81–90 of 149 posts
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Could also be that some people only used Macs or Linux or Unix or iPads.
I hope that's a joke. In case it isn't: IBM PC predates all of those except UNIX (and you wouldn't think much of the pre-1980 UNIXen); CP/M, which originated the standard, comes from 1973.
BTW, does anyone remember having to enter no. of cylinders in BIOS to make the HDD work :)
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Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?
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'm guessing that 3.5 disks were binned, so maybe you could get away with it once in awhile? Of course, the only way you could find out was to actually lose data...
We're not very far away from "what is the blue 'Save' icon meant to be?" are we? Kind of amazing really. Girlfriend's nephews are 6 and 9, pretty tech savvy (there's a lot in the house), but they had no idea what the slots in the front of their grandfather's computer were (and why should they?!).
The way things are going we will probably not have any Save buttons at all soon.
Earlier 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?
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 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.
It'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…
And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be.
> And I've just noticed that the "save file" icon in word processors isn't a floppy disk as it used to be. Maybe the one you're using. But the "Save" icon in the most popular word processor is a 3.5" floppy disk: http://i.imgur.com/WLFtT7A.png This is the latest version -- Word 2013.
But double sided drives were already available on the market. The only problem was that the PC BIOS and DOS didn't support the second side.
So I bought a PC with no floppy drives and picked up a couple of double sided drives at a local distributor for $300 each.
As I'd hoped, they worked fine as single sided drives too, so I was able to boot DOS. Then I got to work on supporting the other side.
It seemed a bit complicated to try to merge the two sides into a single FAT filesystem, so I wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident program) that mapped the other two sides onto additional drive letters.
That turned out to be surprisingly easy. So the four sides on my two floppy drives were A:, B:, C:, and D: drives.
Later I got an awesome Tallgrass 10MB hard drive for only $5000, and that became my E: drive.
Now I knew my storage problems were over: I would never run out of space with that thing!
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Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies. I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2. To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, "Your shell is now on SHGEN-1."
Wow. What would happen if one of those floppies were damaged or unreadable? Would the whole process be a waste of time?
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 disk. I played nethack on another virtual terminal while this was working.
Well, I switched back about 5 minutes later to check on the progress and it was just crawling, like 4KB every few seconds. I moved the mouse to hit the 'cancel' button on the zmodem transfer window, and the transfer rate shot up just then. I thought "well, okay..." and went back to nethack.
A few minutes later same thing happened. Move mouse, transfer speed goes up. I didn't understand IRQs at the time but I grasped apparent causality. I decided I'd try moving the modem to a different IRQ but that required a reboot. I wanted to finish the current disk set, so I sat there with a book in one hand, twirling the mouse in little circles with the other.
That's my hand-crank modem story.
To this day, whenever the network is slow, I twirl the mouse in little circles subconsciously.
[0] like these ( http://az413224.vo.msecnd.net/img/40934/m_40934_1.jpg ) not these ( http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_ACUPLER.GI... ).
