The first time i saw an 8-inch disk, i thought it was some sort of wind-up. But no, there really were disks that big once; my dad had one from some ancient minicomputer he'd worked on at some point.
Father worked at DEC; picked up a PDT-11/150 on discount as a home system. Intended by DEC as an industrial controller.
Low-level LSI-11 processor variant, 128k RAM, (2) 8" floppy drives. The case was 75% floppy drive, 25 % processor boards on top.
Came with RT-11 build floppies, I had to run the OS build in order to generate a boot disk and three language/utility disks. Took about 8 hours to do the full optioning and build from the 13 source floppies.
Ahh, the old days. Wrote my first D&D game, ballistic path analysis, mandelbrot drawn to 80x24 greenscreen VT01...
Early in my career and after a field trip abroad commissioning an aircraft simulator I was stopped at customs with a box of them and was asked what they were worth. Said that we could send the data by modem and so effectively nothing. I was allowed to pass.
I have a stack of 8" floppies sitting on my desk. Also have the old Wang computer they go to laying around. I have not been able to find the actual disk drive though.
Back in the late 80s we had a PL/M development system from Intel we used to program 8051 and 8096 microcontrollers for industrial sensors at Honeywell. The code was saved on 8" floppies.
Yep, you could punch holes in them and put them into binders. Their size was just right for this. Supposedly, it was a perfect way to keep them organized.
I had an old Model II 8" drive I had pulled out of old machine that I used in the Intro to Computing class I taught in the 90's. It made a great prop to show how drives work. The read/write head was about the size of a matchbox.
