201–210 of 280 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying normal 3.5" disks, stamping holes in them and selling them as pristine 3.5" HD disks. Let's just say it was less successful than I'd hoped.
I did this on an Acorn Archimedes disk and though okay at first, the floppy got corrupted after a few days. Bad idea!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.
Ha! I took a Hungarian class with my daughter a couple of years ago; I think she was 8, which is why she needed me to sit in with her, given it was a college class at IU. (I should explain that her mother is Hungarian, and so this was more in the way of language practice and grammar instruction, not that my daughter is a super-genius. Although, of course, she is.) Anyway, one of the dialog exercises was to talk about…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Physical limits are a major component of latency. Until we figure out a way to transmit information instantly with infinite bandwidth, local storage will always be a significant factor. edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.
Relevant: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes."
Bandwidth (in the sense intended here) is measured in bits/second: how do you measure that from a station wagon [full of mag tapes]?
Now a freeway full of station wagons ... that has bandwidth.
My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that…
Aw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm 37, which is like 259 in developer years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty high end for an 8088! Is it a PC or PC-XT?
It does sound like an XT. The first PC I used was an XT-286; the precursor to the AT. It had a massive 20 MB hard drive! I still recall that the expensive accounting software for which my father purchased the computer required an ISA card to run it. Now that's anti-piracy!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume. Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.
> "A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume. " Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahh the Vic 20. Warms my heart just hearing about it :) My parents bribed me to do some stuff when I was younger with the reward of a floppy disk drive. I was living like a boss when I got that drive!
Still got mine, and a box of cartridges. Hacked the paddles into an some electronics experiment years ago, and the RF modulator's given up the ghost, but other than that still all good. Even still got the book, minus the back cover
The Commodore RF modulator that came with it was no good either, but I replaced the electrolytic capacitor inside with a new one and it seems to work pretty well now...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well windows 1.0 were only [1] 5 5.25" floppies and [2] 2 for MS-DOS and another one for write (the grandfather of word). I think i need a drive to try them again ;-) . [1] http://twitpic.com/39kbjz [2] http://twitpic.com/39kaxd
I recall Slackware Linux requiring 13 disks