LT-1: The Failed Floppy Format
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 15 дек 2022
- A surprising number of competitors to the ubiquitous 3.5" floppy disk duked it out through the 1980s -- but one of them failed exceptionally hard.
Sources:
"Laptops With Muscle," Popular Mechanics, May 1990.
"Six-Pound Zenith Minisport Uses 2-Inch Minidisks," InfoWorld, July 24, 1989.
"Inside Track," PC Magazine, February 14, 1989.
"Light Minisport Has Hefty Functionality," InfoWorld, July 31, 1989.
"ZDS Enhances MinisPort, 20MB Hard Drive, Brighter Screen," H-Scoop, July 1990. (archive.org/details/h_scoop_1...)
Zenith MinisPort HD photo: fhl.noblogs.org/2012/07/07/ab...
CF-2 disk media photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Smith-Corona DataDisk media photo: www.worthpoint.com/worthopedi...
Smith-Corona laptop word processor ad: gameraboy2.tumblr.com/post/69...
Famicom Disk System disk photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Famicom Disk System hardware photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Amstrad CPC64 User magazine: magazinesfromthepast.fandom.c...
"Viability of 2-Inch Media Standard for PCs in Doubt," InfoWorld, July 31, 1989.
Canon video floppy disk set photo: www.etsy.com/listing/13024748...
Sony Mavica prototype photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Sony Mavica camera photos: aucview.aucfan.com/yahoo/s105...
Panasonic video floppy camera photo: aucfree.com/items/h437606086
Video floppy disk photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_F...
"Filmless Photography Arrives," Popular Mechanics, November 1989.
Canon FV-540 brochure: archive.org/details/TNM_Video...
Sony PJ-100 photo: www.sony.com/ja/pressroom/pic...
Sony PJ-100 with disk photo: lancelot2.blog.ss-blog.jp/201...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please consider supporting my work on Patreon: / thisdoesnotcompute
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram! @thisdoesnotcomp
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music by Epidemic Sound (www.epidemicsound.com).
Intro music by BoxCat Games (freemusicarchive.org/music/Bo.... 
Наука
"Don't copy that floppy." I can't, I don't have a drive.
this is very weird What would the user do with the floppy disk on their desktop? Insert inside 1.44.disk drive? and then call the help desk to help remove it from inside? hahahahaha
I lack the drive to do that.
Deep.
Haha🤣
Wasn't there a god-awful jingle don't copy that floppy? Yep found It as bad
As remember
aka "Don't floppy that copy"
Zip really was the only floppy alternative magnetic drive that had some measure of success. I at least remember seeing those zip drives on a lot of computers as a kid.
Probably because it was the first to market before CD-R prices dropped like rocks.
@@Toonrick12 and what truely killed it when USB drives become cheaper as well.
I'd argue that LS-120 saw some success, too. Nowhere near as much as Zip, but it was absolutely "a standard" that many companies supported. Many motherboard makers supported mapping an IDE-connected LS-120 as Drive A so it could fully replace a conventional floppy drive in the days when BIOSes and OSes absolutely required certain things to use drive A (Loading storage drivers during Windows setup for example, or BIOS upgrades.)
@@AnonymousFreakYT LS-120s were standard on Compaq machines for a number of years. Problem is since they were backward compatible and looked exactly like a regular floppy drive most of the people who bought them never even noticed the little "SuperDisk" label in small font on the bezel and only ever put regular floppy disks in them.
Yeah I bought both a Internal Zip100 Drive SCSI model and a Internal CD-R Drive. Although the CD-R was used quite a bit for bigger archives the Zip100 got more use for being re-writeable.
My LS120 found a new role when the format failed to take off. It had a high quality mechanism and was backwards compatible with normal 3.5 inch floppies. In practice this meant it could often read problematic discs.
i used mine for backup until i got a cd burner. i found that the 120mb disks were somewhat unreliable though.
I seem to remember that some test equipment, either form HP or Tectronix had one of those drives built in. At some stage, it was getting harder and harder to find blank LS120 disks. I also have an LS120 drive somewhere in an old computer gear junk box, at home (unless I chucked it).
