TheScribblerAnyone know what this is?
Thanks, everyone. I thought that’s what they were, but thought there was maybe something I didn’t know. I think we’ll probably just trash them.
Yeah, I’d be surprised if you could pull data off them, but data recovery pros never cease to amaze me
EldritchInteresting they look like three and a half inch floppies out of their sleeves
The more interesting thing to me is the oddly old timey brand
That’s definitely what it is, but why was it removed from the plastic housing? It would never last long without the protection, and even if it was being bulk-written to, you wouldn’t do it outside the housing.
Very strange.
Someone probably had no idea what they were doing. Like, at all.
I would rip em up as a kid all the time.
SamiMaybe try asking here [email protected]
magmaus3might be a floppy disk, but without the case
thegreekgeekLooks like floppy disks without the shell. How big are they?
Yeah, floppy without the case was my immediate guess too. Not sure why they would have been stored this way though.
From Beagle Bros - Wikipedia:
Beagle Bros was an American software company that specialized in creating personal computing products. Their primary focus was on the Apple II family of computers. Although they ceased business in 1991, owner Mark Simonsen permitted the Beagle Bros name and logo to be included on the 30th anniversary reboot of I. O. Silver, released on December 12, 2014 by former Beagle programmer Randy Brandt.
Found via reverse image search:
manitcorold floppy disks of different sizes. the bottom looks like 5 1/4" the ones on top with the metal centers are all 3 1/2". Both standards needed sleeves to be read. Many of these are likely trash now but that wouldn’t stop me from trying to load them.
Both standards needed sleeves to be read.
For 3.5", yes. 5.25" disks could be removed from their protective enclosures, inserted into a drive, and used as normal. At least until the exposed medium was damaged by fingerprints or other debris. Not something you would normally do though. Source: Did it myself a few times mostly out of curiosity.
This. When my favourite floppies started to have a worn sleeve (especially 3.5", where that metal protective covers started to bend out a bit, threatening to jam in the drive), I usually transplanted the disk itself over to a new sleeve.
It’s the guts of 3.5" floppies, like these, they usually stored 720kB, then 1.44MB, but the latest versions (double sided) were 2.88MB.
The larger one at the bottom is from a 5 1/4" (orange in this picture, the bug daddy in the picture is 8", first type I used, with COBOL)
… and now you kids know where the “save” button icon came from.
God damn I’m old.
Hear, hear.
As in, wha? Did you say something? taps cane on the floor
Come in!
Your belt onions are looking spiffy today
Which was the style at the time…
Started with the 8" bastards on a dedicated word processor (with a 12" CRT, green phospher glow, and typwriter style printer built right into the top of the unit!) that my dad had for medical filekeeping at his office.
It’s been amazing watching storage tech from those to zip drives, and now, floppies of any kind are dying.
ThtevenMy parents first computer was 3 feet tall and cost $30,000. I liked to play frogger on it lmao.
My daughter found a 3.5" floppy in a drawer a couple of years ago (she was 20) and went “What is this? It looks just like a ‘Save’ button!” :)
I hope you smacked her for that lol.
redimkThis reminds me of when I got a new PC when I was younger and I was shocked… “WHAT?! THEY COME WITH 128MB RAM NOW!!! AND THEY HAVE A DVD TRAY??? No more floppy disks!!!”
Fuck, those were nice times (except for dial-up internet).
I remember having a CD burner, dvd burner, floppy drive, and Zip drive for those rare occasions.
Felt like we could store the whole world on 100mb zip disks
I remember backing up all my documents on a zip drive and feeling like we reached peak storage.
Last month I bought two 6TB drives into my house because of all my photos/videos.
I still have a working zip drive.
cousinofjahI still have a bunch of zip disks that I want to examine. Think they’re still good?
Dick JusticeZip drives!
I got all excited when the cost of hard drives got down to $10/MB.
There’s nothing quite like passing around copies of games that are eight-diskettes large and finding out that disk #8 is unreadable after a 30min install. Good times.
PlutoniumAcidI have the original floppy set for MS Office 4.3 for Windows 3.11.
Fourty-three 3.5" disks.
Hahaha, mfw the last few disks is the same face the morning after a spicy burrito.
The part that’s wild to me is I have an SD card in a computer in my pocket that cost $10 or so and is basically disposable but it’s larger than the hard drive in my first computer from 25 years ago
You can get a 128GB pendrive for like 15€…
That’s crazy.
I remember upgrading my Macintosh computer from 512kB to A FULL MEGABYTE! Wow, what a difference, suddenly I could run two programs at once - even three small ones.
Ah, the eighties… Those were the days.
If you play them backwards a satanic message is heard before the media bursts into flames.
