Wherefort art thou Floppy?
31.07.14 Filed in: Storage
“A rose is a rose by any other name” - well-known words, but in this case, a floppy drive was a floppy drive. Period.
Here is how my morning started. I checked an online discounter for some laptops they have on sale, as friends of ours are looking for one. The online shop is well made, you get the basic model and a bunch of dropdowns to add options to it.
Then it happened. I stumbled across this one:
In case you can’t read German... the thing on the second line is an “external USB Floppy drive”. You can choose between a USB card reader and (drumroll, please)... a Floppy drive? Wait. Didn’t those go out in 1995? After all, even a single digital photo from a supermarket cheapo digital camera won’t fit in the 1.44MB a 3.5” Floppy offers...
So I checked Amazon, and lo and behold, the German Amazon store offers several models! Internal, external, your choice. And they are cheap: an external, USB Floppy drive will set you back €12 - that’s cheaper then the cost of an internal one in 1990!
And yes, the US Amazon site also offers these relics. You can buy the disks for them as well, of course, from well-known, trusted brands of the 80’s like Imation and Verbatim! Mind, these run anywhere from 6-10€ a 10-pack. Which makes it the MOST EXPENSIVE storage medium out there at cost per Gigabyte (I came up with €715 per Gigabyte...).
Folks, if you have a real-life application for one of these Drives that convinces me, I’ll go buy one. Might be worth it just to show the kids what storage looks like that would make my iPad cost a whopping €23.000, if we didn’t have flash memory!
The Floppy is dead... LONG LIVE THE FLOPPY!
Here is how my morning started. I checked an online discounter for some laptops they have on sale, as friends of ours are looking for one. The online shop is well made, you get the basic model and a bunch of dropdowns to add options to it.
Then it happened. I stumbled across this one:
In case you can’t read German... the thing on the second line is an “external USB Floppy drive”. You can choose between a USB card reader and (drumroll, please)... a Floppy drive? Wait. Didn’t those go out in 1995? After all, even a single digital photo from a supermarket cheapo digital camera won’t fit in the 1.44MB a 3.5” Floppy offers...
So I checked Amazon, and lo and behold, the German Amazon store offers several models! Internal, external, your choice. And they are cheap: an external, USB Floppy drive will set you back €12 - that’s cheaper then the cost of an internal one in 1990!
And yes, the US Amazon site also offers these relics. You can buy the disks for them as well, of course, from well-known, trusted brands of the 80’s like Imation and Verbatim! Mind, these run anywhere from 6-10€ a 10-pack. Which makes it the MOST EXPENSIVE storage medium out there at cost per Gigabyte (I came up with €715 per Gigabyte...).
Folks, if you have a real-life application for one of these Drives that convinces me, I’ll go buy one. Might be worth it just to show the kids what storage looks like that would make my iPad cost a whopping €23.000, if we didn’t have flash memory!
The Floppy is dead... LONG LIVE THE FLOPPY!
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