The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)

I used to miss being able to hand a floppy disk to someone to give them some data, but then I got used to using email instead (once disk quotas, transfer rates, and attachment sizes caught up). The disks were cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about.

And for a while, I enjoyed handing people CD-Rs or DVD-Rs full of data, and the disks were also cheap enough (eventually) to not care much about. (And disk quotas and attachment sizes have never caught up with either CD-R or DVD-R capacity, although transfer rates have.)

But BD-R never really caught on for a lot of reasons: So even if it is cheap-enough, it isn't universal-enough.

And I'm somewhat loathe to hand someone a thumb drive. They're universal these days and can be cheap enough to not care about, but they can also be expensive and they just don't feel as forgettable as pulling another blank disc out of the box/off of the spindle, writing some data to it, and just letting them keep it was.

Sure, I can attempt to lend another person a thumb drive, but that's a much more complicated thing than giving them a throwaway DVD-R was. (Also, it's an active computer device -- there's very real concerns about trusting a foreign thumb drive that never existed with previously-used iterations of removable media.)

So now, to give someone some meaningful amount of data: I get to upload it to The Clown (with Dropbox or Google Drive or Discord or something). With the most-common methods, I also get to hope that I remember to delete it later (and also hope that they remember to save their own copy before I do delete it).

Which is great, I guess: I can send a mountain of data to anyone in the world this way and we never have to be in the same room.

But it also sucks: I can't simply copy off some data and actually hand that data to anyone else like I did do with a CD-R. There's always a third party involved. (It's like mailing a letter through a transciptionist service might have been, if that was ever a thing that was, instead of addressing it to the end recipient directly.)

As a final lament: What in the fuck ever happened to easily sending data, over the Internet, to a fellow peer? Transferring files with DCC on IRC seems like it was miles ahead of where we are today, and that was 25 or 30 fucking years ago.

(No, I'm not bitter. I'm just old, I guess.)

I think it's worth distinguishing that 'most creators get paid a pittance' is only true on a per-view basis. The total outflows to creators is higher, but the total viewership is massively increased due to the leftward shift in where we live on the demand curve. There's no 'money for nothing' solution where everyone just accepts higher prices and continues consuming at the current rate.

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.

As I grow older, I've learned that I only care about this with music. I've lost access to number of tv shows and movies over time, but never really batted an eye after I've seen them. I enjoy rewatching clips that are mostly on youtube and rarely care for the whole movie.... I'm just one guy though.

When I lost it with music, THEN i really cared. Caused me to seek physical media when I really like sometime, which sadly isn't always possible with all artists.

As teenagers used to record mixtapes of music we likes to people we liked/love. Nowadays people just tag other on social medias or send links in private messages. I wonder if some still take the time to curate / prepare special things the same way we did.

> Iomega Zip Drives

Were those ever open to manufacturing by companies other than Iomega?

I don't know much about the history of Iomega Zip Drives, but I find it interesting that in Japan MO Drives [1] were the winning format for that storage capacity bracket, and MO disks and drives were manufactured by a number of companies, much like floppy disks, not just one. I wonder why the same didn't happen in the West.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

> and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.

fairly per the effort I'd say. previously content required a camera crew and helicopters. now a smartphone among the limitless content creators

In the past 15 years, what’s kept me from keeping a collection of CDs and blurays is the space they take up. It’s nothing compared to say vinyl records or VHS tapes, but it’s still substantial if you have more than just a handful and makes moving that much more of a pain.

Now that I own a house I have a few favorite CDs that get frequent listening, but still no blurays, mainly because there’s not much I rewatch often enough for owning them to make sense. If I went out and bought everything I could justify right now I might have maybe 5-10 tops.

It’d be cool if a physical medium that’s sized similarly to regular SD cards caught on. You could keep a decent number of albums or movies in a case the same size as a bluray/DVD case, or a full-on library in something similar to an early 2000s portable CD flip case.

Imation had their own super-floppy drive that I liked better than Zip drives; it never caught on though. They could also do neat tricks like writing up to 32MB to a standard 3.5" floppy.

>most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world

In the last 50 years world population has doubled. But creator count has increased by orders of magnitude.

