Until VERY recently the US nuclear arsenal required 8" floppies. Disks that went out of favor in the early 70s because they can only spin for a few hours before they start to corrupt.
The one that most blew my mind was that my local Walmart only stopped selling blank BetaMax tapes in the mid 00’s. By the time the store was built they weren’t even selling movies on VHS anymore, but the blanks were still worthy of limited shelf space.
Are you sure they were BetaMax and not Betacam SP? Beta SP (as it’s more commonly known) is a high quality format that was still being used by TV stations when I was working them as late as the 2010s. There were a few other later much higher quality formats like ED-Beta.
Also, I believe some camcorders also used Beta formats.
Japan just gave up the floppy (officially), but there will still be other legacy users.
Until VERY recently the US nuclear arsenal required 8" floppies. Disks that went out of favor in the early 70s because they can only spin for a few hours before they start to corrupt.
The one that most blew my mind was that my local Walmart only stopped selling blank BetaMax tapes in the mid 00’s. By the time the store was built they weren’t even selling movies on VHS anymore, but the blanks were still worthy of limited shelf space.
Are you sure they were BetaMax and not Betacam SP? Beta SP (as it’s more commonly known) is a high quality format that was still being used by TV stations when I was working them as late as the 2010s. There were a few other later much higher quality formats like ED-Beta.
Also, I believe some camcorders also used Beta formats.
I’m sure camcorders were the reason. But no, they were BetaMax.