S
Anyway, back to the original topic: I found a DOS floppy circa 1994 that my wife had used to save some family tree research on, and this new $25 USB-C floppy drive + my mac + an app called “GEDCOM Navigator” means that we can read and enjoy all this old family tree data!
(“we” meaning “cathy”)
@culturednyc No, I knew of it as a board you could theoretically plug into a NeXT cube but my two NeXT cubes never had anything that fancy plugged into them
@discobeez I don’t remember hearing that term but it makes sense!
Of course THIS is still my favourite removable storage. 256 Megabytes, baby! Enough room for the entire OS, AND all your apps AND your home directory! You’d visit a diskless NeXT cube in a lab and boot your entire environment!
Well that was the plan, anyway, until most network admins said “NO”
@fgraver I have some NeXT magneto-optical disks and I suspect there are no functioning MO drives left anywhere. (they attracted dust at an alarming rate.)
@rebeld I’M THINKING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW
@fgraver I recall that when the 3-1/2” floppy came along, people said you could put it in your shirt pocket. So of course someone immediately made a shirt with a 5-1/4” pocket too.
I’m not really sure if you can consider the 2026 World Cup a success if it didn’t have its own Official Floppy Disk.
Fuji is probably bragging that they’re still the official World Cup floppy until a challenger comes along.
wait, what? 2” floppies? Not 3-1/2”? 2”?
yes I was persuaded in 1988 by a really good deal on a Zenith laptop that used these revolutionary 2” floppies. Obviously the future.
Official floppy disk of the 1990 World Cup!
(I didn’t notice what the official floppy of this year’s world cup is.)
will the new floppy drive read ancient Mac floppies which back in the day used an unusual variable-speed-of-rotation encoding?
no
OK what about those 2.88 Meg high-density floppies that were briefly all the rage
no
OK but you still own an entire box of rare, unused 2” floppies from 1985?
yes
1988: NeXT Cube introduced. No floppy drive. Pundits outraged. I quietly smile.
1998: iMac introduced. No floppy drive. More outrage. I continue to smile. Who needs that old technology? Let’s move on!
2026: Um, I just purchased a floppy drive.