8 ms·

When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a m

When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like Sloppy Sokoban, Pong Wars, and Descender. Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world. Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppydisk.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd...

NoGravitas 4y ago
I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
- tjr 4y ago
  https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21 https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21
  - gibspaulding 4y ago
    I love that the top comment on this (from 9 years ago) is complaining about the new macbook air not having a CD drive.
    - grapescheesee 4y ago
      I enjoyed both of these parent posts. I love this whole chain.
- bombcar 4y ago
  People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds. Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combination of slow Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most users. No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't be until considerably later that casually transferring files over the Internet would become feasible.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      That's my recollection as well. I was in college around that time and my primary way of saving data to move between computers was a Zip drive disk (since all the computers in the labs had one), then a USB flash drive with maybe 32MB of space (worked fine when moving files between Macs - I don't think the PCs had USB ports at the time). "Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the time.
      - tssva 4y ago
        The PC I purchased in late 1996 had USB 1.0 ports. USB 1.1 came out in 1998 around the same time as the iMac. The new PC I bought in fall 1998 had USB 1.1 ports. Most new PCs at that time were coming with USB ports. Maybe your school just had older PCs.
- duxup 4y ago
  Not quite the same but I hated the removal of the headphone jack. I now own mostly Bluetooth headphones and use an adapter in the rare cases otherwise, I generally don't even notice that it isn't there.
  - taftster 4y ago
    I still hate the removal of the headphone jack. Bluetooth is overrated.
    - mgkimsal 4y ago
      agreed. until bluetooth earphone batteries can go for a few days between recharging, and can quick charge in, say, 15 min or so, I'll keep my wired. I also have AirPod Pros, but I keep my Bose qc20 around and still find myself using them multiple times per month when the APP go low (never get more than around 3 hrs from them).
    - gambiting 4y ago
      The worst thing about it is that I now have to carry 3 pairs of shitty Bluetooth headphones instead of one good pair because switching connected devices is such a pain that this is literally much easier to live with. I hate it. Bring the headphone jack back.
      - jacobr1 4y ago
        AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition between devices is fantastic
        14 4y ago
        Is that just Apple devices or can you connect to non Apple products with AirPods as well?
        4y ago
ido 4y ago
At least of the 3 examples on that webpage it seems like you made remakes of existing simple games (tetris, sokoban, pong) - did you try making new designs of your own and if not, why not?
- doomlaser 4y ago
  Sure. In 2007 I started up a new label at http://doomlaser.com http://doomlaser.com. Made a bunch of indie stuff as that scene was really starting to bloom. Helped build some big franchises like Tap Tap Revenge, the iOS game for The Hunger Games, alongside irreverent stuff like https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364 https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364, and personal stuff like https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits (a game named after the Mac's low-level graphics blitter). Still working in games to this day.
  - protonbob 4y ago
    I just want to say that tap tap revenge was my favorite game as a kid and I have very fond memories of doing 2 player on the same ipod touch. "Gotta get the high score"
  - The_SamminAter 4y ago
    Oh damn, I used to love Tap Tap Revenge. In fact, I still keep an old iPhone around to play it and a few other games from back then.
  - ido 4y ago
    Thanks! I'm not sure why I was downvoted, maybe people thought I was being negative but I really did just ask because I wanted to know. Your stuff looks great!
xeromal 4y ago
Thanks for sharing!
bartread 4y ago
> Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd... Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgic. On a more serious note, did you manage to make a living out of it and - either way - what made you stop?
- doomlaser 4y ago
  Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em! In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making original indie games for PC and launched http://doomlaser.com http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s) Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie, worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc. I switched from building games in my own bespoke C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also curating cool unique indie game work I see at https://twitter.com/Doomlaser https://twitter.com/Doomlaser btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give Descender a try, Name: test Registration #: SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034
dpedu 4y ago
Oh hey I remember playing Sloppy Sokoban.
makeitdouble 4y ago
> Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world. “The last person standing” is self-proclaimed, and even on quick search [0] there are other floppy disk makers, just not in the US and not answering magazine interviews. In particular Hitachi-Maxxel was outsourcing floppy disk to a chinese maker, and I’d expect that company to still be producing, but just not to the international market. [0] https://www.indiamart.com/gagan-polymers/ https://www.indiamart.com/gagan-polymers/
- Tor3 4y ago
  I could buy 3.5" floppies in a Japanese supermarket just a few years ago. Heck, I could buy cassette tape as well.. and I did! :-)

NoGravitas 4y ago

I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.

