I think a few of those are ZIP disks.

Upgrading to Jazz drives.

Actually had an Iomega Jaz drive at work to hold video projects from our Iomega Buz video capture box. I can't reminisce too much about that format though. Prices came down on regular hard drives quickly enough that we bought a 20GB hard drive before I ever got much use out of the Jaz. The Iomega Buz on the other hand was somewhat glorious in its day.

After several bugfixes, tweaks and a set of hacked-drivers (as well as chucking out Adobe Premiere) the Buz system actually worked okay. I shot in HQ SP S-video, captured to MJPEG at maximum bitrate via the Buz and chopped it all up in a version of Ulead MediaStudio that came bundled with an old graphics card of mine. We did a ton of highly-edited video projects on this hacked-together Buz rig (with overclocked Pentium III and overclocked 440BX chipset FTW) and we regularly got praise for the video quality.

Threads like this always make me miss the days when tech was more hands-on. But I think I hide it well.

The click of global annihilation.

Truth be told, I miss the 3.5" floppy format. I always thought that the physical package of CDs, DVDs and BluRays. (a large disc which is completely exposed to harm unless you use a bulky disc caddy) was a huge and stupid step backwards in usability.

If they'd kept working on the original CD format until it fit onto a 3.5" disc size then put that disc into a retractable-sleeve jacket like the 3.5 floppy every major computer platform could have ditched the 5.25" drive bay decades earlier and we'd all have had a standardized high-capacity package for data that ignored magnetism, scratches, sunlight, etc.

Tech companies always f***ing quit before the job is done.

Probably because Sony was behind that format.

Could not agree more. Sony always had great engineers and a pantshittingly stupid front office.

That's kind of what minidiscs were.

Zip drives?

More useful than floppy, sure.

But still vulnerable to magnetic fields and warm tempeartures. Also small-capacity, too slow, too expensive and way too late. And still kinda bulky.

The media layer of a jacket protected optical disc could have been thinner than the optical discs we actually got, and the jacket could have been as thin and light as a 3.5" floppy jacket...

......I hope to God I never catch myself in a nerdier discussion than this. Is it worse that I'm the one who started it?

How is a floppy not vulnerable to magnetic fields and warm temperatures?

Floppies were highly vulnerable to heat and magnetism. So that's one area where ZIP discs DID NOT improve upon the floppy disc format.

Yup. Funfact: the tech that minidisc was based on was demoed in 1983 but Sony didn't launch minidisc until 1992, and even then they only launched it in the same data capacity as CD.

And even then they doomed it to niche-market use by being goddamned Sony.

Kind of seems laugh-worthy, but, how many modern hackers even know what a floppy disk drive even is, much less a 12 inch? We used to use to same 12 inch floppy drives to run PBX systems at AT&T back decades ago.

Oops! President Trump clicked "[F]ormat" on the nuclear football...