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…

It’s Always Floppy Time!

On [Jan Derogee]’s desk is something that wouldn’t look out of place for many of us, a pile of computer magazines with a case of 3.5″ floppy disks on top of it. The causal observe…

8″ Floppy On Your PC?

We should probably have a new metric for measuring mass storage performance: bytes per pound. An old IBM tape drive from the S/360 days, for example, could hold almost 6 megabytes of data. It also …

Arduino Nano Floppy Emulator For When Your Disk Is Not Accessible

Among the plethora of obsolete removable media there are some which are lamented, but it can be difficult to find those who regret the passing of the floppy disk. These flexible magnetic disks in h…