X-no-Archive:yes
How about a blast from the past:  I found the following document, dated
December 1990 on the web:

"The NeXTcube: Similar to the original NeXT, with three free NuBus
expansion slots. It can be purchased with a variety of mass storage
options, including the 2.88MB floppy disk, various hard disks, and the NeXT
Magneto-Optical disk. The list price for the NeXTcube with 8MB RAM, 105MB
hard disk, 2.88MB floppy disk, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and software is
$7995. The Emporium price is $5613."

And then this one from Stanford University, complete with typos:

"In 1980, the 3.5 inch floppy drive and disc was introduced by Sony. Three
major types of 3.5 inch floppy discs were developed; double density with
720K, high density with 1.44MB, and extra-high denisty with 2.88MB. In 1986
the 720K double density drive first appeared in an IBM system with the IBM
Convertible laptop system. Because of it's low capacity this standard did
not catch on. The next 3.5 floppy was the 1.44MB high density drive that
first appeared from IBM in the PS/2 product line in 1987. Also in 1987
Toshiba announced the 2.88MB floppy drive and manufactoring began in 1989.
IBM adopted these drives in 1991 and because the 2.88MB drive can fully
read and write 1.44M and 720K disks, the change was easy. Virtually all
systems today have built in support for the 2.88MB drives. Although the
2.88MB drives themselves are not much more expensive than the 1.44MB drives
they replace, the disk media is currently still very expensive. The 1.44MB
floppy disks cost approximinately 50 cents each while the 2.88MB floppy
disks cost more than 2 dollars each. For this reason the 2.88MB floppy
never really caught on and the 1.44MB floppy became the industy standard."
  (sic)



Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP America, Inc.
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com



-----Original Message-----
From:   Wirt Atmar [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Wednesday, 17 March, 1999 12:19 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: Off Topic: 2MB Floppy

Stan writes:

> As it turns out, he very well may have a non-standard floppy.  A number
of
>  companies tried to establish a bigger-than-1.44MB standard "floppy".
>
>  If he really has such a non-standard floppy, chide him for ever taking
it
>  away from the computer it was made on, and then look into alternative
>  methods of getting the data:  (1) make a new 1.44 MB floppy (generally
>  possibly on those non-standard drive, if you work hard enough); (2) put
>  the data on the net somewhere, and grab it that way.
>
>  On the off chance you ever encounter a floppy like that and have *no*
>  way of getting the data, and you *really* need the data, there are some
>  companies around that specialize in moving data from one media to
another,
>  and can handle a surprising number of formats.

That's true, but I know of no one who increased the size of 1.44MB floppy
to a
mere 2MB (not counting Denys' recounting of a Sony 2.88MB floppy, which I
must
admit that I've never heard of before). All of the increases in floppy
densities that I'm aware of were significant increases and generally used
some
sort of "floptical" technology to increase the 1.44MB's physical format to
either 21MB or 120MB (and which, as Denys said, can read the standard
1.44MB
format as well).

We bought into the 21MB floptical format about eight years ago to back up
our
Macs. Discs for the "wave of the future" aren't even manufactured any more,
although once they were made and commonly advertised by Sony, 3M, and
others.
We still use the flopticals, but very carefully nowadays.

Wirt Atmar