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The last person standing in the floppy disk business

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Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#261

Post by romwell »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #256
gambiting wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In all the pairs I own it's some arcane combination to enter pairing mode, and then have you tried adding BT headphones to windows when the same ones were paired in the past? You have to remove them first then go back into pairing mode again. It's more bullshit than I'm willing to deal with. With a jack you plug them in and they work.

You don't have to enter pairing mode if the device remembers previous pairings, which is not that strange.

Work phone, personal phone, work laptop, personal laptop, tablet, desktop.

Good luck pressing that button five dozen times to take the call on your work phone after using them with your desktop, only to find out that your glorious BT device only has 4 memory slots like a videogame from 1991, and unlinked your work phone when you used them with your tablet.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#262

Post by romwell »

blantonl wrote: post #63

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.

> hearing that disk drive kurchunking

That's the best onomatopoeia I've seen in a while, and it brings the feeling of instant dread

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#263

Post by golem14 »

I recently found an old backup 3.5" floppy from ≈1993 with some thesis material. I could read it without any problems on an old USB connected floppy drive (and as a bonus, compile the LaTeX with zero problems).

I was a bit surprised and had expected a bit of work.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#264

Post by romwell »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #76

From the first sentence of TFA: > Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” Why editorialize they HN title? He’s a guy! And “last man standing” is a set phrase. “Last person standing” is not.

>“Last person standing” is not.

Was not.

I had no problem reading the title, and didn't even notice anything unusual about it until reading this comment.

Language changes. Complaining about it won't change it back.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#265

Post by insane_dreamer »

The first laptop computer I used was a Bondwell 2 (running CP/M) which was one of the first to use a 3.5" floppy for storage. But I actually preferred the Epson PX-8 which had a micro cassette for storage instead of a floppy (too large). I wonder if there's still any market for micro-cassettes for digital storage anymore just as there is for floppies. (DAT was another tape storage format used in professional audio studio equipment but also used by some computers such as SGI.)

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#266

Post by bartread »

doomlaser wrote: post #176
bartread wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Sales from Descender meant I didn't need to do other work during college (it plays perfectly fine in SheepShaver, if you'd like to give it a try), and it probably helped secure me an internship at Apple working on their internal game development team. I helped work on games for clickwheel iPods. Funnily, I'm one of the full motion video characters in Apple's Texas Hold'em ! In 2007, after the release of Intel Macs, I…

Thanks for the detailed response, and glad it worked out for you - that's awesome. Tap Tap passed me by just because I didn't have a decent smartphone back then but looks like loads of fun (and I love Justice). Sounds like good times! Thanks for the serial - I'll give Descender a try with SheepShaver and see how I get on.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#267

Post by rconti »

lizknope wrote: post #233
blantonl wrote: post #63

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.

I installed Slackware in the fall of 1994. I only had about 10 blank floppies so I would go to the computer lab and download the "A" base system, then wipe those, go back to the computer lab, download and install the "AP" application set, and so on for the development tools, X Windows System, and more. It took most of the weekend but it was amazing having a Unix system on my Pentium 90. I had a brand new IDE/ATAPI CD…

I was actually able to dual-boot and install from hard disk when I installed slackware in .. August 95? But, zmodem on a 14.4k modem meant each download took 12-13 minutes, so it was an entire weekend of just walking around the house with a kitchen timer and kicking off a new 'disk' each time it buzzed.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#269

Post by noizejoy »

daveslash wrote: post #209
vardump wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The wisdom of 1990s was that if you have one copy of data on your disk, you may as well have zero copies. Still true.

Along similar lines: If you haven't tested or dry-run your restore procedures, you may as well not have backups either. That applies more for things like SQL databases and the like, more than personal files on disk. But yeah.... if you haven't tried to restore your database or other data repository from a backup file that you've squirreled away, then you effectively don't have a backup either.

I’d slightly amend the analogy into “an untested backup is akin to having a lottery ticket for your backups”. Maybe you win or maybe you don’t.

Old floppies are also like lottery tickets in that sense.

Re: The last person standing in the floppy disk business

#270

Post by scarface74 »

romwell wrote: post #260
scarface74 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with one device and they are automatically paired with all of your devices and auto switch

>That’s not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with one device and they are automatically paired with all of your devices and auto switch And how do AirPods know whether I want to use them to take a conference call on my work laptop, listen to a YouTube video on the personal laptop, or watch a quick video my friend sent me on WhatsApp on my phone? Do they have telepathic powers that I don't know of? Oh, and will t…

Simple, if I am listening to a podcast and then I take a conference call on my computer, they automatically switch. If I am watching something on my iPad, and I answer a call on my iPhone, they automatically switch.

If I’m actively playing a video or listening to audio on my Mac, my iPhone, or my iPad and I put my AirPods in my ear, sound is automatically rerouted to my AirPods from the device.

If I’m watching a video on my iPad and then I click on a video on my iPhone, they switch.

My AppleTVs don’t automatically switch. An AppleTV is a shared experience most of the time.

But even if you turn automatic switching off, I still don’t have to pair my AirPods with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, two AppleTVs and my Mac individually. I can just click a drop down and they automatically show up on each device or any new device I use with my AppleID.

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