|
empty baggie posted:It’s crazy to think how expensive flash drives were at one time, although it’s also crazy to think how expensive traditional hard drives used to be too. At least flash drives dropped in price much faster than the old style drives. Back when the Mac Plus was new, the Mac was run off of floppy discs. My dad bought an external hard drive for his, it was expensive, and years later when it was past obsolete, we cracked that thing open, and the platters on it were huge. That thing held 20 Megabyes, and it was a ton of space in 1986.
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 12:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:Haritsoppa.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 13:01
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:It's like that gag about what's the bandwidth of a coast-to-coast truck full of hard drives? The sneakernet is/was real. Doesn't google have a mobile file server in a semi-trailer ready to unhook to physically move a heap of drives? Also the text thingo under my Avatar was about me giving my mother packages of 3.5 disks full of porn to an interstate friend when I was a kid.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 13:35
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:It's like that gag about what's the bandwidth of a coast-to-coast truck full of hard drives? https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 13:45
|
|
|
Shipping a SAN is still very much a thing that's done to move a lot of data. When our hospital outsourced their EMR hosting to Cerner, they shipped a SAN to us for the initial data transfer which was something on the order of 20TB. Of course the first thing those fucks did was run a few Oracle commands that immediately trashed the data and forced them to send it back for a second copy, but that's beside the point.
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 14:10
|
|
|
H2SO4 posted:Oracle there's your first mistake
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 14:11
|
|
|
Plinkey posted:there's your first mistake Close: H2SO4 posted:Cerner
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 14:20
|
|
|
Cloud-to-butt never fails. 
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 14:44
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:I've never seen a Hardware Libertarian before and it's a pretty amazing thing. oh man you haven't hung around linuxbeards much have you
|
|
#
?
May 7, 2018 22:13
|
|
|
Plenty of tech relics in this here music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wepu3DAcgTA&t=1s
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2018 05:45
|
|
|
H2SO4 posted:Shipping a SAN is still very much a thing that's done to move a lot of data. When our hospital outsourced their EMR hosting to Cerner, they shipped a SAN to us for the initial data transfer which was something on the order of 20TB. I'm still a bit awestruck whenever I handle a 10 or 12 TB disk - you could have shipped all that on two disks today.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2018 16:55
|
|
|
I remember playing the demo for The Space Bar in the 90's (http://www.mobygames.com/game/space-bar/screenshots). One of the inventory items was a crappy "old terabyte disk," which seemed pretty hilariously out of reach to me at the time.
|
|
#
?
May 8, 2018 23:49
|
|
|
Sweevo posted:It's one of those things were everybody says they saw it, or that it happened to their uncle who works at Nintendo or to their girlfriend who you don't know because she goes to a different school. It's really two different problems that people conflate: I legitimately had a click of death drive, and it ate a few zip disks before I acknowledged that yes, the drive is in fact eating disks. It got replaced under the special click 'o' death warranty that iOmega was forced to honour, at least in Australia(?). I had to put a disk in the drive and hold the phone up to the drive to prove that I had a defective one, while on the phone to an iomega support lady. I also had to send in all the dodgy disks, but you get replacements for those as part of the warranty thing. Collateral Damage posted:Total Annihilation had the in game music as audio tracks on the CD as well, and I really liked the bombastic orchestral score of it. I've read this same kind of sentiment over the past ... 25 (!) years regarding the music for TA, and I've always disliked it. It's to the point that when I imagine TA it's just sound effects and no music, aside from the first 10 seconds or so of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxAdOQtAFEs before music was set to off. It stands out because for pretty much anything else I agree with the general sentiment - like x has great music, and I'd generally agree. Known Lecher posted:Now I'm having traumatic flashbacks to eBay in the dark days before Paypal was a thing. You used to win an auction, then you'd mail(!) a personal check(!!) to the seller. The seller would then inevitably sit on it for a week waiting for the check to clear their bank, though if you were in a hurry you could drag yourself to the post office and get a money order to send instead. (Most sellers would ship immediately for those, but for some it had to be an actual USPS money order, nothing else.) Now you're giving me flashbacks too. However in Australia, almost certainly by a happy accident we'd have the ability for direct transfers using net banking. I'm sure it's universal