Magneto-optical disks

theotherosproject

Anyone heard of these? Seems they were pretty expensive back then, and meant for enterprise users; typical home users were still hanging on to floppies and maybe CD-ROMs.

Magneto-optical disks had a form factor similar to floppy disks (5.25 or 3.5 inches) and needed a special drive. Despite being (magneto-) optical, operating systems detected them as hard disks so theoretically you could install early Windows versions on them. Initially they were WORM (Write Once, Read Many) but later ones were rewritable. They were double-sided too, so if you had one 2.6 GB disk, you would use 1.3 GB on each side. I hope I can get hold of them at some point.

Here is a good video which describes their functionality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdwI4l34AFM

TCPMeta

I had a MO drive in a NeXT system once. Had only one disk to it. Mine wasn't a WORM, it was a typical read/write. A failed attempt to replace tape backup and later was replaced with ZipDrive and LS-120 SuperDisk then fell out of the loop when CD-RW became cheaper and mostly standard.

stitch

I used to have a unit that operated over SCSI - I think it was made by Pinnacle Micro if memory serves right and it did have write-many disks. They were more or less represented like a hard disk and I do believe I was able to boot NT off of it.

DeepFriedCookies

My mother's work system, growing up, had these. Their IT department was so stereotypically 1990's. Magnetic Tapes, dial up internet on each individual system, very stereotypical beige box Pentium 2/3 builds. One of the offices had a Dell system in it, one of the early Pentium 4/late Pentium 3 systems, and in the shipping room (which used to be an office, years and years ago) had an old Dell Pentium 1 box that I would play games that I downloaded off the internet on. All of these systems apparently were backed up.. I guess that means somewhere in the world today, there's a magnetic disk with the first two Doom Games, the entire Commander Keen series, and Nesticle with a plethora of NES games on it.

AndrewH7

Yes, the 'floppical', = 21 megabytes for Atari ST. That = when hard disc = 30MB.