Just recently I wanted to show my kids the 5.25" floppy disk - I had a small stack somewhere, but could not find it. I have finally found an 3½" floppy and have shown it to my kids (14 y.o. max). Evidently they never used such a thing, but I was genuinely surprised they didn't even know what it was. After a considerable amount of time one of my daughters hesitated but said something like: "Wasn't it like old USB stick thingy?". Given they have no USB stick either that's not bad, I guess. Then I proceeded to explain that a floppy disk is pictured on Save buttons - you just had to see their faces, it was a moment of the big revelation.
Apparently 3M was a serious player back in the day on magnetic tapes and floppy diskettes. But today they are not present in a similar market (digital storage) at all.
I wonder what was it like to go through that timeframe, as the management and the employees, where the floppy disks were becoming obsolete. Did they purposefully took the decision to not pursue CD, flash memory market? Or was it just a shortsightedness of the management where they fell behind and eventually had to exit that market?
Of course 3M still managed to be successful and today it is one of the big market cap companies...
3M was indeed a big player in those markets. I purchased both 5.25" and 3.5" 3M floppies and they were good quality and reliable.
I expect they left the market because of declining use and the entrance of much cheaper foreign manufacturers. I expect they didn't enter the flash memory market as they had no existing manufacturing base for them to build on. They would have had to rebrand another firm's chips and circuit boards.
A storage disk doesn't need ability to do random block writes, if you ditch that you can remove the sector gaps and put more sectors on the drive. The Microsoft DMF format and utility can put 1,720,320 bytes on a drive.
It should fit on an DMF MF-2HD (standard double-sided, high density, 90 millimeters microfloppy formatted in Distribution Media Format, holding 1'720'320 bytes).
It's interesting that the index hole is not on y-axis, if it is actually used to allow operations. I used all my SS 5.25" as DS just by flipping them I think, and they just worked. You weren't supposed to do that, but all the SS diskettes were coated on the other side, so you just fliped it and it would work, but it wouldn't be certified for that use case.
As soon as the motors used to spin drives were able to provide a once per rotation signal to replace the index hole, the hole was no longer used for anything. The detector and lamp used to detect the hole were more expensive than using a signal from the motor.
I wonder what was it like to go through that timeframe, as the management and the employees, where the floppy disks were becoming obsolete. Did they purposefully took the decision to not pursue CD, flash memory market? Or was it just a shortsightedness of the management where they fell behind and eventually had to exit that market?
Of course 3M still managed to be successful and today it is one of the big market cap companies...
You could say that 3M doesn’t make the things you use every day; they make the things you use better.
I expect they left the market because of declining use and the entrance of much cheaper foreign manufacturers. I expect they didn't enter the flash memory market as they had no existing manufacturing base for them to build on. They would have had to rebrand another firm's chips and circuit boards.
Looks like it's on the Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20241104214425/https://retrocmp....