I had a Roland electric piano from the 80s that came with a midi synthesizer with its own built-in floppy drive to record stuff on. The floppies were like 2.5”, so you couldn’t use them on anything else except other Roland machines.
“I had a Roland electric piano from the 80s that came with a midi synthesizer with its own built-in floppy drive to record stuff on. The floppies were like 2.5”, so you couldn’t use them on anything else except other Roland machines.”
That’s interesting, I have heard of Roland 3.5 inch floppy drives (and possibly disks) that looked identical, but were incompatible with everything else, but I didn’t know that Roland also used an entirely different diskette size. I’m guessing that, maybe, the cost of producing an entirely different floppy format was high, and in the end, it was just cheaper to take an existing format and modify it to not work with anything else? (Why Roland? Why?)
Ironically, while I’m reading this, I’m taking a break from soldering up a reproduction of a Roland midi interface card for an MPU-401 (the breakout boxes were often kept, but the interface cards got thrown out), while I listen to midi files of old DOS game music on my Sound Canvas. In the last couple years, I’ve been into building the kind of vintage DOS gaming rigs that were simply too expensive for normal people to own when they were new. I got into that as a hobby when I realized that modern computer operating systems make the hardware too abstract to teach my son how computers really work. The craziest part is that after I build a couple more of the midi interface cards, is that we are going to be building an accurate reproduction of an IBM PC 5150 motherboard from scratch. I never would have expected that I would literally be building my own computer (rather than just assembling it from off-the-shelf cards and components). Hopefully, my son will gain an advantage learning about computers in this way over people his age, even if he doesn’t go into a particularly tech related field.