The floppy disk just won’t die
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The floppy disk just won’t die
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Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#2Hmmm.
All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names):
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#3I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful.
You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been manufactured for a long time and deadstock tapes go for $40 on ebay. I could afford the deck but not tapes that would realize its potential; I imagine I might grab a deck for cheap if I see one at a flea market but quality tape mechs need a lot of maintenance so I stick with another obsolete format, minidisc, where the deck costs $120 or so on Ebay and you can get 100 discs (that last forever) for about that much.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#4Hmmm. All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names): https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61
Gotek are awesome. I use one in an old 486 and it works really well as a floppy drive replacement. Especially with the FlashFloppy firmware replacement.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#5There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#6I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful. You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been m…
There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#7> There are some other strange evolutionary dead ends we find ourselves tied to because everything has to bow to the gods of reliability in aviation
Ironically floppies are utterly unreliable and will become corrupted if you look at them the wrong way. I understand that if you are after reliability you have incentives not to change, but it sounds weird to me that you wouldn't move away from that terrible format as soon as a better one like usb storage became available and prominent.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#8I think of the situation with compact cassettes (audio) where you can get a refurbished deck from the 1990s for $300 or so on ebay that is better than any deck I ever owned. They are making new decks but since 2005 or so they all use the “tanashin mechanism” which is cheap and highly reliable (minimal moving parts!) but sounds awful. You can make the best recordings with Type 4 “metal” tapes but these have not been m…
There's at least one music genre (vaporwave) that has a lot of new releases on tape, and often tapes are the only physical format released. Actually come of think of it, there's some releases on floppy disk as well!
The obsolete format I’ve most recently gotten into is VHS tape. Used decks go for $10 or $20 at our reuse center, you can buy prerecorded tapes for 50 cents. If a deck fails or a tape gets pulled you won’t feel so bad. Decks from 2000 or so are solidly better than they were in the 1980s, particularly they all support HiFi sound which is excellent. The quality is not so good as a DVD or Blu-Ray but a good movie on VHS is still a good movie.
Re: The floppy disk just won’t die
#9There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
To this day I still once in a while hear something using the old Mac floppy drive reading noises to indicate "computer is doing something"