On Sat, 26 Aug 2006, Jules Richardson wrote: Are those 2" disks "Video Floppy" disks as used in the Canon Xapshot? -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

David Griffith wrote: Nope, data - came with a British Telecom branded laptop, which it turns out appears to just be a rebadged Zenith Minisport (which uses a 2" drive). cheers Jules -- If you've ever wondered how you get triangles from a cow You need buttermilk and cheese, and an equilateral chainsaw

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Joe R. wrote: Some Korg MIDI equipment used a 2.8" QuickDisk: http://www.keyboardmuseum.org/ar/k/korg/s/sqd1.html Some Akai samplers also used the QuickDisk. Apparently, these was also referred to as 3" diskettes, according to Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Mitsumi.27s_.22Quick_Disk.22_3-inc… Mike Loewen mloewen at cpumagic.scol.pa.us Old Technology http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/

Rumor has it that Roy J. Tellason may have mentioned these words: On the aforementioned wikipedia site, the picture of the 2.8" disk is from Smith-Corona of typewriter/wordprocessor fame - which may have OEMmed a few Radio Shack word processors as I remember seeing (about 6 years ago) a 1-each blister-pack with an RS-branded 2.8" floppy in it. IIRC (which I doubt) the storage was either 100K or 200K. The old RS (which also, is no longer a RS) has since moved to a smaller location, so I'd seriously doubt they still have it. IIRC, they wanted full price for it (like $10+), so I left it. (They were also selling a NOS Tandy 1000SX[1] for a clearance price of $799.99 (almost 1/2 off the *original* released price.)) Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger [1] For those who don't know early Tandy/RS PCs, this was a dual-5.25" floppy drive system (no HD), 8Mhz 8086 w/384K RAM standard... For $800 you could pick up a 500+Mhz P3/Athlon w/decent hard drive & CD burner at that time. I'm guessing he never sold it. ;-) -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com Hi! I am a .signature virus. Copy me into your .signature to join in!

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Mike Loewen wrote: There are some trivial errors in that article, but MOST of it is correct; be careful about relying wikipedia for accuracy. Does anybody know WHICH bar the bar napkin sized disk is based on? I want a napkin from that bar! "In 1976 two of Shugart Associates's employees, Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro, were approached by An Wang of Wang Laboratories, who felt that the 8-inch format was simply too large for the desktop word processing machines he was developing at the time. After meeting in a bar in Boston, Adkisson asked Wang what size he thought the disks should be, and Wang pointed to a napkin and said "about that size". Adkisson took the napkin back to California, found it to be 5.25 inches (13 cm) wide, and developed a new drive of this size storing 98.5 kB later increased to 110 kB by adding 5 tracks.[2] This is believed to be the first standard computer media that was not promulgated by IBM."

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, Roy J. Tellason wrote: It's been repeated a lot over the years. The people have been identified, but so far, I haven't been able to find out which bar. That is not incompatible with the bar napkin story. The question becomes whether the MOTIVATION was to try to fit three in, or whether that was just a serendipitous(sp?) consequence of having a smaller one. . . . and for a while, there was a substantial battle between 3", 3.25", and 3.5" over which one would become the "shirt pocket" disk. Dysan bet the company and lost in their 3.25". George Morrow suggested that we just cut a deal with the clothing industry to increase the size of shirt poskets to 5.25 or 8 inches. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 8/30/2006 at 12:02 PM Roy J. Tellason wrote: That's certainly the talk I heard back then. One innovation that's often overlooked is the automatic shutter so that a paper "envelope" isn't needed to protect the cookie. Certainly, the envelope on the 3.25" Dysan floppy would be easily lost--and the floppies would get contaminated with lint if you tried to keep them in a shirt or coat pocket. Cheers, Chuck

On 8/30/2006 at 11:19 AM Fred Cisin wrote: What's too bad is that the 3.5" diskettes don't completely seal dust away. The hub area still represents a way for contaminants (and spilled coffee) to migrate into the works. But then, given the quality of the blank media produced over the last 5 years, it probably doesn't matter anyway. We've still got a a couple of customers with things like CNC equipment and embroidery machines who are interested in maintaining some sort of floppy support for their oddball formats under Vista. My inclination is to say that floppy drives on PCs are going the way of the buggy whip fast--and that it might be better to sell a floppy emulator to be fit to the original machine that uses some sort of solid-state removeable memory. If you were betting on the next 10-15 years, what medium that holds about a MB or so would you choose? Cheers, Chuck

You are not alone. I think I stated once before that I can remember paying \pounds 3.00 for a single 5.25" floppy disk. My TRS-80 model 1 stored 88K on said disk. But those 88K are still readable. Now I get get 5 1.44M disks for a single pound. It's rare that the data is readable a month later. Personally, I'd rather pay more for my disks and have the data last. My data is worth a lot more than the cost of the media. Anmd don't get me started on drives. I normallly stick an alignemnt disk in new floppy drives, just to check, and I've had far too many that are _way_ off in recent years. Again, they are simply too cheap. -tony

if I remember a case where one of my customers received a very special 8" floppy. We could see that the box it came in, had been mangled by a car tire. There were strange marks on the carton box, indicating that it had been bent in the process. When the disk out, the soft floppy envelope had been damaged, so what to do next ? We took a working 8" floppy, carefully carefully the disk from the envelope, put the disk from the damaged envelope into the good envelope, and read the disk. My customer was so hysterical about throwing things out, that I regularly had to come and take a disk out of the drive, as it had come out of the envelope :-) Nico

Early 3.5" disks had a manual shutter, you had to slide it open before inserting the disk in the drive, and squeeze the corner of the disk to close it after ejecting the disk. Drives designed for those disks only couldn't take the now-standard disks with automatic shutters because they lacked the lever to open the shutter. AFAIK those disk could be used in later type drives withuut problems (such drives would open the shutters on old disks automatically, but you still had to squeeze the corner to close them after ejection) Was there an earlier type with no shutter at all? At one point HP offered an retrofit kit to update old drives to open the automatic shutters of the new-type of disk. I assume it consisted of a new disk holder/eject mechanism, but I don't know for sure. -tony

HP used the 80 cylinder versions of those drives, I think, from the very start. They were certainly Sony mechanisms (and turned at 600rpm). The HP service manual for the drive (actually, mostly a boardswapper guide, and nowhere near as good on the mechanism as the Sony manuals) says that early drives will not open the shutter on automatic disks, and that there's a modification kit available to let them do so. Alas it simply says that 'fitting instructions are included with the kit' -- they are not also given in the service manual. I asusme the modification originated from Sony Is it possible your drive has had the update kit fitted? -tony

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, Tony Duell wrote: YES I have some Shugart 3.5" diskettes that have no shutter. Shutters were NOT removed from them, they never had them, nor provision for shutters. I don't know to what extent those ever made it into mass production. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On 8/28/2006 at 4:25 PM Joe R. wrote: one. Yup, the Dysan/Shugart losing venture. I've got disks and drives. Cheers, Chuck