http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8646699.stm
Anyone still use them? Does your computer have a floppy drive?
Anyone still use them? Does your computer have a floppy drive?
What happened to floppies
- Thread starter Steve
- Start date
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J
joinerjohn
Although my computer doesn't have a floppy disk drive, I use floppy disks in my Yamaha keyboard. I can save keyboard settings and midi data on them. I used to do a bit of midi recording work some years ago and connected my keyboard to my comp using a midi lead. Soon found out I couldn't transfer any recordings back to the keyboard unless I had a floppy disk drive. Bought a USB Floppy disk drive for about £15. I still find the floppy disk has it's place and still use it now and again, although it's been superseded by usb memory sticks these days.
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Lincsbodger
I remember when Windows came on three 5 inch floppies. You cant even get an MPG on one now, let alone an operating system.
And lets not forget all those other abandoned media:
45 RPM EP's
78 RPM LP's
Cassettes
8 track cartridges
Beta Video
Phillips 2000 laser discs
CD's
2 inch 16 track tape
And lets not forget all those other abandoned media:
45 RPM EP's
78 RPM LP's
Cassettes
8 track cartridges
Beta Video
Phillips 2000 laser discs
CD's
2 inch 16 track tape
They weren’t common on PC’s & mainly used on control servers. I can remember loading MS DOS from one floppy (circa 1986) & this quickly became 2 but you had to have 2 x 5 ¼ floppy drives & variable speed drives to run any half decent software & the drives failed often. “Wndows” didn’t exist & after loading MS DOS, “Wordstar” was king on a very green screen & if you could run it, you had a top notch system. I can remember frequently sitting up until dawn in my apartment in South Korea, punching in DOS codes trying to sort something out; those were the days!He's bragging again.
I remember my friends dad had a video player where the tapes were double sided.. you could flip it over and record more on "side B."..
do people still use mini-discs? or DAT tapes? and why didn't they ever take over as storage media from 3.5in?
L
Lincsbodger
They weren’t common on PC’s & mainly used on control servers. I can remember loading MS DOS from one floppy (circa 1986) & this quickly became 2 but you had to have 2 x 5 ¼ floppy drives & variable speed drives to run any half decent software & the drives failed often. “Wndows” didn’t exist & after loading MS DOS, “Wordstar” was king on a very green screen & if you could run it, you had a top notch system. I can remember frequently sitting up until dawn in my apartment in South Korea, punching in DOS codes trying to sort something out; those were the days!He's bragging again.
I worked on Unix before i got windows, i remember "Vi", the command line text editor.
One fun game was to open an important file then type your name at the command line and then try and work out what it had just done. Vi wasn't a WYSIWYG editor, Vi was a 'You Asked For It, Now You Bloody Well Get It' editor. Brutal, savage, powerful and unforgiving, one wrongly type character on a command line could wipe out weeks of work.......
I also remember repairing the boot sector on a Windows machine after it had gone tits up, patching the hexadecimal on the primary boot sector, because in those days automatic drive detection was sci-fi.
I also worked on a MUPPET Bus - a Multiple PET bus. Eight Commodore PETs crudely networked together using co-ax and NETBIOS. The fun thing with that was you could configure any device as input or output, so configuring the printer as an input device was enough the crash the whole thing.
I also worked on a DEC 11750 running MINIMAC o/s and IBM Job Control Language, not even green screen monitors, but TELETYPE input and output. There was a speaker on the main bus, so you could hear it working (sounded like an old modem or fax machine), the girl who operated it could tell you what the core was doing by the noise.
We were also writing COBOL 66 on that, using punch cards. One day someone compiled the data file instead of the program file, and got a 6 inch thick printout of errors and a terse note from the operator telling him not to waste paper. I realised you had to have superuser privileges to use the tape drive, so after that i wrote all my programs using tape input and output, and therefore after that had full root access........People used to wander about with there programming projects as a deck of cards, if you didnt like someone, you took a card out the middle of there deck and pushed it back in somewhere else in the deck, it could then take hours to figure out what was wrong.
The REAL DOS guru's used to know all the undocumented hooks, routines and interrupts. There was a guy called Nigel where i worked, he wrote his own editor in Hex , it was amazing, and the undocumented stuff he knew about DOS was unbelievable. My hero was Seymour Cray, who invented the supercomputer. He keyed in the first boot loader by hand from memory into the Cray One, in binary, using the toggle switches on the front panel to enter machine code byte by byte. Now thats a REAL programmer.
J
joinerjohn
I worked for a while on COBOL . Computer ran a xenix environment. Very similar to unix.
