Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 9:35 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403)
In reply to: Best news is ... by knewt
Parent article: Jumping into openSUSE Leap 16

It didn't help that the floppy drives on the university's various UNIX systems (if they had a floppy drive at all) had various limitations (IIRC, the SPARC ones supported HD (not DD) 3.5" floppies only).
When I did the release of XFree86 binaries for Linux/m68k, my transfer strategy was:
1. Split the archive in small parts, and checksum them.
2. Note down all parts with a failed checksum after transfer,
3. Retransfer all corrupt parts the next day.
After 3 days, everything was completed, usually.
Life improved when I got a DDS tape drive, which was much more reliable...

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 10:40 UTC (Fri) by knewt (subscriber, #32124) [Link] (4 responses)

Hmm, I wonder if that was it then. Because the computer labs were definitely some form of SPARC workstation.

After we got the ADSL, there were times I would....... borrow a lab workstation to run background tasks. The most memorable example being when the uni webserver didn't have an apache module I wanted, so I built my own copy and spawned it off in the background. The workstations didn't reboot all that often, so worked well :)

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 11:21 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

The SPARCStation 1's and 1+'s had a floppy. That was how we got files on and off too in our lab. Seems the 2's and 10's did too. I don't remember the type of floppy. You could definitely format a HD floppy as normal density though.

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 14:42 UTC (Fri) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (2 responses)

The floppy drive was an expensive option for most UNIX workstations. The serial and (monochrome) X terminals didn't have floppy drives either. The few machines with floppy drive were typically inside the server room. Many people didn't have a computer at home in those days, so less need for transferring data.
When the students kept asking for a floppy drive, they got an external SCSI floppy drive, connected to the server through a freshly drilled hole in the wall ;-)

Best news is ...

Posted Oct 10, 2025 15:06 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Now that you say that, yes, only 1 or 2 of the SparcStations had a floppy. But you could just go over, ask to just use the floppy, put your disc in the drive, go back to your own workstation and telnet in and copy your stuff remotely, then eject and go back and get your disk.

On floppies ...

Posted Oct 14, 2025 20:49 UTC (Tue) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

No way was I having floppies inside the server room, we had tape and CD-ROM even in 1990.
Floppies were more popular with Linux using PC, they'd improved a lot on the old true 5 1/4" floppies, having a plastic shell.
Later I did have them bundled with the Solaris sun4m arch workstations and I did find a use for them on desktop, as I'd store tripwire
instrusion detection software storing the data read-only on the bundled floppies,
I'd actually use that mainly to figure out the configuration changes and the files that GUI installers would put on machines as using
a GUI meant missing the good ole documentation and is in practice error prone and tought to replicate at scale.

The floppies were generally used for sharing (small) files with documentation people, translators and so on.
There was at one time requirement to use a DOS emulator and floppy drive, which the PC support installed with DOS
and had to be called back when their install caught a virus and stopped functioning. After that it had a virus scanner active too.
There were some FOSS tools around to write to floppy disks and convert files, but mostly networking was used,
the PCs becoming clients to a network of remote office servers, so UNIX was doing the distribution of data, with
PC clients using NFS taking over from an awkward DECnet system, which wasn't manageable at the scale we were
operating at, at least with a small team.