pkzip spanning disks was a normal thing back then. I'm totally not showing my age by knowing that (and having used it a lot).
I have always felt the floppy was a great demonstrator of the concept: a 3.5 inch might be perfectly fine for everyday usage and storage, but the moment you're trying to carry some data in 1.44 meg [0] zip portions, you're bound to find out just how many defective discs you had the entire time.
[0]okay, it was 1.37 meg of data actually IIRC but still
Not the whole world. In the late 80's through early 90's the publishing industry used 44mb SyQuest disks to transport files.
Those 8 inch disks were not enlarged 5¼-inch disks. The 5¼-inch ones were shrunk 8 inch disks.
They were a fairly inconvenient form factor, the main benefit was the much reduced density, which made them super resistant to wear-and-tear. A lot of 8 inch floppies written in the 1980s still work just fine: last time I checked, BART used them.
I'm not sure they were ever commercially available in high density configurations.
The 3.5" disks were "floppy" too: you just had to take the actual disc out out of its rigid protective shell.
>Supposedly they only stored 1.2MB but I recall seeing 2.X MB models for sale at boeing surplus in the mid 1990s
I can't find anything about this on this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
There are some old drives that store 2 Mb per disk, but that's megabits, not megabytes. It seems the very largest 8" disks ever achieved was 1.2MB, exactly the same as the 5.25".
The “floppy disk” is named for the round mylar storage medium inside the square casing, which is both floppy and a disk in all the sizes they came in, not the square casing, which, while somewhat flexible in 8” and 5¼” sizes, is not really floppy, and absolutely not a disk, for any of them.
Not true. The square casing plus the circular thing inside was absolutely a "disk". But it was not a "disc". The thing inside was a "disc".
There were small pockets of Amiga users that could store 1.76mb on the same floppy disk due to a different type of hardware
I relied on it for years until CD writers became common and affordable.
That said, I found a forum post that claimed an Amiga could store 1MB (1.1 in the comments) on a DD disk (standard size is 880k on Amiga, 720k on PC). So perhaps an HD disk could have been formatted to store over 2MB? I wouldn't be surprised if there were some drawbacks to this method that makes data corruption more probable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Amiga
Some info about different sectors, tracks, etc.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how..., https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...
realy reaaally tiny fraction of Amigas userbase had access to HD floppy drive only ever shipping in ONE top of the line most expensive model 4000. It was a custom modified Chinon FZ357A spinning at half rpm, needed because Amiga could only handle 250Kbit/s data rate while standard HD floppy drive uses 500Kbit/s. Commodore being hugely mismanaged didnt invest anything in engineering, they lacked will and resources to update technology in its subsequent models. 1994 A4000T, the very last Amiga ever manufactured shipped with the very same Chip responsible for sound and Double Density floppy interfacing as the very first model 1000 from 1985.
> drive was more flexible
Stock Amiga FDD was standard and could be replaced with PC after little pinout modification. Controller on the other hand could be called software defined as it lacked any smarts. It could only decode/encode raw datastream to/from ram buffer whole track at a time. In contrast PC controllers target specific sectors.
Article about playing with stuffing more data on PC floppies https://www.os2museum.com/wp/floppy-capacity-math/
Not Microsoft, they used 1.68MB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format
Not me either, I used some utility whose name I've forgotten (might be fdformat as mentioned on that page) to get something like 1.74MB pretty reliably. I think I needed a driver loaded for it to work, but seem to remember either Windows 95 or 98 supporting it natively.
When I was growing up, we had an old Z-80 (I think?) cpm machine that had a tiny crt and 8" floppy drives. We then had a TI-99/4a that used 5.25" and then a panasonic 8086 pc compat also with 5.25" From there we moved to a 386 with both a 5.25 and 3.5 drive, but that was it for the 5.25s
I still have some of the games from the 5.25 era on their original disks, though last time I glanced at both ebay and archive sites, there wasn't much value to keeping them as readily available, but hard to toss that element of my childhood.
Alas, I could not convince my dad to shell out $45 for the 2.X MB 8" floppy drive, so I leaned on the 3x sony 1.44mb HDD I was given sometime in early elementary school all the way through middle school.
2.88mb would have been an absolute luxury. Sometime around 1998 we got a sony viao with the 100MB ZIP drive which felt palatial by comparison.