23 Responses:

1. jer says:

   5 years ago at 5:56 pm

   Also, Zip drives, you insensitive fool.

   • jwz says:

     5 years ago at 6:01 pm

     In what way is a zip disk not a floppy disk?

     • ejelly says:

       5 years ago at 6:55 pm

       Ok, but the CDs in caddies (picture no. 8) are stretching it a bit. Not that I mind...

     • winston says:

       5 years ago at 9:13 pm

       They did seem to be different when El Jobso decided to discontinue floppy drives in Macs and replace them with Zip drives, but what would I know? I do know that trying to insert a 3.5 inch floppy disk into a Zip drive is a recipe for grief. Folding a 5.25 inch floppy in half may work, as may folding an 8 inch floppy in half twice. Would that I had known there was no difference.

     • anon3494 says:

       5 years ago at 3:54 pm

       I figure if 3.5" disks are considered floppy, the floodgates are open.
       I guess as long as the media itself is flexible, everything counts. If bending the media causes permanent plastic deformation or cracks, it isn't floppy.
       How far can you bend a laserdisc before it becomes non-viable?

       • jwz says:

         5 years ago at 5:01 pm

         Since the proper name for 3.5" disks is... "floppy disks"... then yes.

         • anon3494 says:

           5 years ago at 2:07 pm

           Since when do we care about official product names, especially those from IBM? There was two whole generations of properly floppy disks before Mitsumi introduced the rigid 3" QuickDisk (floppy not in the name, you'll note).

       • Jack says:

         5 years ago at 1:22 pm

         3.5" floppies are floppies because the disk inside it that the magnetic data is actually stored on is floppy.

         • anon3494 says:

           5 years ago at 2:08 pm

           ZOMG, when did this place turn into slashdot?
           Yes, man, everybody knows this. And hard drive platters are not floppy, because they are hard. So we call them "hard drives."

     • jer says:

       5 years ago at 7:28 pm

       OK, I remember flexible discs as different from inflexible ones. My mistake.

   • Foone says:

     5 years ago at 6:08 pm

     Hi. I made this tumblr.
     I specifically didn't go SUPERSTRICT on the definition, cause there's not a lot of content for it and there's so many ambiguous floppies.

   • MattyJ says:

     5 years ago at 11:45 pm

     Come for the technical posts, stay for the pedantry.

2. eSyr says:

   5 years ago at 6:09 pm

   Isn't there MO/minidisc on https://www.jwz.org/images/scaled/mp4/2017/tumblr_on711dhco01sm9pw2o1_500.mp4 https://www.jwz.org/images/scaled/mp4/2017/tumblr_oycywuh1gn1wfwmujo1_500.mp4 ?

   • njr says:

     5 years ago at 6:24 pm

     Yeah, MO (and MD) were a lot more common in Japan than in the US.

     http://www.obsoletemedia.org/5-25-inch-magneto-optical-disc/5-25-mo-disk-and-3-5-mo-disk-comparison/

     Some also look like they could be a CD in a caddy, which was also once a thing - and don't look all that much different from a 5.25" MD at a first approximation.

     • phuzz says:

       5 years ago at 1:17 am

       We had CD drives that used caddies at my school. They'd glue the caddies shut so we couldn't get our grubby little mitts on the actual CDs.
       I always wanted a SuperDisk. Bigger than a Zip disk (a whole 120MB!), and it could still read floppies too.

     • J. Peterson says:

       5 years ago at 12:21 pm

       The horror. I remember owning a Fujitsu 3.5" MO drive that was a perfect storm of slow and unreliable.

       • njr says:

         5 years ago at 2:24 pm

         Should have remembered I actually documented my own personal history with high-capacity optical and magnetic (mostly external) drives of the 80s and 90s:

         https://www.flickr.com/photos/njr/3667496728/in/album-72157620535093319/

         It does indeed include a caddy-loaded 2x CD-ROM drive, a Fujitsu 3.5" MO drive (which actually I found perfectly reliable) and a Bernoulli!

3. robert_ says:

   5 years ago at 3:22 am

   I bet jwz misses floppy disks.

4. margaret says:

   5 years ago at 6:13 am

   don't forget star wars disks (and how every IT operations person sees themselves getting ready to do a restore).

   
   *I FOUND THE TAPE! I FOUND THE TAPE! I FOUND THE TAPE!
   
   There was only one tape though - I hope that's all there was supposed to be.
   
   I don't know. The wires were hanging out like that when I pulled it out of the tower. Maybe Cassian fucked it up when he fell down. It should still work.

   • jwz says:

     5 years ago at 12:49 pm

     Data storage in the Star Wars galaxy is extremely physical. There have been many articles about this. I'm surprised they didn't have to wear rollerblades while climbing the tower to power-cycle the wifi modem.

     

5. margaret says:

   5 years ago at 11:44 am

   Are there any words that get people more excited than large-scale, long-term data storage? I fucking doubt it.

   truth.

6. Johhny says:

   5 years ago at 5:15 pm

   I've just used this very page to demonstrate to Firefox developers that they use 40 times more CPU than the old Internet Explorer, just to display it with the videos moving.

   I know you don't use the OS on which this happens, and I don't know if you use the browser for which I reported this, even if I am aware that you worked for Netscape, but maybe it's still interesting for you.

   • Johhny says:

     5 years ago at 5:17 pm

     (the link to the bug report is behind my name)