[INTRO] So, in the last episode we talked about cassette
drives, if you haven't seen that yet, I suggest you go watch it first since it sets the stage
for Floppy Drives. "Ahh! I love talking about floppy disks! Right, so here's the thing.
I don't care if they're 8 inch, 5 ¼ inch, 3 ½ inch, or any of the 3 inch
Amstrad ones or any of the weird things in between. For all over the world, I love collecting
them, I love feeling them, I love looking at them. Floppy disks are more interesting
than pretty much any other older storage medium to me." Technically floppy drives had been
in use since 1971 in the business market, usually in the form of these large 8-inch
disks. These things were huge, and you can see where they got the name floppy disk from.
These are probably most well-known from the movie WarGames, which came out in 1983. But
interestingly enough, nobody was using 8-inch disks in 1983. However, that doesn't necessarily
mean the movie was wrong. It could just be that he was given a 5 year old computer by
his parents, which is not unreasonable I suppose. In fact, the computer I use every day is
5 years old, so there's nothing wrong with that. Also, according to Futurama we'll be
using these in the future for video recording. "Let's just see what you were up to last night. While I was asleep." But the 5 ¼ inch floppy disk is what most
people will recognize from the home computers of the 1980's. Much smaller than the 8 inch,
but still works pretty much exactly the same. "So, when I think about floppy disks, what
I really think about are the 5 ¼ inch floppies. When I had the 3 ½
inch floppies, I already had a hard disk and so floppies sort of played a different role
in my computing habits. But when I was using the 5 ¼ jobs, that was really
the only storage media that I had." So let’s have a look at how these work. First of all,
on the outside you have these "relief notches". The purpose of this is to minimize any bending
of the disk right around the read area. This is the "index hole", which was monitored by
a sensor so that the drive would know exactly where the disk was rotation wise, but not
all disk drives made use of this hole. This is the "write protect notch". A sensor monitored
this notch and if it was found to be open, then the drive knew it was okay to write to
it. If you wanted to protect your data, you could put a sticker or piece of tape over
the notch so the drive would not allow anything to be written or altered on the disk. And
since it was not a good idea to leave this area exposed, a "paper sleeve" was used for
each disk to keep them protected. Let’s take a look inside and see how things work.
The magnetic material is very similar to the material inside of a cassette tape or VHS
video cassette. It just happens to be round and a bit stiffer. So this part of the disk
was used for actual data storage. Now you'll never be able to actually see the data on
the disk, but if you could, here's how it would look. Keep in mind that the typical disk had
40 tracks starting at the outer edge for track 1 and all the way to the inner edge for track
40. Inside of the disk drive, a "stepper motor" is used to move the read head back and forth
to access these different tracks. Now some drives had sensors to help it figure out
where the read head was, but some drives did not. So if you ever noticed when you turn on an
Apple II computer, the disk drives always make this knocking sound. So, what's actually
happening here is that the drive is first powered on, since it has no sensor it has
absolutely no idea where the head is. So, the way to get around that is, they just send
the command to back the head back to track 1 and they send that command 40 times, so
it's guaranteed to be back at track 1. Once the read head gets to track 1 it can't go
any further so every subsequent attempt makes a knocking sound. It does work, however, and
does make sure the head always starts out on track 1. Commodore drives are known to
make the same sound when encountering a read error or when formatting a disk.Now let's
take a little bit closer look at how the data is actually stored on the disk. In order to
help figure out where files are stored on the disk, the computer will divide it up into
sectors. These sectors are defined entirely by software and thus can be very different
from one computer to the next. This is an 8-sector format, typical of the IBM PC. So
if you asked for track 16, sector one you would be reading from this area here. And
if you could see the actual bits of data, they would look kind of like this. Each dot
representing a 1 and the blank area representing a zero. Now, one thing you might notice is
that a sector on track 40 is much smaller than a sector on track 1. And yet, they store
the same amount of data in this format. However, other manufacturers handled this differently.
