Anyone ever use the OS called CP\M on old Kaypro computers? My first computer job in 1985 was supporting an auto salvage yard database on those computers in Texas. CP\M was painful, you could erase the hard disk you booted from, if you weren't careful. Which I did, I spent a whole day entering inventory into the hard drive, then went to back it up by erasing a bunch of floppies first. The one time I forgot to specify A: for the floppy drive to be erased, it defaulted to the C drive. So when it said "Are you sure you want to erase this disk?" I tapped Y and it erased the boot drive, with the OS, the inventory program and all that data I had typed in all day. I took a long walk and considered a career change, I was so angry. Then went back and typed it all in again.

One of these days I should send one of my unused floppy drive to these guys. Then I can point and say "Look! That's my floppy drive that I sent!"

Ahh sift.. you are so easily entertained. I figured after the past decade of making drive components from hard and floppy drives and scanners make music, something like a printer would be old hat by now.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'tainted love, hard drive, geek' to 'tainted love, hard drive, geek, floppy drive, arduino' - edited by xxovercastxx

Musical Floppy Drives - Computerphile has been added as a related post - related requested by spawnflagger on that post.

It's likely an Arduino board in the middle running code specifically written for this. I've seen similar projects. Some actually use custom MIDI files (1 "instrument" per drive), others have the songs coded by hand (C, python, etc).

I just posted another video that has a good explanation:
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Musical-Floppy-Drives-Computerphile

All right, all right . . . down in front. They are 13 floppy drives and 1 hard drive.

looks like 14 floppy drives + 1 hdd (for percussion?)

There are still out there. I still have them at work and on my old box at home. No, you can't have mine. You can get an external floppy drive with USB connector.

I don't know where I'd get access to a floppy drive to copy it.

After he lost in court, the guy bragged to others that he had damaged the hardware he sold me in the hopes it would keep me from launching.

He always thought he was some bigshot that everyone looked up to, so it's not surprising that he blabbed to every other sysop in the area. Unfortunately for him, the truth was that everyone thought he was a blowhard. Most of the sysops were friendly with me because I did a lot of free ANSI screens for them just because I enjoyed it, so it didn't take long for the news to get back to me from multiple sources.

No wonder why they couldn't do calculations, their 386 didn't have a math coprocessor!!!>> ^Phreezdryd:

This seems a little dated (2009?) to be posted now.
IDE hard drive, and a floppy drive?
Just saying I prefer my tech support scam stories to be more timely.

This seems a little dated (2009?) to be posted now.
IDE hard drive, and a floppy drive?
Just saying I prefer my tech support scam stories to be more timely.

... The only real purpose left for these floppy drives...

so, do floppy drives do what they were designed to do anymore?