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This format was great initially, but it was hopelessly undersized after around ten years. It was a shame there was never a proper successor. The 1.44 MB double
by cubefox 3y ago
This format was great initially, but it was hopelessly undersized after around ten years. It was a shame there was never a proper successor. The 1.44 MB double density were simply too little after many years, it wasn't even enough for a single DOC file with a few images. This created the situation where for a long time, it was a major pain to exchange small-to-medium sized files. A successor format with 10 to 50 MB capacity would have alleviated a lot of this pain.
There were eventually "Zip disks" with 100 megabytes, but I think those were proprietary Iomega products and rather expensive, so normal PCs didn support them by default. Only when CD recorders became common, there was a replacement for floppy disks. But even these were suboptimal. They required cumbersome special software just to "burn" your CDs, since Windows didn't support them natively for several years. Moreover, it wasn't a format you could arbitrarily read and write data on. So it wasn't possible to just edit a file and save the changes, like on a floppy disk.
And of course USB sticks often weren't a good solution either, since you wouldn't simply give your expensive thumbstick completely away without having to expect it back.
Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments. To send and receive data, the smaller value of the sender/receiver was the bottleneck. (I think even today, Gmail only supports something like 50 megabytes.)
Much later there was the so-called DVD-RAM, which worked similar to a floppy disk (arbitrary read/write), but it wasn't really a "DVD" -- normal DVD drives couldn't read it. So again no standard PCs supported it. I think it was also not exactly cheap, no doubt due to its unnecessarily large capacity of over 4 GB.
Eventually the problem of exchanging files was solved again, after having been temporarily solved in the 80s with the 3.5 inch floppy. The solution today is uploading files to a free cloud provider like Google Drive, sharing the link, and deleting the file afterwards. It only took a few decades.
- bombcar 3y agoThere was the SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk which saw some popularity in Asia. The real problem was the cost - the real key to floppies is you didn't care if you got it back (at the time people used them, very early on they were more pricey). So CDs did eventually replace them for sneakernet, and USB sticks have finally become cheap enough to be disposable.
- networked 3y agoAccording to https://goughlui.com/2013/05/02/tech-flashback-iomega-zip-100-vs-3mimation-superdisk-ls-120-showdown/ https://goughlui.com/2013/05/02/tech-flashback-iomega-zip-10... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggWW67iPgXI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggWW67iPgXI (which shows a comparison table from a contemporary magazine article), the SuperDisk LS-120 was slower than the Iomega Zip. It was a pretty cool idea to make the drive backward-compatible with 3.5" floppies. As a child reading computer magazines I kind of wanted one—or a Zip drive. However, the lower speed combined with launching after Zip (1997 vs. 1994) really explains why the LS-120 did not succeed on par with Zip. According to the video I linked, iMac owners bought USB SuperDisk drives for their regular floppies. (I ended up eventually getting a CD-RW.) What I think might be a bigger shame is that some version of FD32MB (maybe less dense and less slow) did not arrive earlier and as an industry standard. In 2001 it was far too late for it. Here is an article announcing the FD32MB technology: https://www.theregister.com/2000/10/23/32mb_on_a_humble_floppy/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/10/23/32mb_on_a_humble_flop.... The Wikipedia page for the Superdisk also mentions it. Might it have had a chance if it had launched with the SuperDisk LS-120 in 1997? I am not sure. (And how would the reliability have been with mass adoption? Worse than 1.44 MB floppies'? Maybe it was for the better.)
- bombcar 3y agoThere was also the (quite hard to find) 2.88 MB floppies, which actually had software support in the various OSes at the time. LANs themselves had also come down in costs so even ad-hoc computers near each other often had Ethernet or similar, so the demand never really picked up. Those who needed big transfers offsite used Zip (or Jaz, those things died like flies) until CD-Rs became cheap enough. And then Apple killed it all.
- forinti 3y agoOnly once did I encounter a machine with 2.88 drives. It was a DEC machine. But I don't think anybody had the appropriate media.
- chungy 3y agoWriting off the Zip disk as a footnote is incredibly weird to me. They were massively popular and everywhere, especially before CD-Rs got cheap. I probably have more Zip disks in my closet than 3½" floppies.
- mrWiz 3y agoIn my experience you couldn't assume that a person had a Zip drive. My family didn't have one, but given some effort/motivation I'm sure I could have found a way to read a Zip disk I was given.
- rasz 3y agoclick of death killed ZIPs as serious proposition
- cubefox 3y agoWhat was the percentage of PCs sold that came with a Zip drive by default? In Germany it was approximately 0%. So most people didn't have one. It was purely used as an external drive for backup purposes.
- chungy 3y agoThere were a good few years in the late 1990s that it seemed every prebuilt PC in America had them.
- u801e 3y ago> Even emails were not a proper replacement. Initially free providers only supported sending/receiving emails with 1 to 5 MB attachments. Pretty much every ISP provided an email address for each account. Some email clients supported the MIME multipart/partial subtype which allowed for large attachments to be split up amongst multiple emails.