VCF West: All The Floptical Disks

These days, if you wish to switch a file from one pc to a different, you’d simply ship it over the community. In these uncommon events the place that received’t work, a USB thumb drive will do. It wasn’t at all times this manner, and it was rather more complicated; again within the day once we had floppy drives. We had floptical drives. A single unlabeled 3.5″ floppy disk may very well be formatted as 360, 720, or 1440okay IBM drive, a 400, 800, or 1440okay Macintosh drive, an Apple II quantity, or an Amiga, or an Acorn, or a number of different logical codecs. That’s only one bodily format of a floppy disk, and there are dozens extra.

For this yr’s VCF West, , {hardware} necromancer and collector of uncommon and esoteric detachable storage codecs, introduced out the products. He has what might be essentially the most full assortment of various floppy drive codecs on the planet, and so they had been all out on show this weekend.

The Nintendo Floppies
A Famicom Disk Card. Be aware the indentations/molding of the ‘I’ and ‘N’ in NintendoA 64DD sport pack

Sure, totally different Nintendo consoles had floppy drives. Essentially the most well-known, however nonetheless extraordinarily uncommon within the US, was the 64DD drive, an add-on for the Nintendo 64. The drive was a industrial failure, and is finest remembered for the rationale we didn’t get Mom 3.

The opposite Nintendo floppy disk on show was the Famicom Disk Card. This Japan-only media was meant for the Famicom, and included a singular trademark safety scheme. On the time, Taiwanese copies of Nintendo video games had been rampant, for the easy motive that Taiwan didn’t acknowledge Japanese copyrights, however they did respect Japanese logos. The answer to this drawback was to make the ‘Nintendo’ emblem in every Famicom disk card a bodily key. The ‘I’ and second ‘N’ in every Disk Card was embossed a lot deeper than the remainder of the brand, forming a fundamental trademark-based anti-copying scheme.

The Floptical

Within the early ’80s, you would simply match a whole working system on a single 3.5″ floppy. By the mid ’90s, file sizes grew and it began to get to the purpose the place you couldn’t match a single Photoshop file on a floppy. Options got here within the type of Zip disks, however there was an alternative choice: floptical drives. These disks regarded identical to a regular 3.5″ disk, however used LEDs or lasers to exactly align the magnetic head of the drive to the monitor. The result's extra tracks per inch, and vastly extra space for storing. The Imation SuperDisk, for instance, may maintain 120 Megabytes in an period when laborious drive sizes had been nonetheless underneath a Gigabyte.

The dumbest audio CD ever

99% of audio CDs you’ll discover are round, and for good motive: they spin, very quick. Not often, you’ll discover some odd-shaped CDs, and within the early 2000s you would discover ‘enterprise card’ CD-ROMs that had been lozenge-shaped. All of those may very well be put in a CD drive with out, , exploding. After all, not all audio CDs adopted this apparent customary. I current to you the dumbest audio CD you’ll ever see:

The ‘vinyl’ CD. It’s a regular CD single, however phonograph tracks are additionally carved into the black a part of the disk.

It’s a Shania Twain single, and says that it'll certainly play in a regular Diskman. Nobody would advocate placing this disk right into a 52x pace drive. It might most probably disintegrate.

Manufacturing is an artwork kind, and typically you’ll stumble on one thing that’s a touch good concept whereas nonetheless being cool as hell. The VinylDisk, a half-CD, half-record invention from Optimum Media Manufacturing is a type of innovations. Launched in 2007, the VinylDisk is a 3-minute lengthy phonograph document on one aspect, and a 70-minute lengthy CD on the opposite. There’s just one manufacturing facility that makes these items, so in order for you a weird bridge between applied sciences, there you go.

This was an incredible exhibit put collectively by and would look proper at house in one of many show circumstances of the Laptop Historical past Museum, the venue for this yr’s VCF West.

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