MiniDiscs for peak portable storage aesthetic. I'm still holding out hope that maybe someday we'll go back to visible mini platters on portable devices.

Also along that line, as a competitor, were the Syquest Sparq and SyJet cartridge hard drives. Syquest was eventual acquired by... Iomega.

For a while, I used a SyJet on a SCSI controller as a secondary hard drive for dual booting. Back in that era, I had to patch the Linux kernel to add my Adaptec SCSI card's ID to the list of PCI IDs it recognized, but the driver worked fine once that was done, and the official sources soon caught up.

It worked well, but I rapidly outgrew it, and the cartridges were expensive and hard to find.

Creators hardly got paid anything back in the CD era either! Especially new bands that had no experience with the sharks at the record company.

I remember back in the 90s one of the radio countdown shows did a bit on Madonna. They said because she was her own producer, director, manager, etc she cut out all the middlemen and thus earned a much larger share of each album sale.

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore...

This is a proper definition of disruption.

> Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines[1], which state:

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Going off from a story about floppy disk production into the unrelated topics content ownership and creator pay is the very definition of a generic tangent, flamebait, and an internet trope. Please don't degrade the quality of HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Dunno, "no one" is a bit exaggerated, vinyl records market is growing every year. Of course, due to really cheap and bulky storage devices available today people all around are collecting movies and music , maintaining their collections in meticulous order. I mean, it is obvious not everyone will accept not owning their movies or music, loosing all access to it the moment they stop to pay in exchange for questionable amount of convenience, so the streaming services are of no interest to them. In fact, some people even see that as caring and giving attention to what they watch or listen.

And the thumbsticks got almost as bad as the last of the floppies. Single-use throw-away chinese crap.

I remember a very old XT computer with no HDD that was still booting from the original floopy in ~2001, used daily to play Pentix, until someone (me) connected it by mistake to 220V instead of it's 110V transformer.

>Now we are in 2024 and what actually happened is no one owns their movie or music libraries anymore... they are all streamed from some remote CDN somewhere, and most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world.

I torrent and spinning rust is cheap. So I do have media collection.

I remember being hyped running my first game on a 3.5inch disc on an Atari STE.

I was like, I've arrived. This is the f'ing future!

Even hearing "Iomeda Zip Drive" brings back incredible nostalgia!

you can download any music you want on youtube as mp3s. store them on a usb drive and plug it on your car, or store it in your computer and store a huge music library... but why bother yourself doing that if you can stream directly on any platform...

Yeah, things took a wrong turn somewhere, with people not valuing local storage and local control of data and just continually downloading the same thing over and over from some cloud provider, for a monthly fee.

It made sense with Netflix, because most people don't re-watch movies often: they usually watch it once and never again, or if it's a favorite, maybe a handful of times. Plus, you normally watch movies at home, where you have a fast and cap-free wired data connection. With music, it just doesn't make sense to me, because I don't want to listen to whatever crap someone wants to shovel to me, and I like hearing the same songs over and over (you can never get tired of Led Zeppelin IV), plus I frequently listen to music while away from home, but somehow people have been suckered into paying for 1) a monthly fee to listen to the music they already know they like, and 2) another big monthly fee for a cellular data plan that allows this wastefulness of mobile bandwidth.

Add to this the proliferation of SaaS, with people now running software from their web browser, and interacting with their data while it's on some remote server, instead of all local on their PC. Now, you can't do almost anything on a computer if you don't have an always-on internet connection.

some of us hold onto the past. I still have a Zip disk and drive (and a bunch of old media, all the way back to a 8 inch floppy) and I have a fairly large collection of 4k blurays

In the old world there were hardly any digital content creators. Nowadays you have more millionaires on Youtube than total content creators back in the days.

In high school, we had a virtual stock portfolio competition. At the time, I was an assistant manager (making minimum wage because I was a depressed kid who looked about 12) at a nationwide small store software (and hardware) store. Zip drives were flying off the shelves, so naturally I checked the company's P&L, SEC statements, and stock data. So I assigned 88% of my stock in IOMG because I could tell it was severely undervalued by market cap compared to projected current sales and frontline buzz. I laid waste to that econ-history class of BMW-driving rich kids and all of their "not cheating" help from their dads. As a bit of bittersweet irony, my teacher's investment club lost on IOMG because they got in late and sold early, just 2 months previously. If they had just been patient enough to wait for that 2 week window where the market appreciated excellent sales, they would've realized significant gains rather than losses.

