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

281–290 of 363 posts

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#281

Post by _tom_ »

narrator wrote: post #212

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…

The books are probably just inflation. People think a dollar per book is cheap, now. But cover prices in the fifties for paperbacks look to be 25 to 50 cents. (Source: A quick google).

Books with actual increases in value won't be at a thrift store, typically.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#282

Post by NotYourLawyer »

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.

In what way is this better? We’re referring to a specific man. It’s ok to call him a man.

Over-inclusivity serves no purpose in this situation. It makes the language clunky and needlessly unspecific.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#284

Post by NotYourLawyer »

romwell wrote: post #264
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.

>“Last person standing” is not. Was not. I had no problem reading the title, and didn't even notice anything unusual about it until reading this comment. Language changes. Complaining about it won't change it back.

It’s about 1/30 as common according to google. And hilariously, this very article is the second hit on google for the phrase.

Yeah, language changes. Organically. Not because of silly, clunky usage like this.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#285

Post by bombcar »

duskwuff wrote: post #248
tssva wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 90s was a really weird time. One school that was ”richer” would have bought early Macs and still be using them, whereas a poorer school wouldn’t have been able to buy until the time of the iMac and handily defeat the older machines.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#287

Post by dtgriscom »

In 1990 I was the Exhibits Engineer at The Computer Museum in Boston (RIP). We were opening a new exhibit, the Walk-Through Computer, a giant, two-floor PC.

Of course, it had a giant floppy drive, and at my suggestion they marked it as a 2.88MB drive (just to be ahead of the curve):

https://youtu.be/CoxQLJkLq1c?t=407

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#288

Post by quickthrower2 »

_tom_ wrote: post #280
quickthrower2 wrote: post #275

How about a floppy to USB/flash/SSD adapter. Do we need to make the physical thing still?

3.5" external usb drives are easy to find on amazon, etc. If anyone knows of a 5.25 (5 1/4) external usb drive, please tell me! I still have thousands of old 5.25 floppies. I've transferred or tossed most of the 3.5, since I was able to get a drive for that.

I mean just the other way: say you have an old mainframe in production and you need to clone a floppy, clone it to a more modern medium then use an adaptor.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#289

Post by _carbyau_ »

bombcar wrote: post #236
derefr wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

As a university IT student helper I had to recover 2 PhD thesis from a floppy and one from a USB stick that was thought to be better than a floppy.

The floppy drives at least yielded a jigsaw puzzle set of text they could piece back together. The USB drive at the time got nothing back.

I was always amazed at how someone so smart as to do a PhD could waste so much of their time by not having a second copy.

But here I am with a neglected backup system...

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#290

Post by jiveturkey »

bombcar wrote: post #229
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…

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…

Pretty sure it was Jaz? Not Jazz
Post reply on HN