DOS ain't dead

Hi!

Something completely different: Few weeks ago I bought Novell DOS 7 on eBay. Noticed later, on my Windows XP machine I don't have an FDD to make images from the 3.5" floppies. So also bought a used Sony 2x Speed Read / Write USB Floppy Disk Drive (MPF88E-UA) on eBay Kleinanzeigen. Received today and had no problems to read all 8 disks.

Floppies from the year 1994 and a drive from 2009 still working in 2020. Nice.

(Btw: Imaging was done using Stefan Bion's IMAGE.COM. A86 sources available.)

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That is pretty incredible! I personally have had LOTS of 3.5" disks go bad, and have generally had much better luck with 5.25" disks. I still have a computer with 5.25" & 3.5" drives and also have a USB floppy (3.5"). I've never seen a USB 5.25" drive.

> I personally have had LOTS of 3.5" disks go bad,

Me too. Many can not even be re-formatted (and not because of dirty drive heads)! I wonder if it was a quality-control issue (cheap, quick manufacturing) or a technology-related issue (speed, track size, etc).

> and have generally had much better luck with 5.25" disks.

In my experience, yes with 360kb disks, but not with 1.2g disks. (Same issues as above?)

> I still have a computer with 5.25" & 3.5" drives and also have a USB floppy (3.5").

Many of each in my case!

> I've never seen a USB 5.25" drive.

Me either. I wonder if latter versions of DOS stopped supporting 5.25"?

And i've never even *seen* an 8" drive or disk!

- Doug

Yes it makes sense that lower density floppies are less degrading that HD. I also have still mix of 3,5" nad 5,25" and sometimes get ones, trying to read them and I had almost no problems with 360k 5,25" and much more problems with 3,55" 1,44MB. The magnetic domains gets demagnetized ruring years, it's unstoppable effect. Also the chemical/mechanical stability of magnetic layer is not forever and it may turn to dust as can be visible on old magnetophone reels. So if you have still some flopies without back-up on other media do it soon.
I also have some 8" floppies and one 8" drive for an old HP computer. The drive is large box as common desktop PC case with very loud spin motor that runs permanently after power on. Here you have it: http://www.rayer.g6.cz/1tmp/23-8inch%20floppy.jpg
I didn't run it maybe 15 years so maybe it's not longer working...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Me either. I wonder if latter versions of DOS stopped supporting 5.25"?

Afaik win98 did still support it, so I assume the corresponding dos also. I still have the drive (NEC 1991, 1200 grams).

> That is pretty incredible! I personally have had LOTS of 3.5" disks go
> bad, and have generally had much better luck with 5.25" disks. I still
> have a computer with 5.25" & 3.5" drives and also have a USB floppy (3.5").
> I've never seen a USB 5.25" drive.

Around 10 years ago I had almost no problem reading 3.5" disks from ~60 big boxes (mostly games, some apps and compilers).

I also still have a tower-case DOS computer ('Viper' at https://www.bttr-software.de/members/robert/) with a 3.5" drive, but it sits in my wardrobe since that 10 years, when we moved last. Dunno if it still works. (My 5.25" drive is somewhere at the basement.)

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> Around 10 years ago I had almost no problem reading 3.5" disks from ~60 big
> boxes (mostly games, some apps and compilers).

I read the OmniBook 800 support disk w/o problems yesterday. This disk must be from around 1998.

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