these days, but I remember US users complaining about having to write cheques/money orders for eBay all the time. Are direct transfers a thing in the US now? I mean the kind where you enter BSB (bank ID/branch ID) and then account number. It's free to do, and no limit on the number of transfers (except that each one counts as a transaction, which could in some cases attract a fee). Literally anyone with a bank account can receive money this way, and to send all you need is a netbank login to your account. Even in those days, one time I went into a branch to ask for a bank transfer (no mobile internet), and teller both a: looked confused b: after looking at her computer for a bit, said that I could do that but it cost something like $15 to do, and that it couldn't be done across banks. I even explained that I could accomplish the same thing in a few minutes using my own computer at home, so it was astounding that you couldn't send money that way using a teller (even if it was a more reasonable $1-2 to do so). Casimir Radon posted:I'd kind of like to mess around with some 90s - early 00s Mac software. What's a good decision as far as a machine to run most of what's out there? If, and that's a pretty big IF, if you can get basilisk 2 to behave itself, when running it's a pretty respectable OS 6-9 era mac 2 emulator that does have a port for the PC. It's still pretty crashy, but I haven't found a better emulator that runs on PC. It's much better behaved in an XP environment, particularly on older hardware. For instance it ran perfectly well on my Athlon 1300MHz in win98, and reasonably solidly on XP on the Athlon x2 6000+. I have it running under 7 but only because I was eventually pretty familiar with it's quirks from all the previous times. Laserjet 4P posted:Also, I still have a few shoeboxes full of floppy disks. I wonder whether it’s better to bet on a USB floppy drive to be compatible and functional, or to get a cheap Windows XP box with a Pentium 4 inside, one of those gaudy Dell Optiplex things. It depends on what format they're in. If it's regular PC files, you'd do OK with slapping together an old PC and copying them that way. Or if they're rare/weird encoding etc. then there's the kryoflux boards that "faithfully sample the magnetic flux transitions" from the disk itself, which can then be compiled into a normal image format. I've got one and it's fairly high learning curve, and I've yet to truly copy anything useful with it albeit with only a limited bit of time to actually muddle through it. Hopefully the software can become a little less arcane and simpler to use; either that or the disks I'm using have just degraded too much. Buttcoin purse posted:Like I said, I'd be happier to pay money if it wasn't for something that was worse than what I had before. ... (etc) I am on the same page as you, friend. I just don't do the linux thing yet, aside from on a raspberry pi.
|
|
#
?
May 11, 2018 12:13
|
|
|
For what it's worth I plugged a regular old floppy drive into an old-ish computer at work that had the right MB header only a week ago. Windows 7 is perfectly happy with floppies, and it got through a stack of 2000-2003 ones with no issue. I have no idea if they've changed anything relevant in 10, though. I followed that up by plugging a USB Zip drive into the same machine, which was also instantly recognized and handled a stack of old 100MB disks with no fuss. (We're doing a little "backup and destruct anything with sensitive info" housecleaning at work.) I haven't used a USB floppy drive in ages, but as long as they're normal FAT12 720/1.44 disks I'd be surprised if it gave you any trouble beyond the usual "old worn floppy" issues. Computer viking has a new favorite as of 02:43 on May 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 02:38
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:I haven't used a USB floppy drive in ages, but as long as they're normal FAT12 720/1.44 disks I'd be surprised if it gave you any trouble beyond the usual "old worn floppy" issues. My Win10 Box has no issues with an old Dell USB Drive: 
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 03:14
|
|
|
Wanna know if someone at MS is tasked with QA’ing backward compatibility of that sort. Gotta make sure drives A: and B: still enumerate properly
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 03:31
|
|
|
MS fired their QA staff a few years ago, it's all automated testing now baby
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 03:32
|
|
|
My swank rear end 386 had a 5.25” A: drive and a 3.5” B: drive 
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 03:53
|
|
|
I don't think I've ever seen a drive labeled B in my life. By the time I started using computers it was just A and C and nobody I knew had a PC with two floppy drives.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 07:34
|
|
|
A: 5.25" floppy drive B: 3.5" floppy drive C: Tiny hard drive that seemed massive by the standards of the day Welcome to the early 90s.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 07:49
|
|
|
80 megabytes baybee I still enjoy remembering the guy in my town who was so proud of his new computer he got a custom license plate that said 8 MB RAM Seeing that car around a year or two later was 
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 07:54
|
|
|