Unfortunately I had that one, too with a few expensive disks.
Then changed to zip drive with 100 MB as university had them built in their PCs.
What a mess 🤣
my brother had a LS120 drive and it never worked reliably. We never found out what the problem was, but despite being supported by the motherboard, booting from the drive always failed and would randomly not recognize the 120 MB disks. It always worked perfectly fine with normal 3.5" disks, though. It may have been an issue with the disks, but they were so expensive there was little incentive to buy a whole lot of them when CD-R prices plummeted shortly after
And you can use it today still with an IDE to USB or sata converter.
My understanding was that CF-2 was already a failure when Amstrad started using it. Which is why they were able to pick up a bunch of them on closeoout to incorporate into the CPC.
They were also used in Amstrad's hugely popular PCW range of word processors. Vast numbers were made. The very end of the line models though had switched to 3.5" floppies.
Sounds like Alan Sugar
I had an Amstrad CPC464 as a child, I remember wishing I had the CPC664 that had the CF-2 Disk drive.
Also used in the Tatung Einstein, and Spectrum +3s (but Amstrad owned Sinclair by then). The discs were more robust than 3.5" but it was too late.
@@AgileSnowWeasel Didn't the Zenith SuperSport also use them?
I uploaded my first myspace photos using a sony digital that used floppies. Good Times. lol
I can't believe i've never seen this format when I was a kid. Awesome!
Same here, great part we know right now.
That's a pretty interesting tidbit on Nintendo's Disk Drive- It didn't seem feasible to me for Nintendo to make their own fully proprietary drive - now I know it was based off someone else's format!
Yah, Famicom disks were just Mitsumi's physical format (licensed by Nintendo), with an extra physical key added to the end. The recessed "NINTENDO" letters fit into a keying in the drive, meant to keep non-Nintendo disks from working -- especially since copying the recessed letters would be trademark infringement.
But aftermarketers soon realized they didn't need to copy the letters exactly. Some manufacturers made "skeleton key" keyings that mangled the word (e.g., "VINTEVDO"), or even used empty rectangles with no letters at all ... but still kept just enough plastic in the right places for the disks to work. Others made similar keyings you could attach to the end of regular Quick Disks.
The cons with the 64DD, it was delayed and released late in the n64 lifespand. Worst of all, the 64 MB is very small when Nintendo use 128 MB with a extra future space that go up to 750 MB like the zipdrives.
I've got a bunch of these zenith minisports! They're a huge pain to get working these days. Two simple reasons: the power supply goes bad and the backlight breaks, and the other reason is that they designed the battery really weird: the plug for the AC adapter is ON THE BATTERY. so it's difficult to power them on without trying to charge an ancient battery that doesn't want to be charged anymore. I've worked on a "dummy" battery that could be 3D printed to bypass it. I've also worked on an adapter PCB to let you use one of these LT1 drives in a standard PC. My prototype didn't work, however: I think they inverted one of the pins, so I need to get a good logic analyzer to see it in use, and find out what I did wrong.
just throw it out
@@davidjames666 Throw yourself out.
@@227BlackAce WOW!! didn’t think anyone would be so defensive about me insulting the highly successful Zenith minisport. sorry to hit a nerve. :). I will buy one, reverse engineer it, and market it to make up for my indiscretion.
deleted their comment towards me. hmmmm….. second thoughts?
Living in the _modern_ digital age for so long already, I find it really fascinating to see that we first had to make portable media grow in size to make it smaller again.
Just look at those cute little LT-1 floppies. We can store an infinite amount more data these days on chips the quarter of the size of the metal sliding part compared to what is possible with those diskettes.
Really interesting. And still, I really liked floppy diskettes.
The 3.5" floppy disk (or the 80mm CD/DVD) was the perfect size for removable storage. Small enough to easily fit in a shirt pocket, big enough that you won't easily lose it.
I was thinking earlier this week about how much staying power floppy disks had. You said the 3.5" 1.44MB capacity debuted in 1986; I was still using them daily in college in the early aughts, even though I was mostly on Zip and CD-R(W) for my personal stuff. When I moved into an apartment with some friends I built a dual Celeron (Abit BP6) server and networked all the rooms together so we could share files and play Age of Empires II and Quake 3 and all that good stuff.
