Have you ever seen an 8″ floppy disk?
When one of my friends came up to Clemson this summer, he brought a belated birthday gift. At first, I thought it was some sort of notebook. When I realized what it was, I nearly died laughing. He said his dad found it in storage, and gave it to him. The friend knew that I would be the only one to appreciate something like this, and what would be a better gift for me two weeks late?
That's huge!
It was an eight inch "High Capacity Flexible Disk Cartridge". The disk holds a monstrous 10 megabytes. After a little research, I've come to the conclusion that the predecessor to the Iomega Zip Disks. It was part of the Bernoulli line of removable media produced by Iomega.
The contents of the disk are as follows:
- DBASE III
- Profitshare
- Lotus
- Norton Utilities
Unfortunately, I can't find any equipment on campus to read the data. Go figure.
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In the 1970s I managed an area of a large NYC bank that had a minicomputer that used 8" floppies. It was cutting edge back then. We used the system to track revolving commercial credit accounts.
I temped at a family run laundry/dry-cleaning business that had a few hotel contracts in Amsterdam in 1988. To my horror they had 8" floppies. I flipped out, floppies had to be 5" at most.
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You can envy me. I worked on computer built from discrete transistors with magnetic drum! I had course to use teletype to be able to write punch tape. I loaded BASIC interpret from punch tape to magnetic core memory (made of toroids) into 3rd generation computer made from TTL ICs. (No VLSI.) Our class was last, that learned programming with FORTRAN. I´ve worked with 8" floppy disc, running Intel 8080 assembler.
I have an original 8" floppy disk of Microsoft FORTRAN-80 Release 3.44 for CP/M 80 along with the original Microsoft 3-ring binder manual (1981). You can check out photos of it on my site: http://www.d2ca.org/computer-artifacts-software.html. The manual and floppy label have one of Microsoft's oldest logo styles on it, perhaps even their first logo style!
I also recently found 2 different brands of blank 8" media still in their boxes (7 out of 10 disks in one box, 11 in a second 10-count box ... must have been left over from another box...) -- at a yard sale! Some have "CLASSIFIED" data backed up on them. The brands are Graphic Arts and Shugart Associates. These will be featured on my site as well.
I've seen some Iomega dual-8" drives for sale, but at $400 for the lowest price one and no guarantee of compatibility with any of my legacy systems I will keep looking.
Cool disk!
Dan Rose
Dan's 20th Century Abandonware
http://www.d2ca.org/
hey I'm doing my research on that! Go Figure!
Is it okay if you can email me for some facts on it PLzzz!!