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1. Embed this notice
   Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Friday, 06-Dec-2024 20:39:27 JST Charlie Stross

   I'm shocked (not shocked) at how few people remember using 8" floppies. They only predated the 5.25" floppy by a couple of years! (Although they vanished much faster.)
   https://wandering.shop/@cstross/113559944465203844

   • Embed this notice
     Clifton Royston (cliftonr@wandering.shop)'s status on Sunday, 08-Dec-2024 18:39:53 JST Clifton Royston

     in reply to

     • Steveg58

     @Steveg58 @cstross

     BTW, an interesting trivia bit about the 8" floppy is that it actually came out in 1971, but originally just for a specific niche use as boot media for IBM 360s and 370s.

     A couple engineers at IBM invented it because IBM wanted something fairly simple and self-contained as mainframe OS boot media, to replace booting from tape reels.

     (I had thought I remembered that but checked it on Wikipedia to be sure.)

   • Embed this notice
     Clifton Royston (cliftonr@wandering.shop)'s status on Sunday, 08-Dec-2024 18:39:54 JST Clifton Royston

     in reply to

     • Steveg58

     @Steveg58 @cstross

     I had a pair in the early '80s.

     They were pretty common in the earliest home computing days when the only "home systems" were S-100 boat anchors, but once luggable computers came along (Osborne, Kaypro) and then PCs, they became a thing of the past.

     You could however fit just over 1 MB on a double-sided double density 8" disk. It was a long time before smaller floppy disks caught up to that.

     Charlie Stross repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Steveg58 (steveg58@aus.social)'s status on Sunday, 08-Dec-2024 18:39:55 JST Steveg58

     in reply to

     @cstross
     They were pretty specialist ... hardly ever appeared in home systems.

   • Embed this notice
     Infoseepage #StopGazaGenocide (infoseepage@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 08-Dec-2024 19:07:33 JST Infoseepage #StopGazaGenocide

     in reply to

     • Steveg58
     • Clifton Royston

     @CliftonR @Steveg58 @cstross Not quite. They started as round magnetically coated read-only media that IBM could mail out to clients in a paper sleeve (inside other mailing packaging) to patch micro-code on mainframes. These early disks didn't have integral plastic sleeves for protection and they were only readable by the clients, not write-able. Only IBM had drive which could write to them at the time. They held about 80KB.

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Sunday, 08-Dec-2024 19:07:33 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • Steveg58
     • Infoseepage #StopGazaGenocide
     • Clifton Royston

     @Infoseepage @CliftonR @Steveg58 You are explaining the appearance and use of 8" floppies to people who remember using them. Please don't be a Reply Guy.

   • Embed this notice
     Andrew 🏳️‍🌈 💻 🧦 (amca@aus.social)'s status on Sunday, 08-Dec-2024 19:45:24 JST Andrew 🏳️‍🌈 💻 🧦

     in reply to

     @cstross I got into computers in the late 80s, when 5 1/4" were on their way out and 3 1/2" floppies were on their way in. Never encountered an 8" that was being used IRL.

   • Embed this notice
     Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)'s status on Sunday, 08-Dec-2024 19:45:24 JST Charlie Stross

     in reply to

     • Andrew 🏳️‍🌈 💻 🧦

     @amca Thing is, from 1974-1994 production volume of computers increased by an order of magnitude from generation to generation (each roughly 4-5 years). 8" was *rare* compared to 5.25", which in turn was rare next to 3.5" floppies.

     For comprison, PCs/Macs only ever sold in the 10s of millions until 2000; smartphones are sold by the billion today.

   • Embed this notice
     Clifton Royston (cliftonr@wandering.shop)'s status on Monday, 09-Dec-2024 13:04:20 JST Clifton Royston

     in reply to

     • Steveg58
     • Infoseepage #StopGazaGenocide

     @cstross @Infoseepage @Steveg58

     It happens that I did some work on a similar system for the Tongan govt when I was living in Tonga, in the early 1980s.

     MP/M was pretty nifty - the system I coded on, from a small Australian company, had shared disk storage, but a separate CPU board for each terminal/user, so users had no contention for RAM or CPU resources. That's quite the achievement for a system built on 8-bit CPUs!

     Well into the '90s Tonga was still running the invoice app I wrote them.

   • Embed this notice
     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Monday, 09-Dec-2024 17:46:33 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to
     in one of my first teen jobs as computer operator, I had my first (?) and only (?) encounters with a computer that could read 8" floppy disks. I had used 5¼" ones for a while already, the 3½" ones were yet to appear in my radar for years, but the 8" ones already felt like a relic from a distant past. during those days, the 5¼" ones back home felt smaller than before