In the '90s my friends and I were obsessed with different utilities that would let you put more than 1.44MB on a standard floppy using compression and other techniques to better utilize the unformatted 2MB capacity of the media, but looking back it was honestly kind of a nightmare. Now I can get a 64GB thumb drive at Micro Center for $5, and I have a 2TB NVMe in USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gbps) enclosure... and that was the inexpensive option!
DId I hear someone say AoE2? I was always a Viking. Timberhochmandi!
Born 1997. Never used or touched flop. VHS and caset but only played them.
CD's being common day item... First time writing anything was to a USB stick. And only to add mods to a offline pc. 2008? It is going to be interesting to see when USB 1.0 or more to the point USB 2.0-3.0 standard is gone.
Like I can hardly think I have used a PC without a USB port on it? Maybe a desktop running Win95 struggling hard even running Win95... It might have not had a USB port? But I mean are we really going to lose USB? Like even now right around 2023 my new motherboard only got 1 USB-C port. And a internal header for USB-C.
Like even Apple is forced to go with USB-C. The milage out of USB is going to be insane no? It is USB-C that is going to kill off the USB2.0 combat if anything is. And a simple USB-C to USB-B(?) thing and you can still plug in a USB2.0 device to a USB-C port!
But outside of some strange horror that is.. Well to think about it only USB2.0 was not horrible. The new stuff has non sense names and USB1 and USB3 are pure PAIN. Never heard about any complains about USB2.0 outside of the one way plug in in the dark.
USB3 'drivers' where allot of fun back in 2015 whatever. Ditched CD reader in my new build just to have no USB2 port to install Windows with. And USB3.0 was always a pain before that too. But fast!
Like USB is everything. Just like how floppy was the standard for a very long time in hot plug media. Like the only thing that beats USB and floppy must be the internet protocol. Only reliable connection to fall back on. Everything speaks network or speak nothing at all.
We still used floppies in college well into the 00s because the school didn't have any reliable system for bringing files between home and school, and not every computer had working USB ports. We also had to hand our programs in on paper which never made sense to me and felt so incredibly backwards.
I even bought a 3,5" drive with ED 2,88 MB.
Since there were no Ed floppies available, i punched holes through HD disks at a certain location.
Then i squeezed 5 or 6 MB on a single floppy using rar.
Was a great way of putting data into a black hole, never to return
Btw you can buy NVM flash drives in USB casing from china 30 TB for 40€. They are incredible slow 30mb/s and probably fake.
I currently work in a tech salvage job and a miniSport actually crossed my desk not too long ago. Basically we got a boatload of old laptops in that ended up being my responsibility and it made for a very fun few days of work. Finding that 2" disk drive was one of the many "Wait, what?" moments then.
And imagine now where we have SD cards and USB and whole computers running off SD cards
These days the monitor can be the biggest part of the whole setup
Sharp's MZ line also used Quick Disk. I think these saw some popularity in various packaging formats for word processors, Sharp MZ, Famicom Disk System, various synths, etc.
honestly, i had never heard of any of these until you mentioned the Famicom Disk System…now i get what was going on with the disks now, i thought that they were odd looking or specifically printed just for Nintendo floppies but never that they were a failed floppy competitor!
i only stumbled across your channel by accident but glad that you’re finding this lost tech to feature
Coll video. Do the Imation and Zip floppies next!
you can therotecally connect this drive in a windows 95 laptop with built in floppy drive
I was 13 back then. Great video !
I had one of the Zenith devices and FWIW, I recall pronouncing the name “Mini” - “Sport”.
Yes, it was "minisport", the word PORT in all caps was to emphasize its PORTability! 🙂
I don't think I ever heard of these.
Floppies were so small anyways, I can’t imagine way they would want to make small media instead of thinner drives.
Even if that is true (think the drives where hard to thin down) Just look at CD readers on laptops. They took like a hole side of the machine just for the CD drive! It is not practical having a 3.5 inch bay like that.
