• Mike Wilson (unregistered)

    Some time around 1979 I asked a client to post me a copy of their disk (8 inch floppy) so I could investigate a problem. It arrived in the mail with a complement clip stapled to it. Another time a client mailed a floppy folded in half to fit the envelope.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Michael G.
    Michael G.:
    Kuba:
    AFAIK, there is no permanent magnet out there that will do *anything* to current generation of hard drives. Even if you'd open the drive in a clean room and touch the magnet to the platter. Nothing will happen. The permanent magnets are an order of magnitude (at least) too weak to have much effect.

    Oh yeah? Hold a strong magnet close to the platters of a spinning hard drive and see what happens...

    It sucks! :D

  • Sockatume (unregistered) in reply to un.sined
    un.sined:
    All these stories of people inserting multiple floppies into a drive remind me of my kids and the Wii... I routinely have to extract multiple CD's from it...

    That shouldn't be possible. On my Wii, at least, a pair of plastic shutters come down and close off the disk slot as soon as a disk is inserted. And I doubt you could force a disk past them without breaking the disk and/or shoving huge shards of broken shutter into the drive.

  • Douglas (unregistered)

    no fucking way dude! i am rather young and i still know what 5¼ inch disks looked like. Heck my first computer had two of them, and no hard drive! Eesh kids these days!

  • Darwin (unregistered) in reply to Abscissa
    Abscissa:
    Maclee:
    This really reminds me of this image:

    (You've all seen the image several times already.)

    It's hard to tell for certain due to the image's resolution and compression artifacts, but I could swear that screen says to insert the CD "into drive A:". Which, of course, is equally funny.

    Not quite so funny, since the image is obviously staged. There's no way the CD would break like that if you were just trying to shove it in the wrong drive.

    Someone had to intentionally break it with their hands, and then place it in the mouth of the 3.5in drive for the photo. If the broken CD is staged, it's quite possible that the text on the screen is fake, too.

    Captcha: withheld to preserve the sanity of sensitive forum participants

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    ben curthoys:
    i used tohave a single sided 5 1/4 inch drive, and a stack of double sided disks.

    so i would open the casing, carefully put the floppy to one side, cut a new "write protect" notch with scissors, drill a new index hole, put the floppy part back in, sellotape the sides down, and then use both sides of the disk by putting it in "upsidedown" when i wanted the other side. double the storage space for free.

    and it worked.

    Oh! How I miss those lovely days! :)

    punissuer:
    Not sure I would call that free. If the disks were marked DS or "Double Sided", then you probably paid extra for them.
    Yes, but that's still cheaper than two single-sided diskettes. So, while the storage capacity other side is not entirely free, it's discounted already! And you save space, too!
    But you could flip and notch "single-sided" disks too. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only difference (besides the price) between DS disks and SS disks was that the DS disks had been scanned for defects on both sides instead of just the top. The bottoms of SS disks were usually good enough to use--they just hadn't been certified.
  • Fisher (unregistered) in reply to igitur
    igitur:
    Bit off topic, but that's how many condoms are distributed here in South Africa. They staple them to a safe sex pamphlet!

    PMSL

  • (cs)

    Okay, so I was believing it right up until where it mentioned "Mailer". That is an American term and is not used in the U.K.

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