The floppy disk orphaned by Linux(hackaday.com)
hackaday.com
The floppy disk orphaned by Linux
https://hackaday.com/2019/07/26/retrotechtacular-the-floppy-disk-orphaned-by-linux/
51 comments
Iomega (the makers of Zip/Jaz/etc.) really was an epic case of mismanagement. They had the future of storage seemingly locked up, and then proceeded to fumble it all away.
I wish somebody had written a book about why they made the (extremely poor) decisions they did.
I wish somebody had written a book about why they made the (extremely poor) decisions they did.
While I don't remember a single punchline on management, their media was rather expensive at a time when affordable CD-RW drives and media basically pulled the floor from under them. The response was kind of expected--after flailing around on existing storage products, they released a branded 'ZipCD 650' drive to salvage what they could of the market, while trying to hide that it was in fact an overpriced CD-RW drive that used plain CR-R/RW discs.
In retrospect, it seems really hard to keep iterating on the next proprietary Zip/Jaz drive technology as a single company when your competition is basically everyone else who are collectively working on portable storage with wider adoption rates.
In retrospect, it seems really hard to keep iterating on the next proprietary Zip/Jaz drive technology as a single company when your competition is basically everyone else who are collectively working on portable storage with wider adoption rates.
They didn't license the technology under reasonable terms, for the most part is what killed them. Even up against CD/DVD, most would rather have a zip100 or zip250 disc that was more reusable. IIRC, there was some licensing for disc mfg, but there were price/licensing restrictions in place.
If they'd licensed disks at say $1, and the drives at $10, and let other companies build compatible products, it would have lived a lot longer and they may have even influenced the transition to USB thumb drives.
I worked in 2nd level phone support at one time, but had no insight into anything the company did. Aside: the Jazz drive was effectively a detachable internal drive, where the disks came out. A damaged drive could damage the disks, and damaged disks could damage the drive. When an RMA happened, I'd usually do both.
In the end they had some really good engineering, and a lot of missed opportunities.
If they'd licensed disks at say $1, and the drives at $10, and let other companies build compatible products, it would have lived a lot longer and they may have even influenced the transition to USB thumb drives.
I worked in 2nd level phone support at one time, but had no insight into anything the company did. Aside: the Jazz drive was effectively a detachable internal drive, where the disks came out. A damaged drive could damage the disks, and damaged disks could damage the drive. When an RMA happened, I'd usually do both.
In the end they had some really good engineering, and a lot of missed opportunities.
From everything I've heard about it, the Jaz drive was an unmitigated failure caused by bad hardware choices (basically, the "disk" contained hard drive platters and the drive contained the rest of the hard drive mechanism, and you'd insert the one into the other!!). It was also much too expensive.
If they'd never embarked on that ill-fated idea, and instead continue to put all of their wood behind zip drives (and maintaining compatibility), they could've done better. I agree that licensing would've helped a lot. The zip disks were simply too expensive, and they always felt like a proprietary format in a way that 3.5" floppies did not. I was only a teenager at the time but even I was thinking "So wait, this one company is the only manufacturer? Seems niche, not the guaranteed next thing."
If they'd never embarked on that ill-fated idea, and instead continue to put all of their wood behind zip drives (and maintaining compatibility), they could've done better. I agree that licensing would've helped a lot. The zip disks were simply too expensive, and they always felt like a proprietary format in a way that 3.5" floppies did not. I was only a teenager at the time but even I was thinking "So wait, this one company is the only manufacturer? Seems niche, not the guaranteed next thing."
That awkward transition period away from floppies happened while I was in high school. I remember what a nightmare it was until things finally standardized on the USB flash drive, and then soon after, on nothing physical at all (i.e. file transfer over Internet).
I remember zip disks being around. The disks were too expensive and the drives, especially so. I used a disk or two at school but never bought one for myself. We had a server at school we could upload/download files to (or just log into directly) so there was never much point.
