A perspective on " the beginning of the end for floppies"

To All - There was an ?enormous response,? that still continues, on this classic computer email list by Dave Dunfield [WWW.CLASSICCMP.ORG] on the ?demise of the floppy? in the past few weeks. It was even extended to many other areas of technology. I did some posts on some options on that email list and also including WWW.VINTAGE-COMPUTER.COM and others responded there too. The April issue on page #15 of our long just outstanding 30 year old local Lehigh Valley Computer Group [WWW.LVCG.ORG ? past newsletters are even posted there] had a very good article by Bill Pryor, one of their excellent and perceptive members, titled ?Ephermeral [really ?Ephemeral? ? just a typo and corrected in article ? but may need original title spelling for searching] Media? which he originally wrote in ? 2000 ? !!! This present reprint of this 2000 article now notes the following very similar in many ways New York Times article 2010/03/16 ? 10 years later ! Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html Lot to think about here ! This all fits nicely into my decades of science, technology and society [STS] research [see my web site WWW.KAYPROSTS.ORG] for some more details. Note, this web site is very simple ? just for ?info transfer? ? nothing fancy. Now that we have faster cable internet service finally in our so rural area of SE PA, it will be substantially improved, updated, upgraded, etc. in the near future. Many of us were trained by the National Science Foundation [NSF] decades ago to help society better understand, manage, etc. such very powerful, dramatic, global STS changes we are now presently experiencing in so many areas of our lives, including our hobby of vintage computers. I heartily encourage you all to do your own STS research ? so much so readily available by just searching the web ? e.g. Google searches, etc. Form your own ?informed? opinions, decisions, actions, etc. Then please continue to contribute to the ?dialogue? ? we are all in this together ! Stay tuned ! It is going to continue to be quite a ride with no end in site ! Frank P.S. Thanks Chuck for the long list post - that is what got me inspired ! -----Original Message----- From: Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wed, Apr 28, 2010 7:31 pm Subject: Re: An option - Re: the beginning of the end for floppies On 28 Apr 2010 at 19:01, fjgjr1 at aol.com wrote: I posted a fairly long list of emulators not too long ago. $275 is n the high end--the Chinese version of these (which perhaps is the ame as the one you describe) can be had for about $50. It's not uch--just a uC and some "glue". There are at least two DIY versions on the web. But none of the off-the-shelf versions is going to help with my rother word processor (uses GCR to put 240K on a 3.5") or a real DEC X02 disk (uses DEC's own version of MFM) or an early Lanier word rocessor (uses hard-sectored 8" MMFM recording) or those 5.25" loppies sitting in my drawer that work with Drivetec 2MB and 4MB rives. And no one, that I'm aware of, claims to be able to handle copy- rotection emulation. It's sort of odd, a lot of embroidery equipment originally ran with aper tape, then substituted external boxes with floppy drives for he paper tape reader. Now, I guess we're substituting flash-based loppy emulators for the floppy-based paper-tape emulators. I can ardly wait until we start flogging flash memory emulators to plug nto the floppy emulators that plug into the paper tape emulators... --Chuck