this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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You should check out zip disks. Floppies could only hold 1.5 mb of data, but zip disks started out at 100 mb and ended up being able to hold upwards of 650 mb.
Only the cool kids had those (lol), but they don't get a whole lot of recognition.
If you want some really wild old storage tech, a normal VHS cassette could hold 3-5gb of data. But we didn't have any use for that much storage at the time, and CDs were taking over by the time we did, so nobody bought the VHS storage hardware.
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Those were floppies, too! The storage medium was a flexible magnetic film, same as floppies and unlike the rigid platters found in hard disk drives.
SyQuest competed with the ZIP drive with its EZ Drive, which used a lone hard-disk platter in a removable plastic cartridge as its storage medium.
Both drives suffered from various mechanical problems, high cost of storage media, and low storage capacity, and were ultimately outcompeted by optical discs, which have in turn been replaced by USB flash memory cards (although optical discs are still useful when you need to receive some bytes from someone you don't trust not to destroy your computer).
My dad was a cool kid, who would have thought?