ADVENT #13-#17 — 3.5” floppy
Regular Scheme isn’t actually a garbage collected language, at least in its best, highest, but not latest version. I speak of the language described in the Revised Revised Revised Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R5RS).
That report describes values as having unlimited extent and notes that a clever implementation might be able to manage the stunning burden of such a system. That paragraph more than any other single thing inspired Alice. There are decades of computer science ideas about how to manage the resulting garbage. The Alice idea — which is to not manage it at all — seems like the one that best represents the large and growing footprint of modern software but the real idea isn’t to do nothing, of course, it’s to upcycle some of the garbage to support the runtime.
What do we do with real garbage in the real world? A lot of it we just dump somewhere, like Alice. Some of it we recycle and some of it we say we recycle. Some of it we compress. I don’t know exactly what the computing version of composting would be but I’m sure there’s a part of my home directory doing just that.
Compression is not really part of the discussion for traditional automatic storage management for in-core storage, though it’s almost a default option for out-of-core storage. I wonder why. I marvel at the energy we spend ensuring zero memory leaks in ordinary programs as if they were headed to the deepest sea or furthest moon on a voyage in a closed ecosystem. Are the vulnerabilities we have introduced when juggling trash worth it? I wonder how much actual trash we many have incinerated to feed these collectors of virtual debris.
Speaking of landfills and upcycling, today’s media is the 3.5“ floppy disk. My neighborhood craft store sells little bound journals that use upcycled floppies as the covers. A shame but Margaret, wherever you are, I have disk 2 of your thesis. The inner tracks don’t have holes punched through them.
Floppies are tied up with my childhood as an exciting source of pirated software and as a source of comforting ritual — the frequent reinstallation of OS/2 2.0 from more than a dozen disks. Floppies were how I first experienced Linux in the early days before it had support for hard drives.
In their 3.5” form, they were one of the best stealth fidget objects, with a sprung cover that slid back and forth much more quietly than a retractable pen could click. The solid metal hub made the disk much easier to spin with your fingers than the larger 5 1/4”.
The disks were popularized by the original Mac (double density, single sided — about 400kb), incorporated into the IBM PS/2 in a 720kb double density format, the ubiquitous high density 1.44MB format, and an exotic extended density 2.88MB format. Japan’s NEC offered a drive that used the ED media and tripled track density. As small as these floppies seem today, they held more than the memory in the first systems to which they were connected. The original Mac, for instance, had 128kb. It would be years before most users would get another reusable media that was larger than their system’s main memory.
I may have overestimated your enthusiasm for a mail a day from me about archaic removeable media, and my ability to write one, so let’s call this:
ADVENT #13 — 400kb single side, double density
ADVENT #14 — 720kb double side, double density
ADVENT #15 — 1.44mb double side, high density
ADVENT #16 — 2.88mb double side, extended density
ADVENT #17 — The FlashPath adapter from SmartMedia to 3.5” floppy