Category: Retro

You might get tired of reading about floppy disks way quicker than I’ll get tired of sharing floppy disk content, I’m almost sure of it.

Since I’ve been working on my Failing Sectors project, a website that’s entire purpose is to be slow, breakdown, and wear out floppy disks and drives, I’ve been building the media and drive back stock collection. I came across these Verbatim Datalife Color 3.5 MF2HD floppy disks.

To me, these things are a work of art, the colors, the transparency, the contrast between that and the black metal shutter, with its “murdered out” style embossed logo.

I bought 2 packs of them, with the “one to stock, and one to rock” strategy, basically meaning I can keep a fresh box, and use the other ones, but they’re so nice, I don’t really want to use them, so I’ll buy another box that will be my usable floppies.

Now I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of floppies, very few are this photogenic.

Now here’s the thing, since I’m a “content creator” taking photos of my computers, there’s a desire to see that there’s actually a floppy disk in the drive. Think about a black floppy drive, with a black floppy disk in it, is it really in there? It’s almost invisible, and the 2nd most popular color? Beige. And that has its own challenges.

Now, data reliability? That’s going to be tested in the future, from the reading and research I’ve done, there was a curve of reliability that peaked in the 90s, and as the medium phased out, the less reliable they became, and these were produced in 2003, for sure a last push, and seemed to be targeted towards students and youngsters. I guess we’ll find out the hard way, that’s kind of the point.

So I’ve been messing around with this floppy project for a while, and it’s been an up and down adventure. I put up my first test project, and it failed to do what I wanted, to read the floppy every page load. And that was one of many show stoppers, I’ve said many times I learn more through failure than success, and let’s just say, I’ve been learning a lot lately.

Forcing a floppy read every time a page loads, for every user? Sounds simple, but that’s just not how the internet is built to work, every single piece of technology between you and a website is built for speed, and a lot of that speed comes from caching. From the server’s RAM, disk, the connection between the website and your computer, your browser, and even your own computer. Every single step had to be told “ignore how you’ve been built, and wait for this machine to spin up a floppy disk, and load the content” and I had to figure out a way around each roadblock, and I learned, computers don’t want to be slow in 2026.

Next, I couldn’t just tell you that it was happening, I had to prove it to you. So I got to work on learning how floppies worked, where they cache, how fast a real read should take, and how to prove the reads were real. Not just to myself, but to the visitor. That’s the whole point of Failing Sectors, which is still sitting on the back burner, but I did build out an MVP proof of concept that works, and it’s provable. You can check it out here floppy.er1c.win and when it loads, I’ll most likely hear it spin up.

Now, if you are anything like me, and a little mischievous, you’ll sit there and hit refresh and destroy the floppy, well that’s the point, that’s why the project is called Failing Sectors. Luckily I pulled up my analytics tonight, and noticed there’s absolutely no one reading this blog anyway, so it feels pretty safe, but in the future I’ll be creating some redundancy, and some security filters that limit single IP addresses, and hopefully have enough audience to burn through some floppies! (but don’t test that yet)

So here’s the project update: The technology works! (Or maybe I should say, I’ve broken it, successfully) I still need to build the server, which is a whole story on its own, and the first server is already going to be replaced before it even launches, but I’ve gotta shoot the video about it first, because that’s all a part of the project.

Since part of this large project also involves read floppies on a floppy <> USB controller, I’ve tested this as well, and built a bunch of cool tools, and understand more that I ever wanted to know about floppy speed, sector reading, and logging!

The journey continues…

Fell into a nostalgia hole last week. Here’s what happened:

Sometime after a boring Steam Summer Sale, I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to play old Windows games on my Mac Mini M4 Pro. That one question kicked off a whole rabbit hole. You know how it goes. One minute you’re curious, the next you’re deep in forum threads and file formats you haven’t thought about in twenty years.

That’s kind of what I love about using ChatGPT. It never shrugs or says, “eh, maybe later.” It’s just always ready. Always down to figure stuff out. I’ve gone from random ideas to working setups in a single afternoon, just because it kept saying, “Yeah, we can do that.” This time, that yes led me back to Unreal Tournament.

I had ChatGPT generate me some old-school readme.txt instructions, like the kind you’d find on a sketchy FTP site back in the Unreal Tournament days.

File: UT-README.TXT

This was one of the first games I really played during the “video card” era of PC gaming. Software rendering was dead the moment OpenGL showed up. And with the right setup, Unreal Tournament felt like the future. We weren’t lugging CRTs to LAN parties anymore. We were online. It was 3D shooter warfare over cable modems.

I’ve since learned Quake 3 can run on Mac silicon too. Adding that to the to-do list.

The GE FM/AM Electronic Digital Clock Radio 7-4612B recently made its way around the internet as a meme. The joke was that everyone had the same one—but I didn’t realize how popular it really was until I saw it. I instantly recognized it. Most people were talking about the 90s, the annoying beep, and the fake wood grain. And yeah, I remember all that… but it also unlocked a different memory for me.

To me this clock wasn’t about waking up. It was about staying awake, late at night, exploring the world of AM talk radio.

I don’t remember exactly what made me flip over to the AM band at 14. But if there was a button, a switch, or a dial, I was going to mess with it. That’s just how I was. I’d push it, scan it, maybe even take the thing apart to see how it worked. Until it no longer did.

Let’s just say in 1992, not a lot of kids were hanging out on the AM talk radio band. Maybe that’s what drew me to it. What I found between the static was the Larry King show. He became the voice that kept me up. The format was simple. A guest would be interviewed, and then the phone calls would start coming in. I think that’s what hooked me. It felt interactive. Real people calling in with questions, or sometimes just to be heard. It was like late-night cable access, but on the radio. The audience? Night shift workers, truckers, and other nonconformists listening in the dark. I knew I wasn’t the intended audience. And that made it all the better.

I stayed up many nights listening to Larry King and Art Bell. But in Houston, Sunday nights were something else. They played old-time radio shows. Stuff from the 1940s, before television. Dragnet, Sherlock Holmes, The Whistler. Even back then, it felt like time travel. These were the same broadcasts sent to soldiers on Armed Forces Radio Service, complete with the original commercials. That’s what made it feel real.

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