I also remember CD-RWs being terribly unreliable, and sufficiently costlier than a one-use CD-R that basically no one ever used them. I certainly didn't. What a mess of thrown-away plastic all those CD-Rs were (and remember how if you used the computer for anything else while it was burning and it ran out of buffer the CD-R was ruined?). It certainly felt like a regression from the earlier days of rewritable disks.
I remember zip disks being around. The disks were too expensive and the drives, especially so. I used a disk or two at school but never bought one for myself. We had a server at school we could upload/download files to (or just log into directly) so there was never much point.
I also remember CD-RWs being terribly unreliable, and sufficiently costlier than a one-use CD-R that basically no one ever used them. I certainly didn't. What a mess of thrown-away plastic all those CD-Rs were (and remember how if you used the computer for anything else while it was burning and it ran out of buffer the CD-R was ruined?). It certainly felt like a regression from the earlier days of rewritable disks.
LGR did some videos on Iomega.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4hQeWtkTC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pBhEaMp8mw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4hQeWtkTC8
What were their mistakes? My impression is that it wasn't practical.
My impression is that they were seen as fragile, people feared losing one was like losing whole boxes of regular floppies. A single floppy was fragile, so you made backups of it, but backing up a ZIP disk was slower and impractical because they were more expensive compared to burning CDs.
My impression is that they were seen as fragile, people feared losing one was like losing whole boxes of regular floppies. A single floppy was fragile, so you made backups of it, but backing up a ZIP disk was slower and impractical because they were more expensive compared to burning CDs.
The height of the Zip disk's popularity was in the mid-'90s, when CD burners were still way too expensive for the consumer market.
To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's big mistakes were skimping on quality control, which led to the infamous "click of death" scandal that killed the Zip disk's reputation; and trying to build on the early success of Zip by rolling out multiple new products in a rush like the Jaz and Clik drives, none of which were the slightest bit compatible with any of the others (including Zip).
It probably didn't help matters that Iomega also became an early case study in how the entry of individual investors in the market could have disorienting effects, as Iomega stock became extremely hot in online communities focused on the then-quite-new individual-investor market, particularly The Motley Fool (see https://www.deseretnews.com/article/491232/FOOLS-RUSH-IN-SEN...). The Fool's founders tapped Iomega as one of their highly recommended "Rule Breakers," and there were people on the Motley Fool message boards who were so convinced that Iomega was The Next Big Thing that they called themselves "Iomegans" (!), preaching the Gospel of Iomega with quasi-religious fervor. All that hype drove the price of Iomega stock to dizzying, unsustainable heights.
All of which makes me wonder in retrospect how connected the bad management decisions and the stock pumping were; it's not hard to imagine managers, confronted by staff with big internal problems, pointing at the stock and saying "if we're doing so badly, why does it keep going up?"
(The Fools sort of apologized for their role in all that in a book they published in 2000, after the Iomega bubble had popped; see https://books.google.com/books?id=3TDjULa4nO4C&lpg=PA148&ots.... But it couldn't have comforted their readers much to learn in that same passage that they had cashed out half their position in Iomega in 1997, earning a 650 percent return.)
To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's big mistakes were skimping on quality control, which led to the infamous "click of death" scandal that killed the Zip disk's reputation; and trying to build on the early success of Zip by rolling out multiple new products in a rush like the Jaz and Clik drives, none of which were the slightest bit compatible with any of the others (including Zip).
It probably didn't help matters that Iomega also became an early case study in how the entry of individual investors in the market could have disorienting effects, as Iomega stock became extremely hot in online communities focused on the then-quite-new individual-investor market, particularly The Motley Fool (see https://www.deseretnews.com/article/491232/FOOLS-RUSH-IN-SEN...). The Fool's founders tapped Iomega as one of their highly recommended "Rule Breakers," and there were people on the Motley Fool message boards who were so convinced that Iomega was The Next Big Thing that they called themselves "Iomegans" (!), preaching the Gospel of Iomega with quasi-religious fervor. All that hype drove the price of Iomega stock to dizzying, unsustainable heights.
