A friend of mine left some floppies on the dashboard of his car one night.
When writing on a disk envelope, use a felt-tip pen.īallpoint pen grooves are not the only way to distort a disk's recording surface. But it does dent, and a ballpoint can produce surface irregularities that, in turn, will impair the function of the read/write head. One of the properties that makes Mylar so valuable in electronics is its dimensional stability that is, it doesn't stretch. While the envelope protects the disk from your fingers, it does not protect it from ballpoint pens.
#FLOPPY DISK ARCHIVE SKIN#
Keep your fingers away from both of these holes, or skin oil may get on the disk. It also has an elliptical access hole through which the disk drive's read/write head actually makes contact with the disk. The storage envelope has a hole where the spindle grasps the floppy, a large hole like that in 45-r.p.m. Touch the disk itself and you can kiss the data stored on it goodbye. The first thing you should note is that, unlike a phonograph record's envelope, the floppy's inner dust jacket is always left on.
#FLOPPY DISK ARCHIVE FULL#
Since the entire head must penetrate the disk by about one 30-thousandth of an inch to insure intimate contact over the full width of the head, the disk has to be soft. So, instead, a head that covers a whole segment of the disk at a time is used. It would be extremely expensive to deal with these circumstances by building a head that reads or writes on only a microscopic part of the disk with accuracy. They are, in fact, your computer's library, although a floppy collection will need a little more care than books are often given. The floppies are so called because they are made of Mylar thin enough to bend, or flop.įloppies, which are small enough to slip into protective envelopes, should be stored vertically, like books. Today's small disk systems use predominantly 5 1/4-inch or 8-inch floppy disks, and blanks sell for $5 to $10 apiece. Magnetic memory disks originally measured three to four feet in diameter, but rapid development led to ever-smaller disks that, at the same time, featured ever-increasing storage capacity. The computer industry began switching to disk storage in order to take advantage of this hopping-around ability. You can play the second cut just as easily. If you want to hear only the third cut of a record, you pick up the tone arm and put the stylus in the appropriate groove. In fact, the first personal computers used cassette decks as their E.A.S.'s however, the low cost of the method did not compensate for its slowness and other limitations.Įarly in the memory game, the search-and-find properties of disk recording became obvious to the computer industry. You don't always start with a triumphant opening note and proceed linearly to a splendid finale.
Unlike a symphonic recording, computer data are not usually recorded serially.