171–180 of 363 posts
You haven't lived until you installed an operating system from 38 floppy disks. Slackware and OS/2 for example My lord those were fun days. Especially fun when you got to OS/2 Disk 21 and it died, or Slackware Xwindows Floppy 4 and you started hearing that disk drive kurchunking and you just knew you were dead in the water.
It's amazing that many software products still use the disc icon to represent saving. Many folks using computers now have never even seen one in person. To them it's the save icon, not a disc.
* I was doing this thing somewhat successfully
* Then someone asked me to jump into this software thing even if I had zero experience.
* Then we did X, Y and Z...
It seems rarer these days?
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
I used to work in the disk duplication industry, both at a copier (DisCopyLabs) and then later at the robot manufacturer, Mountain Computer, which was eventually bought by Nakamichi and combined with Trace, our competitor.
We used to be able to sail those suckers over the building on Wyatt Drive to the San Thomas Expressway... Next person to work on roof equipment probably had a curious experience, many discs that did not make it all the way likely scattered all over the roof.
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…
Not to mention they were integrated into the machine itself - picture 1-4 floppy disks fitting snuggly inside your PC right where they're supposed to go and where nothing else even could go, versus a handful of usb sticks of various shapes and sizes sticking out haphazardly like porcupine needles, some even pushing each other over because they're too thick, or connected by a jungle of wires, either way hooked up to a…
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…
> Here's what sloppydisk.com looked like in its heyday, for those interested: http://web.archive.org/web/20070921170305/http://www.sloppyd ... 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 nostalgi…
In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I shifted to making original indie games for PC and launched http://doomlaser.com. In 2008, with the release of the iPhone SDK, it suddenly became very lucrative to know how to develop games for Apple devices, and I helped build out the Tap Tap Revenge series. My favorite thing I did for that was the final boss sequence for Justice's Phantom Pt. II in Tap Tap Dance. A friend and I modeled it after the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q8wLtDFtVQ&t=175s)
Since then, I've gone back and forth between working on personal indie stuff and doing contract work or work in the industry. Helped build the game for The Hunger Games movie, worked on a crazy game for Adult Swim about men transforming into cars, helped build futuristic AR experiences for Niantic's in-house AR SDK, etc.
I switched from building games in my own bespoke C++/Obj-C/OpenGL engines to Unity in 2013. The scene has changed a lot. In the 2007-2011 era, you could pretty much know everybody making cool indie game stuff across the entire world. It was a great time, and a great scene. We all met each other through the TIGSource forums and at events like GDC. It's a much, much larger world now, and thus, it's much harder to stand out. "indie games" as a search term peaked in 2013. But of course, I'm still making my own stuff and also curating cool unique indie game work I see at https://twitter.com/Doomlaser
btw: complimentary serial for anyone who wants to give Descender a try, Name: test Registration #: SDSKSER000-5RF7-068A-7C8F-49D3-4034
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…
> These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk. This quote had me wondering if you could build a hardware emulator layer that would allow you to use a USB-dri…
The most common/cheap solution is the Gotek floppy drive, easily found on Aliexpress or eBay, and with the FlashFloppy firmware [1] for expanding the capabilities of the hardware. Since I'm nitpicking, it's not an IDE interface, as there's no IDE floppy drives :) [1] https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy
Well, LS-120 were available in ATAPI, which is at least IDE adjacent, if you don't want to call it IDE.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I still hate the removal of the headphone jack. Bluetooth is overrated.