I'm glad media in general are on the way out. Downloading and storing is what I like. Hence my passion for Steam and GOG.com.

snorg wrote:

It always bugged me to no end that back in the day the only option was floppies or CDs. CDs could store a lot of data and eventually became dirt cheap due to economies of scale, but the damn jewel cases were fidgety and fragile as hell, not to mention problems with the disks themselves getting scratched or burning useless coasters on early drives. I would have liked to have seen something that was about the size of a 3.5" floppy but much higher capacity, around 100-250mb (like the Zip, only maybe floptical/magneto optical). The Zip had its own problems and was too little, too late.

3.5" floppies were the perfect size. You could fit them into a smaller system, they could take a bit more abuse than a CD, and they were cheap. In the early days of CDs, you couldn't always count on someone having an optical drive but everyone had a 3.5" floppy.

Now with wireless internet everywhere (or nearly) and optical media on the way out, I'm not sure what the equivalent really is. SD cards? Flash drives? Are we beyond physical media now?

You can have my removable media when you pry it from my cold dead disk drive.

Steam and Gog are nice, but I still want something to be able to archive things to long-term. Not to mention the internet/cloud isn't always available. I've thought about picking up a floptical drive for certain things since they have a really long shelf life, but I'm not sure how much longer media is going to be made for them, plus the media is really expensive. SD or Flash probably makes more sense these days, or medical/industrial grade DVD or Bluray. I'm just not a fan of the 5.25" form factor, and postage stamp size memory cards are even more fiddly.

USB sticks? A new 512MiB one will set you back less than €10, so a second-hand smaller one shouldn't cost more than a Euro.

Last year I took advantage of the "Back to School" sales and got myself a 16 GB USB memory device for under $10 CAD. (Which at the time was almost the same as $10 USD.)

In terms of replacing floppy disks, CDs made sense. They stored a lot more data, had much better longevity, and weren't susceptible to magnetism. Mind you, early drives had trouble reading through even the smallest scratches and marks, but later drives were much better at it. The alternatives to CDs at the time all had their own issues and I think overall, CDs had the fewest issues.

That said, I think holographic storage is going to be the next big thing, though it's still at least a few years away from being commercially viable, let alone ready for the consumer market. The idea of storing information across three dimensions instead of just two is going to magnify data storage to an insane degree and in the very long run, could make disc-based hard drives a thing of the past. Solid State / Flash memory will never replace HDs because of the limitations on how many times it can be written and the relative cost per amount of storage space. True, those aspects are always improving, but I've noticed that if a particular kind of technology can't outpace another similar technology within the scope of just half a decade, it probably will never replace it no matter how good it gets, and flash memory has been around a LONG time now. :P

Around 1998-1999 I was working tech support for Iomega. I thank all that is good in this world for that evil to have been abandoned. Hearing the words Zip Drive and Jaz Drive still send shivers down my spine.

rodimus80 wrote:

Around 1998-1999 I was working tech support for Iomega. I thank all that is good in this world for that evil to have been abandoned. Hearing the words Zip Drive and Jaz Drive still send shivers down my spine.

Steve Gibson, Gibson Research Corp., "Trouble In Paradise"
https://www.grc.com/tip/clickdeath.htm

*awaits more shivers and cackles evilly*

I kinda like the ZIP drive (though I never had to pay a premium to get them). Superdisk was somewhat slow, but I always had a soft spot for 2.88MB floppy drives (no need for drivers and such). I've been meaning to build a couple rigs around them but I never got around to it.
Still have one of those Insite flopticals laying around, no idea if it works or not and that doesn't really matter as I don't have any of the disks anyway.

Though I don't really miss them (USB sticks are much easier and have a much larger capacity these days), but I don't mind them either.

CDROM's I only use when I need to create a copy of a Windows disk (I'm not risking destroying another original disk again 🤣 )

Jazz drives were good. 😀

Stiletto wrote:

Steve Gibson, Gibson Research Corp., "Trouble In Paradise"
https://www.grc.com/tip/clickdeath.htm

*awaits more shivers and cackles evilly*

I secretly loved the Click of Death. It meant the end of the call. 😀

snorg wrote:

Steam and Gog are nice, but I still want something to be able to archive things to long-term. Not to mention the internet/cloud isn't always available. I've thought about picking up a floptical drive for certain things since they have a really long shelf life, but I'm not sure how much longer media is going to be made for them, plus the media is really expensive. SD or Flash probably makes more sense these days, or medical/industrial grade DVD or Bluray. I'm just not a fan of the 5.25" form factor, and postage stamp size memory cards are even more fiddly.