Commodore, for example, used 21 sectors on the outer tracks, then 19 sectors, then 18,
and then 17 for the inner most tracks. As you can see, this made the sectors similar
in size and made more efficient use of the disk space. Also Commodore had some other
oddities such as using track 18 exclusively for the directory. Also, Commodore
disk formats did not use the last 5 tracks on the disk, due to some quality problems
with early drives. However, it was possible to use all of the tracks with a custom format.
Perhaps now it is a little bit more obvious why computers during the 1980's of different
manufacturers could not read each others' formats despite being the same physical media.
So, an Apple, for example, could not read a disk formatted in a Commodore. Some systems,
such as IBM typically used double-sided disks. Now what that means is they used two read
heads, one on top, and one on bottom. So they could store twice as much data on a single
disk, well sort of. You see, on Commodore and Apple drives, you could turn the disk
upside down to use the back side of the disk. There's only one problem. See how the write-protect
notch lines up over here. Well, when you flip the disk around, the drive will now think
that the disk is write-protected and won't let you write anything here. The solution
is to make another hole. Now they actually sold products specifically designed to do
this. But I would usually just take another disk and use a razor knife to cut a slot
out. Now you had a write-protect notch for both sides, so you could use the full capacity
of the disk. So let's talk about the actual drive mechanisms themselves. Now, this is
a typical full height drive that would have been used by an IBM PC or an Apple or even
a Commodore back when they were making the PET. A few years later most everyone had switched
to half-height mechanisms. Now check this out. See how much larger a Commodore disk
drive is compared to an Apple disk drive? Why is that? So, Commodore and Atari took
a very different approach to their disk drive controllers. Let’s take a peek inside this
Commodore 1541. Look at that huge circuit board. Wait, what is that? A 6502 CPU, the
same one used in the computers themselves. And here we have two I/O controllers, exactly
the same ones used in the computers, and 8 kilobytes of ROM, and 2 Kilobytes of RAM.
So, it's very much its own self-contained computer. Let me demonstrate this. This is
a neat little program that makes your disk drive play music. It accomplishes this by
using the stepper mode for the head and vibrating it back and forth. But the more interesting
part is that you can now unplug the drive from the computer and it will continue to
do its thing all by itself, because the program is executing internally. [FLOPPY DRIVE MUSIC, WHAT A BLESSING] Now, why did Commodore
put a whole computer inside of their disk drives? Well, my guess is that the probably
did it to reduce cost. Because it was no longer neccessary to put a drive controller inside
the computer. And many of the computer users were happy not even owning a disk drive and
just using a tape drive instead. Basically, with an Atari or Commodore, the computer doesn't
even really know where the information is coming from. It just sends a request out the
serial port and says "I'm looking for file XYZ." The drive will check the disk and see
if it can find it. Once it does, it sends the file back to the computer. An Apple does
something very different. It has to send specific commands to the disk drive telling it to move
the head, spin the disk, and all of the decoding of the tracks and sectors are handled by the
computer's CPU. Now you might think that Commodore drives should be much faster, than say an
Apple or IBM drive because they had their own processor on board. Well, it didn't work
out that way, and in order to understand why you have to go all of the way back to the
Commodore PET. The PET disk drives were HUGE, but they were decently fast because they used
the IEEE-488 parallel interface. It was a 24-pin connector and had 8 pins for parallel
data transmission. Well, when Commodore came out with the VIC-20 a few years later, they
decided to move to a serial interface where data was transmitted one bit at a time. That
wasn't necessarily a problem, since they were going to use a hardware shift register, which
would take care of this at the hardware level. However, the hardware was faulty and it was
too close to the time of release, so they just did away with the shift register and
instead just programmed the CPU to address the data line directly, and it was
pretty darn slow. And they didn't even use the most efficient routine possible. But,
that’s the kind of thing that happens when you push design changes into a product at
the last minute before it launches. Since the VIC-20 only had 5K of RAM, it really didn't
matter that much. But the C64 came out soon after and had a lot more RAM. But they wanted
to maintain backwards compatibility with the disk drives for the VIC-20 so it ended up
being VERY slow. "I remember my first impression of plugging it in and loading up a couple
of disk games, I was very very underwhelmed by the actual speed of this thing. I mean,
this thing was as slow and in some cases even slower than the C2N datasette. And how could
this be? I had no idea that a disk drive would actually be slower than a turbo load on tape."
