Awesome Floppy Disks

It’s been a long time since we needed floppy disks to store data. But we still enjoyed watching this retro factory video posted by StirlingEngineering, which shows how they used to produce 3.5″ floppies. It’s a satisfying 5-minutes sequence of mechanical ear candy.

It was just yesterday that we paid our respects to Floppotron 2.0. As we hoped, Paweł Zadrożniak was at work building an even bigger and better electromechanical band. Floppotron 3.0 has 512 floppy disk drives, 16 hard disks, and four flatbed scanners for a richer and fuller sound than its predecessors.

Paweł Zadrożniak offers up another great electromechanical cover version of a popular song, this time taking on the 1990 Depeche Mode track Enjoy the Silence. Ironically, the sound of a table full of 3.5″ floppy drives, hard drives, and a flatbed scanner grinding away at their stepper motors is anything but silent.

“My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain IBM.” Styx’s 1983 track Mr. Roboto represented the pinnacle of overwrought concept rock. Yet there has yet to be a more appropriate song played by Paweł Zadrożniak’s electromechanical orchestra, the Floppotron and its servo-powered instrumentation.