The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
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The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
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Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#2This article implies multiple times that 3M invented the floppy disk. They did not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk
https://web.archive.org/web/20161222064003/http://www-03.ibm...
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#3I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives.
And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks.
Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.
At least we still have thumbsticks...
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#4This article implies multiple times that 3M invented the floppy disk. They did not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk https://web.archive.org/web/20161222064003/http://www-03.ibm...
Did you read the article?
This is a few pages in:
> Now, to be clear, 3M did not invent magnetic storage—that was done by Austro-German engineer Fritz Pfleumer, in 1928. He created audio tape, a recording medium that started as broad strips of paper coated with iron-powder granules, and eventually moved to less-fragile cellulose acetate with help from what would become another big name in floppy disks, BASF. At first, the innovation didn’t spread outside of Germany because of World War II.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#5> If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks.
I think that's an interesting perception of the public. I think of 3M making all sorts of things, generally, I admire the company...in spite of some rather grotesque blunders and bad behavior. But the first thing that comes to mind is adhesive tape (also mentioned in the article)
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#6just saying, the buggy sticky/fading/back-again header implementation makes this really hard to read.
please make it sticky or even better just don't.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#7I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives. And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks. Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from som…
you can download any music you want on youtube as mp3s. store them on a usb drive and plug it on your car, or store it in your computer and store a huge music library... but why bother yourself doing that if you can stream directly on any platform...
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#8Man seeing some of those disk manufacturers names brings me back to when I used to order bulk purchases of 5.25" floppies from a catalog and sell them at a profit out of my high school locker. And then of course, there was the trick of using a hole punch to add a second write-enable hole to the left side of the disk so you could flip it over and use the back for an extra 140K of storage.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#9I remember being super hyped for the successor of the floppy disk back as a kid in the 90s... Iomega Zip Drives. And then getting super hyped for the successor to the CD... the BluRay, and wondering what sort of holographic multi terabyte wizardry would be the nextgen of optical disks. Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from som…
some of us hold onto the past. I still have a Zip disk and drive (and a bunch of old media, all the way back to a 8 inch floppy) and I have a fairly large collection of 4k blurays
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#10> If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks. I think that's an interesting perception of the public. I think of 3M making all sorts of things, generally, I admire the company...in spite of some rather grotesque blunders and bad behavior. But the first thing that comes to mind is adhesive…
They bought a former employer of mine which was responsible for a universal file opening program (most famously incorporated into Lotus Notes). When I started there, they were Intranet Solutions, and then became Innosoft and Stellant before becoming a division of 3M.