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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

#241

Post by somat »

Sometimes there are people that appear confused why you would do something yourself. "Just buy it" or "just use the cloud service". I think this quote sums up the situation perfectly.

''' At one point we did a gigantic deal with a US payroll company for which we needed to copy hundreds of thousands of disks. We sent the work out to a third party who did the duplication for us. That was okay, but expensive, and it took a lot of time. The quality also wasn’t quite what we wanted it to be. So the next time we decided to do the floppy duplication in-house and we got our own equipment. '''

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#242

Post by geenew »

smoldesu wrote: post #223
geenew wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not know that, I'll have to check next time it comes up. To be clear, I use them as a backup, like when I'm traveling and didn't bring my normal headset.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#243

Post by timbit42 »

Fileformat wrote: post #194
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've been collecting photos of them all: https://www.fileformat.info/media/a.htm

You need to add some mainframe and minicomputer media, like DECtape, etc.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#244

Post by outworlder »

mikewarot wrote: post #139

The tiny storage and slow access time/speed are not something I'll miss. What I do miss is the security that they provided. The serenity of having known good backups, that just work, is something that nobody under 50 is likely to ever experience. Because we had the ability to copy and write protect our software and data, we could easily make manage our security in a completely transparent manner. You could take your…

> that just work

Eh. The reliability wasn't really great. We never knew if our data was still there.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#245

Post by stordoff »

Centmo wrote: post #159
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.

Especially when you're on floppy #25 of OS/2 Warp.

I recall installing Office from ~35 floppy discs, and finding that one of the discs in the 20s was unreadable after what felt like an eternity. The installation still completed after I skipped it though, so presumably it only contained some optional feature I never ended up using.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#246

Post by outworlder »

wrycoder wrote: post #108
koala_man wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think parent refers to the fact that if you insert a floppy disk and reformat it without running anything on it, it's safe. This is not true for USB drives, as USB controllers can be programmed to re-insert a virus or fry the system at any time in the future.

Not true for floppies, either. To reformat the boot sector, include the /S switch. FORMAT /S

Yeah, but they would not autorun anything. If you forgot them inserted and rebooted, however...

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#247

Post by timbit42 »

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 will fit if you use a Sony Mavica with the floppy drive built in.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#248

Post by duskwuff »

tssva wrote: post #239
Cyberdog wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Schools have never been known for keeping up with the latest in computing hardware. The 90s were no exception.

Besides -- early on, a lot of PC makers put USB ports on the back of the computer, since that's where all the other ports were. It took some time for PC makers to realize that USB ports weren't just for permanently installed equipment like printers or modems, and to start redesigning cases or using drive bay breakouts to make the ports more accessible.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#249

Post by outworlder »

iggldiggl wrote: post #218
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.

For quite a while, floppy disks exceeded the system memory by at least one order of magnitude.
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