Known Lecher posted:A: 5.25" floppy drive Would it be possible for A: to be the 3.5 and B to be the 5.25? I swear to god that's how our family's computer worked in 1994 or so.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 07:59
|
|
|
Mak0rz posted:I don't think I've ever seen a drive labeled B in my life. By the time I started using computers it was just A and C and nobody I knew had a PC with two floppy drives. The computer I started out on as a kid didn't have a C drive at all. It was all floppies, all the time. After booting, you'd swap out the DOS disk in the A drive for the (usually write-protected) disk for whatever program you needed to run, and then put your blank data disk in drive B so you could save and load files. Unless it was one of those weird programs like Defender of the Crown that didn't even use DOS, but that you just booted to its disk directly.  e: Grand Prize Winner posted:Would it be possible for A: to be the 3.5 and B to be the 5.25? I swear to god that's how our family's computer worked in 1994 or so. Yup, it was just a matter of setup. Known Lecher's setup was the more common one for a while, then yours was, then all floppy drives turned into dust and blew away.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 08:01
|
|
|
Powered Descent posted:The computer I started out on as a kid didn't have a C drive at all. It was all floppies, all the time. After booting, you'd swap out the DOS disk in the A drive for the (usually write-protected) disk for whatever program you needed to run, and then put your blank data disk in drive B so you could save and load files. That was how my second school's computer lab was, they had monochrome screens! My first school had color Mackintoshes with CD drives.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 08:09
|
|
|
Yeah, I think it depended on how close to the demise of floppy drives we're talking about. If it was earlier, when 3.5" was still new-ish and fancy, people would have had most of their software on 5.25" floppy disks (especially if it wasn't their first computer) and made that the main A: drive. Later on when 5.25" was getting pretty outdated the 3.5" drive would have been A:. EDIT: I also distinctly remember buying games in the early 90s with 5.25" disks in the box and a coupon which you could send away to get 3.5" disks. And later on vice versa. SimAnt, for one. Porfiriato has a new favorite as of 08:12 on May 13, 2018 |
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 08:10
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:For what it's worth I plugged a regular old floppy drive into an old-ish computer at work that had the right MB header only a week ago. Windows 7 is perfectly happy with floppies, and it got through a stack of 2000-2003 ones with no issue. I have no idea if they've changed anything relevant in 10, though. I followed that up by plugging a USB Zip drive into the same machine, which was also instantly recognized and handled a stack of old 100MB disks with no fuss. (We're doing a little "backup and destruct anything with sensitive info" housecleaning at work.) I thought for a moment you installed Windows 7 from a (Mountain)stack of floppies. What was the last Windows with a floppy install option? I think I have seen an XP install set.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 09:08
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:Would it be possible for A: to be the 3.5 and B to be the 5.25? I swear to god that's how our family's computer worked in 1994 or so. I think it was this way on the computers I grew up on, too. Ofc, my first computer had no need to specify, being an OG TRS-80. There was only one drive, whatever was plugged in at the time, in my case a cassette player. (Was from before my time, I was lab assistant for a PowerPC shop in high school computer class, if that gives a better indication of my age.)
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 09:20
|
|
Bad Angus! Bad!
|
Mak0rz posted:I don't think I've ever seen a drive labeled B in my life. By the time I started using computers it was just A and C and nobody I knew had a PC with two floppy drives. I barely have. I had a couple of friends with old computers with 5.25" drives, but my family and most people I knew had computers with just the 3.5" slot. It took me a while to figure out why B drive was always skipped. Known Lecher posted:EDIT: I also distinctly remember buying games in the early 90s with 5.25" disks in the box and a coupon which you could send away to get 3.5" disks. And later on vice versa. SimAnt, for one. I don't remember that, but I do remember seeing ads for games with the option of whether it shipped on 5.25" or 3.5" floppies.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 09:59
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:Would it be possible for A: to be the 3.5 and B to be the 5.25? I swear to god that's how our family's computer worked in 1994 or so. Just to add to what others said, I'm pretty sure that you could never boot from B:, so the choice of which way around they were was important. I think eventually some BIOSes had an option to swap A: and B: around so that you didn't have to redo the cable (since A: was the drive at the end of the cable, or was it B:?). My first PC had no hard drive too, it looked pretty much like this picture I found online:  I had Falcon AT too 
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 10:10
|
|
|