PS: Yeah, I had a SCSI Zip drive. It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form. 3.5" floppies were traded at school, but you'd never loan original media. In general, the first thing you'd do with pristine media of real product without copy protection was make a backup copy or 2 of it. Some programs would burn serial numbers into floppy media on first installation irreversibly, and sometimes (okay, often) original media would go bad.

I thought the next thing after CD/DVD would have been essentially thumbsticks. Or something more akin to Switch cartridges. Data access is data access, it seemed we could get more data in less space by moving to basically SSDs.

But yeah, on demand(ish), always available(ish) content kind of changed the game.

Do you own a USB-C thumb drive?

…

Me neither :-/

Y-yeah streaming sure has killed ownership of media…

* glances nervously at the Ethernet leading into the NAS in the closet, overflowing with music and videos and books and games

ah yes, Iomega zip drives, back in the days when you could stores 10's of 1000s of files and images in 100mb.

Nowadays, that would be like, what, 10 smartphone camera pictures?

> At least we still have thumbsticks...

Except for the drift issues!!

/s

But even gaming has gone to the model you describe. There’s no more “holding” of something.

> most content creators get paid a pittance compared to what they did in the old world

My local 1-hour photo lab clerk has been struggling as well

> They make post-its for chrissake

Wikipedia to the rescue:

"3M Company (originally the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company) is an American multinational conglomerate operating in the fields of industry, worker safety, healthcare, and consumer goods. The company produces over 60,000 products under several brands, including adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, personal protective equipment, window films, paint protection films, dental and orthodontic products, electrical and electronic connecting and insulating materials, medical products, car-care products electronic circuits, healthcare software, and optical films. It is based in Maplewood, a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota."

Although recently not doing so well due to one lawsuit, they have a wonderful rule that nudges management to add new products to its portfolio sooner and more aggresively than other companies, so I associate them with innovation.

The now-famous "Post-It notes" were such a disruptive new innovation, made from scrap paper that was left over when cutting larger pages: literally rubbish/garbage turned into a new revenue stream.

I have no idea why they shoehorned 3M into the article. Floppies rose and fell independently of 3M.

> They make post-its for chrissake, and we're gonna pretend they're most known for floppies?

How many people actually remember that post-its is a 3M product? Maybe buried deep in my memory, but not at the top of it

If you’d asked me to name a 3M product, the first thing that would pop into my head is Fluorinert-range of electrically inert cooling chemicals, used to cool electronics, e.g. in the 1980s Cray 2 supercomputer: stuff many overclockers daydream about but very few ever use (primarily due to how extremely expensive it is, although environmental and safety issues are also a factor). Never seen the stuff in person, but the idea of it is cool

I mostly associate 3M with film products, because that's what they're most known for in the car world. If you want high-quality paint protection film or tint film at a commercial scale, it's usually from 3M (although they have some competitors like Xpel). When I think about adhesives, I think about Permatex, but I didn't realize Scotch and Duck tape were 3M products, so I have probably used way more 3M adhesives than I realized.

When I think about floppy disks, especially 3.5" floppy disks, I mostly think of Sony and Toshiba. Both made floppy disks, but Sony invented them, Toshiba was the first to put a 3.5" floppy disk drive in a laptop, and Sony made one of the first consumer digital cameras which stored photos on a floppy disk (Sony Mavica). I don't even remotely think of 3M. I would associate the brand name "Fellows" more with floppies than 3M, because they were the company that made the 50 and 100 floppy storage trays you could buy at any office store. When I moved in 2022, I threw out nearly 600 floppy disks I still had in a closet for some reason, including a copy of the Windows 3.11 installer set.

I used a ton of floppies since mid-1980s and until early 2000s. The names I actively associate with floppies in my visual memory are BASF, TDK, Maxell, and Sony. I did have the occasional 3M floppy, but these were somehow rare.

OTOH 3M easily evokes images of all things adhesive.

I would have said adhesive tape. And then maybe magnetic tape.