It is down to the size of the drive. 3.5 inch takes 3.5 inch of space in the device. Just look at modern laptops and desktops. HDD's are gone and SSD's are crammed into the backside of the motherboard on desktop systems. It is the cables that makes it hard to cram in SSD's back there but still. They have killed off HHD's.
And for laptops and desktops we are taking a 2.5 inch SSD (way to big) and placing all the bits on a board connected directly to the motherboard with M.2. Why? Because even 2.5 inch is to much! Far smaller then even the slimiest CD reader!
Even a single SSD slot is starting to become a memory of the passed on laptops now. And a SSD fully kitted (8tb or more??) do not take more then a 3.5 floppy in space. But still we are getting rid of a internal mounted disk that eat none of the exterior real estate. It is not really that strange that 3.5 inches on the side of a machine is to bulky. Even CD readers being really thin at the end of the life of laptop CD readers had to be wide just to accept the CD disk! Unless a fast spinning disk hanging out was ok and safe?
Now there are USB stick with like 128GB of storage for $30. And SD cards far smaller and higher capacity to buy. And yet I rather have 1-2TB SSD's and 4-8TB HHD's. Barely have 1 computer with a m.2 slot free to mount and read files. But even computers back in 2000s can read my brand spanking new 2.5SSD at full SATA speed :)
3.5" floppy drives were half height for most of their existence, which was still quite thick for a portable computer and even after it became possible to make them as USB drives they only shrunk to 1/3 height, simply because it's impossible to shrink the double sided mechanism any further. Even CD (and then DVD -> blu-ray) drives are possible to make thinner because they only need a head on the one side
I still have that blue Zip drive. 😂
Thanks for keeping the knowledge of this old tech alive. It's not just interesting or fun for nostalgia's sake for those who remember it. This is history and it's important that it's preserved.
It's really not that important.
As important as a forgotten size of paper that nobody ever used.
I enjoyed the video as much as you did though and I would love to own such a machine that used such a drive!
when i think i kinda knew everything significant about retro tech a new video from you pops up and im always amazed at how you find out these kinda things wow
Man I love the weird and unusual can't wait to see what's next on the list.
Me too
If you had never made this video, I would not have heard of a 2" floppy disk/drive. Thanks.
Aw, they're so cute! I don't remember those size disks or that Zenith machine. Man alive, I had piles of the 3.5 disks. I was always buying Sharpie markers to label them. I haven't checked, but it's possible I may have 1 or 2 still dumped in a drawer or box somewhere. Ah, memories!
I had a Panasonic digital camera with a built in LS-120 Superdisk drive. It took great quality pics for the time and combined with a drive in my computer it was extremely simple to have multiple disks worth of photos and copy them into the PC. The problem was the reliability. The in the camera stopped working after just a year or so and we bought another which also broke pretty quickly. Eventually the PC drive broke too. It was really frustrating because the next two cameras weren't as good or nearly as easy to manage with tiny onboard storage and annoyingly slow transfer speeds.
Interesting.
I always believed they were far superior to the zip drives and the money i put into zip was completely wasted.
Later I got several drives (zip, 120, mo) from trash, best was the MO 640 MB.
I remember Fujifilm making those floppy disks for their first digital cameras similar to the Sony Mavica, my middle school teacher had a Fujifilm camera, too bad they didn’t use Zip disks, those held hundreds of decent quality photos!
In school I remember we had the I think it was the first real digital camera format that was affordable for the most part or just practical for school use not sure the whole story.
It was what was called the zap shot camera.
It did use floppiness I don't remember if it used stared 4 1/4 inch floppies or not.
I think I used maybe once when I was in school but that was it and I could be wrong with this maybe I was just learning how to use it just in case I need to use it for some school project perhaps
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 I think that was probably made by Canon, because those used rectangular floppy disk. The Fujifilm digital camera we used was for slideshow projects on Macs, and we mostly saved our class project on the Zip drive.
@@Markimark151 I actually think that the digital cameras that we had the zap shot I believe that was actually prior to the zip disc even if I'm not mistaken just mentioning this I know it was a different technology entirely and not exactly related but I don't remember exactly when the oil make a zip just came into existence.
Fairly sure that this was prior to that time of the zip disc!
