15 million floppies

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Fri May 23, 2014 12:30 pm

I just sent this to my son and to some friends, and decided that it ought to be posted here, too:

I just got three new My Passport FireWire external hard drives. 2 TB each. Then it occurred to me... My first Mac in 1984 used a single 400K floppy disk for the OS, App, and Files.

So take a look. On the left, 6 TB. And on the right, 400K. The stack on the left is the equivalent of 15,000,000 of those blue things on the right. Let me repeat: 15,000,000. How can I wrap my mind around that?

These floppies are ⅛ inch thick. Stack 15 million of them, and they'd tower 29.59 miles high. That's many times higher than jets fly.

Fifteen million:

A Megabyte = 1000 K
A Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes (1000 x 1000K)
A Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes (1000 x 1000 x 1000K) So...
A TB = 1 Billion KB. That’s 2.5 million 400K floppies. Here are 6 TB, times 2.5 million... that’s 15 million of these little dudes.
- 15,000,000 x .125” = 1,875,000 inches
  ÷ 12” per foot,
  ÷ 5280 ft per mile,
  = 29.5928 miles of 400K floppies.

And that's just three 2TB My Passport drives!

I've already got 10 drives of 1TB or greater, internal SATA and external Firewire, most of which are 2TB, along with four 3TB and one 4TB thrown in. I never really thought about just how awesome are those kinds of numbers. So, when these new drives came in, there was a 400K floppy sitting nearby. Suddenly it dawned on me. I got out the calipers and measured the thickness, did the math, and voila... I finally wrapped my mind around it.

If you laid that many floppies down, end to end, you'd look pretty silly and probably get sore from bending over. But they'd stretch 875.94969696969697 miles. I seriously doubt they even MADE that many 400K floppies. The 3.5" floppy disks encased in a plastic shell were considered new and heralded as products of miniaturization when released in early 1984. By year's end they were already pushing the 800K floppy, soon followed by the 1.4MB floppy, all in the same sized shell. My first hard drive was 10MB, and I thought it was limitless. Ah, the age before digital movie libraries.

I had to do the math several times before I believed I was doing it correctly. You're welcome to check it for me, but you'll find the same conclusions I did. Hard drives that store terabytes of information are frickin' huge!

Hugh Mongoose Lee huge. It's a high-tech world out there.

Shooshie

Michael Canavan · Post by **Michael Canavan** » Fri May 23, 2014 1:51 pm

Technology is pretty amazing.

To be fair though, the same Word document from then compared to the exact same document today takes way more megabytes to produce. The OS was 512K or less back then, and now it's gigabytes. The Mac+ and Atarti's from back then had rock solid MIDI; jitter, and MIDI time stamping came about because the round trip in modern computers was definitely affected by the complexity.

Whenever I think I need that new plug in I remember that my band did pretty impressive things with Performer, a Mirage and a Mac+

FMiguelez · Post by **FMiguelez** » Fri May 23, 2014 3:12 pm

Wow.

That's amazing!

I still remember thinking I had gone overboard and exaggerated when I bought my first Jazz drive in college! Before that was the ZIP drive, and it also felt huuuuge (I don't even remember how much they could hold).

Floppies (the 1.5 MB kind) served me quite well during those college days too! I remember I could store lots and lots of Performer and Finale files in there.
Today, my empty DP template is around 25 MBs, so I would need around 17 of those floppies just to store my current empty session, jajajaja!

Actually, I still have them. And I've often wondered if they are still readable, and if I should invest in some kind of USB Floppy-drive reader (or a Jazz reader) to see if I can rescue my college projects.

Do you think they're still readable after 12-15 years?

cuttime · Post by **cuttime** » Fri May 23, 2014 3:56 pm

FMiguelez wrote:
Do you think they're still readable after 12-15 years?

I still have an Atari ST that works, and I can assure you that the floppies do to. I would have gotten rid of the beast, but some retro-gamers started offering me pretty decent cash for it. I guess I want to see how far it will go on the antiques market.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Fri May 23, 2014 5:14 pm

In time it's going to take some kind of archival reader. The magnetic media fades over time. But I've got audio tapes that sound nearly as good now as they did over 40 years ago, so these floppies ought to be readable for a long time to come.

I'm sure that when the day comes that the fading becomes noticeable, someone will develop an archival reader that picks up very faint signals and parses the data to make sensible bytes. People are going to want to read old floppies.

