Comments on: Remember the Floppy!

By: sinned34

sinned34 — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:14:17 +0000

Still have Pool Of Radiance on 5.25″ floppies in the original gold box!
My old 386 was still chugging away in my mom’s office until about three years ago. I wonder if it still works…

By: Spiv

Spiv — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:06:42 +0000

1: I think I picked up around the cassette tape time and used everything since.

2: holy crap, those 5.25 floppys have the “maniac mansion” game label on them. I played the heck out of that trash.

3: the colorado tape backup was garbage. I still have one in a box somewhere too.

4: My old webpage used to have “this page created using edit.com” on it. Viva Ye Ol Skoolyard.

By: BruceH

BruceH — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:04:01 +0000

I seem to remember the geeks wearing black t-shirts with “Wang” written on the front in white lettering. I thought that was pretty funny, and still do.

By: khan

khan — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:24:55 +0000

I still have some 8″ floppies; probably should just throw them out.

There were many bad jokes at the office when people had to attend training to learn to use the new Wang.

By: Gray Gaffer

Gray Gaffer — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:27:37 +0000

Now this triggers old memories! I wrote my first programs – for Elliot 803 and Elliott 4120 – on a Friden Flexowriter, and had many opportunities to use the little handpunch to “rubout” typos. The 4120/4130 series used a 1000cps tape reader that could build up enough static on the paper for a 6″ spark. Total SOA for the time. I also worked on the 9 track tape drives. 2 GB. We used to joke that the CPU would someday fit into the 4″ Ampex plug that connected the drive bay to the CPU. Half right, I guess.

In the job that followed that, I designed and built a 100 cps reader and 20 cps punch for my lab’s PDP 8E. Then I designed a Floppy interface for 8″ disks, one that could handle both hard and soft sectoring. Things were still fluid back in those days. IBM had only just given Seagate (AFAICR) permission to release their system boot hardware to the public – that being the original hard-sectored 8″ floppy. Wonderful career experience, total flop (!) as a product unfortunately.

I still have my RS data cassette. It still works, and so does the TRS 100 laptop I bought it for. Not that I use it much lately. I also have an archived PC with Windows 95 and a 3.5 / 5.25 combo and a Colorado tape drive for data recovery. But my Masters backup is on a special style of data cassette. The tape drive is in a large and heavy iron case, the I/O is a full size pre-ISA card, and I have no hardware still running that can mount it. Not for nothing is the immediate past 50 years or so sometimes referred to as a “Dark Age”. Meaning no readable records survive. It would seem the records do, but not the technology for reading them. In fact, I have never successfully recovered anything from a tape backup system. So to me they effectively implement the Signetics Write Only Memory system (see http://www.national.com/rap/Story/WOMorigin.html).

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 16:18:08 +0000

You had floppies for your TRS-80? Cool!

Some day I’m going to go through all my stiffies.

By: Glenn Scriven

Glenn Scriven — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:32:30 +0000

Oh the good (bad) old days. Typing IBM cards and submitting them to the computer center, over and over until they were “right”. Then using a PDP11 with 8″ floppies with no word processing, just Fortran (yuck). Then a TRS80 with two floppies and DOS! Then and IBMPC with hard disk (wow), many upgrades (more wow). Now HP Pavilion with everything, amazing! I still have some “stiffies” laying around.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:12:23 +0000

Remember Wang?

By: John J. McKay

John J. McKay — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:50:50 +0000

My Master’s thesis is on a 5.25 disc and I no longer have anything that can read it. I keep telling myself that I’ll scan the hard copy some day. But that sounds too much like work, so it gets pushed into the future.

On the shelf behind me, there is a box of eight inch floppies from a dedicated word processor that Clever Wife used into the early nineties. I think the early drafts of a few of the thesis chapters are on one of those disks.

By: MH

MH — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:25:33 +0000

What am I talking about; 1,400,000 floppies!

Such an increase in capacity in what, ten years, is dizzying!