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The last person standing in the floppy disk business

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Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#71

Post by tgv »

ck2 wrote: post #19

Anyone else old enough to remember the 8 inch floppies on TRS-80 Model II? Heh how far we've come, it's incredible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II

How desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read the multi-megabyte documentation.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#72

Post by shantnutiwari »

egypturnash wrote: post #46

I get nothing but a little eye in the center of the screen, blinking. It is cute but does not contain the promised information. Reloading with the adblockers off gets the story. I hate this world.

I use ublock origin on firefox and I could read the story?

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#73

Post by actionfromafar »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #18

One advantage of floppy disks, is that you could safely take a random disk, reformat it and reuse it. Now, however, if you insert a random USB drive into your computer, you run a high risk that your computer will be pwned.

That was the first thing that came to mind.

Maybe there would be a market for a "data USB port" which would filter away all other kinds of USB devices than storage devices.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#74

Post by thesuitonym »

blamarvt wrote: post #10
causi wrote: post #5

Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.

And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.

tik tik tik tik tik

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#75

Post by jscipione »

ck2 wrote: post #19

Anyone else old enough to remember the 8 inch floppies on TRS-80 Model II? Heh how far we've come, it's incredible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II

No, I’m not old enough to remember 8” floppies but I watched Adrian’s Digital Basement’s repair of the TRS model-2 including restoring the 8” floppy drive, connecting it to 24V, using a adapter to hook it up to a PC to make a boot disk. [0] Unfortunately once Adrian got the Model-2 working and booted to TRS DOS he didn’t test any other software on the machine. My experience with Tandy machines was playing Burger Time off a cartridge as a kid, no 8” floppies.

[0] https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#77

Post by manholio »

throwaway12305 wrote: post #26

At a previous job, I worked at a textbook wholesaler. The industry overall is dying. They were a small player, but they were outrageously profitable. They realize that the good times won't last and they'll never grow into a billion dollar company, but the party isn't over yet. Sometimes it's better to be the last person selling stage coaches than the tenth person selling cars.

In the money quote, he puts it quite eloquently:

Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#78

Post by myth_drannon »

ok123456 wrote: post #68
myth_drannon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually reading a book about these shareware businesses. It was quite profitable selling them for 4$-7$ and they were popular. They would start as one person and occasionaly grow into huge operations involving hundreds of employees.

What's the book?

Shareware Heroes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61272567-shareware-heroe...

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#80

Post by jhbadger »

system2 wrote: post #67
blantonl wrote: post #63

You haven't lived until you installed an operating system from 38 floppy disks. Slackware and OS/2 for example My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2 Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you were dead in the water.

I remember installing windows 95 from floppy disk. It was only 13 disks but with MSDOS it would go up to 16. Some drivers here and there, 20+ disk installation would take hours.

In the early 1990s you could get Linux distributions on floppy (if you didn't have a CD-ROM drive yet) -- I remember one that had over 30 disks.
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