• (cs) in reply to Gedoon
    Gedoon:
    lizardfoot:
    The developer was simply following one of the Golden Rules of programming:

    "Never underestimate the stupidity of the end user."

    I've written on the top of the whiteboard in our office: "REMEMBER: THE USER IS STUPID." It's the motto of our IT team and it is referred to ever so often. I wonder why.

    That is a bit rude, isn't it ? I would write:

    "Users are clueless."

  • (cs) in reply to iMalc
    iMalc:
    I've seen someone try sticking a floppy disk in a zip drive. Unfortunately it fits.

    Yep. But one realizes it immediately because the floppy rattles around in the zip drive upon insertion.

  • (cs) in reply to swordfishBob
    swordfishBob:
    mav:
    Whats a "disk"?
    There's no such thing really. "Disk" is an abbreviation of "diskette", which was a cute way of saying "little disc". The original floppy discs were 8" across, and somewhat more difficult to post.

    [grumble]They were also shitty frisbees - no decent aerodynamics whatsoever [/grumble].

    swordfishBob:
    someone else:
    is this an urban myth?
    No, people found all sorts of ways to wrongly insert these things. It was much more common than the more recent "coffee cup holder" incidents.

    I concur, that happened all the time.

  • (cs) in reply to Ken
    Ken:
    I believe it could happen. I experienced first-hand a customer who, when asked to send "a copy of your data", mailed us a (paper) copy of the disk from the copy machine.

    It happened to me once too, when I asked one of my users to send me a copy of her 5 1/4" floppies in the mail. She must have been really puzzled, or impressed with my powers of interpretation, but the photocopies duly turned up a couple of days later.

    I rang up and explained what I really wanted - I could just see her turning bright red on the other end of the phone as she said, "Oh, I see…".

    So the real disks turned up, another couple of days later. Unfortunately it was an old-school copier, with a rather large electromagnetic field, and the disks had been fried. Oh.

  • Prashanth (unregistered)

    This goes back to when I was in school, 7th grade. I was the only kid in my class with a PC at home but I had no good games to play. There was this other older guy who had a stack of games on 5 1/4"s from a computer training class he'd gone to, but no computer to play them on. Relishing the prospect of playing something other than POP and Test Drive, I called him over and he came with the games...wrapped in TIN FOIL! Turns out he kept his discs wrapped in foil and kept them in the SAFE at home...can anyone guess why?...

    A: (I kid you not!)..He wanted to keep them safe from viruses!!!! Oh boy! :)

  • Stef (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!'

    Wow, I hope those condoms don't have lubricant, it would stain the pamphlet with the package punctured... (See some sarcasm here...)

  • (cs) in reply to Some Random 5.25" floppy user
    Some Random 5.25" floppy user:
    Tucked away in some box in the attic, I have a specialized tool designed to punch a notch with perfectly squared off corners, at the proper height from the top side of the disk.

    Figure if I wait another 10-15 years on that, I can sell it off to an antiques dealer.

    I'm onto a winner then... I've got at least 2 here. And I think there's another at work somewhere in the depths of the cupboards too.

  • Cian (unregistered) in reply to Wouter
    Wouter:
    My colleague experienced almost the same situation. When helping a customer with an email attachment that could not be sent to a third party email address for some reason (probably blocked by our spam filter), he asked the customer to "zip the file and please mail it to me, so I can experiment with the file". A week later, we received a package by mail containing a Zip disk with the file on it. Now, I'm not sure if the issue was caused by the fact that my colleague is native Dutch and was speaking with an Irish customer, or that it was a discrepancy on a techical level..

    Having worked in IT in Ireland for a long time, Zip drives were endemic here in the mid-late 1990s, and theres a lot of non-technical people who wouldn't know what zip, as in to compress, meant. They would, however, know that their computer had a 'big expensive floppy drive' with "Zip" written on it. Something surprisingly similar happened to me...

  • slowtiger (unregistered)

    I've seen some of this and even did it myself.

    MO-drives and Syquest 88 cartridges fit together much too good. I know, because I crammed the latter in the first once. Repair was expensive.

    Once I saw an Art Director explaining something at the workplace of a graphic designer. He was pointing at the screen with some pen. Unfortunately it was a permanent marker.

    An intern was asked to disassemble a couple of Mac workstations. His way of disconnecting the monitor cable from the computer was fast and effective: he just ripped it off. Since he forgot about the little screws, a bunch of graphic cards were ruined.

