💾 Is it a good idea to buy used floppy disks? 💾 

SUSIE was an industry standard gate-level logic sim by Aldec from the 80s that was generally used in conjunction with OrCAD (which is still maintained today). Looks like it's not archived anywhere on the internet, sadly

The VHDL code might have been interesting. The disk labelled Xilinx, Susie and that VHDL code make clear that there was somebody involved with FPGA development.

Having grown up in the tape and floppy disk era I loved this! I still love the sound of a floppy disk drive 👍🏻

SC2 files are SimCity 2000 save games. It looks like this person tried recreating Harvard in SimCity 2000.

Believe it or not, I still have a client who sends me files on 3.5" floppies via snail mail! (He's 87 and wants nothing to do with the internet.) So I got a 3.5" USB floppy drive for about $20. It, and his 30-year-old floppies, work just fine on my Windows 10 machine.

I remember floppy disks as a student. Really fun working on an assignment and and then having it vanish from your PC and the disk because it is corrupt, having to redo it from scratch. Amazing how we could fit so much stuff on them, even though it was only 1.44MB. The text data files I worked with at my old job were generally larger than that. I left all that behind when I got a 64MB USB drive in 2003.

I had an original Lemmings disk, and it too had those weird directories on them. I believe it has to do with the copy protection, so who ever made that copy did a good job?

My mom worked for the state as a word processor. In her 20's she used a ribbon typewriter and progressed through the years with every version of typewriter until they finally adopted computers. As a kid I was fascinated by all the stuff in her ever evolving office. Some of the first computers in her office had floppies that were much larger than the 6" versions we had about a half decade later in our Vic 20's, Commodore's and Apple's. Gen X'r unite, LOL. Oh the memories. :)

Being an original Amiga user i found about 60-65 % of the DD 3.5 actually work reliably, bought as used.

Misusing HD disks for DD usage was already a bad idea back in the 90’s days when DD disks already became harder to come by or for a premium and I was still using my Atari ST. Unreliable as hell. Thanks for pointing out.

I'm glad to see you using the bulk eraser properly. So many people stick the disc under there turn it on rub it a little bit and while the disc is still under there turn it off. Depending on where in the cycle the current was you can actually magnetize the disc somewhat.

I'm always impressed with how much code they were able to fit into such a small amount of memory.

Like with recorded blank cassettes, it is always fun to find out what people put onto it. I watched the whole video seeing you changing disks to see what is on it. Funny to notice how curiosity keep people focused. 😄 Personal information is very attractive because of curiosity and to find out some info about the user. But also without personal information you can trace the origin of usage, names etc just by looking at filenames, filestamps, directory structures and labels. When you think about it, there is so much information in this general information of nothing special, it is actually really scary. Many people don't realize this. I have found harddrives with photos, videos, stories, ideas, documents, financial stuff and so on, it is unbelievable what people sell or thrown away without any care. I am not an evil guy (like many) so I don't do anything with this data but if you want to it is possible. The question is, why are people behave so irresponsible?

Whoever this person was, they probably were a college student in electronics/embedded technology engineering. VHDL is a programing language for "programming" a hardware onto CPLDs and FPGAs.

Until this video I never knew of a relationship between 3.5-inch diskettes and the highly esteemed Turbo Encabulator. Thank you again for another fine video.

I still have a few 8" floppy disks (diskettes in IBM-speak). In 1975 we used them as a data entry replacement for the punch card using the IBM 3741 key-to-diskette machines that were the size of a desk. We were impressed that one disk held the equivalent of over 1,800 punch cards and a 14" hard disk held 2.4MB of data. We were also impressed with 16KB of core memory in the main computer. Alright, alright, my "I remember when..." flashback is over.

Scorch might be a game called Scorched Earth. It was a popular 2D (side-view) game of two tanks shooting at each other from opposite sides of hills and such. It was then evolved into a 3D perspective view with online play and was really awesome. That was called Scorch 3D.

