I heard that this business unit turned into 3Ms healthcare data analytics business partially because healthcare customers kept buying floppy disks after everyone else stopped. https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/health-information-systems-us/dr...
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)
#42Article says 3M exited floppies because it was retail oriented very low margin business. But how is Scotch Tape not that too?
I imagine the difference is that Scotch tape is much better aligned with the R&D that goes into their other products in the adhesives and films categories compared to magnetic tape. If they didn't intend to go further into developing products in the computing space then selling it while it still had value was probably a wise call.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.wiki…
The "FD32" 32MB capability was only implemented on the last drives which could also use 240MB disks.
Maybe the earlier 120MB drive hardware could have been physically capable of it but the drive firmware did not support it.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#44I 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…
I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead (once disk quotas, transfer rates, and attachment sizes caught up). The disks were cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about.
And for a while, I enjoyed handing people CD-Rs or DVD-Rs full of data, and the disks were also cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. (And disk quotas and attachment sizes have never caught up with either CD-R or DVD-R capacity, although transfer rates have.)
But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So even if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough.
And I'm somewhat loathe to hand someone a thumb drive. They're universal these days and can be cheap enough to not care about, but they can also be expensive and they just don't feel as forgettable as pulling another blank disc out of the box/off of the spindle, writing some data to it, and just letting them keep it was.
Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive, but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a throwaway DVD-R was. (Also, it's an active computer device -- there's very real concerns about trusting a foreign thumb drive that never existed with previously-used iterations of removable media.)
So now, to give someone some meaningful amount of data: I get to upload it to The Clown (with Dropbox or Google Drive or Discord or something). With the most-common methods, I also get to hope that I remember to delete it later (and also hope that they remember to save their own copy before I do delete it).
Which is great, I guess: I can send a mountain of data to anyone in the world this way and we never have to be in the same room.
But it also sucks: I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always a third party involved. (It's like mailing a letter through a transciptionist service might have been, if that was ever a thing that was, instead of addressing it to the end recipient directly.)
As a final lament: What in the fuck ever happened to easily sending data, over the Internet, to a fellow peer? Transferring files with DCC on IRC seems like it was miles ahead of where we are today, and that was 25 or 30 fucking years ago.
(No, I'm not bitter. I'm just old, I guess.)
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#45I 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…
there was also writable media. so...
how about one blu-ray of MP3s?
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#46I 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…
ah yes, Iomega zip drives, back in the days when you could stores 10's of 1000s of files and images in 100mb.
Nowadays, that would be like, what, 10 smartphone camera pictures?
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally. My house walls are plastered with M3 Velcro tape that holds everything from hooks to artwork. Really, a marvel of chemical engineering. Those hold quite a load and then you pull down the strip and the adhesive comes off the wall like nothing was ever there.
That has almost never been true for me. Every time I take something off paint chips
Clearly you need some 3M paint on your walls.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.wiki…
The "FD32" 32MB capability was only implemented on the last drives which could also use 240MB disks. Maybe the earlier 120MB drive hardware could have been physically capable of it but the drive firmware did not support it.
I appreciate the correction.
Eventually, right here, we'll all collectively remember the whole truth about the mysteries of this conglomerated and seldom-used removable media format.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#49> 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 have no idea why they shoehorned 3M into the article. Floppies rose and fell independently of 3M.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#50> 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 feel like in recent years people--not just relevant trade professionals but a ton of normal people--have also come to recognize them for making protective gear including, very specifically, N95 masks.