Great work! The video does state this clearly that it was about the journey first and foremost and that's great, but yet to me it feels unfinished when it ends as soon as we get to the really fun stuff, so it's complete in the sense of it being well-produced, publishable content, but it's uploaded as soon as it's publishable, and I'm left with "what, that's it?", as I've mostly been looking at milling and some coating. I get this often with similar videos today. Either it's just me (entirely possible) or it's a sign of the times.
It takes some sifting to find some really good “making” channels on YT. I’ve watched this video and while I applaud author’s efforts, I don’t consider this type of content “good enough” to be subscribing. It felt overproduced and with too epic tone, while giving too little detail on the process, the experimentation, the actual solution (he said ratios are important, but what ratios did he use) and no thorough explanation of what is happening.
The golden standard is Applied Science channel, of course, but there are some smaller channels with similar vibe.
I'm not sure how similar these are to what you're looking for, but:
- https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550 - Primitive Technology, with John Plant. Non-narrated, but subtitled, videos of him building houses & other useful things with just clay, wood & stone. It's not a recreation of how people lived, but of what people might have done - he does research and tries to apply what he's learned to the materials available.
- https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections - Technology Connections. Less making, and more explaining, this has deep dives into (usually) older technology. There's something like six hours explaining how a particular pinball machine works, and I think his most recent video about VHS-C has already made it to the top of HN earlier this week.
Second Primitive Technology (don't forget to turn on the captions). Don't recommend Technology Connections to be honest (a lot of talk to the camera, I prefer videos that show things that can't be conveyed via text).
Here's the channels I like, in no particular order:
- https://www.youtube.com/@TechIngredients Thumbnails and titles are clickbaity, but don't let that fool you. One of the most thorough channels. Polymath like Applied Science.
Chris from Clickspring, the canonical YouTube machinist who has been slowly but accurately reconstructing the Antikythera mechanism for about one decade now.
A lot of honest projects are going to end this way, with a sort of half-failure. YouTube channels which show it anyway are more credible than the ones who seem to always succeed at whatever they're trying.
Yeah, I was hoping he'd get it at least to a somewhat usable state where you can at least load a small file (maybe with some file system sector fiddling).
Meh, there's always been excellent content and half-way there content. I wouldn't read much into it personally. There's always something glowing somewhere.
It's interesting how HN crowd are mostly text (and text with low formatting too!) consumers. Compared to other social media, and even old school forums...
Are we mostly l33t developers here, in love with CLI and Vim? Ha!
They were still forums. And there were some graphical usenet clients that were arguably better than any web forum - 35 years latter and much better graphics toolkits exist today. similiarly, not all bbses were text basee, though with modem being so slow that was the default.
Same reason I never click on YouTube links from friends: I find it annoying to have to wait to find out if I'm interested or not. On the other hand, I'll click on any non-video link someone sends me to have a look.
While it is a great video, it doesn't seem like he actually made a viable floppy disk in the end. Even if he didn't though, it would have been great to say what was actually achieved in the end: what write density was achieved? Could we write and recover even 1KiB of data?
I watched the video when it made the rounds last week. I was impressed with the work and the results. I did wonder, though, if a 5 1/4" disk would have been an easier initial goal, seeing as how the outer envelope is a lot less involved than a 3 1/2".
I was expecting a 5 1/4" or maybe 8". But the video was sponsored by a CNC machine company, so 3 1/2" hard shell form factor (the only popular one that can be CNC'd) makes sense. :)
I don't know how he got it, but if I were faced with that problem myself, I'd try this:
1. dissolve a bunch of rust in hardware-store hydrochloric acid,
2. dilute it in a lot of water,
3. into a similar quantity of water, mix an large excess of baking soda to neutralize the acid,
4. rapidly mix the two solutions together to precipitate a very fine iron hydroxide powder,
5. decant the powder and/or filter it with coffee filters,
6. rinse it to remove the remaining salt and sodium carbonate,
7. heat it to convert it to Fe₂O₃, and
8. heat the Fe₂O₃ in a sealed container with enough carbon to reduce it to Fe₃O₄.
