back to article It's round and wobbles, but madam, it's a mouse pad, not a floppy disk

Welcome to festive On-Call, in which we take our regular Friday tales of jobs gone wrong and run lots more of them because there's sod-all news to write in the week before Christmas. And also because we have lots of lovely submissions that deserve a run. Today: tales of floppy disks. Let's start with “Steve”, who once took a …

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  1. Brian Miller

    It disappeared...

    A place where I worked had PCs with two 5-1/4" disk drives. Every once in a while, I would get a call that a user had inserted a floppy disk in the drive, but it couldn't be read. In fact, the floppy disk had vanished.

    Yep, right between the two floppy drives. Again, and again...

    1. JimboSmith Silver badge

      Re: It disappeared...

      Had a situation where a friend of the family called me one September evening in a bit of a panic as her "floppy disc" wasn't working in her machine. The panic came because she needed to get access to something on there urgently (she made out it was life or death serious). So I went round and discovered that she had installed the second battery (shouldn't have shown her how) on her laptop at the expense of the floppy drive. She was trying to use the now unconnected drive and said that the lights don't come on or make any noise. After I explained that she needed to remove the second battery and refit the floppy drive she perked up a bit. I asked what was so important that I had now wasted part of my evening going round to her and she said "Oh my Christmas card list is on there".

      1. Triggerfish

        Re: It disappeared...

        Had my neighbours come round, big panic his GF computer has crashed with her dissertation on it, (no back ups were not seen as important for the culmination of three years work), help help big pamic.

        So spend several hours ffing around and trying to get it back up, find the relevant word doc and recover it, only thing I manage to get back is the cover sheet of the dissertation and thats it.

        Apologise to them saying sorry this is all I can get. They're really chuffed, because that was all she had actually written.

        1. DJV Silver badge

          Re: It disappeared...

          That reminds me of a story I heard when working with Burroughs/Unisys equipment back in the late 1980s. A customer who had bought a second-hand Burroughs/Unisys B28 system. These came as modular pieces of kit that were clipped together - common modules were CPU, hard disk only and combined hard/floppy. Customer had phoned support because she couldn't get the 5.25" floppy to read after inserting it. Apparently, it was only when the support person asked about whether she'd flipped the floppy drive door shut that it turned out that she couldn't find anything resembling the door catch. It finally dawned on support that she'd been sold a CPU module plus a hard drive only module (no floppy module at all) and had just been slipping the floppy disk in between the CPU and hard drive modules.

          There's a pic here of a B28 system (this one DOES include a combined hard/floppy module): https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/4wmksf/my_burroughs_b28_aka_convergent_technologies_ngen/

    2. Swarthy

      Re: It disappeared...

      My favorite "floppy" story is when I was working at the coal face, and a customer called in, needing help installing the printer. They had bought a printer that came with a driver CD. When the inserted the CD into the drive and closed the door, they heard a loud >CRACK< - that's when they called support.

  2. wsm

    But the disk is square and the hole is round!!!

    Nearly two hours on a support call to remove and replace a sound card driver. Why? Because, after almost one hour and 45 minutes we were ready to put the disk into the drive and load the new driver.

    I already knew we were speaking in different vocabularies, but when she told me that the disk was square and the hole for the drive was round, I had to mute the phone for a minute or two while she sobbed.

    I finally worked up the courage to ask her if she had one of the round disks. She did! We got the disk in, found the driver, actually installed it and the system rebooted with sound.

    She immediately hung up without another word.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: But the disk is square and the hole is round!!!

      I worked for a company where the main software that was used in one area was DOS based and always had been. This was a specialised program and had become vital over the years despite the odd bug or two staying resident even though there were new versions released. You had to remember to make back up discs of your database each week and this had to be done on a floppy disc. These were hardy though and could be sent off site to our disaster recovery site. The company that wrote it had made a fortune out of that but now there were competitors and they were writing stuff that worked (and worked better) on Windows 95 & XP. So the company had to innovate and brought out a windows version which we were the guinea pigs for. I was the Chief Guinea Pig and was going to be the primary tester of it - Oh joy!

      So I gave a report to my boss at the end of the first day as did a programmer who was also evaluating it. I pointed out that all they had done was port the DOS software version to a windows environment. They hadn't made any changes and the only thing new was the GUI which was now all flashy and shiny. All the things that were bugbears in the DOS version existed in the windows version and some new ones appeared. Sadly they had ported over the back up method too and you could still only back up to the A drive i.e. a floppy. No other options existed not CDR, nor to a server, or an external floppy drive. I pointed out that we had just taken the decision to take out floppy drives once the new software was green lit. We'd also put orders in for new machines with no floppy drives and we'd have to change these. The programmer had an even more damning assessment of the back end and database structure. When we asked about the back up options being severely limited and basically crap the UK office said "What other options are there for backing up? They're not very big back up files and they fit a floppy perfectly"

      We did continue the testing until one day about 3 months in there was a massive failure and restoring any of our back ups had no effect. It took them a few days to find the cause but by that point we were already talking to their competitors.