  • Alan (unregistered) in reply to bstorer
    bstorer:
    Referencing Wikipedia should be just like Godwin's Law. If you do it, you automatically lose.

    I am aware that I lose.

    Yes, but "bstorers Law" doesn't have the same ring to it.

  • d.albuschat (unregistered)

    Exactly the same happened to me a few months ago. I own a PSP and PSPs use "UMD"s as their optical medium. They're similar to mini-Discs as they are discs inside of a (semi-)square protection boxing. Well, my older sister wanted to play this game and nearly ripped apart the UMD. I had to tape it later on, but fortunately it still worked.

  • d.albuschat (unregistered)

    Exactly the same happened to me a few months ago. I own a PSP and PSPs use "UMD"s as their optical medium. They're similar to mini-Discs as they are discs inside of a (semi-)square protection boxing. Well, my older sister wanted to play this game and nearly ripped apart the UMD. I had to tape it later on, but fortunately it still worked.

  • Amadan (unregistered) in reply to Joachim Otahal

    [quote=Joachim Otahal]You wouldn't have needed the new index hole for C64/1541 and later (includes PC) hardware, they all used soft-sectored formatting for their disks.[/quote]

    Not the index hole. The write-protect hole, the square thingy on the plastic cover, that you could tape over with a little label to make the disk write-only, and which was not punched on "single-sided" disks - making the unused side unusable by write-protecting it at the hardware level, until you un-write-protected it with a bit of scissor work, or a hole puncher.

    captcha: dreadlocks. dreadful locking system? heeh...

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to punissuer
    ben curthoys:
    i used to have 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!
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Ken
    Ken:
    I believe it could happen. I experienced first-hand a customer who, when asked to send "a copy of your data", mailed us a (paper) copy of the disk from the copy machine. (I'd say "Xerox[tm] copy", but it may not have been a Xerox, and I don't want any trouble with trademark police.)
    This non-native speaker of English calls that a "photocopy".
  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to ParkinT
    ParkinT:
    It's sort of like "the old days" when we listened to music on CDs with grooves in them!
    What? You mean vinyl records? We don't call them CDs.
  • Heinz Gorgon (unregistered) in reply to s|k
    s|k:
    Can you idiots stop with the captcha yet? WE ALL KNOW ALL OF THE WORDS ALREADY. But thank you, thank you for sharing, truly our days are better off. Nobody cares what your damn captcha is.

    Look, now you've created more noise than all captcha signatures combined. You xevious person!

    Challenge: use the captcha word in your post. It doesn't have to make sense.

    Perhaps this will placate s|k. Perhaps it will drive him mad. We have fun anyway.

  • ben curthoys (unregistered) in reply to Joachim Otahal
    Joachim Otahal:
    ben curthoys:
    used to have 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.

    You wouldn't have needed the new index hole for C64/1541 and later (includes PC) hardware, they all used soft-sectored formatting for their disks. So the Computer you talk about must been WAY before C64 time when it needed the extra index hole. Or you did the hole for nothing g.

    Joachim

    it was for a bbc model b micro. the day that i got a disk drive and didn't have to wait for the tapes to load was a big day =). i think i was about 8.

  • (cs) in reply to ben curthoys

    Somewhat off topic but related w.r.t. stupid users...

    My brother had a nearly original PC/XT (4mhz, 64K ram), and after a while, found that it was too slow. He asked that I make it faster. I bought one of those 6mhz upgrade-cpu kits, and proceeded to dismember the PC so as to be able to get at the CPU. After it was done, I decided to test the box before reattaching everything. Of course, sitting in the middle of the empty desk was the original CPU. My brother saw it and asked what it was. I paused and looked at it with a "?" on my face, and after a moment, decreed that it must be "extra" as there was no place inside the PC to insert it, then turned on the box and everything worked.

    He insisted that I put it back in the PC because we shouldn't have "extra" parts.... I tossed it into the bottom of the case (in front of him), sealed it up and refused to work on it further. He was having fits and couldn't understand how the PC worked with the extra part not yet installed.

    sighs

  • moe (unregistered) in reply to s|k
    s|k:
    Can you idiots stop with the captcha yet? WE ALL KNOW ALL OF THE WORDS ALREADY. But thank you, thank you for sharing, truly our days are better off. Nobody cares what your damn captcha is.