Also the app shot was not able to export photos to PC as far as I know I do believe it was just the internal drive and internal hardware and this hand to be connected to television to even swim images There might have been other hardware available but I do not know much about the system may check Wikipedia!
The I find anything or any other information I may come back and post links in a comment!
I've heard there's been some issues here and there with any comments with links being nuked by the system as well not sure to stay as of this or efforts a channel specific saying it or not or something else I was any thoughts from anyone that's well
Child abuses right now to be watching RUclips or even replying to comments at this time this winter storm keeps knocking out the power here keeps coming back on but still it's annoying as everything even though it's so reliable in this area but not quite during this storm unfortunately
@@aaronbrandenburg2441 there were early filmless cameras that used floppies, some were just analog and had no connectivity to the computer, they were only meant to be shown on TV. The real digital cameras came out in the mid 90s, because they made to saved digitally on computers and could be easily printed.
Looking back on the late 80s, particularly, it is clear that nobody had any idea.
George Morrow was dead sure that nobody would use those new micro floppies (3.5” disks) because all the software was on 5.25”.
The Mac almost had 5.25” disks, if not for a bit of internal “save Steve from himself again” insubordination. Without the Mac, I don’t know if the PS/2 would have used them. Without the PS/2, it would probably have been yet another obscure footnote in the history of magnetic media.
So the reason we’re all accustomed to the 3.5” disk, and formats like this one are one-offs, might be down to a headstrong engineer who thought he knew better than his boss.
History is so fragile, often hinging on the whims of otherwise totally inconsequential actors.
That reveal at the beginning really got me 😂
I loved my Zenith MinisPort. My dad and I picked up 2 used ones, I think from the Boston Computer Exchange that had been previously used by some insurance company called Modern Woodmen of America. He also had the external drive, so we were able to transfer data back and forth from the LT-1 floppies. I use to turn heads with it in community collage while I'd be eating in the cafeteria while doing my C programming coursework. Laptops were rare back then, and one this small was even rarer. I still hat it until over a decade ago when a basement flood destroyed a bunch of old computer stuff I'd been hanging on to.
I still have one partial box of the LT-1 floppies left and use them these days as Xmas ornaments.
Good video. The mavica with 3.5" disks was interesting at their time. I remember using at the technical school, were I could use the camera with my own disks and after taking the photos I could write the reports right after.
What an adorable little format, I love it
I know! “It was a format nobody wanted.” I want it! :-D
That’s was a very informative video 😊
So that is what that floppy was for. I have a Fuji Film one in my possesion. I got it from a company I worked at years ago who had a tape stor full of forgotten tape and disk formats. Thanks for that.
Wow, you showed me some floppy disk variants I did never see before... 🤯
This looks very familiar to the certain generation of Japanese gamers like me, as every game shop had a large kiosk stand of Nintendo Disk System which users can download and copy new software titles to their own diskettes from it. I didn’t know where the formfactor came from though. Thanks for the informative video.
Neat little device. Like finding missing links in evolution
The Quick Disk was also used in a couple of Roland synthesizers.
I love these small floppies. They look so cool
I had never heard of these smaller floppy sized formatted smaller. I have zip, jaz, Rev, PocketZip, Ez Flyer, orb, superdisk 120 & 240, and SparQ drives and disks I recently started collection after a 25+ year break from when I had zip and jaz drives in college. Still looking for reasonably priced NOS Sony MD Data SCSI drive and data HiMD drives for my collection. Ahhh the sound of Jaz drives spinning up and reading/writing!
I would've pronounced it Mini-sport. I believe that 2.8" disk is the same used on the Roland S-10 sampler. I remember buying a few disks at Staples that were for Brother word processors, but it could've been Smith Corona.
That's what I initially expected of the pronunciation too, but take a look at the logo at 2:50. Such an odd choice, right?
Format like this make me realize how we successfully miniaturize the computer.
I saw the thumbnail of the video with the 2" disk and clicked play, thinking to myself "I wonder if he's gonna feature the.... Oh OK he did!".. Yup, had a Minisport back in the day when it first came out (then I got the HD version). Loved it/them! Oh them were the days! Hahaha 🤔😏 😎🇬🇧
Introduced in ‘88, I thought floptical drives would take off at 21MB capacity
Very interesting as usual. I used Zip discs extensively but cannot find an affordable reader now.
