I remember laughing at my instructor when he mentioned carrying a box of punch cards. Boy do I feel like the old timer now.
I spent a good bit of the summer of '89 writing C code to drive a tape punch for programming CNC machines.
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
111–120 of 149 posts
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse was illegal software. There were 720KB (Double Density) and 1440KB (High Density) 3.5" diskettes (amongst other sizes). The disk drive would detect the difference by an extra hole in the disk. People would buy cheaper double density disks, drill a hole in it, so that the same diskette could be used as a 1440KB disk. Of course, they were of a far lower quality, and 'arj' (which was popular at the time) woul…
I used an Xacto knife to create an extra notch in Commodore 64 5.25" disks back in the day so that I could take the single-sided disks and make them double-sided. I would take one disk flipped over the other, mark the notch with a permanent marker, then cut out the outline. Most disks, like Elephant Memory, would work fine. You just flipped the disk over and inserted back into the 1541 to read the reverse side.
I had a little switch to bypass the optical notch-detector on my 1541 drive.
I still think the single-sided disks were from the same production line as the double sided ones, and it was all market segmentation.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#113It's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, bu…
lol I'm a 36 year old hacker who forgets quickly myself. After 4 iPhones, I used a Galaxy S3 for a few weeks. When I got the iPhone 5S, for several days I kept pushing the right lower side expecting a back action.
On my iPad mini, I keep trying to unlock it with my fingerprint.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#114God I feel old. I'm getting flashbacks of a quarter mile sneakernet between my friend & my house where we transferred MP3s on a floppy disk with multi-disk zips.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#115Now I really feel old.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse was illegal software. There were 720KB (Double Density) and 1440KB (High Density) 3.5" diskettes (amongst other sizes). The disk drive would detect the difference by an extra hole in the disk. People would buy cheaper double density disks, drill a hole in it, so that the same diskette could be used as a 1440KB disk. Of course, they were of a far lower quality, and 'arj' (which was popular at the time) woul…
I used an Xacto knife to create an extra notch in Commodore 64 5.25" disks back in the day so that I could take the single-sided disks and make them double-sided. I would take one disk flipped over the other, mark the notch with a permanent marker, then cut out the outline. Most disks, like Elephant Memory, would work fine. You just flipped the disk over and inserted back into the 1541 to read the reverse side.
I did the same. And disks were a bit expensive to a kid like me, so I'd even do the cut on various game disks I had, since many of them were single side only, and it was like getting a free disk.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#117Floppy DUO Imperial March: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE
Thank you for kicking off the youtubes. I really, really needed to post this here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI (don't copy that floppy)
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?
Back in My Day when people had POTS modems [0], I once downloaded the ~20 disks of the b'a'se and 'n'etwork slackware disk series in windows 95 and rebooted to install, hoping that none of the disks were bad. It turned out that all of those disks were fine, so I continued downloading the other disks in the series by minicom'ing to my ISP's shell account, ftping them to the remote disk, and zmodem'ing them to my local…
I logged in to upvote this story because I encountered the same problem on a military communications system once (!) There was an interaction between the system beep() function and message processing throughput. If a large number of alerts ever queued up, communications slowed to a crawl as the CPU spent all its time going "beeeeeeep...beeeeeeep...beeeeeeep..." for a few minutes. Moving the mouse caused a rapid-fire "bebebebebebebebebebebeeep" as the buffers flushed and throughput returned to normal.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#119It's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, bu…
lol I'm a 36 year old hacker who forgets quickly myself. After 4 iPhones, I used a Galaxy S3 for a few weeks. When I got the iPhone 5S, for several days I kept pushing the right lower side expecting a back action. On my iPad mini, I keep trying to unlock it with my fingerprint.
I'm still on my first smartphone and it's an HTC Android phone. Using iphones and ipads that weren't mine, it took me a while to figure out that you can double-click the single button to get it to do something different. Trying to interact with it with only one pressable button kind of feels like having flippers instead of hands. I haven't quite grokked the one-button doctrine.
Re: What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
#120It's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, bu…
Sad that a 1 year old has "all her shows" to watch.
That is sadly how parents raise their kids these days...