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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

#121

Post by 83457 »

CliffStoll wrote: post #113
Animats wrote: post #88

A few years ago, the last man standing in the punched paper tape business, "westnc.com", finally gave it up. There were still some numerically controlled machine tools running off paper tape. In 2019, NSA punched a crypto key into paper tape for the last time. As far as I can tell, nobody in the US still sells punched paper tape. Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore old Teletype machines,…

I've got a couple boxes of 80-column punch cards ...

My mom has many boxes from her long career programming for mainframes. She uses them for todo lists... for herself now, not a computer.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#122

Post by snvzz »

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…

Same story. I guess it's pretty common.

What's odd is I used DD floppies, not HD floppies, because my only computer at home was an Amiga.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#123

Post by akolbe »

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 remember that. :) And I remember buying a 1 Gigabyte hard disk for £1,000 ...

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#125

Post by throw_m239339 »

Old samplers/MIDI sequencers without SCSI interfaces do use floppy disks so I hoarded a hundred of them just in case (even though there is a system now that allows a floppy disk reader to be replaced by a USB thumb drive reader). They are getting quite expensive in Europe, not paying 5€ for a single HD disk...

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#126

Post by duxup »

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.

Not quite the same but I hated the removal of the headphone jack.

I now own mostly Bluetooth headphones and use an adapter in the rare cases otherwise, I generally don't even notice that it isn't there.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#127

Post by WalterBright »

I've used punch cards, paper tape, DECtapes, magtapes, cartridge tapes, 8" floppies, 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, and Bluray disks.

I'm not nostalgic for any of them. Good riddance.

Just yesterday, I was watching a new DVD movie. Fresh out of its wrapper, it stalled halfway through because the dvd is defective.

Phooey on all of that. CRT monitors, too.

Today I use terabyte drives, and have a box of USB sticks. For inexplicable reasons, the terabyte drives USB sticks have no way to write on them. So I stick an Avery label on them and write on that.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#128

Post by grogenaut »

83457 wrote: post #121
CliffStoll wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a couple boxes of 80-column punch cards ...

My mom has many boxes from her long career programming for mainframes. She uses them for todo lists... for herself now, not a computer.

Bar I worked at in the late 90s did all their checks and orders on these. Guy who worked there par tike worked dismantling mainframes and had tons of them. Cheaper than any other paper they could find.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#129

Post by virgulino »

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

I remember laughing out loud the first time I handled an 8-inch floppy. The very definition of a FLOPPY disk. It was a little disturbing. I was already in the era of the 5.25" double-sided floppy back then.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#130

Post by bornfreddy »

myth_drannon wrote: post #44
blamarvt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Once my family drove to visit my cousins. I brought a newly bought box of floppies just in case they had some interesting things to copy from... and forgot it in the car with summer heatwave outside. It was a very painful lesson, so many badblocks.

I didn't know the temperature mattered?

Otherwise with new floppies I always reformatted and checked for bad blocks first. Some of the series were very bad quality.

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