The Video Floppy was often used in TV stations for storing video stills for certain occasions, such as when technical issues occurred. Sony also developed a high-bandwidth version alongside Hi8 known as HiVF.
i love how all these floppys tried to be the next big thing but failed
only for cds to come by and say "oops my bad"
Picked up a box of these with 8 disks, 3 still sealed, from eBay exactly 2 years ago (weird). Cost only 99p(ence) plus postage so bought for novelty value alone but have been looking for a working MinisPort to go with them, but not paying the asking price that the few that appear are wanting. Got the user manual though! I assume that Panasonic drive was the only one.
Definitely always wanted one of the Mavica floppy cameras just as a curiosity, it’s just an interesting piece of kit and a really ambitious engineering design.
3.5 drives had a gear inside, to gently lower the head onto the disk, when inserted into the drive. This extra gear needed additional space and size to operate against the springs in the drive. Later, the gear was removed from the drives, causing bad sectors when the disk was inserted.
I keep seeing it as Mini-Sport, like a sporty model of a laptop.
Collin has asked me so many times how’s it going only to interrupt to talk about some obscure tech product. 😂
Had family photos taken by someone who used one of the first floppy disk preview camera systems back in the mid 90's. It used 2" floppy disks, and they could show you an "OK" quality preview of any of a dozen stills stored on the disk and crop/rotate so you knew what you were going to get when the actual prints came in. The whole system was branded Kodak, and haven't seen much reference to it since then. I'm not sure if it used mavipak disks or something else, but I don't remember a hole in the center of the top sides.
I remember the Exatron "Stringy Floppy", a low-cost streaming tape drive offered as an alternative to floppy diskettes. It did fairly well, but between improvements in floppy disks and price drops of hard drives they became obsolete.
There was also ADR which was developed in the late 1990s by a Philips offshoot named OnStream in an effort to make high-capacity tape drives more affordable. It worked well but it eventually flopped as they were entering a format-rich market and no one in the consumer space was really interested in tape.
@@douro20 In the PC marketplace, "tape" was treated as old, yet in the data center it was very much used, and went through about a dozen different formats and variations. I recall a vendor shipping us 8mm video cassettes instead of 8mm data cartridges. We tried a few but the formulation of the oxides and such made them unreliable. I still have a few 4mm, 8mm and DLT cartridges as examples.
I miss zipping a file, breaking it into 20 something parts, and putting them on 20 separate floppy disks
Some vintage Roland sampler also used Quick Disk.
What was the "sense" of the write-enable/protect on these disks? The sense seems to "flip-flop" with each size
8" floppy -- notched=write-protected
5.25" floppy -- notched=write-enabled
3.5" floppy -- hole=write-protect
I do recall the small stickers used to cover the notch on 5.25" floppy diskette were sometimes humorously referred to as "diskette condom"
Thanks to your channel I have a fun world for worldbulding where they reached about 70's level of technology quite a bit early but from there each decade of tech lasted about 3 times longer.
I simply enjoy the idea of super advanced floppies pr cd's the size of vinyl records as well as, as you said tech that came too late. I also get to use a cheat in my fictional universe which can mix magic into technologies.
"cd's the size of vinyl records" like laserdisc?
@@Hamdad yeah. I have a tech I made up which uses magic which can project holograms. They are able to use Laserdisc size media as a way to store holographic recordings.
The *_QUIK DISC_* was also found in the *AKAI* samplers; *_X7000_* (keyboard) and *_S612_* (rack module)
The X7000/S612 were predecessors of the *_AKAI S900_* - one of the most successful samplers, in early sampler history - possibly down to it using 3.5" floppy discs.
For a while I had an X7000 & each QUIK DISC would only hold one (1x) sample per disc. So, to load a Multi-Sample was quite a tedious task!
Part of the problem is that unlike discs the smaller floppies can't go into a normal drive.
