re floptical drives anyone kin chan sparrow cmu edu wrote just curious why floptical drives never seemed to catch on remember those mb disks that look and feel like floppies these drives are scsi devices and can read and write both kb and mb disks sounds to me to be one great product for the pc market are the prices really that unaffordable compared to cd roms which are currently not rewritable i know about the new rewritable cds and expect sony to develop the first mds for the computer my question is why isn t there any substantial interest in developing the flopticals certainly in the uk the mb flopticals are about the same price as a cheap cd rom now you seem to be able to get them for around gbp however the bigger optical drives e g mb are much more expensive around the gbp mark a couple of questions that someone may be able to answer the mb flopticals are they direct drop in replacements for a floppy or do they need driver software etc i e do you just rip out the floppy drive plug the same cables into the floptical stick in a flopti disk and hey presto you have a mb floppy this sounds far too easy on the subject of sony developing mds for computers i have reread a pcw article on this subject and there it says that sony have been doing optical drives for other people for some time and may be about to do a product themselves from the article it seems that the audio md format is a byproduct of their computer storage work the md mechanism is identical to their mo computer optical drives a sony spokesman was quoted as saying that a md disk would hold about mb of data though he refused to comment on any possibility of this being productized the article said that one of the problems holding back development in this area was lack of sensible standards plus there are at least distinct optical storage mechanisms around at present given that it probably needs mds being used as a distribution medium to get it into the market and since this has already been cornered by cds it probably needs someone to come in with a very strong marketting lead to get mds accepted david shepherd des inmos co uk tel x inmos ltd aztec west almondsbury bristol bs sq they didn t like the rates they don t like the poll tax and they won t like the council tax nicholas ridley
