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Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

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Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#91

Post by kw71 »

digi_owl wrote: post #90
agumonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1GB was later or implied compression IIUC. First models, in the floppy disk era, were 300-400MB. Still would have been a beautiful computer storage device, but Sony sonied.

True, they called it HiMD. The drives could also up-format the older MD disks to get a bit more storage. That said, i think there was a version of the original MD format sold as a data drive in Japan. I think Sony had a model or two of their Vaio laptops with it built in. That said, what basically sunk the format was slow write speed and that the Sony Music tail was basically wagging the Sony Electronics dog. The MD…

> The MD was from day one laden with DRM

Just SCMS

> Had to format convert to Atrac via some crazy program

The HiMD machines did not make nice mp3 players because they really weren't meant to be that. Only the final HiMD decks had mp3 codec.

I never converted from mp3 to atrac because atrac was a better codec. I didn't like feeling like I was listening to computer files anyway, and usually dubbed from a cd player.

> the only way to get them back out was via the analog hole

The last SonicStage update lets you download audio. This is important because these devices were used to record original content.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#92

Post by digi_owl »

soylentcola wrote: post #65
ttctciyf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac. I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that…

One of the things that drove me nuts using the earlier Macs at my college was the lack of an eject button. Sure, I understand the reasoning now, but when some crappy Hypercard project I was bungling made the computer freeze, I had no way to remove the floppy short of rebooting the whole computer and waiting or hunting around for a paperclip to push into the little manual eject hole. Still, seeing how many people in m…

I loved how only of my early optical drives had a notch tastefully designed into the front that allowed me to pry the drive open with any sufficiently rigid object, rather than deal with the "pointy thing into small hole" that everything later on had.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#93

Post by digi_owl »

eCa wrote: post #72
ttctciyf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac. I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that…

My first interaction with a Mac (late '90s), I watched the Mac user: * Drag the disc icon to the trash can to eject the disc. * Pull the power cord since there were no other way they knew of to turn it off. Mac's reputation as a usable computer was severely impacted, needless to say :).

After hearing Woz talk about how the early Macs were resistant to malware because most of the OS lived in ROM, i find myself thinking that rather than the Amiga being the last of the "micros" the Mac ended up being so. This in that it was designed more like a C64 than a PC.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#94

Post by digi_owl »

mike_hock wrote: post #54
josteink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…

We also had that fixed with CDs/DVDs when the OS could lock the drive and handle the eject button any way it liked. I didn't quite like the way Linux handled this though, not allowing the disk to be ejected as long as any file descriptors were still open, which meant you had to hunt down the processes keeping them open. But it would be extremely helpful for writable media like flash to be able to do full write-back c…

fuser * while sitting at the mountpoint usually gives a clue.

Also useful when something is hogging the audio device in /dev.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#95

Post by digi_owl »

putterson wrote: post #86
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooh, it'd be cool if you could do the same thing for USB drives. Perhaps some sort of claw or magnetic mechanism could hold the drive in place.

This makes me wonder what those two holes in the shroud of USB A style connectors are for. After a bit of googling it looks as if they are to provide a bit of tension against removal. I'm sure you could repurpose them to lock the usb drive into a USB port.

Some office ape is likely to rip the port out...

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#96

Post by digi_owl »

Tloewald wrote: post #85
josteink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply a…

You could select the disk and then "Eject". Dragging to the trash was a shortcut to unmount and eject. As for Macs not having the problem, this doesn't require qualification. Not only did Macs not have the problem, they treated disks as logical _volumes_ rather than physical devices. If you ejected a disk mid-save on a Mac it would complain, and if you inserted the wrong disk it would reject it and ask for the right…

> Windows still refers to devices by physical location.

Nope, not since NT. I learned that the hard way when moving a HDD containing Win2k around. Even though it was hooked to IDE master it would come up as D: as that was what it was assigned after it got formated with NTFS.

You can go into disk manager and assign a partition any letter than is not already in use.

You can even mount a partition into a existing FHS, much like on unix, but i can't say i have seen it used often.

Basically the letters are there for backwards compatibility.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#97

Post by digi_owl »

kw71 wrote: post #91
digi_owl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, they called it HiMD. The drives could also up-format the older MD disks to get a bit more storage. That said, i think there was a version of the original MD format sold as a data drive in Japan. I think Sony had a model or two of their Vaio laptops with it built in. That said, what basically sunk the format was slow write speed and that the Sony Music tail was basically wagging the Sony Electronics dog. The MD…

> The MD was from day one laden with DRM Just SCMS > Had to format convert to Atrac via some crazy program The HiMD machines did not make nice mp3 players because they really weren't meant to be that. Only the final HiMD decks had mp3 codec. I never converted from mp3 to atrac because atrac was a better codec. I didn't like feeling like I was listening to computer files anyway, and usually dubbed from a cd player. >…

On paper a simple flag, but stringently enforced by every program and consumer deck out there (professional decks where a different matter).

As for what was better or worse i will not get into. MP3 was already turning into the de-facto standard, and thus Sony did themselves no favors by having people go the long way round.

I guess i missed the news about the last Sonicstage release, as by that time i had given up on how Sony was handing tings.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#98

Post by mike_hock »

digi_owl wrote: post #95
putterson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me wonder what those two holes in the shroud of USB A style connectors are for. After a bit of googling it looks as if they are to provide a bit of tension against removal. I'm sure you could repurpose them to lock the usb drive into a USB port.

Some office ape is likely to rip the port out...

Then take the repair costs out of his pay check, and if it happens repeatedly, let him go.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#99

Post by agumonkey »

digi_owl wrote: post #90
agumonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1GB was later or implied compression IIUC. First models, in the floppy disk era, were 300-400MB. Still would have been a beautiful computer storage device, but Sony sonied.

True, they called it HiMD. The drives could also up-format the older MD disks to get a bit more storage. That said, i think there was a version of the original MD format sold as a data drive in Japan. I think Sony had a model or two of their Vaio laptops with it built in. That said, what basically sunk the format was slow write speed and that the Sony Music tail was basically wagging the Sony Electronics dog. The MD…

Right, but on the CD side, Sony had no issues selling generic CD burners even if the Sony Music business probably had issues with that. I don't know how slow MW writes were, but I'd be surprised if they were slower than FD especially with the later seek time. Add weak material leading to regular data corruption and I'm really thinking that pure data MDs would have make a different world.

Re: Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk

#100

Post by WWLink »

kalleboo wrote: post #7
dcw303 wrote: post #3

If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.

I remember when Apple had the soft-eject floppy drives that would only eject after the disk was properly unmounted, and then they even did soft-eject PCMCIA slots. I was surprised when their SD card slots weren't soft-eject.

I don't remember soft eject slots, my powerbook g4 had a button, and I think the expresscard slots on later macbooks just used the same kinda mechanism sd cards use.
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