Now, interestingly enough, people eventually figured out how to make some more efficient,
and thus faster software routines for communicating with the disk drive. So cartridges such
as this EPYX FastLoad came to market. All this cartridge does is replace some of the
kernel's disk drive routines. "This is the EPYX FastLoad cartridge. And this is something
that I would recommend to anyone that wants to use a disk drive on a Commodore 64 with
the original disks. This thing will actually speed up loading times, 4 or 5 times. And
this is very compatible; in fact it works with every single disk I've thrown at my 1541."
Commodore later sort of remedied this with the Commodore 128 and 1571 disk drive. The
combination of these two have very fast disk access, but the problem is it is only fast
when operating in native Commodore 128 mode. But since most games were required to run
in C64 emulation mode, the drive was just as slow thus still requiring a fast-load cartridge.
Now eventually we moved forward to the 3.5 inch floppy drives, and sometimes they were
mistakenly called hard disks by people that really didn't know anything about computers.
Some of the first computers to use these were the Amiga, the Macintosh, and Atari ST. Now, these
guys were with us from the late 80's all the way into the 2000's and apparently will even
be used in the future to store robots' brains. "I downloaded his brain. Everything that is
Bender is right here: His mind, his memories." It's basically the same technology just in
a smaller, more durable casing, with a write protect tab that can be moved on or off so
you don't have to use a piece of tape. So many of you may have heard that the US military
still uses old floppy disks in some of their specialized computers, like for controlling
nuclear missiles and things like that. Well, is that a problem? Not necessarily, you see
those drives and disks were actually extremely reliable back in the 70's and 80's. Of course,
they also used to be expensive. A box of 10 floppy disks could actually set you back.
In the 90's they started making them cheaper and cheaper and the reliability suffered.
And by the 2000's when the last batches were being produced, they were total junk. The
last few boxes of disks that I've bought, probably around 2005, probably some of the last ones
you'd find in a computer store, they were actually Sony brand, a brand that you might
think would be of high quality. And they were total junk. In fact, 3 or 4 disks out of each
box of 10 didn't work right. "One of the things I think that people don't realize now is just
how much floppy disks actually cost back then. You know, you can go now to the store and
you can buy like a spindle of 50 CDs or DVDs for like $10. Which, I know they're also on
their way out. But, you know, back when I was a kid and I was using computers like in the
late 80's and the late 90's, you could easily drop $20 on, like a 10-pack of floppy disks. And really
by that time, the price had already come down, before that they were even higher. And it
was expensive enough that I actually had to ask for a box of disks for Christmas." I think
because floppy drives and the disks had become so unreliable towards the end of the era,
I think a lot of people remember them that way, even though they were actually pretty
darn reliable back in their heyday. In fact, I have plenty of disks that are like, over 35 years
old and they still work just fine. "I've got some floppy disks that have survived since
the late 1979 from Heathkit systems and they're still fine. On the other hand, I've got floppies
from 1999 and they didn't last until like 2003 and they were done. Toast. And I lost
a bunch of cool stuff. But, that's how it goes. That's kind of a thing that's unfair
to floppy disks. I think if you take care of them really well, at least from the ones
I've got in my collection, they tend to last for a really long time." "As a retro computer
collector in 2016, let me just tell you that dealing with these aging floppy disks is a
huge pain in the butt. However, there are solutions like floppy drive emulators now
that make working with these machines a lot easier. But I have to say there is something
comforting, and nostalgic about hearing. [FLOPPY DRIVE CLICKS] That sound." And if you want to really appreciate
floppies, just compare them to tape drives, or even worse, to these old punch-tape reels
that were incredibly noisy. Of course, floppy disks were eventually replaced by optical
media such as CD-ROM, which is a tale for another episode some other time. But one thing
I can say for sure is that the track/sector concept we talked about earlier lives on today
in magnetic hard drives only the data is so much more densely packed. Now, I suspect in
another 5 to 10 years, everything is going to be solid state and think moving disks,
like hard disks and stuff like that are going to be obsolete forever. Edited and improved by: OPGuyK
