131–140 of 180 posts
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The speakers buzzing just before getting a SMS text is the closest I’ve gotten to predicting the future.
Speaking of that... Why did that go away? Less 3g? Moore speakers with better insulation?
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Speaking of that... Why did that go away? Less 3g? Moore speakers with better insulation?
It was a peculiarity of the 2G signal. While the frequency of the signal itself was high enough that it did not interfere with speakers, the channel was shared between phones using TDMA, in which the channel is divided in fixed-size slots, and a phone transmits in only one of these slots while remaining silent for the rest of them. It's the envelope of these transmissions (transmit for a while, stay silent for a whil…
Hmmm. All embroidery machines I have seen in the last - say - ten years were retrofitted with a floppy emulator like the Gotek, (only as an example, there are tens of possibly the same devices sold under n brands/names): https://www.gotekemulator.com/ https://www.gotekemulator.com/P_view.asp?pid=61
Gotek are awesome. I use one in an old 486 and it works really well as a floppy drive replacement. Especially with the FlashFloppy firmware replacement.
If I had one, I'd spin up Civ1 just for old times!
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The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.
What kind of crappy floppies were you using? In my experience, floppy disks were astoundingly reliable as long as they were handled correctly (and even when not), up until the late-90s when they became vestigial and manufacturing quality dropped. Back in the 8-bit micro days, they worked extremely well.
Drives being out of alignment and incompatible with other drives common.
Yes, floppys can work really, really well. But I haven't encountered anything since that wasn't orders of magnitude better in this department.
Unfortunately we had to wait until usb-drives to become ubiquitous before we had a reliable way to transfer files between random computers.
There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.
The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.
I managed to spend 3 hours assembly and disassembling this one machine before finally figure out that my test floppy had gone bad.
Another one was this student whose assignments were constantly being erased.
After watching him go through the motions of what he was doing, I asked him if his bracelet was magnetic. Problem solved.
One of the things I wonder about in retrospect is why floppy drives remained at a static level of ability for the most part. I mean I know there were the LS120 and such things, but why wasn't there a manufacturer just pushing the tech a bit further? Like why not have a drive made with additional precision and capable of squeezing 3 MB into a floppy? Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on h…
"Is there something about the actual media that put a hard limit on how tightly information could be packed on it that couldn't be solved with a better drive?" For floppies: Yes. It wouldn't help to use better precision. The medium itself can't handle that kind of density. 3.5" floppy drives actually went over the limit with 1.44MB ones - they fail when kept in storage for some years. Much much more than 720KB floppi…
Nearly all of my HeathKit Z89 disks from ‘79 are perfectly fine, and only a handful of 1.2M disks from the mid-80s are okay.
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Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future. I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning…
You think hard drives were loud? My dad had a dot matrix printer.
You can tell boarding is about to start because the dot matrix starts printing the final passenger manifest.
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Back when we started to use CDs for backups I was horrified when I found that in general those CDs started to become unreadable after only a year in storage. We never had any problems with original CDs (say, the tons of CDs that came with an SGI computer), but the consumer-type writable ones didn't last at all. I think the technology got better after some years, but I still wouldn't trust a writable CD or DVD to last…
This is because commercial optical disks and recordable optical disks are actually completely different storage mediums. Commercial optical disks, as in the disks that you got when you bought games and movies and the like, are physically stamped. The data is recorded as physical pits that are stamped onto the disk from a master copy. That disk isn't degrading unless it suffers severe external physical damage. By cont…