  3. Tim99 Silver badge
    Windows

    Not Snopes

    I looked after the IT needs of 450 scientists, admin and clerical staff in the 1980s.

    I have seen an 8" floppy cut with scissors because it would not fit in the 5.25" drive; a 3.5" disk hammered into a 5.25'' drive; a 5.25" disk folded to try and fit it into a 3.5" drive; a letter with an enclosed copy of a backup disk, which we had requested from a remote site (yes it was a photocopy); and, my personal favourite, a 5.25" disk that was the only electronic copy of a department's year-end financial data, stapled (twice) to the covering letter, explaining why they were late submitting it.

    Those are some of the reasons why I now look like this >>============>

    1. Ol'Peculier

      Re: Not Snopes

      I've also had a photocopy of a 5 1/2" disk sent to me, as well as (from the same office) another disk with the note stapled to it, so you aren't the only one thinking it deserves to be on Snopes.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: Not Snopes

        Part of me admires those users' resourcefulness and give-it-a-go attitude. It's probably the same part of me that found satisfaction in fixing a CRT monitor by smacking it smartly on the side.

        The rest of me shudders at the idea they might just be the same folk for which the following was printed on a packet of cough lozenges: "For oral administration only".

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        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Not Snopes

          " It's probably the same part of me that found satisfaction in fixing a CRT monitor by smacking it smartly on the side."

          Early video terminals had an acoustic delay line. Bang the case and the display was corrupted. Popularly people said the letters all fell to the bottom of the screen.

          The English Electric KDF9 was a second generation mainframe with a modular rack for the circuit boards and module boxes. One of these modules was part of the program stack nesting store. It was a work of art in tiny ferrite beads threaded onto a matrix of coloured wires - which you could see through the perspex sides. One day one was plugged into the wrong section of the rack. All the wires instantly fused - and the ferrite beads fell to the bottom of the module. A literal case of "dropped bits".

    2. Andrew Moore

      Re: Not Snopes

      Stapling was a regular occurance, if you were lucky, the staple would be in the top left corner and the disk would be untouched. Thankfully, the introduction of the 3" nearly wiped out this practice- I say nearly because we did have one committed site that managed to get a staple partially into one.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: Not Snopes

        >Stapling was a regular occurrence, if you were lucky, the staple would be in the top left corner and the disk would be untouched.

        You could have got ahead of the situation by hole-punching the top left corner of every floppy, and doling out treasury tags!

        Or just dole out A4 envelopes.

        Staples are evil - just ask the person who has to the fix the photocopier!

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Not Snopes

          "Staples are evil - just ask the person who has to the fix the photocopier!"

          Especially the ones in the (expensive!) cartridges where, when they run out, the entire very expensive multifunction photocopier stops functioning, even though the output isn't set to be stapled anyway.

        2. G7mzh

          Re: Not Snopes

          > Staples are evil - just ask the person who has to the fix the photocopier!

          I had a customer who cost himself a lot of money after buying a new laser printer. After a few days, he complained all the prints had nasty black marks on. We investigated, and discovered he's put some pages through with staples in. Now required, new drum and rollers.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    If I could have a dollar for every time…

    … I've seen a CD-ROM stuffed into a 5¼" floppy drive!

    The real fun bit is explaining that that's not where it goes when the machine in question uses a single-speed caddy-loading drive.

    1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

      Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

      Hah, it happened to me too :) Had to use a long-nosed plier to get it out :)

      1. VinceH

        Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

        Around 1990ish, I had to extract a few[1] camera filters from my computer's 3.5" drive. I kept it on a desk in the downstairs back room, and my camera gear was under the desk. The actual floppy discs were locked in a holder, and I came home from work to discover that a sibbling's younglings had tried to use the computer - and presumably tried the filters because it was about the right size, and they couldn't get at the actual discs.

        [1] These were very thin bits of plastic that sat in front of the lens in a holder, rather than screw on ones.

