Schrodinger's Drive

Quivz · February 19, 2020

LS120: Your data is in a state of being there or not being there until you access the disk and check.

Anyone remember the LS120 (also known as SuperDisk if i remember correctly)? I was at university when these things hit their peak popularity. The University upgraded all their PC pools to use these and in computer science we were required to submit all our projects on one of these. At first the lecturers thought they just had a bunch of crappy students, but when it became obvious that the students who performed best on tests were also handing up blank disks with the same frequency as the slackers they finally realised there was a problem. Back in those days there was no cloud storage and the PC pool terminals re-imaged (is that the correct terminology) themselves with every logon so you couldn't save things locally either, so all our assignments had to be saved on these failboat disks. It wasn't until a few years ago when i was reminiscing with a IT lecturer about the good old days i came up with the Schrodinger analogy for the disks.

Radium_Angel · February 19, 2020

30 minutes ago, Quivz said:

LS120

They were fantastic devices....when they worked.

Ditto for MO drives (Magneto Optical)

And Floptical drives (21MB disks that were in the same form factor of 3.5" floppies)

Everything connected by SCSI of course...

Bombastinator · February 19, 2020

28 minutes ago, Quivz said:

LS120: Your data is in a state of being there or not being there until you access the disk and check.

Anyone remember the LS120 (also known as SuperDisk if i remember correctly)? I was at university when these things hit their peak popularity. The University upgraded all their PC pools to use these and in computer science we were required to submit all our projects on one of these. At first the lecturers thought they just had a bunch of crappy students, but when it became obvious that the students who performed best on tests were also handing up blank disks with the same frequency as the slackers they finally realised there was a problem. Back in those days there was no cloud storage and the PC pool terminals re-imaged (is that the correct terminology) themselves with every logon so you couldn't save things locally either, so all our assignments had to be saved on these failboat disks. It wasn't until a few years ago when i was reminiscing with a IT lecturer about the good old days i came up with the Schrodinger analogy for the disks.

Iirc ls120 was basically a laser guided floppy. The guy who invented them wanted to use the tech to leverage himself into being a captain of industry so he refused to sell the tech. He wasn’t all that good at it though. The cost and reliability never wound up meeting expectations, so the tech more or less died along with a few systems that relied on him being willing to sell it. Which he wasn’t. The LS120 basically killed NEXT because the system relied on the tech being publicly available and it never really was.