Just for grins. Standard 3 1/2" floppy hold 1.44 MB, formatted. So the typical Windows update might need in very round numbers about four thousand disks. At 100 disks/carton, that's 40 cartons. Don't know how many cartons to a shipping pallet.
Fortunately Microsoft (and everyone else) doesn't use floppy disks any longer.
I still have floppies in a cupboard somewhere.
There may even be some Iomega Zip drives there.
I may have used floppies for longer than many.
I used to use them back then to update BIOSes.
A bit later, I switched to CD-R BIOS update discs with floppy emulation. Those were the days.
Actually Microsoft used a special format for their floppy disks called Distribution Media Format (DMF) which could fit 1.68MB on a floppy that would normally be formatted to 1.44MB. So that would only need 3,400 disks - a saving of six cartons.
Distribution Media Format - Wikipedia
1440 kB DMF Tracks 80 80 Sectors per track 18 21 Cluster size 512 bytes 1024 or 2048 bytes Root directory entries 224 16
You could have used dual density 2.88 MB floppies! I remember using a DEC RL01 hard drive capacity 10MB about 18" in diameter.
I remember installing Word for Windows (on Windows 3.11 Windows for workgroups) -- 24 floppy disks -- and on Disk 24 got "un-recoverable I/O error after a long painful install process) -- had to wait another week to get replacement.Just for grins. Standard 3 1/2" floppy hold 1.44 MB, formatted. So the typical Windows update might need in very round numbers about four thousand disks. At 100 disks/carton, that's 40 cartons. Don't know how many cartons to a shipping pallet.
Fortunately Microsoft (and everyone else) doesn't use floppy disks any longer.
When software came on CD's was a relevation !!!! -- now it's a doddle from the Internet.
Some youngsters here don't know how easy they have it today -- there was no google back then either. !!! If you needed some questions answered or papers from a library - you had to make a "Snail Mail request" and if you were lucky you got the answer back in a week or so.
Floppy's back then (the smaller ones were 1.44 MB each).
I still have a USB->floppy adapter -- haven't used it in a while --maybe I'll donate to a computer museum.
Cheers
jimbo
Remember when IBM came out with , I think it was called OS2, We had a shortage of 5.25 " floppies.
I have a Win10 Desktop with a 3.5" floppy drive and a couple of USB floppy drives and an IOMEGA USB 250MB Zip drive plus the parts bin has an internal Zip drive, a couple of 3.5" floppies and even have an Epson 5.25/3.5 combination drive. And I have disks to use with them. Never did get the 750MB Zip drive as the CD-R discs became more available at 650MB followed by 700MB.
Now come on...anybody remember probably what was the first AIO computer? With 8" 500Kb floppy disk?
I remember when 3.5" high density floppies at 1.44 MB were considered bleeding edge innovation!
Now here's an interesting tidbit. The US Air Force used 8" floppy discs in computer systems controlling US nuclear missiles until June, 2019!
The US nuclear forces’ Dr. Strangelove-era messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks
I don't think the keyboard on that one latched up to cover the screen. And then there was this:
Almost 8 1/2 MILLION bytes of storage! And only $4,500 in 1981. I remember "TRISS DOS". Apple had some funky way of doing DOS commands on the APPLE IIe; wasn't it something like PRINT CHR$(4) "<DOS COMMAND>". You actually had to print the DOS command in BASIC.
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