Followed shortly by "industrial chemicals".

I associate 3M with the production of chemicals

I feel like in recent years people--not just relevant trade professionals but a ton of normal people--have also come to recognize them for making protective gear including, very specifically, N95 masks.

Nerdy but - last Xmas 3M got hundreds of dollars of my family money.

I got speed tape, ruby tape, silicone fiberglass hi-low temp tape. I don't really need them, I admire the engineering and I'm kinda afraid to use these tapes given how much they cost.

But yeah, the 3M brand = adhesives in my household.

I've been thinking for a few months about a similar write-up about Maxell - I own their cassette tapes, 5.25", 3.5" and 3" floppies, CDs, DVDs, and blu-rays. What a company!

Stuff like this makes me think, but with a different view looking back than when I lived through it.

For example, the hole punch thing. 10 year old me would have never pondered this, but... was there someone at Stedmans' HQ, wondering why there was an 18% uptick in hole-punch sales? Some old, crusty and cantankerous beatnik squirreled away, staring at sales charts and projections, perplexed as to why?

How many households had no hole-punch, but did once the floppy appeared in home?

>when I used to order bulk purchases of 5.25" floppies from a catalog

Imsai!

I immediately think of their products I use on a regular basis. There are so many.

  - micropore tape for mycelium and tissue cultures
  - reusable respirators and cartridges
  - net sanding disks
  - double sided tape for so many things
  - foam ear plugs and earmuffs
  - scouring pads for shop/kitchen/aquarium
  - HEPA air filters for work and home
  - command strips for all kinds of hanging and affixing needs
  - adhesive spray, mostly for wood working or working with templates 
  - stripping pads

Totally. My house walls are plastered with M3 Velcro tape that holds everything from hooks to artwork. Really, a marvel of chemical engineering. Those hold quite a load and then you pull down the strip and the adhesive comes off the wall like nothing was ever there.

They bought a former employer of mine which was responsible for a universal file opening program (most famously incorporated into Lotus Notes). When I started there, they were Intranet Solutions, and then became Innosoft and Stellant before becoming a division of 3M.

I suspect that Chinese also trusts 3M brand because random AliExpress products tend to have "3M" branded adhesive seal (perhaps fake).

Did you read the article? This is a few pages in:

> Now, to be clear, 3M did not invent magnetic storage—that was done by Austro-German engineer Fritz Pfleumer, in 1928. He created audio tape, a recording medium that started as broad strips of paper coated with iron-powder granules, and eventually moved to less-fragile cellulose acetate with help from what would become another big name in floppy disks, BASF. At first, the innovation didn’t spread outside of Germany because of World War II.

Scale and complexity. Floppies were dying. And it might be that so was some equipment for making them. Tape is steady state demand with likely small but clear margin and demand also in future. So quite different future and production scenario.

I imagine the difference is that Scotch tape is much better aligned with the R&D that goes into their other products in the adhesives and films categories compared to magnetic tape. If they didn't intend to go further into developing products in the computing space then selling it while it still had value was probably a wise call.

Shipping businesses grew and still growing. I think they are making so much money from it despite its margin.

> I think with esp32s3 and floppies we can make some cool computer kits :) there are also 5" spi displays 800x480 that are pretty fast

Not sure there is much interest from younger people these days outside of a small niche. Checkout any kind of OS/computer architecture classes on a University campus.

Could be super cool to build a 'mobile phone' that runs on floppy disks.

> PS: I am working on adding UFI support, it is using CBI to the esp32 mass storage which support only BOT, but its going quite slowly because I am trying to use cheap 4$ logic analyzer to debug and its losing samples :(

Have you documented this somewhere?

I am sorry to see you being downvoted.

I feel completely betrayed by 3M. All of the fondness I had for the brand from floppy disks to early post-it notes, painter's tape, and scotch taping gifts with my mom.... all of them are tained with the horror of 3M's complete disregard for everything and everyone for all time.

o wow, i totally forgot about the feeling, yes that was nice.

images don't load with JS disabled, but the text is clear and there's no annoying header to worry about.

What is the spike in November 2020 about?

Is there a way to "see what they saw"? Maybe the results of then could tell me why people cared about a 20 year old media format.