Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 228 posts

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

#101

Post by mark_undoio »

aidenn0 wrote: post #12
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…

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.

I was excited about the LS-120 but I never quite convinced myself to stump up the money to pay for it.

My recollection was that it was: - Slightly larger than the contemporary Zip disks. - Cheaper than a Zip drive. - Could just replace your existing floppy drive, since it was backwards-compatible.

I don't know if it was as fast or robust as a Zip disk - it definitely didn't have the same mind share, though.

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

#102

Post by GuB-42 »

francescovv wrote: post #65
ssl-3 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 quota…

> What (...) happened to easily sending data, over the Internet And for mobile phones - without internet is similar, unnecessarily hard. The other day I was hiking with friends, and wanted to share a .gpx file with the route, at some spot with no cell coverage. I thought: "I 'member, bluetooth can send files". Well, we spent good 15 minutes trying and miserably failed, that's no longer possible in the name of "securi…

There are many ways of sending files between phones, none of them good.

Bluetooth can work, but it is slow as hell, and Apple doesn't support it.

Cloud services are convenient, but you not only you need some signal, but you also uses up your data plan.

If you have USB OTG support, you can simply use a thumb drive, like with your PC, but it is cumbersome and you need the hardware.

There are some somewhat proprietary systems like QuickShare and AirDrop, which are supposed are great when you have support which is not always the case.

Other options include having one phone act as a WiFi AP and host a local HTTP server, there are apps for that (ex: MiXplorer). A bit uncommon, but the advantage is that only one phone needs to do weird stuff, for the other, it is just downloading from a URL.

There are also apps like SyncThing based on P2P networks.

Generally, phones are pretty terrible at dealing with files. Their OS is designed around apps controlling their data rather than around interchangeable files like traditional desktop OSes. The way they want you to work is not by exchanging .gpx files but instead by using some built-in "share" feature of your hiking app. It may be .gpx under the hood, but they don't want the end user to see a file.

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

#103

Post by bArray »

throwaway71271 wrote: post #96

I bought a usb floppy drive, and some old 1.44 floppies, and I thought its just nostalgia, but tbh its just super cool. I think with esp32s3 and floppies we can make some cool computer kits :) there are also 5" spi displays 800x480 that are pretty fast There is also a floppy disk music demoscene, and of course the retro computing scene, but I think 'constrained' programming is one of the best ways to learn and it is…

> I think with esp32s3 and floppies we can make some cool computer kits :) there are also 5" spi displays 800x480 that are pretty fast

Not sure there is much interest from younger people these days outside of a small niche. Checkout any kind of OS/computer architecture classes on a University campus.

Could be super cool to build a 'mobile phone' that runs on floppy disks.

> PS: I am working on adding UFI support, it is using CBI to the esp32 mass storage which support only BOT, but its going quite slowly because I am trying to use cheap 4$ logic analyzer to debug and its losing samples :(

Have you documented this somewhere?

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

#104

Post by camtarn »

DeathArrow wrote: post #57
jwells89 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. What's wrong with SD cards?

They have a limited lifetime. It's a fairly long limited lifetime, sure, but unless you're reading and rewriting the data on the cards regularly, you can't rely on them to all still be intact a decade down the line.

Which is a shame, because I kinda love the idea of my music collection being stored in a little cube that unfolds to reveal a hundred or so micro SD cards.

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

#105

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

sebastianavina wrote: post #7
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…

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...

m4a*. Or Opus.

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

#106

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

prmoustache wrote: post #94
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…

As teenagers used to record mixtapes of music we likes to people we liked/love. Nowadays people just tag other on social medias or send links in private messages. I wonder if some still take the time to curate / prepare special things the same way we did.

For some recent holiday I had my girlfriend burn me a CD of an album I liked. (Legally bought DRM-free)

I'd make her a mix CD, but there isn't much music we've listened to together.

In fact, when I talk to anyone about music, the result is often a mutual "Hm, never heard of them" followed by non-interest.

Music discovery is done independently and I don't usually want to get into other people's bands. I guess it used to be more social. I'm a late millennial, almost Gen Z. For me music is personal and not social. I listen to a lot of video game soundtracks.

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

#107

Post by mark_undoio »

pilaf wrote: post #62
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…

> Iomega Zip Drives Were those ever open to manufacturing by companies other than Iomega? I don't know much about the history of Iomega Zip Drives, but I find it interesting that in Japan MO Drives [1] were the winning format for that storage capacity bracket, and MO disks and drives were manufactured by a number of companies, much like floppy disks, not just one. I wonder why the same didn't happen in the West. 1: h…

It felt like a shame MD Data [1] didn't catch on - but with existing MO formats out there maybe there was no point.

I was also reminded today of Floptical [2] drives, which I vaguely remember hearing about (but didn't catch on either).

Finally, there is my personal niche favourite, DataPlay [3], which were just so small and cute.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Data [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floptical [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataPlay

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

#108

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

jwells89 wrote: post #33
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…

SD cards would be nice. Opus at 128 kbps is perfectly listenable (transparent for me) and 9 times smaller than PCM audio, so if you only need PC compatibility, you can burn data disks full of Opus.

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

#109

Post by [deleted] »

prmoustache wrote: post #94
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…

As teenagers used to record mixtapes of music we likes to people we liked/love. Nowadays people just tag other on social medias or send links in private messages. I wonder if some still take the time to curate / prepare special things the same way we did.

[deleted]

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

#110

Post by LightBug1 »

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…

I remember being hyped running my first game on a 3.5inch disc on an Atari STE.

I was like, I've arrived. This is the f'ing future!

Even hearing "Iomeda Zip Drive" brings back incredible nostalgia!

Post reply on HN