• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

A Unique Floppy Disk

olePigeon

Well-known member
I was going through a literal box of floppies from fellow user @cmstuber.  Lots of cool disks in there that I've backed up and added to my collection.  However, I found a rather unique floppy disk.  It's not of standard construction compared to the original Sony disks that everyone copied.

The write protect slider the most obvious stand out part, but what I don't think is showing on the pictures is that the floppy disk itself is textured to look like stone.

Given that the copyright is 1984, I'm assuming a single-sided disk.

Unfortunately the disk protect slider doesn't slide and I haven't been able to back up the disk.  Since it's a unique slider, I can't replace it with a different one. :(

I'm tempted to perform some surgery on the disk anyway.

 

olePigeon

Well-known member
I forgot to mention that the unique write-protect tab ROTATES.  It doesn't slide.  It's really nifty.

 

NJRoadfan

Well-known member
Early 3.5" disks were...... different. I have a few early HP disks I got with a Mac 512k many years ago. The shutter doesn't auto-return, you have to pinch the disk.

https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/archv013.cgi?read=38419

Sony's were different as well. I think the shutter on them was completely manual.

https://www.macgeek.org/museum/sony400kdrive/

 

frankrodiii

Member
I like the early days of these discs. When the standard was not really defined and several options were available. Imagine for example if Apple decided to use the Amstrad CF2, 3 inch discs for their Macintosh instead. :D  

 

Crutch

Well-known member
I remember seeing floppies like that MacType disk in the earliest days, probably in 1984.  As I recall my original copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and maybe also ChipWits came on floppies with that write protect slider.  It’s not quite unique, but I don’t recall seeing any of those after those very first software purchases.  That style must have phased out within a year or two.

 

Crutch

Well-known member
Oh yeah, here we go, just found this in my boxed Zork I:

image.jpg

image.jpg

 
Last edited by a moderator:

olePigeon

Well-known member
@Crutch  Oooo!  Cool!  Does your shutter have a spring?  Or is it stiff and you have to manually move it?

Incidentally, I'd LOVE to get a box of these types of floppies.  I just think they're so cool.  I suspect they were only commercially available.  I might email the guy over at FloppyDisk.com.  If anyone had some, he would.

 

Crutch

Well-known member
By the way, thanks for mentioning this.  I hadn’t thought about these oddball floppies in years, and it is kind of an interesting thing!

I just checked, mine has a normal spring.  It also doesn’t have the texturing on the floppy itself you mentioned, though I swear I remember that from the ‘80s too.  Can you get a photo showing that?  I don’t remember these floppies not having springs though, is it possible yours had a spring that just broke or something?

By the way, I (for some reason) have two original floppies in my boxed copy of Zork I.  Only one of them is of this particular type, again supporting the idea that these were an early floppy breed that was discontinued sometime during Infocom’s manufacturing run of Zork I (which is highly plausible, as that game was on the shelves for several years ... interactive fiction aged quite well, until one day it didn’t).

 

olePigeon

Well-known member
@Crutch If you open the last picture and zoom in, you can really see the texture.  The front of the floppy is not as pronounced.  It could just be that it kinda looks like stone, but really they're just unpollished molds.

Good to know about the shutter.  Mine is really stiff and doesn't move, so I suspect it's broken.

I'm just not quite sure how to go about to fix it.  I only have the one disk, and the shutter is unique amongst my many floppies.

 
Last edited by a moderator:

Solvalou

Well-known member
I had a set of disks that the shutter was spring loaded both ways (like a normal diskette). But weirdly, you could click it all the way to one side and it would 'lock' in that position until you pinch it and doing that would ping back to it's closed position.

 
Top