Although the era of floppy disks is long gone, enthusiasts still find inspiration in them for their experiments. A YouTuber under the nickname Polymatt decided to recreate a 3.5-inch floppy disk, a once popular data carrier, completely from scratch. And he did it not for practical purposes, but to check whether it is possible to recreate the technology of the past with his own hands, reports Engadget.
For those who haven't seen the days of floppy disks, they are flexible polyester disks with a magnetic coating, sealed in a plastic or metal casing. When inserted into a disk drive, a magnetic head would read or write data. The silhouette of a floppy disk became the basis for the "save" icon in most early programs.
Polymatt began his experiment by modeling the case and parts in Shapr3D and MakeraCAM, then cut the aluminum elements on a Carvera Air CNC milling machine. He made the disk itself from laser-cut PET film, which he coated with a suspension of iron oxide. After assembling all the components and a few failed attempts, he managed to magnetize the disk and even write data to it, albeit in a very basic form.
Although the floppy disk format has been officially considered "dead" since 2010, the actual farewell to it took place quite recently. The Japanese government stopped using floppy disks only in 2024, and the German Navy did so in the same year. In the United States, 8-inch floppy disks were used to coordinate the launch of nuclear weapons until 2019. However, the Japanese government's rejection of floppy disks was not caused by a lack of confidence in the reliability of this outdated data carrier. One of the main reasons for the rejection was that floppy disks were already difficult to find on sale, and the storage capacity of 1.44 MB was starting to become insufficient for some documents.
In the end, the Polymatt project became not only a nostalgic journey into the world of old technologies, but also a demonstration of engineering ingenuity. Who knows, maybe the YouTuber's next step will be to create a CD from scratch.