Does anyone miss...

....the feeling and sound of handling and using Floppy disks?

The smell of a new Floppy, the sliding metal cover, the read/write tab. Peeling fresh labels, writing them out and ordering your disk collection.

The sound it made as you slotted it home into the Amiga. The sensation of pushing the disk into the drive with a single finger. The disk loading sounds...

Ok, it sounds like retro porn I admit, but it's true.

It just occurred to me now I really miss Floppy media. I don't feel the same about Tapes or Carts and CD/DVD/Flash disks just feel cold - they have no character. Installing things from Floppy to a hard drive felt great too.

Sure Floppies were slow, but they felt better somehow. Yes, I'm having a nostalgia morning.....

I enjoy handling real floppies (5 1/4") when I'm playing with my C64.

I also miss some of the later carts produce for the C64.

I miss DOS commands and I'm not just talking about PC DOS but all text based disk operating systems. The need to type something in to load a programme rather than the soulless double clicking of a mouse button. They made you need to understand how a computer worked.

I'm with you on that Buleste. :)

Something about having to do more work to get something to run and waiting in anticipation that made the final experience that much better.

Having everything just instantly available and things download and run with little effort just isn't as satisfying.

It isn't just floppy disks, but the whole experience. As you say, today's media doesn't have any feeling or soul to it, and is very generic. It's the same with CDs compared to vinyl... CDs might sound great and the ability to move to any track, and fast search is all great, and it completely made tapes pointless, but Vinyl had something special about it because you could see the physical mechanics of the needle touching the record and the sound being produced. Same with floppy disks in a way.

I still remember the first time I used floppy disks and thought they were amazing as I'd come from an Amstrad CPC464 the tapes and 10 minute loading times. Even a minute of loading from a floppy was amazing.

Regarding commandline interfaces for OS control... I like both ways... sometimes it can be much faster with a commandline, but other times it can slow you down. Server management these days is much faster in a commandline with Linux, compared to a Windows Server for example. But when managing files on my own systems I much prefer icons for most things. I do however remember opening my new Atari ST in the 80's, powering it up and getting the GEM desktop and wondering where the commandline was to actually do anything with the system... it was very disappointing just being able to access a floppy disk contents and load things. Of course, had I bought an Amiga at the time I would of had the CLI and a proper commandline interface to interact with the OS... just shows how primitive the ST was in comparison. It also took be a while to get my head around no basic language being a part of the OS as standard and needing to load on up separately. Obviously it makes perfect sense now, but not then when I was used to every 8bit system having its own basic language built in and the ability to experiment and play around with the system out of the box.

Anyway... back to floppies. Do I miss them? Not really in terms of a storage format because of their lack of reliability. Even some new games could have track errors... and these days converting ADFs back to floppy, so many of the floppies I have fail with check errors it gets annoying. As a physically media to handle and put into the system to load a game or software it creating a great emotion the first time you purchased a new game and loaded it up, with the anticipation of what you would find.

I can agree with this. Its just when they don't work that it gets annoying.

A lot of my PC disks tend to fail these days. Not sure why. My Amiga disks tend to be fine.

I did install Memtest86 onto a floppy disk earlier to use on my PC. That worked fine and seemed quicker than loading it from the Ultimate Boot CD.

Obviously with the Amiga one of the best parts of using floppy disks is the cool sounds that the drives make.

I played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on floppy.

So, no, I don't miss them AT ALL.

:lol: I feel for you. Playing Monkey Island 2 was bad enough. I did also play Beneath a steel Sky from Floppy Disk and that game was a nightmare as it would ask for a different disk ever few seconds in some parts. Definitely designed with HD install in mind. And even worse when I got to a disk with a read error on it NOOOOO! But saying that, some smaller games still needed a lot of disk swaps... I think it was Flashback which at some points had you swapping disks left, right and centre to get it loading the next section.

Oh yes.

I especially love how my disk drive sounded like a chainsaw, particularly with games that had custom loaders. Disk drives going at it noisily ... what more could you want?

Very good comparision mentioned above with CD's and Vinyl. It is the same thing here.

I don't miss the technical limitations of the Floppy, although I never suffered hardly any read errors - the tech limits drove me insane! Especially adventure games. Also having two disk drives only to find you still had to swap disks if a game didn't support the second drive. Very annoying. Also the lack of Hard drive support on the Amiga. That's one thing that was always great to have on a PC.