    2. GruntyMcPugh Silver badge

      Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

      Many years ago I worked for a University, and the library bought some copies of the Doomsday Book on CD. First day they were made available to the users someone crammed one of the CDs into a 5.25" drive bay. I wouldn't mind but we'd seen that coming and put little Dymo labels on all the CD drives.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

        http://arbitrary.name/blog/all/mac3.html

        This fella shows the things he has removed from the CD slot from his Mac Mini, courtesy of his young children. His other blog entries show him to be a very bright man indeed, as I'm sure his children are. I mean, primary schools have toys where the child is expected to place blocks through slots, and putting foreign objects into CD slots seems to be a continuation of that game.

        In previous decades, VHS machines suffered similar fates - I think you could even buy aftermarket panels to child-proof the cassette door. Small toys not too bad, biscuits and jam less so.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

          Not IT, but I remember sitting in my car wondering where my small pile of change for car parks had gone; took me a while to think of the cassette player.

          1. VinceH
            Facepalm

            Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

            Well, if we're talking cars, then I've done a massive facepalm myself.

            This was back when I used to off-road for fun; I had two cars - one for that, and one for normal getting around. The 4x4 was a diesel, while the road car had a petrol engine. And as soon as I make that distinction you can probably guess: filled one up with the wrong fuel.

            You'd guess right - but that's not the real facepalm.

            You might also reasonably guess that I put petrol in the diesel engine. And you'd be guessing wrong with that part - I put diesel in the petrol engine.

            As any driver should know, the nozzle on the diesel pump is too big to go into a petrol filler.

            The real facepalm, then, is that when I was in that situation I didn't think: Problem - this nozzle is too big. Reason? It's diesel, and this is my petrol car.

            Instead, I thought: Problem - this nozzle is too big. How do I get the fuel into my car?

            And I proceeded to solve that problem, and filled the petrol car's tank from nearly empty to full.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

              "Problem - this nozzle is too big. How do I get the fuel into my car?"

              Thus proving the old adage: "Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool"

              1. Terry 6 Silver badge

                Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

                No what this typifies is a very common issue for people who are problem solvers by nature or training. Sometimes we fail to identify the initial problem state correctly, especially if it's while we're in off-duty mode (we're only human) or not in our own field of expertise. But then we automatically follow our problem solving strategies to the bitter end. The incorrect starting point leads inexorably to an incorrect solution.

              2. VinceH

                Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

                'Thus proving the old adage: "Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool"'

                Guilty as charged. 8)

                (But I prefer Terry 6's explanation!)

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

          http://arbitrary.name/blog/all/mac3.html

          This fella shows the things he has removed from the CD slot from his Mac Mini, courtesy of his young children. His other blog entries show him to be a very bright man indeed, as I'm sure his children are.

          Worst I read about was a child with a chocolate in the shape of a 3½" floppy. Errm, yeah. Not pretty.

        3. G7mzh

          Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

          I used to do TV and VCR repairs, and had a regular customer whose children would post toys, sandwiches and other artifacts into the VCR. (It didn't seem to have occurred to her to put it on a higher shelf).

          That machine finally ceased to be viable (and ceased to be a source of income) when the dear child decided that the machine needed a drink and poured haf a tin of cola down it.

    3. Andy Taylor

      Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

      Back in the mists of time, I used to do support for a company that sold reference databases on CD-ROM. Caddy-loading drives were common at the time and one of our suppliers was selling a cheap caddy which was designed to clip together rather than hinge open. These caddies worked fine if they were assembled correctly, but it was possible to put them together in such a way that the small metal disc that held the CD onto the drive spindle by means of a small magnet could detach itself from the caddy, ending up aforementioned magnet. The only solution was to disassemble the drive and remove the metal disc.

      The 2009-2011 iMacs have an SD card slot on the right hand side, just under the DVD drive slot.

      When working at the fruit store, we would regularly get customers at the bar who had pushed their SD card into the DVD slot and lost it inside their machine. We quickly worked out the best method to get the card out again was to use a combination of gravity and agitation (i.e. hold the machine sideways and shake it until the card dropped out).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If I could have a dollar for every time…

        " (i.e. hold the machine sideways and shake it until the card dropped out)."

        Ah - the "Etch-a-sketch" method.

        http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-04-03

  5. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    Ah, good old 5.25" floppies, long live the 5.25" floppies.

    Interestingly I found that the 5.25" floppies were more reliable than their 3.5" brethren, I used to get a lot of read/write errors with 3.5" stiffies.

    It was so bad at one stage that I used to copy a driver onto three or four stiffies, reasoning that if one develops read errors, then there'll be three more to try.

    Keep in mind this was before USB memory sticks. And lugging an Iomega Zip-100 parallel port external around was not an option...

    Ahhh, the good old days.

    And the trick where you punched a hole into the stiffy to make it double its size from 720Kb to 1.44Mb...

