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In Goncharov there's a mention of a '15 megabyte floppy disk' meant to imply that the movie is set in the 'future' from its creation date, and I have been thinking for the past few days about what a '15 meg' floppy looks like.
The thing that keeps haunting me about is the idea of a multi-layered disc platter inside a fat chunky plastic box, possibly with some design to allow multi-reading, like imagine a floppy disk that's like, shaped like a boxy C, meant to slot into a C-shaped slide
I figure it probably looks like a 2x4, or an incredibly up-sized flashdrive.
That sounds like a Jaz drive, and yes, it's as bad an idea as it sounds.
I had one of these, and it did its job fine. It also had a lot more storage than 15 meg though.
15 is a genuinely wonderful number for that kind of design fiction, implying a whole different evolutionary cul-de-sac of incremental improvement to floppies than the squabble we actually got over replacement removable disk tech that aimed for ~an order of magnitude more storage, all of which lost to CD writers and USB-attached solid-state memory.
A return to disk packs is definitely one possible way to take that; another is to extrapolate the storage density of the little-seen 2.88MB 3.5" floppy + literally scale it up with a return to 5.25".
(My favourite real weird disk is the 40MB cousin of Iomega's 100MB Zip disk, designed to pack the entire drive into a PCMCIA card. It looks like The Future in the sort of way that Minidiscs do, though of course looking like The Future isn't generally desirable for a fictional floppy disk.)
probably not that different, as sony developed the 200mb hifd with a backwards-compatible drive that looked like this:
commercially it failed because the drive had big problems, but in principle, expanding the capacity of the 3½" floppy wouldn't require changing the form factor
So, there is of course the boring answer of "make the drive electronics and the platter formulation better so you can fit more tracks in the same space", as implemented by a bunch of things, but especially the ls120 (which was designed so that ls120 drives could read old floppies). But like I said, boring. More platters is an option, but that gets bulky real quick and loses the portability advantage.
If I were to imagine what a movie prop designer in the early 80s might imagine as the 15mb storage medium of the future, I see them removing the platter material from a bunch of floppies and gluing them together so it's like a 5mm thick puck of (now not particularly) floppy.
this is the only post ive ever seen that made me genuinely question "wait, is there an actual goncharov script some dork made??"
