Off Topic, feeling silly this evening....

[TennesseeTony]

What brands of floppy discs do you remember? 5.25" or 3.5"

The oldest I remember is Verbatim. 5.25"

There was one that advertised "an elephant never forgets." Was that Verbatim? 5.25"

Also I have some Imation disk under my desk collecting dust, naturally. 3.5"

Sony. Sony made floppies. 3.5"

Maxell? 3.5" if so.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Zip disks! Iomega. 100MB. Fragile. Hardly ever worked right for me.

What was the other high capacity floppy, LS? LS-120 or was it LS-250? Never had one of those. Never had one but ex-father-in-law did.

 

[TennesseeTony]

Single side.

Double sided.

LOL.

How far we have come!!!

 

[StefanR5R]

I was shown some already obsolete 8" floppy disks when I was apprentice.

5 1/4" floppy disks of friends' C64s got an extra notch cut with scissors, so that they could be used double-sided.

Myself, I only started at 3.5" not-so-floppy-anymore disks. The ones on my shelf here are from Fuji Film mostly, some Verbatim, a box of Mitsubishi's, and several noname white-box floppys.

Also got a couple of 270 MB removable harddisk cartridges from SyQuest, for use in respective 3.5" SCSI drives. My notes on them say I last wrote them in 1998 and 2001... that's almost like yesterday.

 

[Kiska]

I have these things called tape units each can store about 100GB of data they were called LTO

 

[TennesseeTony]

Fuji and Mitsubishi's...how could I have forgotten them? SyQuest is familiar too. Thanks.

 

[TennesseeTony]

DENNISON

Dennison is the "elephants never forget" brand.....

 

[StefanR5R]

Somewhat off topic even in this off-topic thread: Just one or two years ago, I actually bought a pack of already horribly outdated, horribly proprietary Sony Minidisks. That was because I found a Sony Lissa stereo system. The Lissa consists of receiver, CD player, and minidisk player, which are not connected with analogue line audio, but through iLink a.k.a. FireWire a.k.a. IEEE 1394. My long-term plan with this stereo was to connect it with the Linux PC through IEEE 1394 as well, and use the PC for control and ideally also for audio I/O.

(That plan relied on having some periods of boredom during which I could hack on this thing. But these days, when I am bored, that's virtually always only when I am also tired after work, and no longer capable of thinking as straight as required to put such high-flying plans into practice.)

 

[StefanR5R]

I have these things called tape units each can store about 100GB of data they were called LTO

I wonder how much fitted on audio cassette tapes that were used on home computers. (OK, wikipedia says 100 kB, or 10 times as much with Turbo Tape.)

I still vaguely remember some radio shows in which they broadcast software that you could record and then load on your computer.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

You kids and your fancy new toys. Punch cards and tape got us into space and back.

 

[StefanR5R]

Yeah, my parents had fun getting stacks of punch cards into disorder when they were university students...

 

[Ken g6]

Back in college, I managed to fit most of SETI@Home on one bootable 3.5" floppy, and all of it on two.

I used 5.25" disks on a Commodore 128, but never DC.

 

[Orange Kid]

Back in college, I managed to fit most of SETI@Home on one bootable 3.5" floppy, and all of it on two.

I used 5.25" disks on a Commodore 128, but never DC.

Someone here had a Linux disto with seti on one disk. I'll eventually think of it. mabe viztech did it or one of the other Iowa guy's.

Went through all my floppies a while back, copied them over to DVD

 

[GLeeM]

In 1986 I did CAD on a proprietary system that used, I think, 12" floppies. They were moving to new **286 systems with numeric co-processors added, IBM of course, with AutoCAD and Versacad. (can't remember the first two numbers ??286)

At work in early 2000s we finally ran out of punch cards that we used as note cards for ~30 years. We were so used to those cards they were indispensable so we had special ones made at a print shop.

Kinda disappointed, I thought this was going to be a neff thread, neff, neff, neff. (it's been so long, am I spelling neff right?)