Had to use Jacksons Structured Programming to work out the cobol programs . Compiling was a nightmare. We used to have competitions to see who could get the biggest core dump
Had to use Jacksons Structured Programming to work out the cobol programs . Compiling was a nightmare. We used to have competitions to see who could get the biggest core dump
Hats off man, the ancient geeks are a comin out tonightThey weren’t common on PC’s & mainly used on control servers. I can remember loading MS DOS from one floppy (circa 1986) & this quickly became 2 but you had to have 2 x 5 ¼ floppy drives & variable speed drives to run any half decent software & the drives failed often. “Wndows” didn’t exist & after loading MS DOS, “Wordstar” was king on a very green screen & if you could run it, you had a top notch system. I can remember frequently sitting up until dawn in my apartment in South Korea, punching in DOS codes trying to sort something out; those were the days!He's bragging again.
I worked on Unix before i got windows, i remember "Vi", the command line text editor.
One fun game was to open an important file then type your name at the command line and then try and work out what it had just done. Vi wasn't a WYSIWYG editor, Vi was a 'You Asked For It, Now You Bloody Well Get It' editor. Brutal, savage, powerful and unforgiving, one wrongly type character on a command line could wipe out weeks of work.......
I also remember repairing the boot sector on a Windows machine after it had gone **** up, patching the hexadecimal on the primary boot sector, because in those days automatic drive detection was sci-fi.
I also worked on a MUPPET Bus - a Multiple PET bus. Eight Commodore PETs crudely networked together using co-ax and NETBIOS. The fun thing with that was you could configure any device as input or output, so configuring the printer as an input device was enough the crash the whole thing.
I also worked on a DEC 11750 running MINIMAC o/s and IBM Job Control Language, not even green screen monitors, but TELETYPE input and output. There was a speaker on the main bus, so you could hear it working (sounded like an old modem or fax machine), the girl who operated it could tell you what the core was doing by the noise.
We were also writing COBOL 66 on that, using punch cards. One day someone compiled the data file instead of the program file, and got a 6 inch thick printout of errors and a terse note from the operator telling him not to waste paper. I realised you had to have superuser privileges to use the tape drive, so after that i wrote all my programs using tape input and output, and therefore after that had full root access........People used to wander about with there programming projects as a deck of cards, if you didnt like someone, you took a card out the middle of there deck and pushed it back in somewhere else in the deck, it could then take hours to figure out what was wrong.
The REAL DOS guru's used to know all the undocumented hooks, routines and interrupts. There was a guy called Nigel where i worked, he wrote his own editor in Hex , it was amazing, and the undocumented stuff he knew about DOS was unbelievable. My hero was Seymour Cray, who invented the supercomputer. He keyed in the first boot loader by hand from memory into the Cray One, in binary, using the toggle switches on the front panel to enter machine code byte by byte. Now thats a REAL programmer.
He's bragging again.
Ahhhh,, the memories!!I can still remember using 7 inch floppies
In fact I was being so geeky; such subtlety went completely over my head; I think we may be loosing lesser mortals
L
Lincsbodger
I worked for a while on COBOL . Computer ran a xenix environment. Very similar to unix.
Had to use Jacksons Structured Programming to work out the cobol programs . Compiling was a nightmare. We used to have competitions to see who could get the biggest core dump
OMG Jackson Structured Programming, ive never met ANYONE who used it after i left Uni, i was all alone with my beautifully crafted COBOL!! I loved JSP
My COBOL was a work of art, elegantly looping round and using self modifying variables............we used to have competitions to see who could make the smallest, most cunning, most elegant programs.
I wrote a version of PACMAN using batch Cobol. You put your move as a map direction (N S E W) into a batch file of two bytes then ran the program and it printed an A3 page on the line printer to show the screen. Took hours to play each game
I still use floppies because they're easy to use and dirt cheap. If I want to give somebody a few files I stick them on a floppy. Just right-click the files and send to floppy. I know I could put thousands of times more data on a memory stick but will I get it back. I don't really care whether I get the floppy back or not.
I run Norton Ghost and Partition Magic from bootable floppies. To be fair, that's because I haven't got round to putting them on a bootable CD yet - but I'll have to do it now because the laptop doesn't have a floppy drive.
PS: I still have lots of stuff backed up on DDS1 tapes.
I know I could put thousands of times more data on a memory stick but will I get it back. I don't really care whether I get the floppy back or not. I run Norton Ghost and Partition Magic from bootable floppies. To be fair, that's because I haven't got round to putting them on a bootable CD yet - but I'll have to do it now because the laptop doesn't have a floppy drive.
PS: I still have lots of stuff backed up on DDS1 tapes.
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