1000 Brown M and Ms posted:I barely have. I had a couple of friends with old computers with 5.25" drives, but my family and most people I knew had computers with just the 3.5" slot. It took me a while to figure out why B drive was always skipped. B wasn't skipped for computers with two floppy drives and even less to accommodate 3.5" in addition to 5.25". It was "skipped" because it was special. On a computer without harddisk, you'd boot on your (write protected) operating system disk, replace it by the (write protected) program disk, and store your WordStar/Lotus 123 documents on your data disk. Since some computers had just one drive, you'd be unable to have your program disk and your data disk in at the same time, so you'd have your program disk in A: and your data disk in B:. The operating system would keep track of the last one accessed, and prompt the user to swap floppies whenever the other was accessed. You could also do things like "xcopy a:\*.* b:\*.* /S /Y" to make a copy of a floppy on one-floppy systems, with the system asking you to swap floppies one or more times depending on how much memory you had. Also, who remembers how 1.2 MB (HD) 5.25" drives were almost backward compatible with the 360 (DD) ones? HD drives could read DD floppies, but if you wrote them, you would likely be unable to read them in a DD drive and might even have ruined the floppy forever because HD drives would write a narrower but deeper track, so a DD drive would see images of the old data of both sides of the new track, and would be unable to delete the new data in depth.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 10:36
|
|
|
klafbang posted:Also, who remembers how 1.2 MB (HD) 5.25" drives were almost backward compatible with the 360 (DD) ones? HD drives could read DD floppies, but if you wrote them, you would likely be unable to read them in a DD drive and might even have ruined the floppy forever because HD drives would write a narrower but deeper track, so a DD drive would see images of the old data of both sides of the new track, and would be unable to delete the new data in depth. Oh yeah, I forgot about that. It never affected me because we got rid of our 360KB drives, but I think I remember a computer magazine talking about someone who had hooked up 3 drives in his PC - 3.5" 1.44MB, 5.25" 1.2MB and 5.25" 360KB - with a switch to select between the two 5.25" drives since you can't actually have more than 2. I guess he would have had to power off the machine to switch but at least he didn't have to open it up and move a cable.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 12:36
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:80 megabytes baybee I remember the commercial had grandpa cyber-dating and the old lady comes over and wets her pants at his massive 8 Mb RAM. "I KNEW YOU WERE A POWER USER :bigtran:
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 14:34
|
|
|
Mak0rz posted:I don't think I've ever seen a drive labeled B in my life. By the time I started using computers it was just A and C and nobody I knew had a PC with two floppy drives. A:? B:? You mean ,8,1, right?
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 14:45
|
|
|
Grand Prize Winner posted:Would it be possible for A: to be the 3.5 and B to be the 5.25? I swear to god that's how our family's computer worked in 1994 or so. I ordered my 386 with 2 x 3.5" floppies instead of the standard 5.25 + 3.5" that was the standard I remember having to confirm this three times to the system builders as they thought it was a bizarre setup. I had my reasons  and it was definitely worth it.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 15:18
|
|
|
Floppies in RAID 0.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 15:21
|
|
|
Known Lecher posted:A: 5.25" floppy drive I swapped mine to X and Z because I was ~cool~
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 15:47
|
|
|
Jerry Cotton posted:A:? B:? You mean ,8,1, right? No, on a C64 the second 1541 (if you were so filthy rich) was addressed as ,9. The ,1 was an extra parameter which also explains why it won’t work on “$”. https://superuser.com/questions/318928/meaning-of-parameters-in-classic-load-8-1-commodore-command
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 17:01
|
|
|
Laserjet 4P posted:No, on a C64 the second 1541 (if you were so filthy rich) was addressed as ,9. The ,1 was an extra parameter which also explains why it won’t work on “$”. Yeah but like you said no-one except maybe like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Headquarters had two 1541s.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 17:19
|
|
|
klafbang posted:Also, who remembers how 1.2 MB (HD) 5.25" drives were almost backward compatible with the 360 (DD) ones? HD drives could read DD floppies, but if you wrote them, you would likely be unable to read them in a DD drive and might even have ruined the floppy forever because HD drives would write a narrower but deeper track, so a DD drive would see images of the old data of both sides of the new track, and would be unable to delete the new data in depth. Sorry, Illinois State University, for my child self thinking all your lab computers were broken
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 17:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 19, 2024 10:03 |
|
|
What would you guys say would be the best piece of technology in comparison to its competitors that was reliced very fast ala Zune to iPod and hd dvd to blu
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2018 18:11
|
|