 

[sdifox]

Maxcell, Dyson, Koi, BASF, 3M, IBM, Memorex

 

[sdifox]

Somewhat off topic even in this off-topic thread: Just one or two years ago, I actually bought a pack of already horribly outdated, horribly proprietary Sony Minidisks. That was because I found a Sony Lissa stereo system. The Lissa consists of receiver, CD player, and minidisk player, which are not connected with analogue line audio, but through iLink a.k.a. FireWire a.k.a. IEEE 1394. My long-term plan with this stereo was to connect it with the Linux PC through IEEE 1394 as well, and use the PC for control and ideally also for audio I/O.

(That plan relied on having some periods of boredom during which I could hack on this thing. But these days, when I am bored, that's virtually always only when I am also tired after work, and no longer capable of thinking as straight as required to put such high-flying plans into practice.)

lulz I have a MD deck, MD walkman and around 200 MDs.

 

[Smoke]

My 1st Computer.

Green Screen, Dow Jones News Retrieval Service, Printed Stock Charts every night for the next day trading.

On a trip to the left coast, this computer and printer with tractor feed paper completely filled the trunk of my car. We (wife+2 kids) put all our "stuff" in a car topper.

Those were the days!

 

[VirtualLarry]

You guys forgot about "Nashua" floppy disks. (5.25", I think.)

I had an MO (Magneto-optical) drive. It was kind of like the early predecessor of CD-RW.

The ones I had held like 100 or 120MB, they were roughly the same size as a 3.5" floppy diskette, but were slightly thicker, with a metal sliding sleeve on the center bottom.

They used a laser beam for reading, and then heated up the track and used a magnetic head to swap the substrate / phase-change layer around, from dull to shiny and vice-versa.

Only, I think it was capable of direct-overwrite, which CD-RW is not.

I also think that the sectors were concentric, with tracks, rather than the single long spiral of CD-RW.

Really interesting technology, and really durable.

 

[sdifox]

You guys forgot about "Nashua" floppy disks. (5.25", I think.)

I had an MO (Magneto-optical) drive. It was kind of like the early predecessor of CD-RW.

The ones I had held like 100 or 120MB, they were roughly the same size as a 3.5" floppy diskette, but were slightly thicker, with a metal sliding sleeve on the center bottom.

They used a laser beam for reading, and then heated up the track and used a magnetic head to swap the substrate / phase-change layer around, from dull to shiny and vice-versa.

Only, I think it was capable of direct-overwrite, which CD-RW is not.

I also think that the sectors were concentric, with tracks, rather than the single long spiral of CD-RW.

Really interesting technology, and really durable.

oops forgot Nashua

 

[iwajabitw]

Remember BASF tapes for sure. I think a Commodor 64 or TSR 80? 880? was one of my first. Until I played on a color Apple2e trying to catch that carrot with a bunny....I think that was 6th grade in 85 or so...Love the nostalgia, guys!!!!

 

[iwajabitw]

On an off topic note, just listened to Roger Waters new CD....its free on Prime....not my cup of tea...as much as I love his work...

 

[TennesseeTony]

BASF! Nashua! And just received a DVD of 'The Wall' since I'm too lazy to find a working VHS player.

Seems we're a bunch of "old" farts. Kids and their phones, and their PS9's and Xbox 1440's these days....

 

[sdifox]

BASF! Nashua! And just received a DVD of 'The Wall' since I'm too lazy to find a working VHS player.

Seems we're a bunch of "old" farts. Kids and their phones, and their PS9's and Xbox 1440's these days....

BetaMax

 

[Ken g6]

I've heard of VHS recorders that were used to store data, but I've never seen one. Anyone know how much they stored?

I do have an audio tape data recorder for a Commodore 16.

 

[TennesseeTony]

BetaMax, pfft. LaserDisc!

Skip to 1minute mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0aiFza08Gk


Other formats that tried:
DAT digital audio tape
SA-DVD Super audio.
SA-CD
HD-DVD more recently (Sony finally won a format war )