Gregory's ServerDespite the 3.5" Magneto-Optical format's many advantages - A much larger, more reliable and resilient storage, bright backlight, and a high-resolution active matrix colour screen - it still failed to make inroads against sales of the older ubiquitous greyscale 3.5" floppy disk.
 67 comments
  @drazraeltod @NanoRaptor Double points if it makes floppy drive noises every time you switch pages!   @drazraeltod @Cal @NanoRaptor If anyone makes one of those for a reasonsble price, count me in! BTW: Actually, when I first saw the images above, I expected it to be a floppy emulator where you can switch virtual disks on the display…   @NanoRaptor is this your design? I am in love with floppy with e-ink display that show their content for some sort of retrofuturistic fiction   @thatmanmatt @NanoRaptor it was upside down when you inserted them, but upside up in your classifiers.  @thatmanmatt The label is read when they're standing slider-down in the tray, not when you're about to insert them. FITE ME 😇 @NanoRaptor You joke, but the Franklin REX did "WtF" in PCMCIA form-factor, display spanning much of one flat side. :-)  @lkngrrr @NanoRaptor ChatGPT is just too mechanical and ugly. This is proper hand-crafted artisanal corruption of history.  @NanoRaptor while it was briefly very popular, the Zip disk was relatively flash in the pan as it fell out of use, some citing its reliance on NTSC artifacting for color  @NanoRaptor What most astounds me about these is your ability to match original photos’ noise. Or is it layered after the fact like Netflix’s film grain? @command_tab A little of either/both depending on the source. With my iPhone 7's rubbish camera though, a little judicious use of Filter Gallery->Spatter gives just the right edge noise. @iama @NanoRaptor Lexar made some flash drives with a bar graph showing utilization - https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lexar-jumpdrive-m10-secure-64gb  @NanoRaptor But no. (the MD players are MO drives with 150ish MB)  @mwfc @NanoRaptor They thought they figured it out and came up with Blu-ray, beating the HDDVD. Unfortunately they're still greedy so once again it had no chance against even USB sticks in anything but a specific market. So it became a niche product once more (not as hard as last time, but still…). @Natanox @mwfc @NanoRaptor I have a thumbnail sized USB flash drive, and it looks 10 GB more than double layer Blu-ray disk so of course they can't compete with that if people have a PC with USB @Helgi @mwfc @NanoRaptor Nowadays, yeah. There would've been potential for more though, the licensing costs of those discs just weren't worth it. @Natanox @mwfc @NanoRaptor Sony just made use of those disks in their own Playstation, sometimes people can't just download 100 Gb of a game with their slow internet connection @Natanox  @uint8_t@chaos.social @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social I've had occasional thoughts of making something sort of like Amazon's Snowball, and that is one of the things its e-ink display would do. (tl;dr if you haven't heard of the snowball before, a drive in a small impact hardened box with USB, WiFi, and Ethernet connectivity, and a small display for a mailing label; for sending files to our receiving files from Amazon. Pick up in mail, transfer files, drop back in the mail.) @NanoRaptor when I was about 11 years old I thought I was going to become rich by building this!  That would be more that useful today, perhaps with an SSD or USB storage device 🙂  @NanoRaptor  @NanoRaptor it was the battery draw and the restrictive licensing to OEM's that killed it. Also, some of the early models would randomly drop data. Say what you will about the floppy, it was robust and it filled the need most had.  @NanoRaptor I remember some early (very chunky) external hard drives had a little LCD display showing how full they were, like a battery bar graph. @NanoRaptor so the 120 in LS-120 described the resolution of 120P. That makes so much more sense now! @Salvo @NanoRaptor 1.4 MB floppies were supposedly HD, but they just put a 540p screen on each side and said it was "interlaced" @NanoRaptor eInk floppies just had a nice tactile readability to them, they should have never added the backlight  @NanoRaptor Would really love a portable SSD with an e-Ink display that you can use as a label or a file listing of everything on the drive. Dockcase stuff kinda does this but only while it's plugged in which defeats the point a little.   @NanoRaptor @Unixbigot I checked my box in the basement but all I got are the e-paper kind and none of the displays seem to work any more. @NanoRaptor@bitbang.social it was all due to battery life – the MO ones had cloud-based batteries and the subscription was too expensive  @NanoRaptor this is fake right? A floppy with high res screen and battery? Seems anachronically  @saxnot @NanoRaptor What I love is the fact that the battery was charged by a small generator powered by the motor in drive, it was quite cool tech back then.  LB: I'm currently fighting inside my own head, trying to figure out a justification for the existence of these in the modern world. Imagine a USB drive that had an e-ink screen so you could see what was on it without having to plug it in? I'd love that.  @DJDarren My question is how did these things exist and yet we still had to suffer from ZIP Drives. @NanoRaptor in the 90s, I had a 230MB MO drive and a few packets of disks, but none of them had a display on it, never mind colour and backlit! I must have been conned. In a business environment, the 5.25" MOs and the variant WORMs had quite a market as an archiving solution, huge jukeboxes were built before HDD capacities overtook them.  @NanoRaptor The CH logo on ordinary floppy disks stands for "CHunky video memory layout" - a prerequisite for fast action games like Doom. @NanoRaptor Oh man. Now I'm imaging someone making one of these. Or maybe a 3.5" floppy form factor so you can build a home cluster in an old floppy disk storage box. @mondanzo @NanoRaptor the 5.25 vector disk screens were fragile and had to be protected from insertion, so they only worked "upside down". After that, it stuck   |
@NanoRaptor I'd buy a decent E-Book-Reader in 3.5" floppy design! :D
"slide to switch pages!"