I remember back in the mid 80's when this was the best storage solution we had. To this day I still have thousands of floppy discs for everything from tax files to work stuff. Still have my original "Commodore 64 desktop computer"
QuickDisc was also used on the Sharp MZ platform...
Wow, I'd never heard of the LT-1 before!
I actually really liked my Orb drive.
I had a minisport in college. It was cold to have when it worked. I ended up forcing zenith to buy it back because it was in the shop more than on my desk in school. You also had to buy a special parallel port adapter to copy data to the small floppy drive in the computer.
The idea of analogue on floppy disk absolutely confounds me.
I can remember in 1991 or so, got my first computer: An Amstrad (Schneider) cpc464 with Datasette. Later on i got an external Floppydrive with 3" Floppys. It was a step forward..but the floppys where really expensive. One of them cost me around 10DM (Deutschmark) wich was too much for me back then! And no one of my friends has the same system, everyone was around with a Commodore c64. I decided to ditch the whole system and rest ist history 😊😊
OMG! I have one of these I salvaged from an old Zenith "laptop" I got when I was a kid that only booted once. I recently acquired another Zenith MiniSport and somewhere I have a box of 2" floppy disks from the first laptop as well. I want to say the first laptop had an external 2" drive as well that I probably would have kept but that was several moves and a few states ago so who knows if I still have that.
Also, my current Zenith MinisPort doesn't boot up. It's a project I was saving for a RUclips video I will probably never make but always think about doing. The power supply plugs directly into the battery and the battery passes the voltage through *somehow* and I'm probably missing the original power supply anyways. I possibly kept the brick from my first MinisPort but I don't remember seeing it even close to recently and I'm not sure where it would be if I did have it. I want to get it running because of a nifty trick the MinisPort could do and connect to another DOS PC as a proto-RDP of sorts through the serial port. I would have to look for that article I read about it in again, but it sounded interesting.
I had (still have) an LS120 that would hold 120 MB instead of 1.44 MB. Zip drives were popular also. CD burners were getting affordable so we ditched floppies.
hi very good video i still have a mo 3.5 drive in my yamaha d24 units not used alot as i have pluged in scsi hard drives
sun 711 unit's in the back
Great history, I wish the storage was much larger. Can you do a video on Magnetic Optical Disc drives ie Olympus, Fujitsu, Sony M.O. Disk, and ect.
It's amazing that MO lasted as long as it did, considering that there were literally dozens of different formats which weren't compatible with one another. MiniDisc and Hi-MD were actually magneto-optical.
The Iomega Clik!/PocketZip disk is the 3rd 2-inch floppy disk, which holds 40 MB.
Wow. The handwriting on that first floppy looks identical to my grandfather's. Trips me out. I even got out an old 5.25" floppy he had written a label for and it's need identical. Cool stuff.
Where'd you get the 2.5" from?
I have the laptop and 2 drives for my Zenith 286 and 386 laptops and well as the Minisport. It was nice, one of the first with ROM boot to dos. Still needed a floppy to store anything or run programs. The Zenith supersport 8088 is heavy. Not as bad as my luggable Compact computer. Oh what fun it was back then. Computers now are so lite.
I still have my Toshiba T1000. Beyond DOS in ROM, the 768KiB RAM expansion could be set as a battery backed bootable RAM disk. That made it a silent laptop with SSDs and suspend in the 80s.
ZX Spectrum +3 had a 3" disk drive as standard, i still got the the normal tape drive +2a version for my birthday as there were so, so many more games available for it.
Yeah, I think the Spectrum had the *_QUIK DISK_* or was that the Spectrum QL (Quantum Leap)? There's a DocuDrama called "Micro Men" (2008) about the rivalry between Sinclair & Acorn, where I recall hearing about the Quantum Leap having problems with the QUIK DISC...
Is there anything else inside a Mavica video floppy, considering the asymmetrical rectangular form factor?
The Akai S612 used the Quick disk format making it less desirable to other Akai samples that used stander 3.5 in floppy's
Neat. I have one of the Canon VF-based cameras. It doesn't work, sadly (no power), and I haven't found the time to figure it out yet. Probably our good friends the e-caps causing havoc after 30-odd years.