    There also was an utility called FDFormat (DOS) which did weird tricks to squeeze in more space on an existing 1.2Mb floppy or 1.44Mb stiffy. I preferred to use plain vanilla DOS format as I was not sure whether data will be safe or not.

    1. Olivier2553

      Talking about reliability, a coupe of years ago I was tasked to put the students thesis online. Prior 2000, they were archived on 3.5" floppies, and the on CD. I was surprised to find out that a greater percentage of the floppies where readable when compared to CD (even those not older than 5 years).

      Floppies were of reputable brand, while CD were on the cheap side. In both case, I tried to use the best or newest peripheral. CD and floppies had been stored in the same box, so storage was not the issue.

      1. Rich 11

        I found that out the hard way with CDs too. One office had the bright idea of putting their end-of-month backups on individual CDs (good), placing each CD in a protective sleeve (good), labelled the sleeve with the month and year (good), and made absolutely sure that everyone knew what and where they were (good). The problem was they used transparent sleeves and pinned them to a notice board instead of putting them in a cupboard or safe. The sunlight panned across the board every morning and the CD coating slowly but surely deteriorated...

      2. Mage Silver badge

        CDs and DVDs

        The commercial ones are pressed. They don't fade.

        Ordinary retail writeable kind only have the tracking groove pressed, the "pits" and "lands" are changed dye. They fade. DVDs faster than CDs. Only MO discs are suitable as a backup, regular writeable CDs and DVDs are only temporary, not archival. They can erase in a few days if left on a window-sill.

        It's not the top, but bottom that is the problem.

        I have 30 year old floppies and 50 year old audio tape that still work.

      3. Simon Harris

        I remember archiving my thesis onto 15 3.5" floppies in 1991. I don't think those discs have been back in a drive since. To be honest, I'm not even sure I could find the discs now.

        As for punching holes, I remember round about 1980, when I was at school, making an extra cut-out for the index hole on 5.25" 80K single sided discs so that you could flip them over and use the other side.

    2. Kingston Black
      Coffee/keyboard

      Stiffies...

      Since you brought it up...

      Many years ago I had a attractive Namibian student working with me. She was studying at university in South African, but on year's training placement at the company I was working for in the UK. One morning, she came up to my desk and the following conversation took place:

      Me: "Hello *******" (she shall remain nameless).

      Her: "Hello ***, can you give me a stiffy please?".

      A colleague promptly spits tea all over his keyboard and monitor.

      Me: "A stiffy?"

      Her: "Yes please, one of those" (pointing to a 3.5" floppy).

      Her: "Those are stiffies, 5.25" are floppies."

      Me: "Ah!"

      Her: "What did you think I meant?"

      Silence, except for choking noises from the next desk...

      1. Nick Kew

        Re: Stiffies...

        How was your Namibian's sense of humour?

        When I've lived and worked abroad, I find being a foreigner gives me splendid licence to commit linguistic faux pas that will have the natives in stitches.

        It's not always deliberate, but it's much more likely than you'd think.

        1. Tikimon

          Re: Stiffies...

          Utterly unrelated to computers, but it's a great linguistic mixup example. I had toured a wooden sailing ship visiting our sunny shores on a world tour. I was hanging around afterward, observing and annoying the crew with questions. One of them finally told me I could sign up to sail it (which I did!). Well, I also overheard a lady chatting with a couple of the crew about her daughter who was joining the ship there for a leg of the tour. It came up that her daughter loved to dance. She said "Oh yes, she loves to shag. I'm sure within a day she'll probably be teaching the whole crew." Cue choking and giggling, then they had to explain why.

          My week as temp crew was also the coolest thing I've ever done.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      1) Stiffy *snigger*

      2) doubling the capacity with a hole-punch gives you a 1.44 disk that was only rated for 720 and while you might get away with it a lot of the time, this might hint at the possibility of an explanation for the high error rates

      3) putting stuff on re-used compuserve disks has its own "probability set" given the cost-related data survival expectation of said disks, given what you paid for them

      4) Other FAT-but-not-FAT type disks had swearing too

      5) Extra hate to everybody for dredging up painful memories, may you all receive socks for Christmas *that are too small*

      1. Rich 11

        may you all receive socks for Christmas *that are too small*

        Given that my feet are swollen and inflamed at the moment, I'm quite certain that that is going to happen.

    4. AceRimmer1980
      Pint

      Ah, good old FDFORMAT

      Not forgetting the TSR that went with it, FDREAD ;-)

      Normal DD format 9 sectors/80 tracks would give 720K. An Atari ST disk typically had 10 sectors/82 tracks, giving 820K for not much effort. An Amiga could shoehorn 1.1Mb onto the same disk.

