I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch

Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by smokel on Saturday August 23, 2025 @08:12AM (#44995403)

He uses quite a bit of tooling, including lasers. It's not like he would be able to get this far in the middle of nowhere :)

In a way it is somewhat similar to people writing demos for old computers using emulators. Still great fun, but using these tools it doesn't take a village to make one floppy disk. With modern hardware you are apparently able to pull this off on your own. That would have been almost impossible in the 1980s, when these floppy disks were popular.

I probably worded it badly, but I really enjoy these efforts, and I would never be able to do this myself, even if I had a shed with all those tools!

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by cluckindan on Saturday August 23, 2025 @08:19AM (#44995450)

Are you even a musician if you don’t have a goat farm?

How can someone call themselves a programmer when they don’t even mine for silicon!

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by dotancohen on Saturday August 23, 2025 @12:14PM (#44996968)

  > How can someone call themselves a programmer when they don’t even mine for silicon!

To be fair, after three or four Tinder dates I realized that it was mostly silicon to be found there. It's not a stretch to say that a programmer going out on Tinder dates is mining for silicone!

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by bitwize on Saturday August 23, 2025 @01:20PM (#44997472)

So now we've got clankers catfishing human singles?

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by zootboy on Saturday August 23, 2025 @01:24PM (#44997506)

Silicon and silicone are two very different things...

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by cluckindan on Saturday August 23, 2025 @01:30PM (#44997577)

It’s not sili-cone valley, you have to say sili-kawn.

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by duskwuff on Saturday August 23, 2025 @02:19PM (#44997960)

Silicone Valley is in Southern California.

(The San Fernando Valley was central to the porn industry in the late 20th century.)

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by rbanffy on Saturday August 23, 2025 @12:01PM (#44996887)

> when they don’t even mine for silicon!

Knowing how to design a CPU is quite helpful.

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by the_other_mac on Saturday August 23, 2025 @11:11AM (#44996557)

For anyone that hasn't seen it yet, there's the YouTube channel "Primitive Technology", where a guy does this literally - in a jungle, with no tools apart from what he makes himself. He gets as far as smelting a tiny amount of iron.

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by debesyla on Saturday August 23, 2025 @10:03AM (#44996074)

I couldn't find an answer on google - how is a goat farm precursor for music? It's an activity that needs herding and shepherds started playing songs for fun? Or..? :o

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by orthoxerox on Saturday August 23, 2025 @11:25AM (#44996659)

It's an old story about using a drum machine and feeling like it's not real music, replacing the synthesized samples with real drum samples, then getting rid of the machine playing the drums yourself, then making your own drums, then finally farming your own goats for leather to make drumheads out of.

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Re:I Made a Floppy Disk from Scratch by et-al on Saturday August 23, 2025 @10:32AM (#44996297)

Stringed instruments use goat or sheep intestines. And drums are from their skin (leather).

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