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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

#221

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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…

oh sure, The Shop in Go By Street http://fullonlinebook.com/poems/a-shop-in-go-by-street/ftpz....

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#222

Post by pan69 »

> How did your business initially come about? > > I started out as a tax lawyer in Washington, DC. I became involved with a software company in California that was doing unique tax calculations.

Ah, right, "unique tax calculations". I guess thats one of describing it. :)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#223

Post by smoldesu »

geenew wrote: post #220
14 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do note that using the microphone will degrade the playback and recording quality to rotary-phone-levels. For the sake of everyone in your Zoom call: please buy a $50 wired microphone if you're going to spend $150 on Airpods.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#224

Post by Shorel »

gambiting wrote: post #186
taftster wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My Xiaomi Red Mi Pro has a headphone jack.

It is one of the reasons I got it.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#225

Post by Cyberdog »

duskwuff wrote: post #193
bombcar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combinatio…

That's my recollection as well. I was in college around that time and my primary way of saving data to move between computers was a Zip drive disk (since all the computers in the labs had one), then a USB flash drive with maybe 32MB of space (worked fine when moving files between Macs - I don't think the PCs had USB ports at the time).

"Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the time.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#226

Post by AshamedCaptain »

gambiting wrote: post #186
taftster wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As simple as hitting a button on any decent BT headset.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#227

Post by derefr »

duskwuff wrote: post #193
bombcar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combinatio…

Depends on the use-case.

You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.

I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.

When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.

Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!

And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.

But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#228

Post by jbay808 »

duskwuff wrote: post #193
bombcar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combinatio…

I remember, in 1999, my friends using a website called imacfloppy.com to transfer files to themselves via the internet. I suppose it was the dropbox of the day.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#229

Post by bombcar »

duskwuff wrote: post #193
bombcar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combinatio…

From my group I was one of two people who had a Zip drive (the other guy had a Jazz™ drive too) and we usually dragged the parallel port drive along with the discs.

But that was just when things like IRC fileservs and Napster (1999) started to take off which was the main medium of "file sharing" at that point (for local transfers networking gear had dropped significantly, the iMac had ethernet built in, everyone had some sort of yumcha network setup - often sharing that 56k connection. 56kbps is 18 gigabytes a month, and the proliferation of "unlimited" internet was right around that time.

The final nail in the coffin was affordable CD-Rs. Once those started to proliferate (rip mix burn) you finally had disposable removable storage you could give people. Floppies were that, but zip and USB were not.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#230

Post by yazantapuz »

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."

22 years later I find out there's a joke behind the name. Thanks HN.
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