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New Egg is having a sale on 2TB Hard Drives: $70 with free shipping.
Not that I have any interest in pron at all.
And that was when the image would scroll line by line over my blazing fast 14,400 US Robotics modem.
Nothing like DS DD 5 1/2 inchers.
(That’s just asking for a joke, right?)
I never had glasses like that.
# 4 foobar said, “Nothing like DS DD 5 1/2 inchers.”
Remember the excitement when we discovered you could actually use BOTH sides of as 5 1/2 inch disk? Of course, you had to learn how to cut a notch on the the opposite edge.
But, of course, my first floppy disk drive used 8 inch disks and, IIRC, held 360,000 bytes. It was a great advance over the university computers that still used paper tape.
I wonder if there are antique collectors now selling punched data cards?
Animby, that just brought up a whole world of memories. I forgot about the old 8 inchers and notching the floppies. I didn’t actually see tape and cards until I had to convert some old engineering software to Fortran IV.
#5 – You still have that sweater though, right?
Remember the short lived LS-120 120mb 3.5″ disks…. WHY!?!
The first shirt pocket floppy disk.
There was an ad in the back of Byte magazine targeted for UNIX folks. It was a t-shirt with a pocket that would hold an 8 inch disk.
Remember when there no program that could actually render an image file on the screen for you? The only ones out there were hard to use and flaky. When Netscape released their browser, I quickly discovered it worked great as a generic media display program. I could toss almost any media format at the time at it and it would render it.
.JPG was born in 1992 – 1993, pics were probably enormous .GIF, 320×200 in 256 colors (VGA), or, 512×342 in monochrome (Mac).
Well, if you have a good imagination, and the floppy is full of stories, then 1.4 MB of porn is a wonderland. What you see in your mind is more important than what you see with your eyes. Not that I would know… JCD told me. 😉
“I wonder if there are antique collectors now selling punched data cards?”
An outfit in Dayton, Ohio sells old computer equipment. I don’t remember seeing card readers, but several years ago I did see an 8-track (data) tape machine, and an 8″ floppy drive. Both are gone, indicating someone bought them. Also a TTY machine, also gone now.
i like chicks
why wouldn’t anyone like chicks?
Is that John Hodgeman’s high school picture?
I still have a functional 5-1/4″ drive, and a few months ago hooked it up to one of my computers and copied the installation files for some very old programs, like Microsoft C (before it was C++) and Windows v3.1 from the days when it ran on top of DOS.
One of these days I’m going to see if I can get Windows 3.1 running on VMware just for the hell of it. Back at the time, I thought “It just doesn’t get any better than having scalable fonts actually built into the system!” Window 3.0 didn’t have that luxury item.
A 386 with 2800 baud dialing into Pitt’s internet to read VM Mail because I preferred it to pine.
One day in the lab the guy next to me was copying Wolfenstien 3D. That took 4 minidisks to install. We knew it was wrong, but we both got our copies.
That was near 20 years ago. Thank god for mozilla 1.99 and winsock
I know I had a gadget for punching out those floppies so I could use both sides and may still have it. The topics posted suggests many of Johns readers are old fart… erm, senior citizens such as myself.
Yes we are! Old farts, that is.
ASCII art FTW
#10 Rob Leather – The LS-120 could read – but not write – 3.5″ Double Sided/High Density floppy disks. The 100 MB Zip disk, the LS-120’s major competitor, could not. Around 1999 or 2000, the computer lab where I worked ordered the LS-120 in place of floppy drives in its new computers (Pentium IIIs) for this reason.
Internally, both drives were bootable. It’s still seen on BIOS options today as Zip or LS-120 in specifying a boot sequence of devices. That’s probably the biggest “legacy” of these devices.
In the late 1980s, the computer on my desk was a CPT 8525 with dual 8″ floppy drives and a built-in monochrome monitor set in portrait orientation. One drive was for the OS and the other was for data. I thought it was dated even then. This computer was popular within legal and accounting offices at that time.
Then, a box of 10 3.5″ DS/HD floppy disks pre-formatted for the Macintosh was around $25.
#6 Animby – just phoning it in; #20 deowll –
My math teacher when I was a high school senior told me of that device in order to make a “flippy” disk for a SINGLE-sided magnetic disk drive. I still want to use the term “flippy” when I find a DVD that contains data on both sides and thus has to be “flipped” for a DVD player or DVD drive. I guess this shows my age.
Oh, the EGA pr0n wasn’t too bad, but the CGA pr0n was horrible. Waiting all that time for a lousy three color, or 16 color graphic!
Anyone remember the picture of the Mona Lisa made out of thousands of ascii characters printed side by each? And similarly composed and somewhat more revealing pictures made by those old batch printers?
I remember when 5.25″ floppies were the late, great thing. In high school, we still had 2 TRS-80s with dual 8″ floppies when the school got some TRS-80 Model 3s.
And, I remember when my parents bought me my first computer: Commodore 64 with the new 1541 floppy drive, BMC monitor, 2 joysticks, and I got subscriptions to a bunch of magazines that had BASIC code in them. That computer cost my parents almost $3k.
As for the ASCII art text files, I still have some of them some where. As well as print outs of arguments I had on bulletin boards that I saved.
I just wish all those C-64 floppies hadn’t degraded. I lost a lot of great software. 🙁
#27 peter- Don’t remember the Mona Lisa in ASCII, but I do remember printing an large word art images onto many consecutive sheets of tractor-fed paper. The log-in and passwords for that session’s lecture, etc. The program was called Bannermania, I believe.
#28 BigOkieTechie – “… we still had 2 TRS-80s with dual 8″ floppies when the school got some TRS-80 Model 3s.”
My guess is that this was around Spring 1983. My high school school replaced its Commodore PET computers with the TRS-80 Model III around then.
Great times!
I doubt that there are any 5.25″ floppy drives available that can read the Commodore 64 format now, anyway.
This just in: The 1983 movie “WarGames” is being remade.
Thought about that movie on this thread.
What a coincidence!
Geez I am old, TRS 80 model 1 with a cassette drive. I remember coding a star trek game as a class project. Yeah it was a horrible game. Think ET bad.
Oh please! That’s a “high capacity” three and a half inch floppy disk and couldn’t hold anywhere near the same capacity as a rock solid 20-meg MFM hard drive. Maybe I should say “brick solid” since there was such a demand for them that some people actually received clay bricks instead of actual hard drives. — Thanks Maxtor!