All of which makes me wonder in retrospect how connected the bad management decisions and the stock pumping were; it's not hard to imagine managers, confronted by staff with big internal problems, pointing at the stock and saying "if we're doing so badly, why does it keep going up?"
(The Fools sort of apologized for their role in all that in a book they published in 2000, after the Iomega bubble had popped; see https://books.google.com/books?id=3TDjULa4nO4C&lpg=PA148&ots.... But it couldn't have comforted their readers much to learn in that same passage that they had cashed out half their position in Iomega in 1997, earning a 650 percent return.)
> The Fool's founders tapped Iomega as one of their highly recommended "Rule Breakers," and there were people on the Motley Fool message boards who were so convinced that Iomega was The Next Big Thing that they called themselves "Iomegans" (!), preaching the Gospel of Iomega with quasi-religious fervor. All that hype drove the price of Iomega stock to dizzying, unsustainable heights.
Sounds like /r/wallstreetbets had a predecessor!
Sounds like /r/wallstreetbets had a predecessor!
As a Mac user anyway, they were very practical, and were basically the de facto standard for external/portable storage for a while. Service bureaus accepted files on Zip disks, etc., Apple built them into a few models of Macs... they really were the "floppy replacement".
The 'click of death' thing happened with their later drives; I assume they tried to cut corners either on the design or QA and things suffered as a result. The original SCSI drives didn't have that issue, that I ever saw. It was the later USB and parallel-port drives that weren't especially reliable.
My feeling is that Iomega couldn't figure out if they wanted to do a razors-and-blades business model by selling the drives cheap and then charging for the media, or if they wanted to let the price of media fall, so that it became a widespread standard that they would 'own'. At first they didn't allow anyone else to make Zip disks; eventually they let Fuji and a few others manufacture them and sell them under their own brands. (I still have a few NIB Fuji Zip disks!)
The 'click of death' thing happened with their later drives; I assume they tried to cut corners either on the design or QA and things suffered as a result. The original SCSI drives didn't have that issue, that I ever saw. It was the later USB and parallel-port drives that weren't especially reliable.
My feeling is that Iomega couldn't figure out if they wanted to do a razors-and-blades business model by selling the drives cheap and then charging for the media, or if they wanted to let the price of media fall, so that it became a widespread standard that they would 'own'. At first they didn't allow anyone else to make Zip disks; eventually they let Fuji and a few others manufacture them and sell them under their own brands. (I still have a few NIB Fuji Zip disks!)
That book always has been, and always will be a single word:
"Money"
"Money"
Presumably, they stood to make much more money long term if their standards hadn't died.
I've read it. Time to update my GoodReads profile.
> In a saner world, the 240 MB LS-240 would have been the last floppy.
Years ago I longed for an LS-120 but by the time I had the money a CD writer was the better deal. I occasionally look at eBay for LS-120s just for fun but I now have a new unicorn to search for and one that didn't even come out in the US - the LS-240. Thank you for a new bit of nostalgia!
Years ago I longed for an LS-120 but by the time I had the money a CD writer was the better deal. I occasionally look at eBay for LS-120s just for fun but I now have a new unicorn to search for and one that didn't even come out in the US - the LS-240. Thank you for a new bit of nostalgia!
I liked LS-120s because they were IDE and the last generation or two of PC mainboards with a real floppy controller, the controller, or the BIOS, only supported one drive.
So with the LS-120, you could have a Phenom II with the same 3.5/5.25 dual-floppy capability as your old 386SX.
Bought like four of them in external cases from my university's sale-of-scrap-goods dealer. They're just IDE units with a little adapter board to either USB or some weird propriatery connector.
So with the LS-120, you could have a Phenom II with the same 3.5/5.25 dual-floppy capability as your old 386SX.
Bought like four of them in external cases from my university's sale-of-scrap-goods dealer. They're just IDE units with a little adapter board to either USB or some weird propriatery connector.
I saw quite a few 120MB Super Disk drives back in the day, I don’t know if I once saw a Super Disk. They were all used as 1.44MB floppy drives for the early iMacs.
Superdiscs weren't difficult to get at all.