tjr 4y ago
https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21 https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21
- gibspaulding 4y ago
  I love that the top comment on this (from 9 years ago) is complaining about the new macbook air not having a CD drive.
  - grapescheesee 4y ago
    I enjoyed both of these parent posts. I love this whole chain.
bombcar 4y ago
People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds. Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
- duskwuff 4y ago
  > the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport. I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combination of slow Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most users. No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't be until considerably later that casually transferring files over the Internet would become feasible.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    That's my recollection as well. I was in college around that time and my primary way of saving data to move between computers was a Zip drive disk (since all the computers in the labs had one), then a USB flash drive with maybe 32MB of space (worked fine when moving files between Macs - I don't think the PCs had USB ports at the time). "Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the time.
    - tssva 4y ago
      The PC I purchased in late 1996 had USB 1.0 ports. USB 1.1 came out in 1998 around the same time as the iMac. The new PC I bought in fall 1998 had USB 1.1 ports. Most new PCs at that time were coming with USB ports. Maybe your school just had older PCs.
duxup 4y ago
Not quite the same but I hated the removal of the headphone jack. I now own mostly Bluetooth headphones and use an adapter in the rare cases otherwise, I generally don't even notice that it isn't there.
- taftster 4y ago
  I still hate the removal of the headphone jack. Bluetooth is overrated.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    agreed. until bluetooth earphone batteries can go for a few days between recharging, and can quick charge in, say, 15 min or so, I'll keep my wired. I also have AirPod Pros, but I keep my Bose qc20 around and still find myself using them multiple times per month when the APP go low (never get more than around 3 hrs from them).
  - gambiting 4y ago
    The worst thing about it is that I now have to carry 3 pairs of shitty Bluetooth headphones instead of one good pair because switching connected devices is such a pain that this is literally much easier to live with. I hate it. Bring the headphone jack back.
    - jacobr1 4y ago
      AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition between devices is fantastic
      - 14 4y ago
        Is that just Apple devices or can you connect to non Apple products with AirPods as well?
        4y ago

ido 4y ago

At least of the 3 examples on that webpage it seems like you made remakes of existing simple games (tetris, sokoban, pong) - did you try making new designs of your own and if not, why not?

doomlaser 4y ago
Sure. In 2007 I started up a new label at http://doomlaser.com http://doomlaser.com. Made a bunch of indie stuff as that scene was really starting to bloom. Helped build some big franchises like Tap Tap Revenge, the iOS game for The Hunger Games, alongside irreverent stuff like https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364 https://kotaku.com/ultimate-shovelware-shit-game-5032364, and personal stuff like https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits https://doomlaser.itch.io/standardbits (a game named after the Mac's low-level graphics blitter). Still working in games to this day.
- protonbob 4y ago
  I just want to say that tap tap revenge was my favorite game as a kid and I have very fond memories of doing 2 player on the same ipod touch. "Gotta get the high score"
- The_SamminAter 4y ago
  Oh damn, I used to love Tap Tap Revenge. In fact, I still keep an old iPhone around to play it and a few other games from back then.
- ido 4y ago
  Thanks! I'm not sure why I was downvoted, maybe people thought I was being negative but I really did just ask because I wanted to know. Your stuff looks great!

xeromal 4y ago

Thanks for sharing!

bartread 4y ago

> Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd... Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgic. On a more serious note, did you manage to make a living out of it and - either way - what made you stop?

doomlaser 4y ago
Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em! In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making original indie games for PC and launched http://doomlaser.com http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s) Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie, worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc. I switched from building games in my own bespoke C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also curating cool unique indie game work I see at https://twitter.com/Doomlaser https://twitter.com/Doomlaser btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give Descender a try, Name: test Registration #: SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034

dpedu 4y ago

Oh hey I remember playing Sloppy Sokoban.

makeitdouble 4y ago

> Crazy to think that now there's just one disk supplier hanging on to a bulk order of floppies, supplying the whole world. “The last person standing” is self-proclaimed, and even on quick search [0] there are other floppy disk makers, just not in the US and not answering magazine interviews. In particular Hitachi-Maxxel was outsourcing floppy disk to a chinese maker, and I’d expect that company to still be producing, but just not to the international market. [0] https://www.indiamart.com/gagan-polymers/ https://www.indiamart.com/gagan-polymers/

Tor3 4y ago
I could buy 3.5" floppies in a Japanese supermarket just a few years ago. Heck, I could buy cassette tape as well.. and I did! :-)