The last person standing in the floppy disk business
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The last person standing in the floppy disk business
1–10 of 363 posts
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#2I found some floppy disks in my house from when I was a kid last year. I plugged them into a reader I had and they still worked. I didn't need them so I sold them on eBay and someone bought them and the reader.
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#3> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-drive with an IDE floppy drive interface. A quick Google search revealed that someone already builds this!
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#4When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like Sloppy Sokoban, Pong Wars, and Descender.
Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world.
Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#5Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#6When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like S…
I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#7> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-dri…
Yeah, this kind of thing is not exactly uncommon in the retrocomputing scene, though it's often an SD card rather than a USB drive.
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#811 years old me was afraid about putting some liquid paper on a floppy disk label to write my name could damage the computer.
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#9> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-dri…
You can get floppy emulators on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.ca/Emulator-SFR1M44-U100-Install-Industri...
Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business
#10Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.
And nothing makes your heart sink faster than the rhythmic sound of trying over and over to read the same bad disk.