Flipping your Disk (1981)

Re:Flipping your Disk (1981) by dboreham on Monday September 30, 2019 @02:25PM (#21118230)

When you flip the floppy over the media rotates the other way. Supposedly the inside of the jacket had a fabric coating who's purpose was to catch fragments of media falling off during use. If you spin the media the other way those fragments come back off and gunge up the head. Or so the story goes.

Also of course there were real double-sided drives that used both sides of the media (with two heads). Vendors expected users to use those and pay extra.

Source: punched many a hole in Pet floppies back in the day.

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Re:Flipping your Disk (1981) by joezydeco on Monday September 30, 2019 @07:29PM (#21120632)

There was indeed a fabric coating in most floppies, but in my experience taking them apart I never found any material that looked directional.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/21/8-...

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Re:Flipping your Disk (1981) by JudgeMonroe on Monday September 30, 2019 @03:27PM (#21118824)

I have a fabric brush that works on that principle, such that I have to take care when using it left-handed instead of right-handed as the direction changes and instead of removing lint from my garment it puts all the accumulated lint back on if I run it the wrong way.

But this is almost certainly not the case with the floppy disk fabric. Virtually every piece of Apple software sold on floppy that needed more than 1 disk side used the flip-side of the disk, making disk-flipping and running the disk "backward" not only common but necessary almost every time you used the computer.

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