Anyone know what this is?
Anyone know what this is?
I found this old software on a medium I don't recognize at my church. Does anyone know if this has value to anybody?
this97 comments
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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.
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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).
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I got all excited when the cost of hard drives got down to $10/MB.
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I remember upgrading my Macintosh computer from 512kB to A FULL MEGABYTE! Wow, what a difference, suddenly I could run two programs at once - even three small ones.
Ah, the eighties... Those were the days.
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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.
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Don't forget the cassettes before that. (Sinclair 1000 / ZX-81)
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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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Oregon Trail, on cassette, on a RadioShack TRS-80 in the school library.
Gaming heaven.
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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.
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Good old turtle. You could also program loops, so you could make fancy shapes like circles.
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Logo ? Anyway there was a this "programming langue" with a turtle and it had like 6 commands : move forward/backwards, turn left/right, pen up/down :-D
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I learned this and BASIC at around the same time.
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That sounds like Logo
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I remember that! As others have posted, Logo.
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If you play them backwards a satanic message is heard before the media bursts into flames.
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Interesting they look like three and a half inch floppies out of their sleeves
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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.
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Someone probably had no idea what they were doing. Like, at all.
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I would rip em up as a kid all the time.
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The more interesting thing to me is the oddly old timey brand
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That brand was a software maker back in the Apple II days.
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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.
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Nobody ever asks why it's the C:\
Pour one out for A:\ and B:\
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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.)
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My heart aches for those floppies’ demise.
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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 (@textfiles@mastodon.archive.org) on Mastodon. If anybody has a lead on how to read those, it's him.
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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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or arts and grafts. someone might had an idea for either the cases or the discs themselves and the dics wouldnt work so they saved them for later. and now he we are at a later date...
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@TootSweet @TheScribbler what monster did this
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One more interesting feature was the "write lock" switch on the 3.5" ones, a sliding button that covered one of the squared holes on their edges. The floppy drive would sense that and refuse to write on them.
On the 5.25" it was a notch cut on the side (there were punchers for that). To write on a "protected" disk, you'd cover the notch with adhesive tape.
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They can probably be read if you thrown them into another case. I used to rip them apart and put them back together as a kid.
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I have floppy disks containing Bungie's game Marathon for the Mac. 3 out of 4 I've been successful in dumping onto the PC but one is giving me trouble. Would Jason Scott be the person to ask about recovering the data from the disk?
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If anyone can point you in the right direction, it's probably Jason Scott. And it appears I've conjured him.
The process of recovering that disk may involve a long drive to one of a very few people in the world with specialized hardware for that purpose.
One thing you might want to do, though, is check Archive.org to see if they have that disk. You might just be able to get that data there. If they don't have that disk and you do manage to recover it (or even if you don't manage to recover the final disk and can only get images of 3 out of 4) do consider uploading disk images to Archive.org .
(This from someone who has an old 3rd-party collection of Sim City 2000 cities on CD that was sold in stores that I've been planning to image and upload but haven't yet. I'll get to it soon, though!)
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That looks like a floppy disk with the protective casing removed...
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might be a floppy disk, but without the case
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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.
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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.
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Well, I feel old.
3.5” floppy discs which have been removed from their plastic shells.
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Wow this makes me feel old
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Looks like floppy disks without the shell. How big are they?
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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.
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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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You're technically correct, the best kind of correct. And that said, from a daily-use perspective, the 3½" type has a rigid case, i.e. not floppy. So the storage medium is floppy, while the whole object that the user is expected & supposed to interact with is not. That's why I find "3½ inch floppy disk" to be a bit of a misnomer.
The 8" and 5¼" types have soft carriers, which is why I have no qualms calling those "floppy disks."
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the disk that lies inside a floppy disk (a 5.25 floppy disk judging by the size)
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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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Yeah, I'd be surprised if you could pull data off them, but data recovery pros never cease to amaze me
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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.
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old floppy disks of different sizes. the bottom looks like 5 1/4" the ones on top with the metal centers are all 3 1/2". Both standards needed sleeves to be read. Many of these are likely trash now but that wouldn't stop me from trying to load them.
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Both standards needed sleeves to be read.
For 3.5", yes. 5.25" disks could be removed from their protective enclosures, inserted into a drive, and used as normal. At least until the exposed medium was damaged by fingerprints or other debris. Not something you would normally do though. Source: Did it myself a few times mostly out of curiosity.
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This. When my favourite floppies started to have a worn sleeve (especially 3.5", where that metal protective covers started to bend out a bit, threatening to jam in the drive), I usually transplanted the disk itself over to a new sleeve.
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Trash now.
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Buffalo bill works there
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Maybe try asking here !whatisthisthing@lemmy.world
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From Beagle Bros - Wikipedia:
Beagle Bros was an American software company that specialized in creating personal computing products. Their primary focus was on the Apple II family of computers. Although they ceased business in 1991, owner Mark Simonsen permitted the Beagle Bros name and logo to be included on the 30th anniversary reboot of I. O. Silver, released on December 12, 2014 by former Beagle programmer Randy Brandt.
Found via reverse image search:
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Copy A: . B:\
floppy disk days long and gone
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I know they're floppies but when I see them like this it always reminds me of the first intern role I had at datacard/gemplus UK, I had to change the disk stacks in the main frame at specific times with specific access codes, lift the lid and pull out the disk stacks, put them on a specific numbered trolly and insert the next stack.
Was all very precise and I saw someone screw it once, glad it was a perm staffer and not me, I took so many notes on that process I dreamt of them for years.
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