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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)

#111

Post by mauvehaus »

MikusR wrote: post #93
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…

>most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world In the last 50 years world population has doubled. But creator count has increased by orders of magnitude.

Creator count probably hasn't gone up per capita. It's just that that one band I liked from my high school can put all their music on SoundCloud, have an Instagram page and a TikTok and be discoverable to people worldwide instead of selling cds they burned and applied inkjet labels to and selling them to other kids at the same school.

I suspect it's more a matter of everyone being more visible, a helping of Dunning-Kruger, and a dusting of narcissism to choose to be visible to everyone because everyone cares.

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

#112

Post by foobarian »

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.

Kids these days seem to screenrecord youtube videos, and then stitch them together in iMovie/cabcut/other.

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

#113

Post by bombcar »

ssl-3 wrote: post #95
Rinzler89 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh right, my bad. Though around the 2010s IIRC many laptops even on the budget end were being sold with BD reader combo drives.

I held a portable USB3 Blu-Ray reader in my hand once. I could have used it, too, but I could not think of anything I wanted to do with it by that time in 2017 -- seven years ago -- despite my proclivity for making backups of films. BD on a PC has never been common in my world of computing, and by 2017 optical drives in general were becoming very uncommon in everyone's world. It never broadly caught on.

Just at the time Blu-ray would have made sense for computers everything went to downloads. I bought many games that came on CD or DVD but the only ones that ever came on Blu-ray were for console.

And even those are mostly download now.

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

#114

Post by rob74 »

> But you might be wondering, how did 3M make the leap from reel-to-reel tape to floppies? It feels like just as strange a leap as a masking tape company developing reel-to-reel audio tape.

Er... no, it doesn't? If you have experience with one kind of magnetic media, it sounds pretty reasonable that you could leverage that experience to make other kinds of magnetic media too. Actually, "fellow thick-Helvetica enthusiast" BASF did exactly the same: they were very big players in the reel-to-reel tape market too. And, while 3M spun out its magnetic media business as Imation, BASF did the same with EMTEC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMTEC)

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

#115

Post by bombcar »

camtarn wrote: post #104
DeathArrow wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Maybe not SD cards but something similar - Nintendo Switch cartridges are a few GB and seem quite durable.

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

#116

Post by bombcar »

froddd wrote: post #59
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…

Do you own a USB-C thumb drive? … Me neither :-/

I have a thumb drive with usb a on one side and c on the other.

Insanely surprising how useful it is even at places with more networking than the NSA.

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

#117

Post by jmclnx »

ssl-3 wrote: post #44
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 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…

> 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

The only thing is writing to a CD/DVD can be a PITA. To me diskettes were very easy when it came to read and write to physical media.

>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

This I agree with, I have a tough time giving flash drives away for some reason. If one could buy a pack of 10 1gig flash drives for the same price as a box of Diskettes, it would be easier. Right now you can only buy flash drives 1 at a time.

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

#118

Post by throwaway71271 »

bArray wrote: post #103
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…

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

that would be beyond cool!

> Have you documented this somewhere?

not yet, sending the proper commands the endpoints always go stale so I am trying to debug the usb packets send from my pc vs the esp32, but usbpcap is not enough because the thing I send is the same (as far as I can see) as linux/windows, so I am trying to debug it on the wire

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

#119

Post by 8A51C »

ssl-3 wrote: post #44
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 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…

3.5 floppies were the peak of media for me. Built in case, small enough to fit in a pocket, small and light enough to carry a handful around all the time, cheap enough to share freely, tactile. Nostalgia alert, I recall this from my school days, jacket pocket with all my discs in, we would roam around the school looking for empty rooms with computers, then bang; in goes the floppy and I have all my files. Share something with someone? No issue, copy it on a spare and hand it over... CDs didn't fit in a pocket and had an annoying case, though you needed much fewer of them.

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

#120

Post by unsupp0rted »

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…

> most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world

My local 1-hour photo lab clerk has been struggling as well

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