Even with that said, those gray-hairs will frequently claim that of the many makers of floppies out there, 3M made the best ones. Given that, I was curious to figure out exactly why 3M became the most memorable brand in data storage during the formative days of computing, and why it abandoned the product.
↫ Ernie Smith
I do not remember if I ever held any particular views on which brand of floppy disk (or diskettes, as we called them) was the best. We had a wide variety of brands, and I can’t recall any one of them being better than the other, but then, I’m sure people in professional settings had more experience with the little black squares and thus developed all kinds of feelings about them.
It’s been nearly two decades since I so much as touched a floppy disk, but from what I recall Verbatim and 3M were my “never fail” brands. I don’t recall ever having issues with Sony disks either but they were usually more expensive so I stayed away from them for that reason alone.
Sadly, Verbatim has let me down a lot in the past few years with their USB flash storage; I haven’t had a reliable Verbatim other than an 8GB one where the case cracked and broke off, and I 3D printed a new case for it since I used it as a FuguIta based “go anywhere” OpenBSD installation. Ironically that one is still alive many years later even though I moved on to a USB 3.2 SanDisk drive for that use case.
We were a Maxwell house as far as disquettes and audio cassettes were concerned.
I thought Maxwell House sold coffee?
We are a Maxwell house as far as super capacitors are concerned…
https://ibb.co/XSxdmYD
https://ibb.co/1KXgXPg
Good fun, just watch out that the wrench doesn’t complete a circuit 🙂
Funny, I just cleaned, re-capped and revived my 1979 Apple ][ and tried floppy disks I had stashed in my appartement building underground for ≥ 40 years.
To my surprise, some worked without any cleaning.
The brands: 3M, Dysan, Verbatim. Datalife, Memorex.
Back then I made these floppies double sided with the hole punch trick.
I still use my Amiga and have a lot of disks, I seem to recall 3M being good along with Verbatim. I also have a lot of Imation disks but I don’t recall if they where any better or worse.
3.5-inch floppy disks produced by 3M in the 1990s seemed very solid, but – at least in my case – after about 10 years of storage, almost all of them failed. On the other hand, Sony floppy disks purchased around 2005 are still reliable, which I randomly test from time to time.
It was not the most memorable brand of magnetic storage at all. That belongs to the japanese company TDK, the company that produced everything from Audio and video reel drums, BetaMAX, VHS, music casettes and DAT tapes to floppies, stiffies (like the 3.5 and zipdisk) and more all the way to modern magnetic storage.
They also made very high quality writable CD, DVD, HD-DVD and blueray disks.
It has doubled in stock value over the last year. So they are doing something right.
Verbatim was considered number one in my part of the world (a small town in south Poland) in the second part of 90-ties. I was not even aware that 3M was making floppies.