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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)

#141

Post by nine_k »

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 used a ton of floppies since mid-1980s and until early 2000s. The names I actively associate with floppies in my visual memory are BASF, TDK, Maxell, and Sony. I did have the occasional 3M floppy, but these were somehow rare.

OTOH 3M easily evokes images of all things adhesive.

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

#142

Post by Rinzler89 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #102
francescovv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

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

Wait, seriously? iPhones still don't support Bluetooth file transfers? I knew this was the case with the first iPhone but I just accepted that's a limitation from the OS being still an early release of a brand new product with limited functionality, I wouldn't have expect this to be the case after 15 years.

Anyway, I'm still baffled we never got a standardized Wi-Fi file transfer protocol, like with Bluetooth but at wi-fi speeds.

Oh right, nevermind, Apple wouldn't have supported anyway versus their own proprietary one that only works on Apple devices.

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

#143

Post by jhallenworld »

Albums released on floppy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRm2_Uy_7bk

Sony invented the 3.5" floppy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djsyVgTGaRk

I recently went through my large box of old 3.5" disks and discovered that most of them are failing. The older 5 1/4" disks seem better, maybe because the density is lower.

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

#144

Post by herodoturtle »

8A51C wrote: post #119
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…

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 somet…

Fellow pocket disk pirate here, loved reading this. We used to spray paint our discs with makeshift stencils to get a camo look (a bit like that one laptop prep scene in Hackers ‘95). Mostly used to collect / trade our .BAS files and the odd bit of saucy content from BBS.

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

#145

Post by dockd »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #142
GuB-42 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

>Bluetooth can work, but it is slow as hell, and Apple doesn't support it. Wait, seriously? iPhones still don't support Bluetooth file transfers? I knew this was the case with the first iPhone but I just accepted that's a limitation from the OS being still an early release of a brand new product with limited functionality, I wouldn't have expect this to be the case after 15 years. Anyway, I'm still baffled we never g…

You first have to get a file from your iOS app. Good luck with that.

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

#146

Post by kijin »

jmclnx wrote: post #117
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…

> 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 Thi…

Not only that, but it's hard to buy small flash drives. The smallest I can find in retail stores around me are in the 16-32GB range, which feels like a total waste when all I need is a few hundred MB (i.e. just beyond the email attachment limit).

Smaller flash drives are available online, in bulk, of course, but they're not much cheaper. I guess the cost of flash becomes a negligible part of the total price at the single-digit GB range these days.

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

#147

Post by kijin »

nradov wrote: post #135
mrWiz wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way it generally works IME is that if I want someone's data I better have my own thumb drive to get it, and if somebody wants mine they better have their own.

You've got to be kidding. There's no way I'm going to plug someone else's thumb drive into my computer. Who knows what kind of malware it could be carrying, like having unprotected sex with a random stranger.

Is it any different when you receive a zip file by email? It could very well have been crafted to exploit a backdoor in your compression program.

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

#148

Post by sandyarmstrong »

everfrustrated wrote: post #81
francescovv wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

On Android builtin as Share -> Quick Share/Nearby share Available since Android 6 (c.2015)

Have you tried it? It's horribly slow.

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

#149

Post by selestify »

yxwvut wrote: post #134
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 think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.

Do you have any sources I can use to dispel this myth the next time I see it?

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

#150

Post by ryandrake »

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…

I recently had to have a non-technical person send me a very large file, and encountered this. There really is no good universal way to do this, even here in 2024! File is too big for E-mail, ftp is too big a technical hurdle for the guy. Dropbox requires accounts and sharing and all sorts of access shit for him to figure out. I ended up enabling WebDAV on an existing web server I have admin access to, and luckily he's on MacOS which makes it relatively straightforward to write a file to WebDAV. If he were on Windows I have no idea what I'd ask him to do, since I tried for 20 minutes to figure out how to actually connect to a WebDAV folder in read-write mode and Microsoft thwarted me at every turn.

It's pretty shocking that we don't have a dead-simple cross-platform "send a file to someone over the Internet" solution that doesn't involve cloud servers and accounts and downloading apps.

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