Comments on: [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Cody

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:13:39 +0000

I remember WORMs, they were a hot topic in the early 90s and really looked like they might take off if they would only drop in price …

It never happened and I never saw one in real life.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Bob E

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:32:21 +0000

I've been rumaging around the net trying to find a battery for my Canon Xapshot. I'm still digging around for the power adapter!

I picked-up a case of disks and have a ton of pictures on them. Looks like I'll need to move them onto a more modern platform! I even had a picture of the President of Commodore published in AmigaWorld that was taken with the Xapshot! Great little camera for 1988…..

Now to dig through the junk cable/adapter pile!!

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: jdiwnab

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:41:59 +0000

I have a 2″ internal laptop hard drive in an old 486 tablet. It's pretty bazaar the first time you see it. The interface is standard, but the drive itself is very small.

I also recently obtained an 8″ floppy disk. Never got to use it, but it is still very unique, at least now a days.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Brian Deuel

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:21:48 +0000

NeXT put a magneto-optical drive in their early computers (or maybe all of them; not sure). This drive used discs that were similar to Mini-Discs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Benj Edwards

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:24:55 +0000

Hey Jarson, check out this scan to see an ad for a camera that used those video floppies you mentioned. By the way: great stories, everybody. Keep them up.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Jarson

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:09:04 +0000

I remember the Video Floppy around 1992, which at the time I used it was part of the Canon Xapshot. Although analog, it was a precursor to digital cameras to come. It used tiny 2″ floppy discs and stored about 20-30 still images (I forget exactly). You can find an article about it on Wikipedia.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Toon

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:45:26 +0000

I remember using not only Zip drives, but also Jaz(z?) drives in college. They were very expensive and the disks were even more fragile than Zips. Fragile disks + college computer rooms + rowdy art students = disaster. Could hold a whopping 1 or 2 gig, though. The sort of storage you now get on a free USB memorystick.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Rockin' Kat

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 11:08:49 +0000

I have a couple SCSI Castlewood ORB drives. A 2.2GB removable cartridge media… the cartridge contains a platter much like a regular hard drive. I really liked it. If I recall right it cost less per GB than my dad's Jazz 2GB drive and was far far FAR more reliable…

Back when I first got my Mac G4 tower I got a SCSI card for it just for the ORB drive and a scanner.. Unfortunantly Castlewood never released an OS X driver for it, and I could never get OS X to see it on it's own so I pretty much stopped using it on a regular basis when OS X came out.

I actually used it for a while on my Apple IIgs. GS OS was able to see the whole 2.2GB drive and make use of it… And it even was able to handle ejecting and inserting disks without rebooting.

…The Jaz 2GB drive had this irritating problem where formating disks had a tendancy to render them useless. I'd get a PC format disk, reformat it Mac and lose .2GB of storage.. if it got formated a second time, the disk would be rendered completely useless.

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Layne

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:55:32 +0000

I've used the ls-120′s and the magneto optical drives. I had the original Zip drive (parallel port, external). I've even used the SyQuest drives. I also used several tape drives (Ditto's come to mind).

Layne

Comment on [ Retro Scan of the Week ] Forget the CD — Here's the Optical Card by: Chrisbones

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:45:04 +0000

Wow… I was gonna say Syquest and my Color Classic too! But Alas, it was taken.
So I will mention my love/hate relationship I had with Iomega ZIP 100. My Color Classic was way overdue to be replaced and I basically ran every app I had off of a ZIP disk and kept that 80MB hard drive as empty as possible. Which is not fun if you were running Photoshop off of one ZIP but needed a file off of another ZIP.
Then there was the ZIP "click-of-death" syndrome… ah memories!