Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Funny Keyboard

What’s the most important keyboard macro you know? Honestly, it’s probably Ctrl-S. But do you use that one often enough? Chances are, you do not. What you need is a giant, dedicated Sav…

It’s Like LightScribe, But For Floppies!

Back when CD-Rs were the thing, there were CD burner drives which would etch images in the unoccupied areas of a CD-R. These so-called LightScribe drives were a novelty of which most users soon tir…

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The TRON Keyboard

[Folaefolc] was craving a new keyboard build a few weeks ago and got inspired by the humble 3.5″ floppy disk. So much so that he decided to make a split keyboard with each half having the exa…

Remember The Tri-Format Floppy Disk?

These days, the vast majority of portable media users are storing their files on some kind of Microsoft-developed file system. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, though, things were different. You absolu…

A Modern PC With A Retro OS

Despite the rise of ARM processors in more and more computers from embedded systems to daily driver PCs, the x86 architecture maintains a stronghold in the computing space that won’t be going…

Exploring PC Floppy Protection: Formaster Copy-Lock

[GloriousCow] has started working on a series of investigations into the various historical floppy disk copy protection schemes used in the early days of the IBM PC and is here with the first of th…

Everything You Wanted To Know About Early Macintosh Floppies

Using a disk drive today is trivial. But back “in the day,” it was fairly complex both because the drives were simple and the CPUs were not powerful by today’s standards. [Thomas]…

This MIDI BoomBox Takes Floppies

You might have had a boombox back in the 1990s, but probably not like the Yamaha MDP-10. As [Nicole] explains, the odd little device played MIDI files from a floppy disk. Technically, it wasn&#8217…

Retro Hackintosh Made From Retro Parts

Apple as a company, has staked most of its future around being a “walled garden” where it controls everything from the hardware up through the user experience. In some ways this is good…

Flux Is Your Friend For Archiving Old Floppy Disks

Nothing screams retrocomputing quite like floppy drives. If you want to preserve some of your favorite computing memories like that paper you wrote about the joys of the Information Superhighway, […

Reliving The Authentic 90s Linux Experience

Installing Linux on a modern PC has never been easier. There are tons of tools available that will nearly-automatically download your Linux distribution of choice, image a USB drive, and make it bo…

Preserving Floppy Disks

Time is almost up for magnetic storage from the 80s and 90s. Various physical limitations in storage methods from this era are conspiring to slowly degrade the data stored on things like tape, flop…

Using Excel To Manage A Commodore 64

The “save” icon for plenty of modern computer programs, including Microsoft Office, still looks like a floppy disk, despite the fact that these have been effectively obsolete for well o…

Floppy Disk Sales Are Higher-Density Than You Might Think

Floppies may be big in Japan, but nostalgic and/or needful Stateside floppy enthusiasts needn’t fret — just use AOL keyword point that browser toward floppydisk.com. There, you can buy …

Floppy Disk Sings: I’m Big In Japan

The other day, a medical office needed my insurance card. I asked them where to e-mail it and they acted like I had offered them human flesh as an appetizer. “We don’t have e-mail! You …

It’s RAID. With Floppy Drives.

There are some tings that should be possible, so just have to be tried. [Action Retro] has a great video showing just such an escapade, the creation of a large RAID 0 array using a pile of USB flop…

PDP-11/34 Restoration And The Virtue Of Persistence

The wildly successful PDP-11 minicomputer was a major influence on the evolution of computing throughout the 1970s. While fondly remembered in modern day emulation, there’s nothing like booti…