Floppy discs and floppy drives
[the publish date is retroactively published]
There are problems with buying original hardware; one is you WILL overspend, and the other is you start getting nostalgic for things you’ve never had. Also, I kept drooling over floppy drives on eBay. Things came to a head in October; I bought a 1541-ii. The VERY drive I drooled over! It was at the right price and working! Then I realised I needed something else, or more to the point, I need to find A LOT of something else…
… Floppy Disks! One slight snag I found, and that was 5.25′ floppy disks are no longer being made (WHO KNEW!), so I was going to have to source these, I have. I bought ten from Ami64, and I found an unopened pack of 10 on eBay, went through those in a week, and I am (at the time of writing) waiting for another two packs of 10 unopened disks. Hopefully (fingers and toes crossed), this batch will last longer than the last ones!
You see, I was copying a ‘few’ disks from my SD2IEC to my newly acquired 1451; this was mainly thanks to Jan Beta’s YouTube tutorial using DraCopy
You can either copy single PRG files or an entire disk, the latter being SLOW! No fast loader is going to help you here, it’s a 10-minute wait, whether you like it or not! So, I have a load of disks, and nowhere to put them, so I went online and found an STL file (which, for some reason, I haven’t got and can’t find…DOH!) of one and printed it. I have graffitied it like a 14-year-old would, so my setup looks like something out of a rich kid’s bedroom!
I thought, stupidly, this was going to hold enough. NOPE. Now, although I have a 3d printer, I didn’t want to keep printing these, as I do with my game tapes (I got into computers because of the C64, and now my latest geek gadget is making stuff for my C64, I just love how it has come right around!) so off to eBay I went and found this neat little box!
With a period correct box and a bunch of floppy disks, it does make you see how far we have come, as this box is a disk drive but a manual one! I have been trying out Mini Office 2 and GEOS, but that’s going to be a future post.