Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last person standing in the floppy disk business

eyeondesign.aiga.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 363 posts

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#211

Post by 14 »

jacobr1 wrote: post #206
gambiting wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition between devices is fantastic

Is that just Apple devices or can you connect to non Apple products with AirPods as well?

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#212

Post by narrator »

What's funny, economically, about this guy is that his investment in floppy disks made roughly a 10x return!

"Another thing is that I don’t know what my inventories are worth. I know that ten years ago I bought floppy disks for eight to 12 cents apiece. If I was buying a container of a million disks, I could probably get them for eight cents, but what are they worth today? In the last ten years they’ve gone from ten cents to one dollar apiece, and now you can sell a 720KB double density disks for two dollars."

Reminds me of when I was at a thrift store and these used paperbacks were being sold used for triple the cover price that they sold for new in the 1950s.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#214

Post by goosedragons »

asciimov wrote: post #196
stinos wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.

They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them.

They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#215

Post by jlarcombe »

About five or six years ago there was a single packet of 5.25 inch floppy discs for sale in the window of a strange shop near my office in London.

It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed to come in or go out.

I walked past the shop every lunchtime and grew increasingly obsessed with this box of discs, the first I'd seen for sale for maybe twenty years. Where had it come from? Why was it in the window? Who was going to buy it?

Eventually I decided that I'd have to buy them myself, just so I could stop thinking about it.

But the next time I walked past the shop, the discs were gone!

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#218

Post by iggldiggl »

Tr3nton wrote: post #141

I fondly recall when my friend became the first kid in our neighborhood to get cable internet instead of dialup. I biked over to his house with a backpack full of 3.5" floppies and spent hours filling them up with games. It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk; same for the total download size of a fairly barebones website. Nostalgia!

> It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk

… and the full decompressed version of that image might not have fit into your computer's memory at that time, either.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#219

Post by jagged-chisel »

jlarcombe wrote: post #215

About five or six years ago there was a single packet of 5.25 inch floppy discs for sale in the window of a strange shop near my office in London. It was one of those weird shops that never seemed to actually open or have anyone come through the door. The rest of the stock seemed to be travel clocks and things like those waving cats. I think it was mainly a wholesale business but nothing ever seemed to come in or go…

Strange Stories fodder

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#220

Post by geenew »

14 wrote: post #211
jacobr1 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition between devices is fantastic

Is that just Apple devices or can you connect to non Apple products with AirPods as well?

Linux, windows, Mac all work. The mic works too (on windows at least), so they make a good backup if you don’t have a headset for a teams/etc call.
Post reply on HN