Last year at a thrift store I found some Zip disks. One of them still contained the LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU virus from about 20 years earlier.

VSD file format is the native format of Microsoft Visio application. This format is commonly known as Microsoft Visio Drawing File. VSD files contain advanced diagrams and vector graphics.

I would buy batches like these not because I will ever need floppy disks, but just because it's fun to check those old files , finding old dos games or save files , or somebody's high school report from 1992 btw , amazing that you can still find these in 2023

A friend gave me a box of floppy disks from her dad, and apparently he punched out the HD hole in some DD disks back in the day. Needless to say, they won't be used as HD floppies under my possession!

Back in the day, I found that formatting a PC disk in a Mac, then reformatting it in DOS would often recover a bad disk.

You see my curiosity would’ve had me opening all those files

Please look at the BUTT zip file 😂😂😂😂

3:33 7 months later i came back to this video and now i cant stop laughing at the audio cassette tape thing

Hehe.. A few months ago, I set about to go through my boxes of floppies and test format each.. I discovered that my oldest brother, who died in 1994, had taken a couple dozen 720k floppies, drilled a hole in each (actual drill -- the holes are perfectly round), and had successfully formatted and used them as 1.44MB. Half or so of them were still readable (archives of Windows 3.0 or somesuch) and were successfully reformatted.. but I covered the holes and formatted as 720k to make them usable with my PCjr's 3.5" DD drive (yes, 720k floppy drives were made by third parties for the jr).

oh dude, i LOVED those dyson floppy disk labels! For some reason they were just so pretty to me, even though they were really plain. The colors on those labels were great. You could see the color of the label from the back, identifying it in a simple manner... And applying them was fun, after all they were stickers, and kids love stickers, haha.

16:02 probably the previous owner was into FPGAs: Xilinx is a manufacturer of FPGAs. 21:17 It seems to be a Harvard Graphics file a graphics presentation software used before PowerPoint existed, in fact I think it was the first presentation program ever.

Thanks for taking me back to a better time once again!

3:33 LGR is hacking your video via floppy disks from a 256 kbps file with LGR "audio cassette tapes".

Speaking of unreliable, did anyone else back in the day use the DOS "800k" tool to reformat their 5.25" DD 360k floppies to 800k on their 5.25" HD drives? I remember having a field day with it after upgrading from a PCjr (with 5.25" DD drive) to a 286 clone (with 5.25" HD drive). Much to my chagrin, such floppies didn't last long before getting bad sectors.

I've never heard someone refer to it as "dot bump".

I need to try doing this sometime! You've given me inspiration to do so!

In South Africa, we call 3.5 inch disks “stiffies” to distinguish them from 5.25 inch floppies

You were right, that bulk eraser is scary!

Wow, back in the 80s UK you rich if you had a disc drive most of us had games on tape, until the atari st and amiga 500 became affordable. All the best.

Any time I find a box of floppy disks at a thrift store, I'm sure to grab them. I don't expect them to be around forever.

I love buying used disks! At worst I'll find maybe 1 or 2 that don't work when I buy 30 or so

Can’t go wrong with floppies! Nice to see most of them still work well. They are considered obsolete, but then again, the same was said for the cassette when CD became the main format. Still great to use them on older machines!

This was an excellent video. Reminds me of buying used memory cards then finding others save files on there. Also pre-owned Nintendo DS games would normally have the previous owners save files on the game card. Northing mind blowing but it was interesting to see how far people got with their progress

vhdl is a programming language for modelling integrated circuits, or something along those lines

PLEASE remember to inspect the disks for possible dirt as well!!! They can get dusty or dirty if it isn't rot

Store your diskettes in an airtight container with silica gel dessicant bags inside as well. Diskettes do absorb atmospheric moisture, which can cause the coating to smear and clog the drive heads.

