this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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I found this old software on a medium I don't recognize at my church. Does anyone know if this has value to anybody? this

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[–] [email protected] 229 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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 big daddy in the picture is 8", first type I used, with COBOL)

... and now you kids know where the "save" button icon came from.

They were not meant to be removed from their protective envelopes, they're probably damaged now.

[–] InverseParallax 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hear, hear.

As in, wha? Did you say something? taps cane on the floor

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] emogu 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your belt onions are looking spiffy today

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (6 children)

This 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).

[–] MyDearWatson616 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I remember having a CD burner, dvd burner, floppy drive, and Zip drive for those rare occasions.

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 6 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] breathless_RACEHORSE 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!" :)

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[–] Thteven 9 points 1 year ago

My parents first computer was 3 feet tall and cost $30,000. I liked to play frogger on it lmao.

[–] jungle 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Don't forget the cassettes before that. (Sinclair 1000 / ZX-81)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Having worked in a datacenter somewhat recently, I can assure you that cassettes are still in use. Now, they manage to fit tens of TB in a 4"x4" square.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Good old turtle. You could also program loops, so you could make fancy shapes like circles.

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[–] Eldritch 78 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Interesting they look like three and a half inch floppies out of their sleeves

[–] Hazdaz 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Someone probably had no idea what they were doing. Like, at all.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros

The box is from some fancy Apple software from long before most of you were born.

The contents are just the skeletal remains of assorted species of the Save Icon.

[–] tym 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nobody ever asks why it's the C:\

Pour one out for A:\ and B:\

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Originally, personal computers only had a floppy disk drive, which got letter A, and later models could have two floppy drives, so A and B. When hard disk drives appeared they got assigned to letter C (and typically D for a secondary HDD). E then became customary for optical drives (CD-ROM, DVD-ROM etc.)

[–] chronicledmonocle 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me, an average Linux enjoyer: "What's a drive letter?"

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago

My heart aches for those floppies’ demise.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago

That looks like a floppy disk with the protective casing removed...

[–] TootSweet 32 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] dustyData 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] TootSweet 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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. ;)

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[–] Imgonnatrythis 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hope this is just a Boomer hating shit post. Pretty sure it is.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

might be a floppy disk, but without the case

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Well, I feel old.

3.5” floppy discs which have been removed from their plastic shells.

[–] MinimumChips 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

12 megabytes of RAM, 500 megabyte hard drive, built-in spreadhseet capabilities and a modem that transmits it over 28,000 bps

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

either that or the porn is hidden there

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Beagle Bros was a software company that developed useful quirky software for the Apple ][ computer. They had a schtick that all of their manuals and promotional materials were styled like flyers from "old West" salesmen. They were actually pretty funny if you were in on the joke.

[–] UhBell 12 points 1 year ago

Wow this makes me feel old

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Looks like floppy disks without the shell. How big are they?

[–] prettydarknwild 8 points 1 year ago

the disk that lies inside a floppy disk (a 5.25 floppy disk judging by the size)

[–] Iron_Lynx 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Looks like the physical storage medium of a 3 1/2 inch diskette. Which is usually called a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk, except with this one it's a bit of a misnomer, since this iteration has a rigid case, unlike the older 8 inch and 5 1/4 inch versions. Or should have, it appears to be removed in OP's case.

[–] Gobo 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The disk itself is flexible, hence the floppy disk. In contrast a hard disk had rigid platters, hence hard. The outer casing has nothing to do with it.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, floppy without the case was my immediate guess too. Not sure why they would have been stored this way though. It's a bit weird.

[–] TheScribbler 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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