Shooshie

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Fri May 23, 2014 5:47 pm

At least three of my drives are devoted to my iTunes library, and probably three more to its backup. I've got 12 years of TV shows, Movies, and other videos, not to mention thousands of audio files. It's mainly the movies and TV shows that fill up all that space. Yeah, I could use the cloud, but some time in the next decade I'll be retiring to my ranch where broadband is limited to whatever you can get out of the sky, and that's not very fast even today. Just drive out about 15 miles from the nearest town, and you've entered the technological void. AT&T and other companies don't seem to care about developing that, so they've left it to small vulture companies that charge rates 4x higher than city rates for internet connections that are a fraction of the speed of broadband. Some of them are still back at 750 kilobits per second. Fast compared to a 2400 baud modem, but molasses compared with our broadband now.

So, I'm making sure that whatever I take out there is self-contained. I won't be downloading terabytes of movies once I'm out there. Forum posts, yes. The occasional audio project, yes. But unless something changes, I'll be isolated from the technological spiral. It's probably many years away, but I'm just planning ahead.

Shooshie

twistedtom · Post by **twistedtom** » Sat May 24, 2014 4:37 am

So funny, my first computer an Atari had a 10mb hd. I have 7.5TB internal and 3 external right now on my tower. And I also back some stuff up to Blu-ray.
Years back when HD's started to hold a little more data a friend bragged about his one GB HD that cost close to $1k and that was in yesterday's money. As a kid I bought some old computer modules to play with that were vacuums tubes. We once had a computer controlled machine at work that had a magnetic donut core memory. At one time magnetic core was $1k per K of memory, and that was in yesteryear dollars.

I expect with 3d SSD core technology we will see larger SSDs at a lower cost and more durable as well.

twistedtom · Post by **twistedtom** » Sat May 24, 2014 4:41 am

Come to think of it your phone is way smarter than you old computer.

bayswater · Post by **bayswater** » Sat May 24, 2014 6:40 am

Same thing with RAM. I had the use of the first PC release. It came with 64K, and I spent $800 upgrading it to 384K. At that price, a 16G upgrade would have cost $200 million, before inflation.

BobK · Post by **BobK** » Sat May 24, 2014 8:44 am

Mind sufficiently blown.

Carry on.

crduval · Post by **crduval** » Sat May 24, 2014 9:37 am

I remember working on a product that had a 5mb drive that weighed about 30 pounds and had platters with roughly a 20" diameter. We then upgraded it to a whopping 35mb drive that was only about 10 pounds and was the size of a milk crate. We thought that was pretty amazing at the time!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Nigel Keay · Post by **Nigel Keay** » Sat May 24, 2014 1:51 pm

Just before seeing this topic I'd dug out my old Professional Composer Master Disk and popped it in the 3.5" drive of an old G3 (Power PC) with OS 9.0.4 that I still have, but it wasn't recognizable. I'm trying to convert some files for someone but think I need a much older machine - Mosaic had been around at least ten years when I bought the G3. Could be a mission to find a working Mac older than that.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Sat May 24, 2014 1:58 pm

twistedtom wrote:Years back when HD's started to hold a little more data a friend bragged about his one GB HD that cost close to $1k and that was in yesterday's money.

It took me a year or two to get one of those. I had to wait until the prices came down a bit, but I was in awe of a Gigabyte drive, too. It seemed impossible. I worried that it would be unstable, and that in a year or two the data would all get lost on that big datafield. But the drives really have gotten MORE reliable, not less.

Back in the day, I thought the way of the future would be in removable cartridge drives. I collected a shelf full of Syquest cartridges -- the big 8" 40MB kind, and I was making progress on a shelf of the little EZ135 cartridge drives, which were a quarter the size, physically, but held over 3 times as much as their big 8" cousins. Those were neat drives, and I miss them, but they were SCSI, and when the Mac left behind SCSI, those became orphans. I copied them all to larger hard drives and never looked back.

BKK-OZ · Post by **BKK-OZ** » Sat May 24, 2014 4:25 pm

These kinds of reminiscences always end up reminding me of this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo&feature=kp

crduval · Post by **crduval** » Sat May 24, 2014 5:07 pm

BKK-OZ wrote:These kinds of reminiscences always end up reminding me of this: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo&feature=kp

Ha ha! Perfect!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

MOTUnation.com