If u show this to the kidds they say : "Why did someone Print the Save Button on an 3D Printer" hahahaha

My life was used 5.1/2" 360k floppies in bulk. You just spent hours formatting them while listening to rock music. Also due a visual inspection. Chuck the bad ones. Also keep a q-tip and rubbing alcohol around to clean off the heads. Never know when one of them like a reel to reel tape would leave gunk on the head.

We shouldn't just lose the capability to manufacture old outdated technology. They need to be archived properly.

The bad sectors have been marked as unusable, but the rest of the space is probably fine. I had such disks, way-back-when.

Thank you for this wonderful video. It brings back wonderful memories. I own the rare 144mb Caleb "it", 200mb Sony "HiFD" and 240mb "SuperDisk" floppy variants. The 240mb is my favorite.

Nice to hear and see this old stuff again 😁👍🏻

Opening used floppy disks. Peak content.

VHDLs are FPGA design files. probably lost to time ones as well

When you bulk-erased those disks at the end, it was like those movies about Nazis in which the German soldiers walked down a line of bound prisoners, shooting them once each in the back of the head

Most likely the seller really did not have a floppy drive to test these disks with. Otherwise they would have most likely cleared all data from them before selling. You should really have archived those disks before formatting. There may have been software on them which was never archived online. Archiving is also a great way to test disk readability.

I feel very emotional to see these floppy disks. I used both types in 80s with my desktop computer. Those were the days my friend...

I used single sided 5.25 disks as double sided by cutting a notch in thrm and they worked for decades.

The hardest is now 5.25in because there are NO portable versions of this drive. Especially if your a vintage computer collector (Have Atari 800XL w/1050 DD/Coleco Adam w/5.25in DD/Commodore 128 w/1541 DD and TI 99/4A with 5.25 DD) and they are a pain to manage! These old machines store between 80K and 170K on a 5.25 and finding functional disks are a chore and often expensive and a dice roll. Many are worn from grabbing them and "shoving" them into their respective drives. And some I've bulk bought used the old and very unreliable "notching" the reverse side of a single sided disk with a hole puncher. And yes, I know there are mass storage devices for all these computers (I have a NanoPEB flash card replacement for my TI 99/4A) but it's like VWestlife said, it's just not the same as its original storage media. And 1.2mb 5.25 floppies are not an option as vintage disk drives cannot read the higher density storage they offer. This is the downside of vintage computers. Sure you can invest in modern CF and SD card replacements ,and you can also invest in even hard drives. But it's like listening to an original album of an artist, and a CD. Sure the CD sounds great, no distortion or hiss, and it's crystal clear. But it just doesn't sound like the way the artist intended it to sound, flaws and all. Same for floppy disks. Many MANY games and productivity software were on floppies and there is just a nostalgic feeling hearing the disk spool up, the gentle clacking of the read/write head. But sadly, this will eventually fail as more and more floppies become either unusable, or can no longer be formatted. And those few left will also fail and by the middle of the century, most magnetic media will be unusable.

Another great in-depth video, VWestlife, and I think I still have a sealed box of 10 floppy disks and an open box and several used disks as well as an external floppy disk drive with a USB connection that I can connect to a laptop or desktop computer. I also still have the larger original floppy disks from the early 1980's that were actually floppy and they contain all sorts of video games for my still-working Commodore 64. :)

Absolutely if those used floppy disks are cheap, also I found a used 10 pack of 5.25 floppy disks at a record store for $5, they’re the Fujifilm brand! Too bad no company is reproducing floppy disks, because there’s lots of old computers and even new USB floppy drives still available online!

I just found your channel, i gotta say as this technology is outdated and by the standards of today, im hooked on learning about the tech from the 80s and 90s! ill be sticking around from now on!

