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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)

#31

Post by ssl-3 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #23
aidenn0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imation had their own super-floppy drive that I liked better than Zip drives; it never caught on though. They could also do neat tricks like writing up to 32MB to a standard 3.5" floppy.

Really? On a regular disk? I thought the upper limit was ~2.7M

Yes, their LS-120 drives could store ~120MB on a special disk, or allegedly 32MB on a regular 3.5" high-density disk[1]. It used SMR recording just like the modern spinny-rust hard drives of late that none of us particularly like to accomplish the latter trick.

(I owned an ATAPI variant of this drive for time, but I sadly only ever used it for reading and writing normal disks of normal formatting.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#32

Post by 0x0000000 »

> 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.

That's crazy, I wouldn't think anyone would first and foremost associate 3M with floppies instead of adhesives, even those with a few grays like myself.

They make post-its for chrissake, and we're gonna pretend they're most known for floppies?

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#33

Post by jwells89 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

I 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…

In the past 15 years, what’s kept me from keeping a collection of CDs and blurays is the space they take up. It’s nothing compared to say vinyl records or VHS tapes, but it’s still substantial if you have more than just a handful and makes moving that much more of a pain.

Now that I own a house I have a few favorite CDs that get frequent listening, but still no blurays, mainly because there’s not much I rewatch often enough for owning them to make sense. If I went out and bought everything I could justify right now I might have maybe 5-10 tops.

It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. You could keep a decent number of albums or movies in a case the same size as a bluray/DVD case, or a full-on library in something similar to an early 2000s portable CD flip case.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#34

Post by b112 »

dhosek wrote: post #8

Man 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.

Stuff like this makes me think, but with a different view looking back than when I lived through it.

For example, the hole punch thing. 10 year old me would have never pondered this, but... was there someone at Stedmans' HQ, wondering why there was an 18% uptick in hole-punch sales? Some old, crusty and cantankerous beatnik squirreled away, staring at sales charts and projections, perplexed as to why?

How many households had no hole-punch, but did once the floppy appeared in home?

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#35

Post by 1letterunixname »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

I 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…

In high school, we had a virtual stock portfolio competition. At the time, I was an assistant manager (making minimum wage because I was a depressed kid who looked about 12) at a nationwide small store software (and hardware) store. Zip drives were flying off the shelves, so naturally I checked the company's P&L, SEC statements, and stock data. So I assigned 88% of my stock in IOMG because I could tell it was severely undervalued by market cap compared to projected current sales and frontline buzz. I laid waste to that econ-history class of BMW-driving rich kids and all of their "not cheating" help from their dads. As a bit of bittersweet irony, my teacher's investment club lost on IOMG because they got in late and sold early, just 2 months previously. If they had just been patient enough to wait for that 2 week window where the market appreciated excellent sales, they would've realized significant gains rather than losses.

PS: Yeah, I had a SCSI Zip drive. It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form. 3.5" floppies were traded at school, but you'd never loan original media. In general, the first thing you'd do with pristine media of real product without copy protection was make a backup copy or 2 of it. Some programs would burn serial numbers into floppy media on first installation irreversibly, and sometimes (okay, often) original media would go bad.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#36

Post by holoduke »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #3

I 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…

In the old world there were hardly any digital content creators. Nowadays you have more millionaires on Youtube than total content creators back in the days.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#37

Post by LeoPanthera »

0x0000000 wrote: post #32

> 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. That's crazy, I wouldn't think anyone would first and foremost associate 3M with floppies instead of adhesives, even those with a few grays like myself. They make post-its for chrissake, and we're gonna pretend they're most known for floppies?

I would have said adhesive tape. And then maybe magnetic tape.

Followed shortly by "industrial chemicals".

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#38

Post by steve_adams_86 »

fdr wrote: post #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…

I immediately think of their products I use on a regular basis. There are so many.

  - micropore tape for mycelium and tissue cultures
  - reusable respirators and cartridges
  - net sanding disks
  - double sided tape for so many things
  - foam ear plugs and earmuffs
  - scouring pads for shop/kitchen/aquarium
  - HEPA air filters for work and home
  - command strips for all kinds of hanging and affixing needs
  - adhesive spray, mostly for wood working or working with templates 
  - stripping pads
The list goes on. There are alternatives from other brands, but a few of these are hard to compromise on and 3M does an incredible job. Their cubitron mesh/net sanding discs for example. I also like their respirator equipment too much to switch out another brand. Then finally it might seem insignificant but their double sided tapes are really good. When you find a bad one you never forget it, and similarly, you remember the good ones. 3M has been my favourite so far.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#39

Post by jsz0 »

I'm not sure I ever actually bought a box of blank floppy disks. Instead I would call up software companies and ask for free demos instead. I did it so often the postal service warned may parents they would stop delivering mail to the house.

Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

#40

Post by oarsinsync »

b112 wrote: post #34
dhosek wrote: post #8

Man 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.

Stuff like this makes me think, but with a different view looking back than when I lived through it. For example, the hole punch thing. 10 year old me would have never pondered this, but... was there someone at Stedmans' HQ, wondering why there was an 18% uptick in hole-punch sales? Some old, crusty and cantankerous beatnik squirreled away, staring at sales charts and projections, perplexed as to why? How many househ…

A lot of houses used paper records and folders to store them in. The folders would often use ring binds that required the papers to be hole punched.
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