I agree with this one - also, even with a relatively competent Internet connection, CD and DVD are still generally faster on the draw (especially compared to the kinds of ISP speeds you can expect out in the sticks). I like the idea of not having to have the computer connected to the Web all the time as well - sometimes it really doesn't need that functionality, it just needs to be able to install Quake or Red Alert or whatever, and that's it. 😊 Agreed on things becoming small too - the amount of microSD cards I've lost over the years is staggering...who'dve thunk something the size of a grain of rice would be easy to misplace. 😦

From what I remember from my stint in archival data, even the "professional grade" optical discs don't last anywhere near as long as they should (and there's a reason a lot of stuff is still kept on hard copy when it's available) - I think 10-ish years is still the general suggestion for re-writing the data if you're planning to store it long-term on optical media. 😖 I also know that some places (like where I worked) prefer to store film or tape if possible, because there's a lot more experience with preservation/handling over the years. Never actually thought to ask how floppies fit into that scheme, not that we really had that many.

Other then burning older games onto CD-Rs and DVD-Rs I have stopped using physical media. I mainly stick with just HDDs.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I'm glad media in general are on the way out. Downloading and storing is what I like. Hence my passion for Steam and GOG.com.

Exact opposite here - that's clearly the worst possible development in terms of data preservation and ownership. Gotta have a copy that isn't dependent on a 3rd-party service whose interests don't necessarily overlap with yours, and whose long-term availability is anything but guaranteed.

As I've said here before, nothing so far has really managed to replace the floppy disk in *every* way, from universal market acceptance to painless, guaranteed low-level support with little or no software overhead. USB flash drives have clearly gained the former, but not the latter, and memory cards have form factors that shift a little too rapidly. The reliability of optical media is inversely proportional to its capacity, and a decade from now they'll all be frisbees.

Couldn't disagree more.

All these floppies and CDs with copy protections that are a real pain. I don't miss them one bit.

GOG.com is DRM free. Download it once and just install it.

My father used Magneto-Optical disks back in the day to move his large graphic design files between work and home. I loved the idea of "a cross between a CD and a floppy" but I never got a chance to play with them. He borrowed an external drive from work whenever needed and always took it back immediately. As for Zip disks, they were really popular with Mac users 'round these parts, I guess Windows users were too darned cheap. 🤣

I loved CD-ROM technology during the multimedia era and I was blown away when I got the possibility of recording my own CDs, but after years of worn out laser diodes, rotting dyes rendering discs unreadable and my DVD backups getting impractically large I don't miss it at all and believe that its time has passed. For moving relatively small amounts of data NAND Flash or 2.5" hard drives suit me well, for mass storage and backups multi-terabyte HDDs are cheap and convenient enough (but reliability is still a concern). The only use cases I still have for optical media are cheap data transfer (DVD-Rs are so cheap now if I hand one out I don't expect it back) and old CD/DVD based video game consoles.

I belive I'd have loved something like the MO disk becoming popular before CD writers. Something around the 3.5" form factor in a hard, durable plastic case, bootable without special BIOS support or device drivers. Everything would've been so much easier. 😵

I think from floppies to CDs, the course it took to that transition is as natural and expected as it could be.

I couldn't think of any other methods that could have replaced the CDs. I think only the iomega drives were somewhat promising, but the lure of digital audio and full motion videos really boosted the prospects of CDs at that time, plus they doubled up as a huge storage repository for data files.

I still transfer small downloaded files from the net using my newer PCs to my 486 and Pentium II machines which are not connected to the internet, via the floppy disks which is easier than burning on a CD and then transferring.

We are moving towards the media-less era. Thanks to high internet speeds, it's more common to store and get what you want online. And with emulators and virtual softwares like Daemon Tools, Virtual Floppy Drives, Dosbox and WinUAE and what not - there's no need to have media anymore. And with MUNT, you don't even need to worry about not having a MT-32/CM-500/LAPC-I anymore. 😁

Of course, all this does not stop us, especially Vogoners here, to build our systems, right down to systems with the 5.2" floppy drives! I don't believe I actually went online to buy a couple of those drives, and even some blank 5.25" disks, to relive my attachment and nostalgia with these classic machines.

(On another note, DRMs suck. Big time. If not for the occasional sales, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with Steam. It's much preferable to get a no-cd fix to play these games with a piece of mind.)

I wish something had replaced cassette tapes for music besides CD's. The CD holder in my car is bigger than my old cassette holder and doesn't hold as many albums. Whoever thought this was a good idea should be shot in the head.

Malik wrote:

(On another note, DRMs suck. Big time. If not for the occasional sales, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with Steam. It's much preferable to get a no-cd fix to play these games with a piece of mind.)

Aye. Bioshock 1 and 2 are the worst I've seen - the first one I don't think can be re-installed more than once or twice, and the second one is an unplayable mess due to the DRM (it carries SecuROM, Games For Windows Live, and Steam all together - 😵).

One thing I always wondered about not taking off though - anyone else remember DVD-RAM discs that came in those "cartridge" cases, similar to floppies? Why didn't that idea take off for optical media in general? I have a DVD player/drive that can load those cartridges (as well as normal discs), and it just seems like a much more secure way to deal with optical media - they don't get scratched up as easily, and they sit more securely in the tray. And it doesn't affect the drive's compatibility with conventional discs either. 😀

Same reason CD caddies never took off 😀