As someone who gets their blank cassette tapes from used lots, in maybe 90% of the cases you're going to be fine. I have around 100 cassettes and only a dozen of them are brand new. Of course I can't compare things like signal degradation over time, but most tapes sound fine. The worst I've seen was some cassettes from the 1970s that were shedding the particles and caused dropouts. You can't fix a part of a tape that got eaten, but that's only a part of it and to me it's a little charming, to the point where I listen to that same music digitally and I expect that dropout to be there :D. Anyways, since floppies are magnetic tapes in a different form, they should physically last a very long time, but I have no idea if the data will last as long, since they're not an analog medium..

I learned programming in the early 1980s. I worked on IBM Midrange systems - 32/34/38. They used 8 inch floppy disks for the OS and the OS updates. We'd get a stack of them and load them in one by one. Took quite a while to do an update. Thank the gods we had a tape drive to do backups!

Makes me feel young that I only remember seeing the computers with the built in floppy or 3 inch sized diskettes of the early 00s altjough nowdays from at least the 1997ish era the use of data is with most stuff.. cd or even dvd drives or dvd slot/trays nowdays for reader/writer or for a cd rip with witch music is made freely within the realm of passed around music etc etc. But not remembwring the site unless once at a thriftshop fwiw the presence of diskettes themselves or really anybody USING those.

I’ve used one of those bulk erasers to demagnetize a CRT. It made some fun patterns, and worked a treat!

Thank you for the upload :)

Out of the handful of 720K disks I own, they all say 'Made in England' on the back! Just started using HD disks again last year when I bought a used Sony Mavica for $10.

Absolutely. Unless they have been physically damaged inside, you can clean them and they will work as new in a clean drive. Do inspect them before potentially adding dirt to your drive heads. Some that have been stored incorrectly may have gotten dirt or mold transferred to the sleeve inside. That sleeve is in fact what determines whether a specific disk can be used: a little dirt that will not transfer onto the coating or drive heads is fine - that's what the sleeve is for - but you cannot and should not use a disk where the dirt on the sleeve may transfer onto the coating, because it could transfer onto the drive heads.

after all this years I still enjoy watching this channel videos, 🔥

Could you possibly take a qtip of isopropyl to the disk that still bad sectors after the bulk erase or would the isopropyl just make them worse?

18:08 did i hear a Laugh? lol That was some spiked info supplied! "Sinusoidal Depleneration": Cautions Turbo-Encabulator enabling Dingle Arm - the least of Worries.

its a shame you didnt back up some of those programs, as those will likely be lost to history now

I might have asked this before, I am looking for the low level program that allows you to access the firmware of USB sticks to change the type byte and the storage capacity. I get a lot of fake sticks and they usually have 2 or 3 GB of space. Instead of creating a partition just a little smaller than the max size on the stick, and leaving a partition that is fake, I want to return it to report to the OS the maximum amount of storage it has, so no one accidentally overwrites the data by using the partition that really doesn't exist. Any help on this would be great. Thanks

The magnetic coercivity of the 720K media is different from the 1.44 disks. It was notorious back in the day to lose data after a few months,

these are hard times for vintage enthusiasts so if you find them cheap enough and you need them do it. it helps if you have the hardware variety and software tools to test and refresh/revive some of them i you have to.

you could have searched for deleted files with a recovery tool

I saw some brand new Imation 3.5" low density diskettes for sale in a Wal-Mart sometime in the very early 2000s...so I bought them all and still have most of them. I'll admit I wasn't feeling dedicated enough right now to watch you go through all the diskettes, though I might later. I was wondering for a while if you might set the DIRCMD environment variable with the switches you wanted, or if you might use any of the command recall options to save a little time. (Wow, was that kind of a nerdy thing to say. It's probably even worse that I actually remember any of that.) I have had mixed results using a bulk eraser even on "known good" diskettes. I've wondered if some floppy drives just can't cope well with the "random" junk the bulk eraser leaves behind. For whatever reason, at least some of the LPCIO chips on the market today _still_ contain floppy disk controller logic...

