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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

#301

Post by salmo »

amatecha wrote: post #274
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.

Yeah even at the time there were magneto-optical disks[0], which I think got as high as around 9.1gb. I had a bunch ranging from 120-480mb, which was huge at the time. They are a bit thicker than a regular floppy, but nearly the same form factor. Awesome at the time for backups and of course very useful for print/publishing businesses that had to courier over huge 300dpi documents to print, stuff like that. [0] https…

Wow. I totally had blocked those out of my memory.

I deployed a batch of desktops to an office with the drives and 1 disk each. We hoarded the disks of course.

I think I mostly just fidgeted with them at my desk since we just had a few machines that could use them.

They were more reliable than our external SATA CD burner (Smart & Friendly brand), though. That had its own table we wouldn’t touch while burning at 1x. It could 2x but the failure rate was too high and CDRs were still expensive. Zip drives were for peasants being mostly parallel or IDE. :)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#302

Post by paulirish »

In the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), which I've kept.

About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate the folks who keep the door open to legacy technology. (…but meanwhile I'm still realllly curious what's on that disk!)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#303

Post by kupopuffs »

paulirish wrote: post #302

In the 90s, I bought a Brother word processor machine from a yard sale and I used it for journaling in high school years. It saved to a 3.5" floppy (non-HD?), which I've kept. About a decade ago I was hoping to recover the data. I sent it to David at retrofloppy.com who tried his best but failed to recover the data. He sent the disk back to me, and charged me nothing. It was a lovely exchange and I hugely appreciate…

Get out a microscope and notepad and write down those bits

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#305

Post by smoldesu »

mbreese wrote: post #300
grapescheesee wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or apple could kindly add decent support for it.

It's not an Apple issue. Works perfectly when you use a Mac + AirPods. The issue is when you try to use Windows. All bluetooth headphones I've tried (with microphones) sound horrible with Windows, if they work at all. The walled garden has a few advantages...

Airpods do not have better duplex audio on MacOS. The problem is that AAC cannot support high-quality recording and playback at 330kbps, so it has to degrade the quality of the recording stream to fit within the Bluetooth bandwidth. MacOS might default to using your laptop's microphone, but that's something you can also set up on Windows. Hell, it should be the default on Windows as long as you have AAC support installed - there's no reason a headset should be using SBC over Bluetooth unless the last version of Windows you used was XP.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#306

Post by Dylan16807 »

stinkytaco wrote: post #45
martopix wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In modern computing

Surely the floppy disk is not more modern than the modem? They started to die around the same time, if I recall.

Both are not modern. I don't think the original post was trying to imply that floppies are modern.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#307

Post by 1letterunixname »

Copy II PC Option board, actual floppy notchers, and cleaning disks and diskettes are just some of the other floppy paraphernalia. Floppies have notoriously low reliability (unrecoverable reads) and painful transfer rates. ZIP disks were only slightly better. CDs and DVDs were far better and then USB thumb drives killed everything else with the then futuristic holy grail of solid state storage.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#308

Post by 1letterunixname »

doomlaser wrote: post #176
bartread wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd ... Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgi…

Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em ! In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I…

Sweet. I remember when X:Com UFO Defense had their copy protection codes stored in the .EXE not as unsigned integers but as ASCII text. Not difficult to set it to all 0000-0000 for every question, or just jump over the code that does the checking entirely. If one were devious in writing copy protection software, they would pass around an ever-changing cryptographically-signed state within the context of an event system that does (non-inlined) integrity checks all over the code base and explodes should any fail.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#309

Post by jaygreco »

doomlaser wrote: post #176
bartread wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd ... Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgi…

Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em ! In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I…

Tap tap revenge! I have a lot of fond memories of that game on a 1g iPod touch.
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