I just miss the feeling of using floppies, installing them onto hard drives, writing out the labels, swapping with friends, the way they slotted into drives, the loading sounds, flipping through my disk boxes etc.....

I get none of that from a DVD or Blueray, flash drive or STEAM/internet download. It just doesn't feel as good. Far easier and faster, but dull and lifeless somehow.

Nostalgia, a funny illogical thing. :D

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Buleste

I miss DOS commands and I'm not just talking about PC DOS but all text based disk operating systems. The need to type something in to load a programme rather than the soulless double clicking of a mouse button. They made you need to understand how a computer worked.

---

Do you remember CP/M?

I came from an Amstrad CPC 6128, which came with a 3" disk drive. I absolutely love handling those rare 3" disks (and the fact you can 'turn over' the disk .... LOL) but I also remember using CP/m quite a bit to manage files on disks. It seemed quite odd in it's syntax (copying a file was strange with the PIP utility, specifying the destination BEFORE the soure on the command line)

However, I still really enjoy the use of floppies on my Amigas. I have purposely kept one A500 with no hard drive for this purpose.

I'm currently loving using a Kryoflux to archive loads of floppy disks because it is chugging away reading the disks and it brings back so many memories from years ago, sitting around an A500+ copying loads of the latest releases with friends using XCopy Pro. :)

I'm pretty sure that I've said it here before, but things in chunky(ish) caddy style housings are just so much more pleasing to behold. You can handle them any way you like (unlike CDs) have them loose in a bag or storage compartment, pile them up on the desk - and of course the lovely positive tactile feeling of pushing it into the slot and hearing the mechanical parts engage. Dropping a disc in a tray just doesn't have that same feel to it.

I'm particularly fond of minidiscs for that reason, plus at the time they felt so modern (not that I'd ever want to use them now). I guess the closest approximation for me nowadays are the CF cards we use in our camera, cos they're a bit chunkier than an SD and click into place nicely.

Totally agree. CDs/DVDs/BD etc are all without a case for the obvious reason that it saves a lot of manufacturing costs. But I would have loved to see DVD and BD in a casing with a shutter for much better protection and longevity. It was however initially the case with DVD-RAM and their cases would have worked just as well for all other 12cm discs. They used to come in pleasingly chunky cases that reminded me of an oversized SyQuest cartridge (remember those?).

I also used to love Zip Disks when they were all the rage at the end of the 90's. They seemed to suddenly appear from nowhere and become an overnight success. Everyone was using them and it was a really easy way to save work and transport it. Obviously the USB drive was completely superseded all such removable rewritable media now and is really affordable, but it just isn't the same is it. It doesn't have any moving parts or tactile feeling when you connect them to the computer.

However I've still got loads of Zip Disks and a few Zip drives because of the Nintendo 64 Mr Backup I own, which uses them to load roms into memory to play them on the N64. Great backup system and more versatile than CD.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by J T

I'm pretty sure that I've said it here before, but things in chunky(ish) caddy style housings are just so much more pleasing to behold. You can handle them any way you like (unlike CDs) have them loose in a bag or storage compartment, pile them up on the desk - and of course the lovely positive tactile feeling of pushing it into the slot and hearing the mechanical parts engage. Dropping a disc in a tray just doesn't have that same feel to it.

---

You cannot beat the sound of a floppy being inserted into DF0: on an A500 - that loud (ish) CLUNK is so nostalgic

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by J T

I'm particularly fond of minidiscs for that reason, plus at the time they felt so modern (not that I'd ever want to use them now). I guess the closest approximation for me nowadays are the CF cards we use in our camera, cos they're a bit chunkier than an SD and click into place nicely.