How could anyone not want such a cute disk?
I REALLY wanted an LS120 drive when they came out. Soon gave up when I saw the price.
... And I had the 3" floppies too, in my Amstrad CPC 6128+.
Was the LT-1 electronically compatible with a 720k 3,5 inch drive? Appeared to have a 26 core cable, similar to which exists on some laptop-targeted slim 3,5 inch drives.
I had a minisport back in the day - i really liked it for the time... sold it many years ago but i still have a box of 10 new LT-1 blank disks somewhere in the garage. Not sure what they would be worth now or if anyone would be interested in them.
Ugh Syquest. In college I had to buy a few dozen Syquest 135 carts for various computer science classes.
In the forward looking 90's it seemed like the hip thing to do. They required homework and projects to be turned in on these, as this was well before affordable optical discs or USB flash drives.
They were crazy expensive for a student earning barely more than minimum wage. I didn't even have a drive for them for the first year! I'd just work on stuff in the computer lab, then email snippets of stuff to myself, or stash it in a folder on one of the servers I had access to. Just so I could access it when I got to my home computer!
Syquest was the superior format of the time. But Zip disks won on price, even though they were slower, less reliable and smaller. But I could get an internal Zip for $99 and the disks were $10 or less (Compusa had some good sales)
By the way, Roland had a few samplers that also used the 2.8" quick disk format.
Our school used LS120's for a short time until they became obsolete. Then flash drives
Wow, look at that ironically relatively huge Canon floppy drive for such small disks!
Respect for not calling the video Fuji's Flopped Floppy Format.
From all the formats that came and went on PCs, on a somewhat unrelated note, I feel like Sony lost a gigantic opportunity with Minidisc by not making it a data format right away. Just damn make the same disk and drives for both PCs and audio players and let it happen. Given the sufficient success it had, and the era it was situated, it could have been at the forefront of the Internet music era right away. Guess Sony might have been a bit paranoid from being also a recording label.
I was always a fan of super disk, mainly because it offered larger disk sizes, was backwards compatible with current floppies, _and_ it could expand use of your current 1.44 MB floppies by formatting them to 32 MB. All that, in addition to its own disks as large as 240 MB. Was a much better transition drive to CD and solid state than Zip, imo.
Thanks to all those old thick computer magazines of the 80s/90s are permanent records of tech products, successes and failures. Those publications nor any hardcopy remnant s of more recent tech doesn't exist any more.
A friend has one of those floppy disks and we have never seen a drive that reads from those disks.
Those were the fun times, with so many storage media to choose from. The future seemed so promising.
However, in the year 2023, we have...nothing! Someone please make a 1.44TB floppy disk!
the floppette
Nice video, but ya gotta remake the thumbnail, since "mini" is already the 5.25" disk. With the original floppy disk at 8", that's why the 5.25" is mini, hence the 3.5" being called micro, which then makes the next smaller one from the somewhat common line-up, the 2.8", the nano. So that makes this one, along with the other two 2-inchers, VF-50 and Iomega Clik!/PocketZip, the PICO-sized floppy disks.
I remember that the schneider/amstrad cpc had 3" floppy
Sony already had their minidisc with 130-160 MB of capacity, and didn't need to reinvent the wheel. There were other less common brands of magneto-optical disks for computers.
Huh, odd for "Mavica" to mean "magnetic camera," since cameras were already shooting onto _tape,_ also magnetic, a long time before that
Amazing to think that you can now get a 1TB micro SD card the size of your fingernail. That is 1.4 million times the capacity in a package that is a fraction of the physical volume...
Damn, I don't remember this format at all.
oh hell, back in the day i had pcmcia form factor hard drives. i think i had a 60meg and a 40 meg and i can't be bothered to remember the brands. they were type 2 pcmcia requiring 2 slots.
Those are type 3. Type 2 (the most common) just bulges a little compared to the flat type 1.
@@0LoneTech fair enough, it has been literally decades.
@@kght222 True. And most of us never saw type 1, though it's not quite as rare as HDMI type B. I also thought IBM Microdrive was in this category, but the wikipedia page seems to only talk of a CompactFlash sized version.