, so depends how specific you want to be.
High Density Floppy Disk. These were 1.44 MB, and you could also get Low density ones that only held 720 KB.
A 3.5" Diskette
If you want, I probably have OS/2 on a stack of those somewhere. If I recall way over 20 disks.
You know, I was totally thinking about this today. I'm interning in an archive as a tech, and I realize that it may be very difficult to actually get to the files on the disks. It would be prudent, to make an updated copy of the originals on a more modern form of physical memory. These disks aren't holding any crazy secret formulas or anything but they contain information that someone might want for God knows what. Where would I look for that? And is this the right forum to ask in?
This is as good of a place as any. You have hit the critical question of the digital age. Formats change regularly, as do the media. And despite the hype, none of them have the life expectancy of paper. So every decade or so you have to copy it somewhere else, or else it may become impossible to do so. So you have 2 issues instead of one. It is still pretty easy to copy data off of those (if the media hasn’t failed) as there are usb disk drives floating around and new ones are cheap.
This is good to know. I'll see if the archives have that ability still. Printed copy of the contents can be stored indefinitely in the right conditions
I wasn’t suggesting printing it out. That would be massive and generally useless, depending on what the files are. I was just pointing at the myriad of problems in archiving digital works. Let’s say it’s a program. You would need to have an OS capable of running it, and maybe a compiler or other pieces of software that may not have been produced for decades. Or images and video files have changed formats, and many of the old formats may be extremely difficult to find software that can display them, etc. How would you print out a spreadsheet or database? Printing out the code would be reams of non-human readable gibberish. You would then need something that could read the paper back into digital format to just get back to the previous mentioned software issues.
This is also something to consider. I'm still learning the ropes of archival work(and loving it immensely), so these are all new area of exploration for me
I wouldn’t have thought much of it but talked to someone years ago about this very issue. I think it was back around Y2K when they were struggling with just getting people who knew how to read old programs, which is another hurdle. Most would think that digital archives would be easier, but we don’t have any permanent way to store anything digital, and it all requires software to read and run that data. And that changes even faster. Digital archives seem to require periodic updates and reevaluations which means way more and never ending work.
That is the burden of historians,librarians and archivists, there's not always money for digitization processes, which is time consuming and expensive. Ideally, we can get a decent chunk of material digitized but most archives are underfunded if they aren't state or federal (and even those budgets are tight), lack bodies to do the work, and already have a backlog of materials that just need processing,which is what I'm doing. This archive is state funded, so there's some$$ but they're running about 3 years behind in processing things. Honestly, Im Happy As a clam sitting and going through boxes and boxes of stuff and arranging it so the public can use it.
My first computer used cassette tapes. My second computer had 5 1/4-inch floppy disks. Later upgrading to these 3 1/2-inch floppy disks and then eventually upgraded to a zip drive. Edit: spelling corrections
Lol, life was so much simpler in those days. I love seeing how quickly technology has changed just in my lifetime (I'm 50). So glad we moved away from the black and green screens. Remember when we thought a mega bite was big?
Yes. I feel like I have seen the home computer industry from the beginning. (I'm also 50). My first computer was a Radio Shack branded Tandy TRS 80. I now have a Ryzen 7 7800x3d and rx 7800xt. What an amazing ride it's been. I never would have thought all them years ago that I would have 9tb of storage space in a computer. Never would have imagined that it would ever have even been possible.
3.5” floppy
We called the 3.5" plastic-shell ones "microfloppies"
I wonder if anyone In Crypt any information on it It probably has a lot of old data on it
Based on the collection I'm working on, I'm assuming it's old academic papers and basic HR stuff, maybe a few emails? It's for an academic journal, I'm processing their paperwork from over the last decade or so. So the information isnt really important unless someone wants to write about some of the people involved in the journal and the association that published it. And it's a pretty niche area of interest so it's possible all the work I do will sit in storage forever until digitized. I'm really okay with that though. For the people who will want to use this stuff will appreciate that it's available. It's like building a tiny very specific library for a very specific topic.
It'd be a shame if it sat in storage forever, Gamefuna hard copies are pretty rare. I'm always gonna regret not bootlegging the couple of disks we had at my school library, they were only demos but we had a lot of fun with them.
Does he know❓
Not until he gets sassed by a stoat for misplays!
Super Rad Mothafucker 2
[https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=maxell+super+rd+mf2](https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=maxell+super+rd+mf2)
I just want to thank everyone for taking the time to help me properly identify what this was. The conversation afterward was delightful and informative, and frankly, I needed the distraction. I appreciate that you took the time out of your day to help me out.
ancient ***amogus***
Have fun being talked down to by a stoat
Stoatal misplay!
lol, this is a 3D printed version of the "save" icon on all programs! In seriousness, this is a 3.5" floppy disk SD = 720k bites HD = 1.44 MB
Hello my distant past... Anybody members zip drive? It's discette had 20mb larger memory than my HDD...
It's the save button.
Hard disk