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The last person standing in the floppy disk business

eyeondesign.aiga.org

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Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#91

Post by stinos »

asciimov wrote: post #30

I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr. Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of…

I had exactly the same with Minidisc. Go through discs with labels I made myself, select one, 'click' opens the player, 'click' insert the disc and close, then the device comes to life in your hand and you press a hardware play button (of which muslce memory knows the location by heart so always just works), music comes out of the headphones, so fullfilling.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#92

Post by protonbob »

doomlaser wrote: post #81
ido wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least of the 3 examples on that webpage it seems like you made remakes of existing simple games (tetris, sokoban, pong) - did you try making new designs of your own and if not, why not?

Sure. In 2007 I started up a new label at http://doomlaser.com . Made a bunch of indie stuff as that scene was really starting to bloom. Helped build some big franchises like Tap Tap Revenge, the iOS game for The Hunger Games, alongside irreverent stuff like https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364 , and personal stuff like https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits (a game named after the Mac's low-level…

I just want to say that tap tap revenge was my favorite game as a kid and I have very fond memories of doing 2 player on the same ipod touch. "Gotta get the high score"

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#93

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

Koshkin wrote: post #50
wollsmoth wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

burning dvd/cds was fun. Figuring out how to burn a dvd that could run on a dvd player was fun. Now it's all just done via chromecast. Convenient and less wasteful, I have to admit.

And the Germans had fun naming their software "Nero Burning ROM."

I never got that, it's amazing. Was a teen when I was using it and hadn't learned enough Roman history. Thanks.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#94

Post by actionfromafar »

lake_vincent wrote: post #57
101008 wrote: post #52

Floppy disks (or diskettes, as they are called in Spanish) were very important for my formation when I was a kid. I had a computer but I hadn't internet access at home (very expensive for my family), so I was going to the computer café two blocks away and I downloaded files into the diskette that then I was able to check at home. That's how I downloaded tutoriales (File > Save page as...) and a lot of stuff. Things b…

I remember actually exchanging floppy disks containing images (made in Paint, of course) with my friends via snail mail. It was the original version of Snapchat. Horrible latency.

Were some of them also, hrm, explicit in nature?

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#95

Post by tpl »

Very happy to have not had to deal with a floppy that was done being able to be read in a very long time. I used to work at a campus computer lab and we would experience failures commonly while imaging machines. I do miss floppys but I am happy to see the extent that they are no longer critical.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#96

Post by mietek »

roelschroeven wrote: post #59
seanc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true! Floppies had viruses too. Even back in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo_(computer_virus)

Michelangelo and similar viruses only activate when you boot from the disk it's on. Insert a disk with Michelangelo in a running system, then format the disk (make sure you overwrite the boot sector), all OK. The operating systems of the time didn't have any autoplay functionality that could be exploited by viruses. I guess in theory viruses could have exploited things like buffer overflows in the OS code that reads…

There were plenty of Macintosh viruses that spread this way, such as the WDEF/MDEF/CDEF families.

> Infects the Desktop file used by the Finder. … Spread through sharing disks, as every Mac disk includes a Desktop file. It is not necessary to run a program to spread this virus; simply mounting the disk is enough for it to infect the Desktop file of every disk mounted on the Mac.

https://lowendmac.com/2015/classic-mac-os-viruses/

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#98

Post by lake_vincent »

actionfromafar wrote: post #94
lake_vincent wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember actually exchanging floppy disks containing images (made in Paint, of course) with my friends via snail mail. It was the original version of Snapchat. Horrible latency.

Were some of them also, hrm, explicit in nature?

Lol, no, I was way too young then! They were probably pictures of Power Rangers or Super Mario I drew, lmao.

By the time I was of that age, we had the wonders of dial up internet and semi-scrambled adult TV channels.

:')

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#99

Post by rawoke083600 »

Part of the "joy/hell" of using floppies, the waiting to see if your data was ok. Example when you have ARJ/ZIP/RAR a 10+ disk "floppy collection" (pirate copy) of your favourite game from you friends from school.

You get home after school and dammit floppy number 7 has CRC error :/ sigh

It could take DAYS to copy a game, back then, between you friend forgetting for a day or two and having to redo big copies at least once :) All with the turnaround time of waiting one-school-day

#GoodTimes :)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#100

Post by bombcar »

NoGravitas wrote: post #6
doomlaser wrote: post #4

When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like S…

I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.

People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.

Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds.

Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".

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