I don't know if this would actually work, because my entire education in chemistry consists of watching NileRed videos in which the primary lesson is that nothing works the way you think it will. Wikipedia has some more-promising-sounding approaches that require materials I don't have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron(II,III)_oxide#Preparation
> use ammonia to promote chemical co-precipitation from the iron chlorides: first mix solutions of 0.1 M FeCl₃·6H₂O and FeCl₂·4H₂O with vigorous stirring at about 2000 rpm. The molar ratio of the FeCl₃:FeCl₂ should be about 2:1. Heat the mix to 70 °C, then raise the speed of stirring to about 7500 rpm and quickly add a solution of NH₄OH (10 volume %). A dark precipitate of nanoparticles of magnetite forms immediately.[9]
You can also buy it as a pottery pigment or as a black "ferrite" pigment for mixing into whitewash to make black paint, but if the particles are too coarse, you probably can't mechanically grind them down to be small enough.
You can get ferrous sulfate from the garden store as a fertilizer, and if you get it wet it likes to oxidize to ferric sulfate with the air. Or you can encourage it with hydrogen peroxide. I wouldn't be surprised if that would work as a replacement for the ferrous and ferric chloride mix in the Wikipedia recipe.
Ferrite is going to be pretty hard on your ball mill, since it's harder than steel, so at best you're going to get a lot of steel contamination in your ferrite. More to the point, though, if you buy 100-micron ferrite flour and you're trying to get a suspension of 1-micron particles, you need to break each of those flour grains into about a million pieces. My intuition is that, while in theory milling will eventually produce the desired result, it will probably take enormously longer than you can afford to wait. So generally the papers I've read about getting submicron particles† of one or another substance do it by synthesizing it in small particles in the first place, not by milling.
______
† "nanoparticles", because calling them that allowed you to scam funds from the National Nanotechnology Initiative even if your research had nothing to do with Drexler's mechanosynthesis objectives!
A 5.25" single-density disk would be literally an order of magnitude easier to make. 4x larger magnetic domains. Larger tracks mean wobble matters less. No tight-tolerance shell. Thicker substrate.
Haven’t seen the movie, but if the goal is to read a single 8" disk once, it wouldn’t surprise me that, with modern tech, were easier than creating a disk. A McGyver construction would leave out the spindle motor and the stepper motor for the read head. You can manually rotate the floppy at about the right speed, manually move the disk head to find the positions of the tracks, record the signal and then do signal processing on you multi-GHz laptop to recover the signal.
I would be very interested to know what material was used and how these magnetic films were created back in the 80s. Please share any info that you have!
In March 1998, CU Amiga magazine gave away the Amiga port of Doom. It was three DSDD disks, even accounting for the Amiga's larger 880 KB rather than 720 KB capacity. It was also only the shareware levels.
I'm sure that modern compression algorithms could do a better job than what Doom was using for its images. It appears that original Doom was basically using a vertically-oriented image format which indicated vertical strips of raw bytes, or transparent areas. It's much cheaper to skip drawing transparent areas.
Would obviously need some decode time to decompress the images, and memory to store the decompressed images.
Hehe, very nice to see something outside the scope of software or PCBs with this level of useless enthusiasm.
Obviously "from scratch" is a bit of a stretch here, but this is the material we come to Hacker News for.
Thanks for sharing!
Edit: sigh, I should probably run my comments through ChatGPT to avoid being downvoted. I like this, I share my enthusiasm. I like the uselessness of it, meaning the uselessness of making a floppy disk in 2025, not the lack of educational value. Sheesh.
He uses quite a bit of tooling, including lasers. It's not like he would be able to get this far in the middle of nowhere :)
In a way it is somewhat similar to people writing demos for old computers using emulators. Still great fun, but using these tools it doesn't take a village to make one floppy disk. With modern hardware you are apparently able to pull this off on your own. That would have been almost impossible in the 1980s, when these floppy disks were popular.
I probably worded it badly, but I really enjoy these efforts, and I would never be able to do this myself, even if I had a shed with all those tools!
For anyone that hasn't seen it yet, there's the YouTube channel "Primitive Technology", where a guy does this literally - in a jungle, with no tools apart from what he makes himself. He gets as far as smelting a tiny amount of iron.
I couldn't find an answer on google - how is a goat farm precursor for music? It's an activity that needs herding and shepherds started playing songs for fun? Or..? :o
It's an old story about using a drum machine and feeling like it's not real music, replacing the synthesized samples with real drum samples, then getting rid of the machine playing the drums yourself, then making your own drums, then finally farming your own goats for leather to make drumheads out of.
> How can someone call themselves a programmer when they don’t even mine for silicon!
To be fair, after three or four Tinder dates I realized that it was mostly silicon to be found there. It's not a stretch to say that a programmer going out on Tinder dates is mining for silicone!
