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The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
61–70 of 228 posts
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#62I 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.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#63At the late stage Sony floppies were better quality and they had better data retention. No bad sectors ever.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world. As I grow older, I've learned that I only care about this with music. I've lost access to number of tv shows and movies over time, but never really batted an eye after I'v…
I find it particularly weird as a DJ that DJs under about 40 seem to have no problem with the idea of just streaming their entire setlist from a CDN, and in fact think I'm very weird and old fashioned for carrying around a thumb drive. (Wait til they see the actual vinyl crate I sometimes use...)
I was heavily-involved with an off-grid, pop-up DJ event at a race a few weeks ago.
We didn't have a plan. I mean: We hoped to make people (race fans, in a somewhat debaucherous campground/festival environment) happy, and we hoped that the music we brought with us would make them happy, but that was all of the planning we did on that end.
I was able to keep our Internet connection standing up and working very well all week (without using Starlink, which it seems isn't quite easily-rentable yet), which was a big improvement over the previous year when our bandwidth dropped to around zero once the great heaping throngs of spectators broadly showed up for the main race.
And that was a very good thing, because these flagrant drunks loved singing.
Our actual-DJ-dude was able to download tracks to sing as-requested. And it was a lot of work, but it was fun for everyone and fit the vibe. I'm glad we had the network available to let this happen.
We left the crates of vinyl at the DJ's place, since there wasn't room to transport it. And we were prepped for regular-ass DJing of just about any genre with the MP3s and FLACs we brought with us (via CDJs), but we did not anticipate that we would be doing karaoke (which is obviously a very different world from mixing jungle).
But back to your point: We were able to explore karaoke because we had good Internet, and I'm glad we were able to get there, but we also had a plethora of other options that existed on physical media that we could actually-touch.
I can't imagine showing up to a DJ gig without...any music at all, and just trusting that the greater network would behave itself for the duration and allow clean streaming to happen.
That just seems like madness to me, since the Internet sometimes fails -- and it seems to prefer failing when there's an unusual influx of people in a locality. It is unfathomable to me that someone would rely on having a fat-enough network connection to keep people moving in a place where there is a large crowd.
(But yet: People actually do that?)
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#65I 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…
> 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 "security". So I had to wait for cell signal to come back and send the file via whatsapp. To someone standing right in front of me.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#66Article says 3M exited floppies because it was retail oriented very low margin business. But how is Scotch Tape not that too?
Scale and complexity. Floppies were dying. And it might be that so was some equipment for making them. Tape is steady state demand with likely small but clear margin and demand also in future. So quite different future and production scenario.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stuff like this makes me think, but with a different view looking back than when I lived through it. For example, the hole punch thing. 10 year old me would have never pondered this, but... was there someone at Stedmans' HQ, wondering why there was an 18% uptick in hole-punch sales? Some old, crusty and cantankerous beatnik squirreled away, staring at sales charts and projections, perplexed as to why? How many househ…
A lot of houses used paper records and folders to store them in. The folders would often use ring binds that required the papers to be hole punched.
Sure, agree completely, although I wonder why you believe I may not know that? Yet lots of houses bought pre-punched paper, or just didn't use ring binders.
The 18% is just a throw out number, and the concept is a joke, yet... I'm sure there was some increase in hole punch purchases.
Because...
I bought one as a kid, after getting tired of cutting a ragged hole with scissors.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#68Earlier 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…
Huh, I wonder what the problem was. I semi-regularly send files between my Windows laptop and my Android phone. I do recall never being able to get that functionality working properly with a Mac though.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#69Back in those days, getting your hands on a foil-wrapped 10-pack of 3M (DS) HD floppy disks was the true feeling of happiness... :D
Heck, even five would be pretty nice.
Re: The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
#70> 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?
Nerdy but - last Xmas 3M got hundreds of dollars of my family money.
I got speed tape, ruby tape, silicone fiberglass hi-low temp tape. I don't really need them, I admire the engineering and I'm kinda afraid to use these tapes given how much they cost.
But yeah, the 3M brand = adhesives in my household.