    He didn't get a captcha :(

    captcha: grumpy - sounds like someone has a case of the mondays!

  • Dave (unregistered)

    I have been in software development for 20 years and have had lots of things happen to me personally. The stories discussed on this thread are true and have happened to me. Some of them are ridiculous but these were in the days when most people didn't even know what a PC was, and most didn't care.

    Many years ago I had a customer who used to send me daily photocopies of 5 1/4 floppy disks as off site backups of their system.

    Another customer open a 5 1/4 floppy with a pair of scissors and then fed the round disk out of the middle into the drive, and rang us to complain that the disk didn't work.

    Another customer, a teacher at a school, repositioned all the keys on the keyboard into alphabetical order so the children could find them easier. And then rang us to complain that when she presses the "A" key she gets a "Q" instead.

    An office manager once asked me how he was supposed to type with a mouse.

    and a cleaner at one company I worked at really did unplug the server to plug in her vaccuum cleaner every night.

    CHEERS

  • (cs) in reply to MX5Ringer

    My personal favourite is the user who forced two 3 1/2" disks in the drive at the same time as he was only prompted to "insert disk 2" instead of "remove disk 1 then insert disk 2"

    Not a myth - been there, done that. Was a first I.T. experience where I was interning (high school) in a support capacity at a company. The machine in question was a NEC 286-class machine with the larger 5 1/4" drives (not the half height, lower profile ones).

    I was doing a WordPerfect upgrade (IIRC), and there were a couple of machine that were not connected to the Netware network (using 10Base-2, BTW :). One of which had a screen reader/magnifier for a visually impared user.

    Background: back then, a user called themselves a Power User if they could plug in their own serial mouse, install the driver for it, and successfully get a solid-rectangle cursor block moving around the screen in DOS.

    After upgrading the Network File Server's version, I was about to upgrade this user's system when they insisted in doing it themselves. Being close to lunch time, I figured "why not?" and left the disks with them.

    Upon returning from lunch, I had a message (I do not remember if it was VM, or an email via cc:Mail or Right Hand Man) that went something like this:

    Uh, hi. This is Xxxxxx. I am trying to get the upgrade working but it is failing. When it asked for the second disc, I put it in but it kept asking for the disc. I tried the third disc but it would not go. Please come down when you have a minute.

    Knowing that the "third disc would not go" part was a bad sign, I heading right down to find that indeed, upgrade discs 1 and 2 were both in the drive at the same time. They actually fit it with little trouble - none of the discs were bent or kinked in any way and still worked.

    After completing the upgrade (myself, of course), I returned upstairs and told my manager what had happened. While both laughing and being quite upset, he basically yelled at me telling me that I should never leave a user along in a situation like this, because they could do far more harm than good.

    Lesson learned.

  • captcha? who cares (unregistered) in reply to ben curthoys
    ben curthoys:
    i used to have 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.

    Ah yeah, those were the days, I used to do the same thing for my C64.....well after we upgraded from tape to disks that was.

    Damn you C64, its you who I blame for getting me into this mess.... i coulda been a lawyer, or an accountant, or ...

  • Loopy (unregistered) in reply to s|k
    s|k:
    Can you idiots stop with the captcha yet? WE ALL KNOW ALL OF THE WORDS ALREADY. But thank you, thank you for sharing, truly our days are better off. Nobody cares what your damn captcha is.

    It honestly makes me insane.

  • Guy Geens (unregistered)

    A friend of mine told me this:

    The user left a 3.5" floppy on the dashboard of her car. Outside in the sun.

    When she came back, the case had deformed and the floppy would no longer fit into the drive. She called the help desk, where my friend tried to figure out what was wrong. (The user referred to the floppy as "the plastic thing that goes into the computer".) Eventually, my friend went to her desk and told her she lost her work.

    Later, I told this story to another friend. He claimed to have encountered a similar situation. Only, he didn't give up at that point.

    He carefully disassembled a working floppy,"transplanted" the inner disc and glued it all back together. He actually recovered the data.

    Those were the days - when the data stored on a single floppy was worth enough to go through all that trouble.

  • Captcha Captcha Captcha Captcha Captcha Captcha Captcha Captcha (unregistered) in reply to Loopy

    Instructional Tutorial on Proper Procedure to Quote Captcha

    Don't simply say: Captcha: xxx; this is boring.

