Antrepo Design imagines a world where things still come on 3.5″ floppy disks. For reference, Adobe’s CS4 Master Edition would arrive on about 6,400 of them.
You could, of course, stash an awful lot of flash in the form factor. I wonder if anyone’s invented a magnetic panel that could “fake” output the way one of those MP3-player-to-cassette-deck adapters do? But then you still have the speed limitations of the drives and their controllers. WELL IT WORKED IN THE MAGIC WORLD IN MY HEAD.
A poster of the concept is available at the high high price of $100.
Set of 4 posters [Anterepo shop via Technabob]
Rob, you posted flash-in-a-floppy things before:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/14/power-on-self-test-p-5.html
(though even that was just a Yanko-esque mockup)
240Kbps? Pah. In my nightmare world, Adobe CS4 is published in hex form in a very very thick copy of “Your Computer” magazine, and I type the machine code in…forever.
Jeez, and I thought installing OS/2 from floppies was a PITA.
I always like to think of storage in terms the height of a stack of 3.5″ floppies.
Imagine, for example, a Nikon D3 with the CF memory replaced with floppies. 2x32GB in 1.4Mb floppies is about 48,000 of the little suckers. It would be slightly unwieldy. Then think about the older 5.25″ disks that only had about 64k on the single sided versions.
By my calculations, if CS4 Master Edition were distributed as punched tape, it would stretch 4/5 of the way around earth when laid out flat.
You mean like one of these?
http://www.edgetechcorp.com/support/products/digital-media/flashpath/
I remember getting “Space Ace” for the Apple II GS when I was a kid. It came on at least 8 3.5 discs.
Somehow, I think if they were forced to distribute on 3.5″ floppies, they’d figure out how to get the bulk of the wasted space out of the application…
Hypothetical 64000 floppies, bah.
Try actually creating installation floppies for Windows (95) using only old, used and abused floppies you happen to find. Then try installing Windows from those ~60 floppies. Repeat as long as it takes to get a full set of ~60 working floppies.
More like:
“Please insert Disk 6 now to play the next 25 minutes of the game”
@Se7a7n7: Ah the simpler times! When games were still a total pain in the ass to install.
Back in high school, my entire software collection consisted of about 200 5.25″ double-density diskettes. Single-sided (they were only about $40 per 10-pack) modified so that I could use the second side.
I now routinely handle individual files larger than all of those disks put together.
I got the following message trying to load disk 2118:
Data error Reading drive A
Abort, Retry, Ignore?
I remember programs like Wordperfect 5.1 that came on about 20 floppies, but 15 of those were printer drivers.
And AutoCad where there were printer drivers and plotter drivers and screen drivers.
We tend to forget what a boon it was to not have to deal with all that stuff once Windows came along.
Somewhere at home I still have Photoshop for original Macintosh on a single floppy. Sure, the program’s come a long way since then. But I also have Microsoft Word on a single floppy. And that version, for everyday purposes is just as practical as the Office 2007 version. And they call me a luddite.
#9:
The proper solution in that case is to just use a few known good disks. When it asks for a new disk to be inserted, overwrite one of the ones you have been using from the images I assume you have stored on the computer you made the 60 disks from.
You actually could use one of these to get a super-large floppy..
http://www.amazon.com/Sony-Floppy-Interface-Memory-MSAC-FD2MA/dp/B00005T3Q1
Up to 240 Kilobytes per second data transfer rate!
Install???