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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

#311

Post by fourjawchuck »

Animats wrote: post #88

A few years ago, the last man standing in the punched paper tape business, "westnc.com", finally gave it up. There were still some numerically controlled machine tools running off paper tape. In 2019, NSA punched a crypto key into paper tape for the last time. As far as I can tell, nobody in the US still sells punched paper tape. Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore old Teletype machines,…

The machine shop I work at still runs machines that use 5 hole paper tape.

In fact there is a fixture in the shop we just finished on one of those machines that is for an aerospace customer of ours.

It’s very interesting to me and something I hadn’t seen before working at this shop.

It’s amazing what is still out there running.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#312

Post by romwell »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #284
romwell wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“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.

And who is the arbiter of language that decides which usage is silly and clunky?

Usage is usage. What is clunky and silly is complaining against language that is perfectly clear and understandable, whatever words it uses.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#313

Post by tapanjk »

asciimov wrote: post #30

I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr. Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of…

> sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr

... and praying that there is no read error.

That was my experience in this part of the world where the computer environments were not dust-free enough for floppies to be reliable. But yes, the nostalgia is still strong.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#314

Post by paulmd »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #289
bombcar wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

LaTeX and git work really well and you can push to somewhere remote as a backup (and will usually retain the ability to pick through the ref-logs if something goes wrong). LaTeX is super super popular in the academic world and it wouldn't be surprising for a thesis to be required to be submitted in LaTeX anyway.

Github has a word-by-word visual diff thing that would be really nice since usually you don't want to consider whitespace to be semantically significant in the context of a diff, eg word wrapping.

The business world likes to fret over every detail and I get it but a lot of powerpoint presentations/etc could really be done pretty simply with a latex template, and git checkin/merging/etc is sooo nice. Let alone chapter material or stuff that needs equations/figures, a bibliography manager, table of contents, etc. Super super nice for cross referencing, kind of like a generalized form of javadocs, and it does layout pretty well with some help, and it doesn't randomly spazz out and break borders etc.

Etckeeper is really nice for change tracking for your /etc folder too... love being able to look back and see if there's been any changes that might have broken stuff, get a log of package updates etc.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#315

Post by Animats »

fourjawchuck wrote: post #311
Animats wrote: post #88

A few years ago, the last man standing in the punched paper tape business, "westnc.com", finally gave it up. There were still some numerically controlled machine tools running off paper tape. In 2019, NSA punched a crypto key into paper tape for the last time. As far as I can tell, nobody in the US still sells punched paper tape. Although if you really need it, you could get it made. I restore old Teletype machines,…

The machine shop I work at still runs machines that use 5 hole paper tape. In fact there is a fixture in the shop we just finished on one of those machines that is for an aerospace customer of ours. It’s very interesting to me and something I hadn’t seen before working at this shop. It’s amazing what is still out there running.

> The machine shop I work at still runs machines that use 5 hole paper tape.

Where do you get blank tape? I know Teletype collectors who need a supplier.

I've never seen 5-hole tape CNC gear. Most is 8-hole.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#316

Post by paulmd »

goosedragons wrote: post #214
asciimov wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a shame Sony never produced a consumer grade minidisc writer for PCs. I always wanted to be as cool as Neo in the original Matrix, sharing warez on minidiscs.

They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them. They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.

yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and then iphone won for portability/convenience.

It's also always struck me as one of those products that was primarily made for the japanese market and they didn't really care as much about the rest of the world, it was a walkman 2.0 thing for japan since they fucking love walkman.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#317

Post by selimthegrim »

weinzierl wrote: post #117

The money quote from the article - and it is so well put - is : "Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me." My floppy story is: In the late 90s 3.5" floppies were ubiquitous and the Zi…

Let’s not give the nuclear weapons silos any ideas (I think they just got off 5.25”)

In a no doubt soon to be discovered manuscript of Journey to the Center of the Earth maybe 16” floppies will be mentioned.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#318

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#319

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#320

Post by summm »

paulmd wrote: post #316
goosedragons wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did. It came out too late and was too expensive for what you got compared to a Zip drive (an extra 40MB and smaller size for like an extra $500). They were also weirdly limited in that MD-DATA drives could only play regular MDs, not record music onto them. They also made some later Vaios with MD drives built-in but I don't believe those could handle data, just music.

yeah, that's the story of MD in general. Sony the record company was terrified of the implications of bit-perfect digital copies with no generational loss, so they made sony the electronics division gimp it in tons of random ways and made the user experience confusing and awful, and then got their lunch eaten by CDs/ripping (lossless and otherwise) and itunes anyway. DVDs and HDDs won for storage and the ipod and the…

That's the story of Sony in general. They had great tech but their content division always forced the consumer electronics division to gimp that tech in random ways, which led to the tech failing on the market.
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