I had a Panasonic (?) digital camera that had a Superdisc drive inside. Pictures you took would be written to whatever disc you had inside (a regular 1.44mb would fill quickly). There was an adapter so you could use the camera itself as an external drive.
I still use some pictures from that camera in ebay listings, 15 years later.
I had a Panasonic (?) digital camera that had a Superdisc drive inside. Pictures you took would be written to whatever disc you had inside (a regular 1.44mb would fill quickly). There was an adapter so you could use the camera itself as an external drive.
I still use some pictures from that camera in ebay listings, 15 years later.
Yeah I owned a drive, but never the lS120 disks. It read 1.44s faster though.
I still remember the feeling it gave me as a kid to buy a box of 10 3.5" floppies. That was, like, fifteen whole megabytes of storage! Right in the palm of my hand!
Jeez, I'm old.
Jeez, I'm old.
My install of OS/2 Warp failed due to a bad floppy. Disc #33, of course........
i remember the wow what am i gonna do with all that storage feeling ! and the way we used them as currency too...
I feel ya. Back in grade school I had a cherished pile of 5.25″ Apple ][ floppies that I kept games and art on.
However, it's for the best. The old must make way for the new.
However, it's for the best. The old must make way for the new.
You don't have to feel old! Unless you had to razor blade a cutout in a single sided 5.25" floppy so you could write to the back...
Eh, i skipped the whole 5" era - i guess i saw them as too fragile. i developed and wrote my dissertation on 8"ers (mostly the "newer" ones with a capacity of 1MB).
But i also, in that same endeavor, used a TTY for I/O and used its tape punch (by holding the tape still) to edit snippets.
Of course earlier i used to play sonnets on an IBM 1620 (which was free for use after midnight) with sorted decks of Holleriths. To edit them i would use the adjacent keypunch (also holding to edit).
But i also, in that same endeavor, used a TTY for I/O and used its tape punch (by holding the tape still) to edit snippets.
Of course earlier i used to play sonnets on an IBM 1620 (which was free for use after midnight) with sorted decks of Holleriths. To edit them i would use the adjacent keypunch (also holding to edit).
Hah. I remember using 5.25" floppies (just barely), but I was quite young at the time.
This was really something you could do? The back surface of the floppy was inaccessible, but was still usable despite not intentionally being so?
That reminds me of this, except real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwEuQAMVfZc
This was really something you could do? The back surface of the floppy was inaccessible, but was still usable despite not intentionally being so?
That reminds me of this, except real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwEuQAMVfZc
I was apparently fancy, I was given a notcher when I got my C128 as a kid :P
Fine, brag about your fancy HD diskettes. You must be rich.
You can always tell when I pass, I'm the guy driving the Lambo throwing 3.5" disks out the window
How about 32 floppy drives (now that used to cost a small fortune!) playing Daft Punk- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FCIZp2HXHr0
Way fewer drives, but my favorite song-played-by-floppy-drives is this rendition of the Athletic Theme from Yoshi's island: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_fqxKwVSJM
It sounds so good! Like, aside from the fact that they're floppy drives, I actually objectively like the sound of this.
It sounds so good! Like, aside from the fact that they're floppy drives, I actually objectively like the sound of this.
Old is remembering when storage was audiocassettes.
First you had to type pages of hex from a magazine, then you could try to record it onto a cassette.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-in_program
Yep. I remember the joys of Usborne's programming books, where you'd have variants of the same program for the different flavors of home computer.
[deleted]
I once read a cyberpunk story, in which elite hackers, tackling some black ice, used ridiculously vintage gear for protection.
If someday the fate of humanity rests on a raiding a museum and booting m68k Linux from the floppy of a 128K Mac, as a daring last stand against the space alien armada, we're going to feel silly for not having working drivers.
If someday the fate of humanity rests on a raiding a museum and booting m68k Linux from the floppy of a 128K Mac, as a daring last stand against the space alien armada, we're going to feel silly for not having working drivers.
