"a good 90% of major brand mini-floppies can be turned into "flipped" floppies.". Which is only true for disks made after about 1980. Prior to that, SSD's (LOL, the original meant Single Sided...
"a good 90% of major brand mini-floppies can be turned into "flipped" floppies.".
Which is only true for disks made after about 1980. Prior to that, SSD's (LOL, the original meant Single Sided Disk), only had magnetic media on one side. The notch was there to protect the read/write heads from damage because they made direct contact with the surface of the disk. They didn't float.
Once Dual-Sided Disks became popular (they were more than twice the cost of a SSD), manufactures saved production costs by only creating one type of disk and then when one side failed QA testing, they packaged that disk as Single-Sided. Very late, quality became so good that no manufacture did much QA testing and you could expect 99.9% success punching a single-sided HD disk to make a DSHD disk.
I remember my dad (I'm 49) using a single-hole punch back then. IT wasn't long before some cheaply made disk punches started to be sold. Only benefit of those were you didn't have to guess where to punch. You just slide the disk into the tool and squeezed it.
3.5" disks ended up being similar, only for low-density and high-density. Even early on, the media was actually the same. All 3.5" disks were high-density. Two things separated them. 1. A square hole in the top corner. 2. Testing at the factory. Name brand HD disks went through much stricter testing, on both sides. Only those that passed testing became HD disks. Those that failed only on one side became low-density disks. Those that failed on both sides were scrapped.
The downside to using a low density disk as high density is that it frequently only worked in the same drive it was formatted on. Every floppy disk has a slightly different alignment.
I'm not old enough to have known 5.25" floppies. It feels like I'm being pranked while reading this—it feels silly to think that a home-grown mechanical change using a hole punch was ever...
I'm not old enough to have known 5.25" floppies. It feels like I'm being pranked while reading this—it feels silly to think that a home-grown mechanical change using a hole punch was ever legitimate or technologically feasible.
Technology these days. What happened to the simplicity of the past?
More recently people would be able to unlock disabled cores on their CPUs in a similar manner. GPUs, too. Make a few hardware or software tweaks and your expensive tech component now thinks it's...
More recently people would be able to unlock disabled cores on their CPUs in a similar manner. GPUs, too. Make a few hardware or software tweaks and your expensive tech component now thinks it's an even more expensive tech component. Lots of CPUs and GPUs have parts of themselves failed and are sectioned off so they can perform fully as a lower-tier part.
Although if yields are high, then some fully-working high-tier chips will be artificially limited down to become lower-tier products. In those cases, used to be that you could sometimes trick the chip into re-enabling those parts.
Don't think it works anymore, I think they like physically damage the parts they're disabling or something now, I haven't heard of anyone doing anything like this in a while.
What's the purpose of that? I can understand being cheaper to make the same hardware because of mass production, then cripple one to sell as something inferior, but wouldn't be better if they did...
What's the purpose of that? I can understand being cheaper to make the same hardware because of mass production, then cripple one to sell as something inferior, but wouldn't be better if they did not cripple the hardware and sold just the superior one with a lower price? They would beat the competition.
It depends on how many people are willing/able to pay for the best version, and how much of a premium they will tolerate. If 95% of users have a fairly solid price ceiling of $100, but that other...
It depends on how many people are willing/able to pay for the best version, and how much of a premium they will tolerate.
If 95% of users have a fairly solid price ceiling of $100, but that other 5% will pay $500 for top performance, then it makes sense to sell a limited version for $100 and still capture those $500 sales too.
If, on the other hand, most users will pay somewhere in the $150 range, maybe +/- $30, and the top performance users will only go as high as $200 then it probably makes sense for the company to cannibalise their $200 sales to meet in the middle at $175.
Understood, i think. If i make a chip that costs both $100 and $300. Same chip, but one is crippled. Why not put them all fully featured for $100? It's not like they are not making a profit...
Understood, i think.
If i make a chip that costs both $100 and $300. Same chip, but one is crippled.
Why not put them all fully featured for $100? It's not like they are not making a profit selling at $100. It probably is the bulk of their sales since less people pay for more expensive hardware. While you loose those who would pay $300, now people who paid $100 will spread the word about your product and $300 people will come around since it will be better than the competition who still does the $100/$300 thing.
Totally possible - and the companies doing the selling will have analysts and marketers working on exactly that question: will the extra volume at the lower price be enough to offset the lost...
While you loose those who would pay $300, now people who paid $100 will spread the word about your product and $300 people will come around since it will be better than the competition who still does the $100/$300 thing.
Totally possible - and the companies doing the selling will have analysts and marketers working on exactly that question: will the extra volume at the lower price be enough to offset the lost profits from the higher price?
If a company is selling two versions, it means they've come to the conclusion that it won't. They might be wrong, of course, but that's the call they've made and if the question is being raised at all that means that the situation probably wasn't entirely clear cut.
It's very similar to price discrimination, but with the added caveat that the products are different (albeit artificially).
I went through a brief phase doing this to 5.25" floppies but was always a little nervous about losing data so in the end stopped doing it. I'm old enough to remember these days and had a fairly...