    Instead, say something like: Captch: gotcha (really!) (note the levity and irony)

    God I love this forum

  • Been there done that don't care any more (unregistered) in reply to Guy Geens
    Guy Geens:
    A friend of mine told me this:

    The user left a 3.5" floppy on the dashboard of her car. Outside in the sun.

    When she came back, the case had deformed and the floppy would no longer fit into the drive. She called the help desk, where my friend tried to figure out what was wrong. (The user referred to the floppy as "the plastic thing that goes into the computer".) Eventually, my friend went to her desk and told her she lost her work.

    Later, I told this story to another friend. He claimed to have encountered a similar situation. Only, he didn't give up at that point.

    He carefully disassembled a working floppy,"transplanted" the inner disc and glued it all back together. He actually recovered the data.

    Those were the days - when the data stored on a single floppy was worth enough to go through all that trouble.

    Or that we didn't know any better... Truthfully, is any data on any medium of any level of technology every really worth the effort? Haven't you folks ever simply ignored some urgent requirement because of <whatever> reason, and given some time, the urgency dissipated and nobody actually cared?

  • (cs) in reply to Prashanth
    Prashanth:
    This goes back to when I was in school, 7th grade. I was the only kid in my class with a PC at home but I had no good games to play. There was this other older guy who had a stack of games on 5 1/4"s from a computer training class he'd gone to, but no computer to play them on. Relishing the prospect of playing something other than POP and Test Drive, I called him over and he came with the games...wrapped in TIN FOIL! Turns out he kept his discs wrapped in foil and kept them in the SAFE at home...can anyone guess why?...

    A: (I kid you not!)..He wanted to keep them safe from viruses!!!! Oh boy! :)

    I thought you were going to say he was afraid the aliens would scan his data... ;-)

  • Not A Robot (unregistered)

    Hmm, I seem to recall this urban myth from the times when people still used 5.25" floppies - it came in a selection of stories, including the one about the secretary who folded the disks for carrying, and the one who stapled the instructions to the disk...

    Anyway, there I was, making corrections to a 200 card batch with an 80-hole card punch, when suddenly...

    Punched tape made good roaches back in the day...

  • Metalstorm (unregistered) in reply to anonymous

    Reminds me of when I was doing tech support in a call center, someone called in because the software asked them to enter their credit card, they changed their mind and wanted their card back.

    Was basically thinking WTF?, after a while realized she stuck the credit card in the 3 1/2 drive and couldnt get it out.

  • dolo54 (unregistered)

    I have an opposite tale. As a young intern of 18 I was working for a business graphics company. They had this huge project stored on a bournoulli (sp?) drive which I had really seen before. The woman who was working on the project starts yelling "f&*# the disk won't read! the job is corrupt! we're f@#!ed!!!" so I go over as I was already kinda the junior fixit guy around there. I take a look at the disk which is covered in a hard shell and ask "how does this work?" she replies "it's a magnetic optical drive." I think "optical huh?" and then slide open the small covered slot for the reader. sure enough it looks like a cd inside. well being familiar with cds I think maybe there's some dirt on the disk, so I proceed to turn the disk inside the case and sure enough I see the offending smudge. I then took my SHIRT and wiped it off. well the woman sees this and is like "NOOOOOO what are you doing?" but it was too late. the deed was done. I say "try it now." and sure enough the data was recovered and everything worked like a charm. dumbfounded she says slowly "wow... uh, I would have never in a million years thought to do that."

  • dolo54 (unregistered)

    "never really seen before."

  • (cs) in reply to Maclee

    the sad thing is this guy did exactly what he was told, insert the disk labeled Windows XP Professional CD-ROM into Drive A: Press ENTER when ready

    I give this guy an A for following directions, I give Micro$loth a Lawsuit for misdirection

  • [twisti] (unregistered) in reply to ben curthoys

    Open one side up, take out disk internals (the round thing!) and put in CD/DVD. Due to the padding inside the old floppy disks, your CD/DVDs will always be safe and even clean! It's like having a case that polishes your CD/DVD. And it's damn space efficient.

    captcha: onomatopoeia (wtf?)

  • el jaybird (unregistered) in reply to Loopy
    Loopy:
    s|k:
    Can you idiots stop with the captcha yet? WE ALL KNOW ALL OF THE WORDS ALREADY. But thank you, thank you for sharing, truly our days are better off. Nobody cares what your damn captcha is.

