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…

The Ultimate Commodore 1541 Drive Talk: A Deep Dive Into Disks, Controllers, And Much More

When we think of retrocomputing, it’s very often the computers themselves that get all the glory.  There’s nothing wrong with this of course- the computers of the late 70’s and 80…

Raspberry Pi Floppy Driver Uncovers Fishy Secrets

A forum post by New Zealand electronics enthusiast [zl2wrw] about retreiving waypoints from a mysterious floppy disk caught our eye. The navigation system on his friend’s fishing boat had die…

Running Modern Linux From A Single Floppy Disk

There was a time when booting Linux from a floppy disk was the norm, but of course, those days are long gone. Even if you still had a working 3.5 inch drive, surely the size of the modern kernel al…

Reading Floppies With An Oscilloscope

There’s a lot of data on magnetic media that will soon be lost forever, as floppies weren’t really made to sit in attics and basements for decades and still work. [Chris Evans] and [Phi…