> On Oct 23, 2015, at 9:07 PM, Mercury Thirteen <mercury0x0...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I've found it varies widely upon the floppy used. The cheap ones used by > the previous owners of some systems I work with usually have very poor > integrity. On the other hand, the good quality ones used by software > publishers in the 80's to ship their applications still seem to work well. > > On 10/23/2015 8:57 PM, Thomas Mueller wrote: >>> What I mean is that if your computer is OLDER than 386 >>> then it does not make much sense to expect CD/DVD at >>> all, so for such computers, a floppy distro is better. >> Reading about a floppy distro raises one concern in my mind: reliability and >> shelf life of floppies. >> >> In later years, I could write only a small minority of 3.5" floppies; >> ability to read outlasted the ability to write. >> >> I also noticed that 5.25" floppies appeared to have much better shelf life >> than 3.5" floppies. >> >> I wouldn't have been able to install FreeDOS from floppies because of >> inability to find sufficient good floppies. >> >> FreeDOS outperformed Linux for handling floppies, and Linux did better than >> FreeBSD or NetBSD. >> >> How is the experience of other users with old floppies? >> >> Tom >> >>
I’d have to agree with Mercury Thirteen on this one. If they are of decent quality and properly stored 3.5’s are a fairly reliable medium. I’ve got several of them that date from back in the late 80’s and early 90’s that I wanted to use for some VM stuff. Mainly the original MS-DOS 6.2, 6.22 upgrade and Windows 3.11 Disks. Plugged in the USB floppy drive I bought years ago, stuck in the disks, worked flawlessly. >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> _______________________________________________ >> Freedos-devel mailing list >> Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-devel mailing list > Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