---

I've always been convinced that MiniDisc was the media of the gods! It was just so reliable and so versatile (as an audio format)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by J T

(not that I'd ever want to use them now)

---

Why not? I still use MiniDisc (I have 2 MiniDisc recorders and 3 MiniDisc Hi-Fi Seperates)

A lot of Sony's storage developments over the years have been well designed, reliable and robust. It was always just such a shame most never took off outside of their own products. They did finally get it right with Blu-Ray though.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by woody.cool

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by J T

(not that I'd ever want to use them now)

---

Why not? I still use MiniDisc (I have 2 MiniDisc recorders and 3 MiniDisc Hi-Fi Seperates)

---

I came quite late to the MD party. I had a great little portable MD Player-recorder that was only a little bigger than the disc itself, but having to record in real-time just as MP3 players were starting to take off was real weaksauce. Now I've just got too used to the convenience and capacity of more modern devices (I know there was the net-MD thing, or whatever it was, but that didn't really register much).

I've long since binned my big audio stuff (separates, an AV amp and floorstanders). One day I'll get something nice and dedicated just for music.

Anything stored as data files that can be copied to a device at the maximum speed of the connection is always going to win in the end compared to a linear recording method like tape or disk. I still like MiniDV for video recording if only needing SD quality, but it is still quite inconvenient compared to current memory card and HD video systems that store everything as files. No need to transfer video before editing, just stick the card in or copy over the video files and it is all there in original quality ready to be edited.

And this is also true for floppy disks. Copying an original disk means needing to copy the whole disk sector by sector and track by track from start to finish. Convert it into an ADF or other sector image and you suddenly have a very portable disk images that takes less than a second to move around, copy or send. It is also why floppy drive emulators are of interest these days to completely replace the original drives in the Amiga (and other retro systems) with a memory card reader that can access any sector image and then load it to emulate and trick the host system that it is really loading a real floppy disk. Amazing innovation, but as we are discussing here, it completely loses the tactile nature of floppy disks, the noise of the loading, the click and feel as the disk is put into the drive... definitely not the same, but definitely more reliable and data secure. So many floppy disks are now starting to degrade and generate sector read errors, or even worse completely dead sectors that can't be read at all.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bloodwych

....the feeling and sound of handling and using Floppy disks?

The smell of a new Floppy, the sliding metal cover, the read/write tab. Peeling fresh labels, writing them out and ordering your disk collection.

The sound it made as you slotted it home into the Amiga. The sensation of pushing the disk into the drive with a single finger. The disk loading sounds...

Ok, it sounds like retro porn I admit, but it's true.

It just occurred to me now I really miss Floppy media. I don't feel the same about Tapes or Carts and CD/DVD/Flash disks just feel cold - they have no character. Installing things from Floppy to a hard drive felt great too.

Sure Floppies were slow, but they felt better somehow. Yes, I'm having a nostalgia morning.....

---

Er...no. Way to many moving parts to be honest..a little too electromechanical.
I agree floppys have character but the sliding metal cover overtime would either fail (spring) or open `V` away from either side of the floppy so if you did push it in it would get stuck inside the drive.Again the labels were okay but i had a few floppys were the label had come away from the disc when pushed inside and i had to open the Amiga and remove the top metal case to the drive to save it:no:.I understand and mostly agree that most modern format feels cold and bland but it is more safe,convenient and reliable if you look after it-this is proven from a collecting view point as many floppys may not of faired too well over the years but the more recent `cold` formats will still be exchanging hands for the next 100 yrs

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Menace

I agree floppys have character but the sliding metal cover overtime would either fail (spring) or open `V` away from either side of the floppy so if you did push it in it would get stuck inside the drive

---

I had both of these happen numerous times with my A500+ .... I remember dismantelling the floppy drive to get a metal shutter out plenty of times.

I never had any issues with floppies falling apart. Not even with my original Bloodwych disk, which took some serious abuse. Must have been lucky!

I never had the shutter come apart inside the drive. But did have disks with missing springs or jammed shutters, and I used to just remove the whole shutter and use the disk that way until I could copy it.

Disk labels could be annoying and get stuck inside but I don't remember then causing too much problem. Never had to dismantle a drive to retrieve anything.

The main reason I had no issues was probably due to the fact I had so many disks!

I never re-used disks - copied a game onto one and into the diskbox, so I guess each one suffered less from wear and tear.

Exactly the same for me. I would buy disks in 100's and they would be used once each for copying games and anything else.

Being a bit of a poorper, I couldn't really afford to keep buying disks, so I 'recycled' disks quite a bit, hence a lot of 'wear and tear'

I still use floppies for my Amigas almost every day, so actually I don't miss them. :D