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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

#231

Post by saruken »

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…

Funny, I did the same thing with a 5-pack of Zip disks a couple years ago. I ended up buying them though, for a couple bucks. Who else would have? I still have them sitting on my desk, keep telling myself I'll finish rebuilding the old tower PC I picked up at a thrift store, and I'll buy a Zip drive for it.

I used to have a Zip drive in my PC in high school -- I remember saving 3ds Max files to it when I was first learning to model. And Deadlock, a turn-based strategy game that came with some version of Windows, I copied it onto a Zip disk and distributed it to some friends. But as I remember they were too busy with Kingdom Under Fire and Brood War.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#232

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

throwanem wrote: post #192
zelphirkalt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240 "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo information on the medium in order to achieve tracking precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media) write more information in the same area. They were back-compatible wit…

LS-120 could also superformat a standard HD floppy to 30MB with the caveat that you had to write the whole disk in one pass.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#233

Post by lizknope »

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.

I installed Slackware in the fall of 1994. I only had about 10 blank floppies so I would go to the computer lab and download the "A" base system, then wipe those, go back to the computer lab, download and install the "AP" application set, and so on for the development tools, X Windows System, and more. It took most of the weekend but it was amazing having a Unix system on my Pentium 90.

I had a brand new IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM which was not supported yet. About 6 months later it was and I started ordering the multi CD set from Walnut Creek cdrom.com every 6 months or so to get new distributions.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#234

Post by systems_glitch »

floppydisk.com bought Athana a few years ago, and got the remainder of their stock. AFAIK Athana was one of the very last manufacturers of several media formats. I don't know if floppydisk.com ended up with any of their manufacturing capability, or if Athana even had any at the time of sale. Athana had stopped manufacturing at least some of their offerings (e.g. 5.25" hard sector) over a decade ago.

floppydisk.com didn't get them all though, we bought around 28,000 5.25" DSDD diskettes surplus:

https://i.imgur.com/f5jM4mO.jpg

The above pictured lot is where the diskettes for the boxed releases of Nox Archaist and Burger Becky's game came from.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#236

Post by bombcar »

derefr wrote: post #227
duskwuff wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sm…

Yeah, the disposable nature of floppies was key; sure they were small, but if you lost one you didn't cry all night (unless it had your only copy of your thesis on it).

That wasn't really solved until the era of the "affordable" CD burner, so there was a moderately painful 1998-2001 or so era where you had to do some tricks often or trust someone with a relatively expensive piece of equipment.

Even in 2000 a burner was around $250 or more, but spending $15 or whatever on a ZIP disk was painful even then, if you weren't sure you'd get it back.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#238

Post by timbit42 »

WalterBright wrote: post #127

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 b…

I'm nostalgic about them but I don't want to use them due to the lack of reliability. If they were reliable, I'd love to use them.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#239

Post by tssva »

Cyberdog wrote: post #225
duskwuff wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The PC I purchased in late 1996 had USB 1.0 ports. USB 1.1 came out in 1998 around the same time as the iMac. The new PC I bought in fall 1998 had USB 1.1 ports. Most new PCs at that time were coming with USB ports. Maybe your school just had older PCs.
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