This is a shame. I still use floppy disk with Linux as I can write force the drive to write in 720k mode which is necessary for older computers such as Amigas and Atari STs. USB floppy drivers can't write to 720k for reasons that I will admit I don't fully understand.
This is going to cause me a major headache as Linux was my last choice really when it came to floppy drives. I am already keeping an old desktop Core 2 Quad around just because it as a proper floppy controller.
Why couldn't the driver be left in the kernel I have no idea.
This is going to cause me a major headache as Linux was my last choice really when it came to floppy drives. I am already keeping an old desktop Core 2 Quad around just because it as a proper floppy controller.
Why couldn't the driver be left in the kernel I have no idea.
>Why couldn't the driver be left in the kernel I have no idea.
As far as I can tell, the driver is not going away. It's just no longer being maintained.
As far as I can tell, the driver is not going away. It's just no longer being maintained.
Yeah and after so many years of polish, it'll probably still work for decades without a maintainer.
Also don't forget that it's not required for people to update to a new version of Linux the way it is for Mac or Windows. If you want, just never update. Or, worst case, keep an old machine around at a working version of you don't want your main computer to go out of date.
Also don't forget that it's not required for people to update to a new version of Linux the way it is for Mac or Windows. If you want, just never update. Or, worst case, keep an old machine around at a working version of you don't want your main computer to go out of date.
While the machine is old relatively it is quite happy running discord, vscode and a web browser and I use it in my office as my main dev machine. I don't want to have to go through the hassle of running two operating systems or compiling a custom kernel.
Well we will see what happens I suppose.
Well we will see what happens I suppose.
It sounds like you're entering the realm of sufficiently niche to the point that you might need two computers (or at least dual boot). I've been there for decades, though not for the exact same reason.
Yeah you are probably right. I think the last version of Windows that runs well and has a proper floppy driver is XP-64 bit (basically Windows Server 2003 64bit).
OpenBSD will probably work well if I swap out the Geforce 8800 GPU with an AMD GPU of some sort, I am sure I could get a relatively decent one second hand.
OpenBSD will probably work well if I swap out the Geforce 8800 GPU with an AMD GPU of some sort, I am sure I could get a relatively decent one second hand.
The driver isn't being removed, at least not for the foreseeable future. This patch set just fixes a few bugs, and marks the driver as 'orphaned' since it no longer has a maintainer that's capable of testing it on real hardware.
What does "orphaned" mean in this context? Was the code removed from the kernel? Still in the kernel, but no one knows if it works?
Still there, but no longer actively maintained. It's "orphaned" in the sense that it doesn't have anybody there to care for it.
Not removed, just quasi-deprecated and no maintainer.
So who'll volunteer as tribute? Someone must be able/want to?
Why? The hardware has been "stable" for about 2 decades now. I reckon you'd have more trouble with the IDE/USB interface drivers these days. God knows connecting an old LPT CNC machine to a modern computer proved ridiculously hard - ended up just using a very old laptop with an integrated LPT port/controller :D
I don't think it's about new features or anything, but running regular regression tests to make sure that changes elsewhere in the kernel don't break it.
in 2001 i got a sony picturebook (with the transmeta cpu) and i had trouble installing linux because the kernel failed boot because it could not find a floppy drive. (i was booting from a usb floppy the bios was emulating as a normal floppy, while linux later was detecting it as a hard disk. because of the emulation, the kernel expected to be booting from a floppy, and so it insisted on looking for one)
i don't remember how i solved the problem, but i do remember rummaging in the kernel sources to see if i could figure out how to disable that floppy check.
so we have gone from a point where the floppy was seemingly mandatory to a point where it is finally dead.
i don't remember how i solved the problem, but i do remember rummaging in the kernel sources to see if i could figure out how to disable that floppy check.
so we have gone from a point where the floppy was seemingly mandatory to a point where it is finally dead.
CD next!
It didn't help that floppy quality took a nosedive around 1994. Buyers went by price, and then concluded that floppies were unreliable. A few years after the floppy quality went bad, the same happened for the drives. Floppies are now remembered for being unreliable, but that wasn't always the case. They were quite reliable around 1993.