First game I ever played was on those 8” floppies. It was a turtle game where you would type in DOS commands and make it move. I can’t remember the command prompts but it was fun enter like forward 1000 and it would blast across the screen.
Good old turtle. You could also program loops, so you could make fancy shapes like circles.
Logo!
That’s it! Ha ha wow haven’t seen that since elementary school.
I learned this and BASIC at around the same time.
I remember that! As others have posted, Logo.
Logo ? Anyway there was a this “programming langue” with a turtle and it had like 6 commands : move forward/backwards, turn left/right, pen up/down :-D
Nate CoxWell, I feel old.
3.5” floppy discs which have been removed from their plastic shells.
Yeah, as others have said, floppies without cases.
Just to be clear, floppy cases were never meant to be removed. They were glued together in such a way that it wasn’t possible to take the case off without breaking the case. And these disks can’t be read without the cases. Basically, the cases were considered part of the disk (just like the plastic casing of a an audio cassette or VHS is integral to the functioning of the medium.) I have to imagine whoever took these out of their cases had a misunderstanding about how computers on the order of thinking a CD-ROM tray is a drink holder or trying to print a document by laying the monitor face-down on the bed of a copy machine.
If you wanted to read the 3.5" disks, you might be able to do so if you can procure a proper floppy drive and some sacrificial floppy disks. It’d probably take some finesse and careful gluing skills.
But that all assumes that these disks haven’t lost their data already. Floppies tend to just plain old degrade over time. So the data very is very likely heavily corrupted.
I have heard of really specialized hardware to read data off of degraded disks, but that’s probably “you have to know a guy/gal” level of specialization. If you really wanted to go that route, I think you’d probably want to know if what you have there is “valuable” (basically not already available on Archive.org and also interesting like unreleased source code or something.) But if you thought you had something like that and wanted to pursue it, you could @ Jason Scott (@[email protected]) on Mastodon. If anybody has a lead on how to read those, it’s him.
They were probably disassembled for showcase. They weren’t the most resilient of things and eventually enough area of the disk would degrade as to make the disk unusable. Eventually as in, really fast. Every office had a pile of defective floppies marked as corrupted to prevent people from losing their data to them. Essentially you could format and write on them but reading was impossible or returned garbled data. They were comonly disassembled to showcase how they worked and to experiment as they were a cheap source of ferromagnetic coated cellulose.
or arts and grafts. someone might had an idea for either the cases or the discs themselves and the dics wouldnt work so they saved them for later. and now he we are at a later date...
I have floppy disks containing Bungie's game Marathon for the Mac. 3 out of 4 I've been successfully in dumping onto the PC but one is giving me trouble. Would Jason Scott be the person to ask about recovering the data from the disk?
If anyone can point you in the right direction, it’s probably Jason Scott. And it appears I’ve conjured him.
The process of recovering that disk may involve a long drive to one of a very few people in the world with specialized hardware for that purpose.
One thing you might want to do, though, is check Archive.org to see if they have that disk. You might just be able to get that data there. If they don’t have that disk and you do manage to recover it (or even if you don’t manage to recover the final disk and can only get images of 3 out of 4) do consider uploading disk images to Archive.org .
(This from someone who has an old 3rd-party collection of Sim City 2000 cities on CD that was sold in stores that I’ve been planning to image and upload but haven’t yet. I’ll get to it soon, though!)
They can probably be read if you thrown them into another case. I used to rip them apart and put them back together as a kid.
One more interesting feature was the “write lock” switch on the 3.5" ones, a sliding button that covered one of the squared holes on their edges. The floppy drive would sense that and refuse to write on them.
On the 5.25" it was a notch cut on the side (there were punchers for that). To write on a “protected” disk, you’d cover the notch with adhesive tape.
Jason Scott@TootSweet @TheScribbler what monster did this
Jason Scott! I can’t express how honored I am that your apparently first post on Lemmy is a response to me!
Also, yes, monstrous. ;)
We can thank the beauty of ActivityPub to let people reply across multiple platforms.
t0m5k1I know they’re floppies but when I see them like this it always reminds me of the first intern role I had at datacard/gemplus UK, I had to change the disk stacks in the main frame at specific times with specific access codes, lift the lid and pull out the disk stacks, put them on a specific numbered trolly and insert the next stack.
Was all very precise and I saw someone screw it once, glad it was a perm staffer and not me, I took so many notes on that process I dreamt of them for years.
As everyone else said, they’re floppy disks with the plastic case removed.
Since you found them in a church, could they have belonged to a church bell system? I’ve seen other church bell systems in the past where the songs came on weird mediums.
This is just a random guess, I don’t know why anyone would remove the casing.