    It honestly makes me insane.

    A nice drink of cognac ought to make you feel better.

  • mnature (unregistered) in reply to Some Random 5.25" floppy user
    Some Random 5.25" floppy user:
    Tucked away in some box in the attic, I have a specialized tool designed to punch a notch with perfectly squared off corners, at the proper height from the top side of the disk.

    Figure if I wait another 10-15 years on that, I can sell it off to an antiques dealer.

    But only a few of us even know what it is just by looking at it. I must have two or three of those. I visualize a time, after I pass away, when my children will be going through boxes of archaic computer hardware, holding up something, and asking the rest if they know what it is. Then everyone falling to the floor laughing when someone identifies it as something like a floppy notch puncher.

    Why, oh why, do we hold on to this stuff?

    I do remember a time when Macintosh owners couldn't function unless they had a straightened paper clip handy . . .

  • Joachim Otahal (unregistered) in reply to Amadan

    Hm, mix index and write enable hole... [quote user="Amadan"]Not the index hole. The write-protect hole....[/quote]

    You are funny, I talked about the index hole, just like Ben Curthoys did: [quote user="ben curthoys]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[/quote]

    Read his his comment.

    Check this: [image]

    Middle large hole: That is where the motor holds the disk. 5 millimeters right of the hole you see a small hole in the casing, that is the index hole. The magnetic disk itself has a hole too which you can see when turning it inside the case, very old machines use that to know when to write a sector. That is not the write-enable cutout which is at the corner.

    And now please somebody tell my why quoting preview doesn't work :).

  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered)

    It's definitely not an urban legend. Back in the days of 5 1/4" disks I saw it a couple of times in the computer lab.

  • muttonchop (unregistered) in reply to Prashanth
    Prashanth:
    This goes back to when I was in school, 7th grade. I was the only kid in my class with a PC at home but I had no good games to play. There was this other older guy who had a stack of games on 5 1/4"s from a computer training class he'd gone to, but no computer to play them on. Relishing the prospect of playing something other than POP and Test Drive, I called him over and he came with the games...wrapped in TIN FOIL! Turns out he kept his discs wrapped in foil and kept them in the SAFE at home...can anyone guess why?...

    A: (I kid you not!)..He wanted to keep them safe from viruses!!!! Oh boy! :)

    Many years ago, a friend's dad wouldn't let him install a game he'd borrowed from me in case it had caught a virus from my computer.

    It was on a CD.

  • Ward Cooke (unregistered)

    With regards to copying floppy diskettes, a friend likes to tell this story.

    Back in the 90s the company he was working for was running an expensive proprietary product of some description and they needed technical support. Unfortunately, the company that supplied the product was unwilling to supply support unless they could show they had paid for it, and due to a glitch of some sort my friend's company wasn't appearing as a paid customer in the database.

    So the tech suggested, "If you can find the first installation diskette for our product, make a photocopy of it, and fax that copy to us, we'll be able to read the serial number off the label and take that as confirmation you're a customer. Then we'll be happy to help you."

    So my friend found the diskettes and walked the fisrt one to the copier. Just as he was putting in on the glass, his boss walked by and asked, "What are you doing?"

    His reply: "Oh, I'm just making a copy of this diskette."

    CAPTCHA: onomatopoeia. Lovely place; I'd like to visit it again some time.

  • RichardJ (unregistered)

    Reminds me of one of our customers back in the days of 8 inch floppy disks. They kept a backup copy of the data in a cash box but because it wouldn't fit they folded it!

  • Michael G. (unregistered)

    That's what we old time hackers call a "naked floppy." You get a point if you've ever booted one, which I have. (See question 356 at http://www.sthl.org/subscribe/hacker.html).

    The trick to booting a naked floppy is:

    1. Don't bend the disk when extracting it from the plastic sleeve.

    2. Do not touch the surface of the floppy with your fingers.

    3. Insert the empty sleeve or another disk into the drive to move the spring insert mechanism out of the way if needed (this may not work in all drives). This step is not necessary if you use an old Shugart mechanism such as an original Apple Disk II, which is the drive I have successfully booted a naked floppy on.

