101–105 of 105 posts
up until mid 90s it was floppies, then since mid 90s it was CDR
it's like saying minidiscs dominated the 90s, which would be as stupid
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Unfortunately, I never got around to using it! I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose. That said, it's not too late... I still have my Amiga system in storage, and a VHS recorder.
>I bought it with high hopes, but my Zip disks turned out to be so convenient and spacious that the VHS-backup need never arose. It's good to hear, in retrospect, that you were able to use a storage medium that did not even exist when Amiga were discontinued. Which type of interface for the Zip drive works with it? (It occurs to me that Zip disks presumably offer the great virtue, otherwise absent as I understand it…
However, since the Zip disks were formatted with an Amiga file system – I used PFS3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_File_System) – they couldn't be used with a PC.
I'm curious whether the data is still readable, after 30 years...
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Zip disks continued in their niche until USB sticks were large enough and reliable enough - because of that ability to use them as a disk - there were some packages that claimed to turn a CD-RW (or even a CD-R using append) into something that pretended to be editable, but they weren't great. Macs did much better with removable drives for years since the users were used to "ejecting" the disk instead of just pulling…
Back around 1999 I tested some patches from Linux kernel hacker Jens Axboe that added packet writing support. This enabled DVD+RW discs to look like normal drives and you didn't have to make an ISO image and burn it. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.1/cdrom/packet-writing.ht... https://reactivated.net/software/packetwriting/ And in my googling for those links I find that Jens is still the block device maintainer an…
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The iMac certainly accelerated the adoption curve. There were USB ports on other PCs, but since they also had normal (at the time) ports, no PC users were going out and buying all-new USB peripherals. Apple's decision to leave out all the other ports meant that a bunch of folks were forced to buy new USB peripherals (and/or adapters), and gave peripheral manufacturers a dedicated market for USB
I don't but this. The first 2 generations of iPod didn't even have USB connectors, only FireWire, which was a PITA as most PCs had a USB connection by that time but FireWire wasn't common as opposed to Mac.
By the time the iPod came around, Apple had adopted FireWire to handle devices that USB's then-limited bandwidth couldn't really support. USB peripherals like mouse/keyboards were already pretty widespread by then.
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> but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.
I did some more digging to find out that the infamous BSOD demo with Bill Gates on stage was meant to show off plug and play on Windows 98. It was caused by a USB scanner. This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac. https://youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84