It was very grounding to understand how disk capacity has grown over time.
And yet the funny thing is, all the documents that are absolutely critical to my personal life would fit on a floppy no problem. That said I'd never have risked them to a floppy even when you could get them new. I never had good luck with floppies lasting any length of time at all.
I think my family's first computer had a 1GB hard drive in it (at most), now I can get an SD card with 1000 times that. It's amazing and truthfully I don't understand how it's possible.
I worked in a personnel office in the Army for a bit in the mid-90s, and they had a Windows machine with a bunch of documents and spreadsheets on the hard drive. The Staff Sergeant who ran the office was paranoid about losing everything in a hard drive failure, so the first thing he made me do was move all of them off to floppy disks. (I remember he called A: "the alpha drive" if that gives you any hint on his level of tech savviness.) Maybe the disks were old. Maybe it was the humidity. At any rate, it was only a couple of weeks before half that stuff was unreadable.
At the same time, I remember one time I crumpled up one of those 5.25 inch floppies in my TRS-80 programming class in high school, then I realized there was something I wanted off of it and flattened it back out - and it worked!
Mind blowing
I recall aligning Shugardt SA800 8" floppy drives with an oscilloscope and it's described in the maintenance manuals along with the circuit diagrams—yes, there was actually a time when we automatically had the Right to Repair and manufacturers provided circuit diagrams and repair information as an accepted and normal practice (back in the 1980s the very notion of Right to Repair would have been foreign and ridiculous to us)!
(Incidentally, I still own two SA800 drives, they're still mounted side-by-side in their docking bay. I also have copies of the operation and maintenance manuals. They not only cover the theory of operation of the drive but also its maintenance and alignment procedures.)
As the linked article demonstrates (https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2021/05/recovering-l...), when one cannot read a floppy or gets data errors during a read the first thing to do is to try different drives as the read sensitivity and mechanical alignment can vary from drive to drive—even if one's drive is in perfect mechanical alignment the disk one is trying to read may have been recorded on a drive that was out of alignment (tiny alignment differences don't matter much in normal operation but those differences can matter with disks recorded on badly aligned drives, or when damaged or the surface partially demagnetized). I cannot overstress the benefit of having many floppy drives to hand before attempting more rigorous data recovery methods (I once recall using seven drives before I found one that would read a very marginal disk).
One of the more rigorous methods to recover data from a floppy was to use an oscilloscope. I've it to adjust a good, well-aligned drive so it would read (now track) an out-of-alignment disk which was otherwise unreadable. Afterwards, the drive had to be realigned using a calibrated disk.
One of the most important parts of both floppy drives and hard disks that's not much discussed these days is the data separator circuitry. This critical circuitry is needed to separate the data component from the noise. Most people don't think of modern hard disks as analog devices but they are at the point where data is read from the surface of the platter. Moreover, in hard disks where high packing density is paramount, the data in the signal read from the tracks is often below the noise level so in effect even a normal read operation is actually a sophisticated data recovery operation. Needless to say, in modern hard drives that much of the data separator technology is both secret and highly proprietary.
There is still considerable misconception about the reliability of floppy disks. I recall attending a data recovery seminar late into the floppy era when other storage was becoming more prevalent (when HDs started to vastly outstrip floppy storage capacity). The lecturer went to considerable effort to emphasize that whilst floppies were often considered as inferior storage media and maligned as being unreliable but this view wasn't necessarily supported by the facts (his evidence changed my perception and decades later he was proved correct).
In fact, floppies could be very reliable, especially so if they were well treated (in reality, the more justifiable claim was that their storage capacity was very limited). There's however a caveat here, very early floppies were little more than rust in a binder medium that could flake off or easily wear loose. That was definitely not so with the much more resilient high coercivity coatings of later floppies. In fact, I still have programs recorded on such disks and those that I've accessed in recent years have all been readable (and I'm talking of some hundreds of disks that were recorded over 30 years ago which I transferred to HD storage for convenience). Thus, when referring to floppies it's very important to be specific about the type of disk and that also includes the manufacturer, as some brands were much better than others).
The article was enlightening from a different perspective, I was particularly interested in the Greaseweazle reader as I'd not come across it previously. In recent years I've not had the need to recover data from a floppy but having done in the distant past I'm very curious about the device's operation. Reckon I'll try to acquire one more out of curiosity than from necessity.
https://www.openstenoproject.org/plover/
Yes, there are people who use it for programming, too.
Not my thing at all, but maybe it's yours.
Writing tip: this should be the first or second sentence in the article to draw people in. Instead, it’s at the end.
This one, though was far more about the journey than the destination.
(This isn't always the case, and is arguably far less often the case than authors tend to think. But I feel it's more than fairly applied in this instance.)