    4. Carefully slide in the naked floppy, hope you center it well.

    5. Close the drive door and boot it.

  • Zzyyx (unregistered)

    In the mid-80's, I worked in the R&D division of a multinational engineering firm. We were among the first in the company to use an electronic design CAD suite, and offered training to other divisions. As is typical with CAD programs, the most common commands were assigned directly to the F1-F12 function keys, with other common commands accessed by meta + fkey combinations. Mounted just above the function keys on the workstation keyboards were thin plastic "cheat card" holders with decks of ruler shaped cards listing command bindings for various programs. The top row of each card listed command bindings for the straight function keys, the middle row showed Ctrl + fkey bindings, and the bottom row showed Alt + fkey bindings.

    At one training course, a co-instructor and I noticed an older guy coming unglued with frustration at a workstation. My colleague and I walked over to assist and observed the individual furiously stabbing his finger into various labeled rectangular areas on the cardboard cheat sheet. When my colleague asked what was wrong, the guy retorted angrily that the "function keyboard" was broken on that workstation.

    My colleague did an admirable job keeping a straight face long enough to instruct the gentleman on the fine points of function key use. We managed to get to our office down the hall and close the door before hitting the floor, contorted in laughter.

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to iToad
    iToad:
    As God is my witness, I actually saw somebody fasten an 8" floppy to a steel filing cabinet with a magnet. At least when I mentioned that this wasn't a good idea, the person responsible instantly understood why.

    I tried it with a 5.25" HD floppy once just for the fun, and nothing happened. It was a cabinet-style rectangular magnet like you'd find in cabinet door latches. I used to keep the floppy "posted" on the fridge that way. I remember my dad being scared, since it was an important floppy. I told him that even though the sleeve says not to, it doesn't hurt. That floppy had been sitting on the fridge, taken off almost every other day, for more than a year. It got some bad sectors in the end, but this was simply due to lots of use, not due to the magnet.

    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.

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

    [image]

    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.

    Dude, that's like the whole point, DUH!

  • Kuba (unregistered) in reply to Joachim Otahal
    Joachim Otahal:
    ben curthoys:
    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.

    You wouldn't have needed the new index hole for C64/1541 and later (includes PC) hardware, they all used soft-sectored formatting for their disks.

    Hmm, AFAIR soft sectoring still needed the index hole to know where to start 1st sector. Hard sectoring would use multiple index holes. 3.5" disks do it by mechanically aligning spindle (with an index sensor) to the medium's hub.

  • Mario (unregistered) in reply to ben curthoys

    Are you proud of that? Everyone that had a Commodore 64 or 128 with a disk drive did that.

    Well, we either simply cut the whole - the disk is far enough-, or used a "5.25 floppy disk hole maker".

  • Michael G. (unregistered) in reply to Mario
    Mario:
    Are you proud of that? Everyone that had a Commodore 64 or 128 with a disk drive did that.

    Well, we either simply cut the whole - the disk is far enough-, or used a "5.25 floppy disk hole maker".

    A standard single-hole punch worked well, too. Just punch a half-circle. If you missed and were a bit off, just take another bite, so to speak.

    Also, regarding the index hole that the OP mentioned: Many systems didn't even use the single-hole for lining up sector 1. The Apple II was that way. When it formatted the disk, it simply put the sectors wherever they landed on the disk. When it subsequently read from/wrote to the disk, it looked for the header of the correct sector.

  • Michael G. (unregistered) in reply to Kuba
    Kuba:
    iToad:
    As God is my witness, I actually saw somebody fasten an 8" floppy to a steel filing cabinet with a magnet. At least when I mentioned that this wasn't a good idea, the person responsible instantly understood why.

    I tried it with a 5.25" HD floppy once just for the fun, and nothing happened. It was a cabinet-style rectangular magnet like you'd find in cabinet door latches. I used to keep the floppy "posted" on the fridge that way. I remember my dad being scared, since it was an important floppy. I told him that even though the sleeve says not to, it doesn't hurt. That floppy had been sitting on the fridge, taken off almost every other day, for more than a year. It got some bad sectors in the end, but this was simply due to lots of use, not due to the magnet.

    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...

  • Maarten (unregistered)

    It truly amazes me that nobody spotted the real WTF... It is in those 2 lines:

    Brian: OK, I got the disk, what do I do now? Robert: Take the disk out of the mailer and place it in the drive.

    Something makes me believe that Brian already took the disk out of the mailer, so Robert should have instructed him just to place it in the drive.

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