      And +1 for 5 1/4's being amazingly robust. I once had some posted to me, where the postie had folded them in half to get the envelope through the letterbox. They still worked.

      1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

        Re: Ah, good old FDFORMAT

        Has anyone done a stiffy joke yet?

        - Mike, The Young Ones, 1982.

    5. Muscleguy

      During my PhD ('88 to 92/3) I had 3 boxes of 3.5" micros (the 1.8MB HD versions) in disc boxes with my thesis on them. One was the working copy which got backed up to the travelling set in my bag. The third set was at home and came in once a week to be backed up (no computer at home).

      So if I was in transit between home and work and they both burned down or there was a big earthquake (this was NZ AKA The Shaky Isles) I would still have a copy of my thesis, even if I lacked a machine to put it into . . . If while on my bike I encountered the semi-trailer of fate my work was there for posterity. It wouldn't have survived a direct asteroid hit, but deep southern NZ should have been okay-ish in nuclear exchange (until the nuclear winter hit). Well the govt kept telling us to plan for emergencies.

      Mind you in my honours year I properly ejected an 800Kb micro, put it in my labcoat pocket, went and demonstrated a lab and it would not read when I put it back in. I put it down to my animal magnetism.

  6. Mr Dogshit

    Backup the config

    Our receptionist diligently saved the config of the company switchboard to a floppy, and would take it home in her handbag (off site storage you see). She’d been doing this for years. I took a look and found it was just the configuration of her console – not the 2500 users in the system and their extension numbers.

    1. phuzz Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Backup the config

      Agggghhhh!

      You just reminded me, I logged onto a customer's system the other day, to reacquaint myself with the firewall config, and had an urge to check out the backup system I'd set up a year or so ago.

      Backups are made of a bunch of different directories, and a couple of databases, before being archived and finally rsynced across to a central server where they'll be included in the off site backup.

      Now this customer had moved offices recently, and changed their IP range as well, and clearly someone had though ahead and to avoid getting errors, they'd commented out the entire section of my backup script that copied the backups off the machine to the other server. Of course, they'd never un-commented those lines...

      So, for about ten moths, this server had been carefully backing up everything, but never copying the data off itself.

      (yes I fixed the script, and no, I didn't bother telling the customer, they'll only find a different way to bugger it up)

      1. Vic

        Re: Backup the config

        So, for about ten moths, this server had been carefully backing up everything, but never copying the data off itself.

        I got called in to a customer[1] site where they'd had a disk crash. They'd been running the business on a Deskstar, and that drive had done what Deskstars do.

        The data was gone. I couldn't get to large numbers of sectors, let alone carve anything off them. I had to tell the customer the bad news, and suggest a new drive and a restore-from-backup[2]. This was my optimistic way of asking them if they *had* a backup.

        Yes, they did have a backup. Well, that made life easier. So where was it? On the other machine in the office.

        Except, of course there was no backup. They'd just shared the drive across the network, with both machines merrily writing data off to that paragon of data integrity...

        I was fielding calls for months afterwards. "We used to hace this file on the desktop, but it';s gone". "Do you remember that disk crash you had? Do you remember what I said about most of your data being lost?"...

        Vic.

        [1] They weren't my customer until that day. And I'd probably have been better off not takinng them on at all.

        [2] I made a number of other suggestions as well. I'm pretty sure most of them were ignored...

  7. Oengus

    Poor instructions

    I have a story of 5.25" drives as well.

    I worked for a major bank and we would send updates to the branch terminals on 5.25" floppies. It got to the stage where the updates exceeded the capacity of a single floppy. We quickly started receiving calls that the users were having trouble loading the updates. We worked out that the instructions said "When the message on the screen says 'Load Next Disk', insert the next disk in sequence and press return to continue." This was in the early 80's when no one had a personal computer so people did exactly as instructed and tried to stuff the second floppy in the drive without removing the first disk.

    The people writing the instructions were so used to inserting and removing the disks it didn't occur to them that someone would need to be told to remove the disk before inserting the next one.

    The next version included the instruction to "remove the disk in the drive then insert the next disk in sequence"...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: Poor instructions

      I believe I understood I had to remove a disc before putting in the next one since I got my first 45rpm disc player as a child, far before anybody thought you could have a computer at home, or on your desk... thus, no, the issue was not that novelty called PCs...

      1. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Poor instructions

        <i?I believe I understood I had to remove a disc before putting in the next one since I got my first 45rpm disc player as a child,</i>

        You never had an autochanger that would let you stack half-a-dozen disks up for playing?

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