In the mid-90s, I was working for an OEM of large industrial machinery. I was about nine months out of engineering school and had just completed my first major project. This particular project included the installation of the first PC-based HMI that my company (and the customer) had ever used. This HMI was a very complex system for its day.
The system also had extreme environmental challenges due to the shock, vibration, and dirt. We ended up with the Allen-Bradley T60 computer for hardware, which was about the only system on the market that would survive more than a week. I was also pushing the envelope of DOS and the available hardware, so much so that I needed a third-party memory manager to manually allocate each program to make it work.
One of the key features of our new PC-based HMI was that the customer could now extract fault information from the machine to analyze it in the office, and even store long fault and maintenance histories. Due to the equipment’s location, network cabling to the office was not possible and wireless connectivity was still a number of years off. However, "Sneaker-Net" (or in this case, "Steel-Toe-Boot-Net") was a breakthrough solution. The ability to save the fault data to a floppy disk and load it back to the computer in the office was a major development for our customers.
After a lengthy onsite commissioning process, I returned to the office and everything seemed to be going well for the customer. But that changed. I started getting phone calls from the electrical maintenance supervisor saying that the information downloading process was no longer working. This started an in-depth troubleshooting process. Was the raw data good on the HMI? Yes, shutting down the graphics still allowed the raw data to be read on the hard drive.
Was it copying correctly? Yes, the files could be reread after the download. It appeared to work every time, but the files were totally unreadable in the maintenance office. We even swapped out the floppy drives to see if the vibration on the machine misaligned the drive heads.
After going back and forth like this for some time with no solution, the only thing left was to walk through the process and see if there was anything anywhere that could be corrupting the data. I asked the electrical supervisor to tell me step-by-step what he did. He verified a freshly formatted disk -- good. He put the disk in the HMI drive -- good. He went through the proper download process -- good. He waited for the drive light to go out -- good. He removed the disk and put it in his shirt pocket -- oops.
Yes, back in those early PC days, even a casual user had to learn DOS codes. I remember what a shock it was the first time I saw a PC without a 5 1/4 inch port, then seeing the first PC without a 3 1/2 inch port.
Ahhhhh, the good old days! Wow does this bring back memories.
When I was in high school our PC's had 8" floppies! I remember when they came out with the 1.2MB 5 1/4" disks (a big jump over the 360KB). So much stuff you could fit onto them. Then the 720K 3 1/2", then the 1.44MB 3 1/2"!
I remember working hard to get my entire OS on one disk (including the memory manager) so I could boot with only one disk (no swapping). Then pull out that disk so you could put your program disk in to run something. If you were lucky, you had two disk drives (or even better, you set up a RAM disk so your most used DOS utilities were available all the time, without hunting for a disk). You really had to understand the machine to be able to do that.
Now, my digital camera takes still pictures that wont even fit on the largest floppies (>10MB). Its memory card is 32GB (> 20,000 times larger) and almost indestructable. Amazing when you look back on it.
A friend used to work in tech support at an insurance company. They'd send out disks to various departments and one particular department always complained the disk they received would be unreadable.
After sending several replacement disks they decided to visit the manager and see what the problem was. My friend went to the manager's cube and asked to see the disk before they tried to use it.
The manager spun around in his chair and (you guessed it) removed the magnet holding the disk to his file cabinet and handed my friend the disk.
@Tim, that reminds me of my first PC I got when I started college. Two 5-1/4" drives with no hard drive. That was enough to use WordPerfect in one drive (it came on a total of 2) and use the other dirve for data. I upgraded to a 30MB drive a year or two later. It also had a monochrome monitor, but a Hercules card to due graphics.
I have used the 3 1/2 inch floppy disk for many years and not had one fail, except for those that either got wet or had pop spilled on them. The cheaper drives were not so reliable, though.
But do you really want to give out multi-dollar memory sticks to pass out documents of only a few dozen K? when a floppy disk, not discounted, cost maybe 5 cents? And I do know several folks who have had memory sticks just die on them, and nothing was recoverable. At least from a disk it is often possible to recover most of a damaged document. IT might not be good for code, but recovering most of a document has a lot of value.
Also, we discovered that the 3 1/2 inch floppies were not so very easy to damage with a magnet, although it certainly was possible.
At my first job out of college, I used a CAD station that had a 50 Mb hard drive and a 3 1/2" floppy. As there was no e-mail or network, it was hard working on a project was we had to save to floppies to transfer between engineers. We ended up installing compatible tape backups on the computers that would allow us to effectively transfer files between computers (as long as they were not above 50 Mb).
Kids today have no idea how dedicated you had to be in order to be a techie back in the day! 3 1/2"s were a big improvement and CDs were phenomenal...WOW! We can really store some stuff, baby!
Seems USB drives are the storage of choice now...which I must admit are much hardier - they are almost teenager proof! A friend of mine told me you can no longer buy a new car that will take a multiple CD deck even after market - USB ports are the only game in town.
I remember the colors when they came out, too, Nancy. It seemed so surprising. I was never a big fan of the disk. They failed so often. I remember sending articles to magazines on those disks. Every so often the disk would arrive at the editor's desk unreadable. Quite a pain.
I used to work on hall effects so naturally we had tons of magnets lying around - we had to be super careful keeping them away from any media. I remember when 5 1/4" floppies came out in different colors - we thought that was SO COOL!
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