31–40 of 47 posts
These used to be 50 cents a piece at my high school library. What a joy it was to have a tiny simple way to transport essays (and pixel art and other fun things) to and from school and amongst all the school computers.
Yes! But beware the one computer in the second row that wrecks your disk, learned one by one, the hard way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, what's the use case for ringconnectd? Just to find out what your IP is? What would you need that for back in the day?
Dialup systems typically spent most of their time offline. If you wanted to connect to one over IP you'd need some way to get it to dial back up to the ISP, and then some way to get the new address it'd ended up on.
ringconnectd never answered a call, but rather listened for a ring pattern that you could specify. So what I'd typically do is go to a payphone, dial my line at home, let it ring twice, hang up, get my money back, dial again letting it ring twice again, hang up, get my money back again, then go to the computer lab to wait. My system at home was configured to connect after the ring pattern [ring, ring, delay, ring, ring]. It would then wait 30s, connect to its ISP, and email me its current IP address.
I did it this way because I was already using the terminal for pretty much everything, and we didn't get dedicated machines on campus. So it was better to just hold my work on my Linux machine at home and connect to it from the lab.
"Add to cart" does nothing. Wonder if they actually sell floppies, or just shred them to keep pushing us towards modern technology.
I've bought many floppy disks from these guys and I can say that they are 100% legit.
Also, destroying old technology is no way to progress into the future.
Now I've got a pack of old floppies that are outgassing :0 I have no other explanation. This is an almost-full box of miscellaneous floppies in one of the original cardboard trays of 30 from Office Depot. I've got kilos more floppies in different closets but these are good ones I selected a few years ago that all passed SCANDISK. Now this one little box is in an old ziploc bag in the office and it keeps self-inflatin…
Are you sure it's not just the bag attempting to return to its original shape? They are also not truly airtight, so there might be some sort of osmosis effect too. The possibility of mold growth may also be considered.
The bag is old and imperfect, and I don't think it is completely airtight either. Not as much from permeability of the polymer but phyical wear & tear too.
I smelled the exhaust when I deflated it the last few times and it is very faint but industrial. Doesn't smell like mold but organisms could still be hidden somewhere breaking down plastic or additives. Which may or may not consume oxygen.
Osmosis I have been considering too, if fairly high molecular weight breakdown products are gradually emerging into the gas phase, with the bag way more permeable to atmospheric gases, maybe the atmosphere is forcing its way in and builds slightly higher partial pressure than ambient as a molar dilutive effort.
This is a good time to put the floppies in a brand new bag and see what happens, the experiments never end ;)
Now I've got a pack of old floppies that are outgassing :0 I have no other explanation. This is an almost-full box of miscellaneous floppies in one of the original cardboard trays of 30 from Office Depot. I've got kilos more floppies in different closets but these are good ones I selected a few years ago that all passed SCANDISK. Now this one little box is in an old ziploc bag in the office and it keeps self-inflatin…
Hm, if there's anything of note in the floppies, maybe archive them? There are some USB devices that will read and store the actual magnetic flux values, for max fidelity.
No irreplaceable game floppies and probably nothing worth saving at all, but it was only about 10mb total on all the disks combined, might as well save it on a HDD when the web wastes more of my megabytes than that in five minutes now.
So the files were just backed up the regular way before testing a couple dozen disks for future use, and bagging them to keep out the dust.
I tried to pick clean ones but actually probably kept in a bit of vintage dust when you think about it :)
"Add to cart" does nothing. Wonder if they actually sell floppies, or just shred them to keep pushing us towards modern technology.
Also: wow, this shop still has 8" floppy disks!
Looking through their website, it seems they are not recycling them in the usual sense of the word, but reusing them. That is, they reformat and resell them at a discount (66%) that of new ones. Which is fine, I guess, if they're just laying around your house, but it's not like they're making new things with the materials which is what the word recycling usually implies.