I went through a brief phase doing this to 5.25" floppies but was always a little nervous about losing data so in the end stopped doing it. I'm old enough to remember these days and had a fairly large collection software collection on 5.25" disks until 3.5" HD disks came about and that was the end of that. 1.44Mb?! How much storage?? It honestly felt like the universe. Don't get me started on my first 40Mb HDD.
Yeah, I used to do this. My programming (and hacking) days began on Apple II(+ ?), circa 1980-ish. I don't recall ever losing data doing that on, easily, 100+ floppies that I manually double-sided...
Yeah, I used to do this. My programming (and hacking) days began on Apple II(+ ?), circa 1980-ish. I don't recall ever losing data doing that on, easily, 100+ floppies that I manually double-sided that way.
"a good 90% of major brand mini-floppies can be turned into "flipped" floppies.".
Which is only true for disks made after about 1980. Prior to that, SSD's (LOL, the original meant Single Sided Disk), only had magnetic media on one side. The notch was there to protect the read/write heads from damage because they made direct contact with the surface of the disk. They didn't float.
Once Dual-Sided Disks became popular (they were more than twice the cost of a SSD), manufactures saved production costs by only creating one type of disk and then when one side failed QA testing, they packaged that disk as Single-Sided. Very late, quality became so good that no manufacture did much QA testing and you could expect 99.9% success punching a single-sided HD disk to make a DSHD disk.
I remember my dad (I'm 49) using a single-hole punch back then. IT wasn't long before some cheaply made disk punches started to be sold. Only benefit of those were you didn't have to guess where to punch. You just slide the disk into the tool and squeezed it.
3.5" disks ended up being similar, only for low-density and high-density. Even early on, the media was actually the same. All 3.5" disks were high-density. Two things separated them. 1. A square hole in the top corner. 2. Testing at the factory. Name brand HD disks went through much stricter testing, on both sides. Only those that passed testing became HD disks. Those that failed only on one side became low-density disks. Those that failed on both sides were scrapped.
The downside to using a low density disk as high density is that it frequently only worked in the same drive it was formatted on. Every floppy disk has a slightly different alignment.
I'm not old enough to have known 5.25" floppies. It feels like I'm being pranked while reading this—it feels silly to think that a home-grown mechanical change using a hole punch was ever legitimate or technologically feasible.
Technology these days. What happened to the simplicity of the past?
This is how MacGyver was able to defuse bombs with chewing gum, a paperclip, and his Swiss Army knife.
More recently people would be able to unlock disabled cores on their CPUs in a similar manner. GPUs, too. Make a few hardware or software tweaks and your expensive tech component now thinks it's an even more expensive tech component. Lots of CPUs and GPUs have parts of themselves failed and are sectioned off so they can perform fully as a lower-tier part.
Although if yields are high, then some fully-working high-tier chips will be artificially limited down to become lower-tier products. In those cases, used to be that you could sometimes trick the chip into re-enabling those parts.
Don't think it works anymore, I think they like physically damage the parts they're disabling or something now, I haven't heard of anyone doing anything like this in a while.
What's the purpose of that? I can understand being cheaper to make the same hardware because of mass production, then cripple one to sell as something inferior, but wouldn't be better if they did not cripple the hardware and sold just the superior one with a lower price? They would beat the competition.
It depends on how many people are willing/able to pay for the best version, and how much of a premium they will tolerate.
If 95% of users have a fairly solid price ceiling of $100, but that other 5% will pay $500 for top performance, then it makes sense to sell a limited version for $100 and still capture those $500 sales too.
If, on the other hand, most users will pay somewhere in the $150 range, maybe +/- $30, and the top performance users will only go as high as $200 then it probably makes sense for the company to cannibalise their $200 sales to meet in the middle at $175.
Understood, i think.
If i make a chip that costs both $100 and $300. Same chip, but one is crippled.
Why not put them all fully featured for $100? It's not like they are not making a profit selling at $100. It probably is the bulk of their sales since less people pay for more expensive hardware. While you loose those who would pay $300, now people who paid $100 will spread the word about your product and $300 people will come around since it will be better than the competition who still does the $100/$300 thing.
People don't just want money, they want more money.
Totally possible - and the companies doing the selling will have analysts and marketers working on exactly that question: will the extra volume at the lower price be enough to offset the lost profits from the higher price?
If a company is selling two versions, it means they've come to the conclusion that it won't. They might be wrong, of course, but that's the call they've made and if the question is being raised at all that means that the situation probably wasn't entirely clear cut.
It's very similar to price discrimination, but with the added caveat that the products are different (albeit artificially).
Don't be TOO nostalgic. Things were a lot harder then, and they took longer.
I went through a brief phase doing this to 5.25" floppies but was always a little nervous about losing data so in the end stopped doing it. I'm old enough to remember these days and had a fairly large collection software collection on 5.25" disks until 3.5" HD disks came about and that was the end of that. 1.44Mb?! How much storage?? It honestly felt like the universe. Don't get me started on my first 40Mb HDD.
Also here's a device you could buy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Squareholepunch2.png.
Yeah, I used to do this. My programming (and hacking) days began on Apple II(+ ?), circa 1980-ish. I don't recall ever losing data doing that on, easily, 100+ floppies that I manually double-sided that way.