Inventions that are 10 year too late

[silveronsilver]

QPS (the SuperFloppy people) recently manufactured a $200 floppy drive that can fit 32 megabytes onto a regular 1.44Mb floppy.

This is no joke.

They write the sectors really really close together and do on-the-fly compression (like DiskSpace) to achieve this marvellous feat.

Now, if QPS had made this invention 10 years ago, when nobody could afford a CDR drive, and CDRW hadn't even been invented, they would be THE GODS OF STORAGE. People would make shrines to QPS in their homes. BBS'es could archive there warez on QPS formatted 32Mb floppies. Everybody's floppy investment would become 20x valuable overnight.

But today, in this day and age of $100 80-gig drives, $100 24xCDRW drives, 20c CDR's, and 50c CDRW's, nobody has even HEARD of this invention.

How sad it must be for that QPS engineer to realize that his invention came 10 years too late...

 

[HaVoC]

Excellent point. It's still a good invention for those that have a lot of existing floppies. However, the 3.5" floppies are so damn delicate and susceptible to corruption that they are really dangerous for storing important data. I hope this technology has implemented more robust error checking/correction.

Even 6-7 years ago this invention would be major. When I started college in 1996 the CD-RW was still very expensive as were the media.

I think the effort really wasn't put into a better floppy years ago because at the time people probably saw better forms of data storage anyway. Also you have the age-old innovation killer: backwards compatibility.

 

[Gonad the Barbarian]

These drives also support 240MB super disks, the 32MB floppies are just a bonus. This is decent tech and still has place today. It's superior to zip drives and can be more convient than burning a CD.

 

[geno]

$200 can buy you a 24X CDRW drive....why bother with a 3.5 drive?

 

[Ionizer86]

The Segway...since America is so car dependant, it's waaaay too late into the game. They're not going to redesign entire cities for the Segway. Cars will still have to exist...

 

[911paramedic]

The only good reason for a 3.5 is to load my CD drivers, and I hope that changes soon....

 

[McPhreak]

Well, I guess sometimes people need to transport data that's more than 1.4MB (such as an image file) from say work to home and it would be pretty impractical to burn it on a CD. I guess these people are banking that there are a lot of people in this situation.

 

[Burnt]

$200 can buy you a 24X CDRW drive....why bother with a 3.5 drive?


heh, $200 can you get you a 24x scsi cdrw drive!

 

[LongCoolMother]

or a 32x burner

 

[MrCodeDude]

Amen to the Segway.. God, $1500 it is? For a scooter? I can get a Gas Scooter for 1/10 the price.. And the gas scooter is faster.. The Segway can only go like 15mph or so, or at least, I thought it could.
-- mrcodedude

 

[gopunk]

<< Amen to the Segway.. God, $1500 it is? For a scooter? I can get a Gas Scooter for 1/10 the price.. And the gas scooter is faster.. The Segway can only go like 15mph or so, or at least, I thought it could. >>



is the gas scooter dynamically unstable? didn't think so.

 

[sitka]

Battery powered blenders.

 

[eplebnista]

<< Well, I guess sometimes people need to transport data that's more than 1.4MB (such as an image file) from say work to home and it would be pretty impractical to burn it on a CD. I guess these people are banking that there are a lot of people in this situation. >>




There are the so called Pen/Thumb Drives available that could also be used for file transport and cost quite a bit less than $200, unless the files are larger than 128MB. They have the advantage of physical size too, as they are fairly compact and shock resistant.

My $.02,
eplebnista

 

[vegetation]

There's always still a market for the "old" devices. Take Dot Matrix printers. Nobody uses them anymore, so no need for new models, right? Nope, industry still uses them extensively enough because the cost per page of output can't be beaten, as such there are new dot matrix models out all the time. I don't know anything about this new floppy drive, but I'm sure industry would have some kind of purpose for it. 1.44" floppies are dirt cheap, especially if you saved all those AOL diskettes from long ago

 

[PlatinumGold]

also

another advantage to dot matrix is that it is the best technology to print thru carbon forms. that might not seem like a big deal to a high tech firm, but to an old industrial firm that has stacks and stacks of carbon forms already printed up and is reluctant to through them all away, the dot matrix printer is really the only solution.

 

[cavingjan]

There is also something to be said about continuous feed and wide carriage paper. My wide carriage dot matrix printer just died and I was unable to get the repair parts for it and had to scrap it.

 

[guyver01]

<< $200 can buy you a 24X CDRW drive....why bother with a 3.5 drive? >>




because most people don't use the "RW" feature of their CDRW... they only use the "R" feature....

hell... i'm not gonna burn 15meg file to an 800meg CDR.... i use the smaller CDRs...

 

[element]

also the RW feature is slow, only 10X max so far.

 

[geno]

<< also the RW feature is slow, only 10X max so far. >>


I've seen 16x before

 

[FrontlineWarrior]

one invention that is way before its time is the "Jump to Conclusions" Mat. Watch... 50 years. This thing will blow up!!!!!!!

 

[element]

<<

<< also the RW feature is slow, only 10X max so far. >>


I've seen 16x before >>



Got link? I've not seen anything over 10x for RW.