141–150 of 363 posts
It's especially amusing that a single photo taken on my phone exceeds the capacity of a standard 1.44MB 3.5" disk; same for the total download size of a fairly barebones website. Nostalgia!
ZIP drive was the bomb. I don't recall what it was, but there was a Gateway or something (maybe) with a built-in ZIP drive. The future, man.
I miss the physicality of floppy disks. Picking up a caddy of disks, thumbing through reading the labels, sliding them into the drive and hearing the motor whirr. Nowadays, my caddy has been replaced with a small plastic bag full of chips and thumbdrives. Even though my small bag can easily hold millions of times more data, the little chips aren't a joy to use. None of them have labels telling their contents. All of…
My memory of floppy disks was having to write multiple copies of the same files across different disks because odds are one of them would fail. It was particularly painful if you had to zip any files up as odds are you’d end up with a failed CRC. I was a relatively early adopter of CD writers because I was sick of floppy disks failing. I’ve also got a stack of 3” floppies (like what was used for the Amstrad CPC and N…
And by coincidence, an unopened, branded box of 10 x DS/HD 3.5" floppy disks arrived in the post for me today. They will be used with a couple of Z80 systems I have constructed - when I build a floppy controller board!
Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.
The 5 1/4 disks, IMO, had a superior kinesthetic. A much more solid thunk sound when being inserted and a deeper tone while being read. Enjoy, the sounds of floppies :D [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8
Nothing in modern computing compares to the audible and kinesthetic satisfaction of the ka-chunk of a 3.5 inch floppy being inserted into a drive.
The 5 1/4 disks, IMO, had a superior kinesthetic. A much more solid thunk sound when being inserted and a deeper tone while being read. Enjoy, the sounds of floppies :D [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnFQZa8SKP8
When I was a kid in 1998, the newly returned Steve Jobs introduced the original iMac from Apple, the first Mac without a floppy disk drive. This seemed like a monumental shift to me at the time, and me and my friends had just started to write our own freeware and shareware video games for the platform. I named our software company SloppyDisk Software. We stuck to that brand for around 10 years, releasing games like S…
Blimey: the download page for Descender still works. I mean, I've downloaded it on Windows, so that's not going to end well, and I guess it won't actually run on my Mac because 32-bit, but I was pretty impressed that I could download it at all. Nice site as well: very nostalgic.
On a more serious note, did you manage to make a living out of it and - either way - what made you stop?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
Not quite the same but I hated the removal of the headphone jack. I now own mostly Bluetooth headphones and use an adapter in the rare cases otherwise, I generally don't even notice that it isn't there.