Comment by bartread
6 hours ago
There was a time when, for me at least, the 3.5 inch floppy seemed like the pinnacle of portable storage technology, especially as compared to the cassettes and 5.25 inch floppies I’d been used to.
I made regular use of 3.5 inch disks as portable storage up until, if you can believe it, 2000 when I mostly switched to Zip disks and, occasionally, CDRs. I never found CDRWs that useful.
Writable CD storage was always a bit of a faff to use though, whereas Zip disks behave exactly like floppies, only a lot bigger.
Fast forward to 2002 when I first got home broadband, and it just became easier to simply transfer files directly over the internet rather than toting disks around.
Not long after that cheap USB sticks started to get usefully large but, really, I’ve barely used them in 20-odd years.
It’s funny how, once floppies became too small for most practical uses - even though I’d used them exclusively for 10 years - I didn’t spend much time with anything else before jumping to just relying on the network for file sharing, syncing, and transfers.
Very occasionally I do still use them today: I’ve got an old Korg Trinity synth that uses 3.5 inch floppies for storage, and I’ve got a minty fresh box of them still hanging around in my office. I’ve also got an Amiga 1200 that uses DD as opposed to HD floppies.
The 1200 is a little weird in that it can also use HD floppies.
Whoa, wait, what? It can? I did not know that. Back in the day I had an A500, and only bought the 1200 decades later. Had no idea it would accept HD floppies. TIL. Thank you!
It can't. The GP is mistaken.
The stock A1200 floppy drive cannot read/write HD disks, though you can format most HD disks as DD and physically use them as DD (depending on the brand of floppy disk; back in the late 1990s I used to buy HD floppies because they were the only ones I could easily get, and they were cheaply made and weren't all that reliable on the Amiga, but became more reliable when formatted as HD in an HD floppy drive)
This remains true for the A1200s sold by Escom, which used deliberately downgraded PC HD floppy drives. Still can't read/write HD, and can't easily modify these rare models downgraded drives to support HD.
The easiest and best way to read/write HD floppies is to either buy an external HD floppy drive, available for any Amiga though I believe you'll need Workbench 2.0 or later for it to work, or buy an A4000 or A4000T, the only models of Amiga with a native HD floppy drive.
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I thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc like that. But, too little too late for too much money.
But conceptually, haptically, optically...phenomenally!
Yeah, it's funny they never really took off as a data storage format the way zip disks and CDs did.
To me a MiniDisc would have been far better than a Zip disk but I never encountered MiniDisc used in that context. Certainly, whereas all the machines in the computer lab during my masters had Zip drives and floppy drives, making Zip the logical choice for my home PC, I don't ever remember seeing a PC with a built-in MiniDisc drive anywhere at all - not even in computer shops.
Shame really. I'm sure they probably existed but maybe rarely enough that they'd classify as oddware? (HT to LGR for that piece of terminology.)
I was a big MiniDisc fan. They were like digital cassette tapes. I could record from the radio, trim out the DJ, re-order the tracks, and give them titles. Looking back, it was all a bit tedious to do on the player/recorder itself, but paired with modern software and a reader for the PC, I'm sure it would be outstanding.