Would it be worth your time to archive the contents of those floppies to a burned CD ROM? I did that for over 1,500 floppies years ago. I used to buy 3.5" floppies at HAMfests years ago to reformat. You can still use a floppy with bad sectors because the format process locks them out and can't be used. The storage capacity is just less.

I always used ARJ as my compression program back in the early 90's. Vividly remember when I wanted to uncompress some game that was spanned over 6 or 7 disks more than once one of these disks exhibited bad sectors :)

i remember first year of high school being issued with box of floppys and the last year being a usb Stick

This vid was such a tease. I thought we'd get some floppy archaeology, checking out random programs, but instead just blue balls. Also you never at any point made mention of the fact that the previous owner was a master of chaos. Who names 20 disks all called "zip files"? Like ok theyre zipped but what programs?

Nice content, thanks. Depending on the size library you choose, it is possible to put the collection of most ATARI games on a single floppy diskette.

I bought a couple boxes of floppy disks lately from Amazon and a couple of the disks seem to already have bad sectors. I am thinking of getting a bulk eraser (my uncle had one for his tapes when he was alive). Could a bulk eraser possibly serve an additional purpose as to resolve any bad sector issues within a hard drive (without removing its cover and as long as any of the issues aren't due to physical damage?)

that's surprising the seller sent you a couple of HD floppy's you must thank the seller for that!

I had a bunch of floppy disks kicking around so I bought a USB floppy drive and did what you are doing here. Some of them worked but were slow but files showed up and many had read errors. I had some songs on a couple of them that were compressed into lo-fi wav files but were really mp3s at a low bit rate so they would fit on the disk yet sound reasonably good. Could fit maybe 2-3 songs on one disk depending on the audio quality used. Higher quality songs would barely fit yet sound better. The filename was changed from .mp3 to .wav because these songs were used in the AOL chat rooms back in the late 90s. Could fit maybe 2-3 songs on one disk depending on the audio quality used. Higher quality songs would barely fit yet sound better.

16:27 i like the sound the drive makes when it seeks (it seeks because it tries to find a file that is in a bad sector)

From what I heard buying old stock and reselling them is a business for some people. There are still older industrial machines that are in use and only support floppy drives. Users of such machines are target customer for these businesses.

Loved the Retro Encabulator clip, that's a classic video

❤ hearing the BIOS boot with the floppy check sequence!!

Hahaha I'm too curious I would be opening the files

I pick up floppies almost every week (used and NOS) for next to nothing because I can’t bear the thought of them going to landfill. I format and check for errors and have amassed a few thousand…had no idea the DD disks were getting rare. I have no use for them, I should probably start giving them to vintage enthusiasts who might actually use them.

A few years back I bought a pack of 10x Double Density 3.5" disks, British Telecom (BT) branded (back when they also sold computers, mostly t businesses), went back to buy more, sold out, cos people are desperate for DD 3.5" disks, also got a bunch of BT branded 5.25" disks, some DD, the rest, Quad Density, which was handy as I had a Teac FD-55FR which is a Quad-density drive, which I set up and lightly modded to work as an Amiga drive, and it does indeed work, no point to it, I just like it... :P

As someone with old synths and samplers, I actually even have a bunch of unused Maxel 8" discs still in its original box.

I wonder if the metal dust cover is preventing the bulk eraser from working on the covered parts of the disk. What if you rotated them 180 degrees then used the tape eraser again? Maybe you have already tried this before, but I'm curious if that would help.

Thanks for the video, Kevin.

do u know about the Catweasel mk4 pci express board for pcs?? because - im about to purchase a new pc so i need to know really if Individual Computers still sell these? the Catweasel cards?? thanks................... my friend thanks.........................

Scorch15 must be Scorched Earth v1.50

Back in the day I used to buy DD diskettes and drill a hole in them.

Good video, thanks!

Great find. I use those old discks for my Amiga. :)

Well as a person who just bought 100 DD 720k disks for his Tandy 1000HX this is an oddly topical video. lol

What are you using, that the DIR command has a /v switch?