Floppy Technology

If you have an interest in old school musical hardware, you can still find some uses to floppy disks. Although these drives would be probably better replaced nowadays by HxC SD-card to floppy adapters.
Despite sounding obsolete as fuck there is a real interest among musicians for 12 and 16-bit retro samplers.

I hated it when a game didn't fit on one floppy.

and now they hardly fit on a bluray

Only if you can find some that weren't made in China.

Foppies can't have NSA malware installed in their ARM mcus like SDcards can.

I'm one of the top ten most Dangerous Hackers alive and have to worry about these things.

Sometimes I store textfiles on them. I also have a floppy with repartitioning software.

chill out dude.

An eletromagnetic pulse could easily destroy your precious toys.

Setting them on top of the CRT hooked to one of those ancient machines could wipe them out just as easily.

H E W A L K S A M O N G U S
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t.Snowden
Dont forget the thermal printer to print out your OTP, Ed.
Modern printers dox you via internet or ID marks. At least block the yellow ink from printing (it may refuse to print if you refuse the cartridge)

Floppy drives make good MIDI instruments

Is it possible to make an SD raid floppy cartridge?

youtube.com/watch?v=7a7-5WYOKxE

Yes.

P.S.: This is what the son always sounded like in my head: youtube.com/watch?v=q657rEkgfKs

This is what it actually sounded like: youtube.com/watch?v=0bYeHPa_R88

Printer bonus: youtu.be/pG8RAbWs1yo?t=16s

p-please dont hack me

are they *really* obsolete? Analog equipment always has a certain quality to it, from it's characteristic sound. You can't fully predict how an analog system is going to behave, so digital models of a system are never going to be equivalent.

I use them as coasters.

No, floppy disks are laughably fragile and susceptible to bit rot, extremely low lifespace, and absurdly small in capacity. Let this format stay dead.

*lifespan

yet more sturdy than HDs and SSD

Having almost no magnetism expands the lives of floppies ( if kept in proper condition ) to 20-25 years. Hard drives unused will break in less than 5 years no matter is done to save them. SSD's prevail the longest but are unrecoverable if broken.

They are not analog (my Akai at least does not have one bit of analog signal processing in it).
They're still unique in the sense that they have their resampler algorithms written in ways you would not find in current software.
The math was made in integer, since there were no floating point units. To make a high quality resampling you need the dynamic range of floating point math, so these units had some inherent distortion in them. Also some Akais are known for using "8-point windowed sinc", which is probably laughable by current standards, but was probably the best that could be done at the time for an output of 16 concurrent tracks.
It's surely a combination of these factors that create the "color" of these old samplers' sounds.

Audio Cassettes NEED to make a comeback for computer storage because they actually CAN serve a practical purpose in this day and age. They are slow as fuck, however, they do have an advantage over other storage mediums, and that's data storage density, making them great for archiving mass amounts of data.

And yes, I know there are tape storage devices made today for this purpose, but its mostly proprietary shit. Compact cassette storage was great because it was cheap and a universal standard. We need something comparable today with higher storage capacities.

A cassette on your pic would be no more than a 100M and the read speed about 56Kbps and the write speed even worse.

You can buy a tape-drive and a tape-cartridge yourself. The cartridges are pretty cheap indeed, but a drive would cost you a bit. But it would be LTOs, not exactly the same as cassettes.

You'll need to use GOOD cassettes too if you want not only a reliable data store for the modern world but also a large storage of memory.

Watch this:

youtube.com/watch?v=jVoSQP2yUYA

I'm one of the top ten most dangerous hackers not alive anymore and I suggest using this.

When I used cassette tapes for storage with my MSX the unreliability was a huge factor to drop it as soon as I could. Read and writing errors happened far too often. I guess in a labo environment this would not be as much of a problem, but in your normal home where dust is flying around these tapes just couldn't compete with the better protected floppies.

discogs.com/search/?format_exact=Floppy Disk
it seems so ;^)

I use the amiga, so I use floppies quite often.
I'll give you a funny story. Few months ago I bought myself an old laptop. 166Mhz P1 with MMX, 48MB of ram and 2GB disk. It has no ethernet port, nor does it have USB (that's not surprising though), so I knew I'd have to burn CDs, use floppies or do a serial transfer to get anything to it. I finally decided to buy a PCMCIA WI-FI card and do everything over a network. But while waiting for that card I wanted to transfer my stuff onto that laptop. The whole reason I bought it was to see if my game would run on such a old hardware. I've read, that every windows program comes with a serial terminal called Hyper Terminal, so I though i'd just do a serial transfer. But guess what, that program was gone. The previous owner had to remove it, because the directory and the help file was still there, only the exe was gone... Well fuck. Now I have to wait for the PCMCIA card or go to a store and buy me some CDs... But I wasn't patient enough for that.

So here's what I did
1. I made a amiga disk image with hyperterminal.exe inside
2. I made a amiga disk image with a program for the amiga allowing it to read/write to IBM formated floppies
3. Transfered both images to a real amiga floppy via serial
4. Launched the program that allows my amiga to read IBM formated floppies, copied the hyperterminal onto it
5. Stick that floppy into my laptop. IT god damn works

It only took me about an hour or so, but hey, it worked !