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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

#181

Post by myth_drannon »

bornfreddy wrote: post #130
myth_drannon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

nah, some just melted. It was on the front seat with no shadow in Israeli +40C degrees heat.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#182

Post by zelphirkalt »

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…

Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#184

Post by romwell »

I'm still using floppy disks with my Yamaha PSR-630 workstation keyboard — you can arrange an entire song on that machine in no time. Plenty of highly acclaimed vintage music equipment — notably, Ensonique samplers — still use them too.

I got the floppy disks for my machine from Microsoft's supply room when I was an intern there in 2014. At the time, there were still some niche uses for floppies in the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., RAID drivers for Windows XP could only be loaded from a floppy on install, IIRC), but that was on the way out too — so I grabbed half a dozen disks from a pile.

Remarkably, they are still perfectly usable.

The major problem I have with them is that the floppy disk drive on the keyboard is slightly out of alignment. Which means that the only way to read the floopies is to use that specific disk drive.

I've been meaning to replace the drive for years, but never really got to it. I've also considered swapping it out for an SD card reader/USB drive (ones meant to replace floppy drives are readily available), but where's the charm in that?

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#185

Post by NavinF »

duxup wrote: post #126
NoGravitas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Latency still sucks on non-Apple Bluetooth headphones

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#186

Post by gambiting »

taftster wrote: post #150
duxup wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still hate the removal of the headphone jack. Bluetooth is overrated.

The worst thing about it is that I now have to carry 3 pairs of shitty Bluetooth headphones instead of one good pair because switching connected devices is such a pain that this is literally much easier to live with. I hate it. Bring the headphone jack back.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#187

Post by chernevik »

brunoTbear wrote: post #90
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #76

From the first sentence of TFA: > Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” Why editorialize they HN title? He’s a guy! And “last man standing” is a set phrase. “Last person standing” is not.

Editorialization serves a valuable role of making writing better. IMO, language that is more inclusive is better than language that is less inclusive. Keeping needlessly gendered phrases around simply because they're a "set phrase" doesn't serve any compelling interest. Language evolves. You can fight the ocean with a rake, or you can be supportive of changes that make language better for your friends and neighbors.

Language has idioms and phrases, and over time these connect generations.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#189

Post by romwell »

taftster wrote: post #150
duxup wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I still hate the removal of the headphone jack. Bluetooth is overrated.

My Samsung Galaxy A22 has headphone jack (which gets used all the time), dual SIM, dedicated SD card slot, NFC, all day battery, and 5G support.

It came out this year — there are plenty of sane manufacturers releasing phones with features that people want out there.

Use cases for 3.5mm jack that Bluetooth can't handle:

* Never having to worry about headphones running out of charge

* Zero added latency - critical for music making apps (somewhat remediated with latest BT versions, but good luck finding latency specs on the box)

* Switching between devices instantly (work/personal laptop and phone) - especially not fun if you use more than 2 of them

The last issue is especially annoying. It's 2022, I should be able to pair my headphones instantly by tapping them to the device I want to pair them to, without screens and buttons. Accelerometers exist. Proximity sensors exist.

But noooo, apparently, UX is not a consideration in the design of this godforesaken protocol.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#190

Post by rvba »

flyinghamster wrote: post #120
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.

SCO Xenix was every bit as bad, and yes, I did the Slackware "download floppy images, make a stack of floppies, spend hours installing" dance as well. I remember being very relieved by the rise of CD-ROM and CD-R.

Buffer overflows when burning CDs was a big pain too.

I am not sure if those early CD writers even had buffers - but they were so expensive back then, that I didnt have one.

There was "that one guy" who had it and was supplying pirated stuff for whole neighborhood.

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