[ale] a moment of silence please

Wed Apr 28 07:24:14 EDT 2010

YOU HAD MAGNETIC MEDIA?!?!?!?!?

toggle switches, and paper tape were the IO methods on the first computer I
had access to. It was a big next step up to be able to use punch cards for
program entry over those horrid toggle switches. And output was multiple
feet of wide greenbar with tractor holes never quite were perforated
correctly for fast tear off.

And it wasn't my Dad's computer room with the bazillion floppies and rw
tape. It was mine. :-)

I still have a huge pile of floppies with win 3.1, MS office, autocad,
mathmatica, Lotus 1,2,3, excel 4, quicken, Prodigy and the upgrade to
14,400baud, etc. I may still have my first Slackware floppies downloaded
over that speed-boosted 14.4 modem.

Still have a box of zip disks with the tons-o-crap downloaded from uusnet as
I bounced between win3.11 and slackware.

Hmm. Maybe I should throw out some cruft...

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 6:47 AM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com>wrote:

> I remember the punch tools. I remember using a soldering iron on the
> 3.5s and cleaning up the hole with an Xacto. I'll raise you: knowing
> exactly where in my Dad's "computer room" I could go today to find the
> little black stickers that I would put on a 5.25 to make it writable
> again. I'll raise you: going to visit my dad for the weekend to find
> my room full of ceiling to floor stacks of boxes of 5.25 floppies when
> it was his turn to look after the inventory of CUGA*. Good times!
>
> *Computer User's Group of Ashland (KY), which was basically like a
> monthly software swap meet.
>
> On 4/28/10, Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com> wrote:
> > A friend of mine once bought OS/2 on cd.  I know we had 2.0 and Warp,
> > but I'm pretty certain this was Warp.  We were probably in the early
> > part of high school.  He didn't own a cd-rom drive, but I did.  A
> > monstrous 1x sony external deal that used caddies.
> >
> > He saved 10 or 20 bucks by going cd instead of floppy.  But we had to
> > find 10-20 floppies to use to create the install disks.  We made those
> > at my house and we walked the couple miles to his house to install it.
> > Half way through we hit our first bad floppy...  So we had to go back,
> > recreate that one...  I think we had to do that twice.
> >
> > I don't miss 3.5 inch floppies.  My fond memories are of 5.25 floppies.
> >   I had a neat little punch tool that made perfect clean holes to make
> > the other side writable in the Apple drives.
> >
> > The 3.5 punch tool was much more monstrous by comparison, and the hard
> > plastic didn't cut as cleanly.  I do remember once melting a hole in a
> > 3.5 floppy with a soldering iron to make it high density...
> >
> > Pat
> >
> > On 04/28/2010 12:49 AM, Chris Woodfield wrote:
> >> I see your loading Windows 3.1 from floppies and raise you multiple
> >> installs of Microsoft Office 5.1(?) for Mac - I think there were at
> least
> >> 30 floppy disks in the box. And Windows 95 clocked in at 15 disks?
> >>
> >> -C
> >>
> >> On Apr 27, 2010, at 6:59 26PM, Dustin Puryear wrote:
> >>
> >>> I have vague memories of loading Windows 3.11 from floppies when I was
> >>> in 9'th grade or so. Wow.
> >>>
> >>> -----Original Message-----
> >>> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
> >>> Michael Trausch
> >>> Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2010 4:11 PM
> >>> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes! We run Linux!
> >>> Subject: Re: [ale] a moment of silence please
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Paul Cartwright<ale at pcartwright.com>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>> JoshuaInNippon writes "In a brief press release buried within Sony
> >>> Japan's
> >>>> website, the company announced that they would be ending sales of the
> >>> classic
> >>>> 3.5 inch floppy disk in the country in March of 2011. Sony introduced
> >>> the
> >>>> size to the world in 1981, which saw its heyday in the 1990s. Sony has
> >>> been
> >>>> one of the last major manufacturers to continue shipments of the disk
> >>> type
> >>>> they helped develop, but had ended most worldwide sales in March of
> >>> this
> >>>> year. The company's production of the 3.5 inch floppy ceased in 2009.
> >>> Sony
> >>>> noted the demand, or a lack thereof, as the reason. The company's
> >>> withdrawal
> >>>> is one of the final marks in the slow death of the floppy era."
> >>>
> >>> Being that I *still* use 3.5" floppy disks, this does make me quite
> sad.
> >>>
> >>> I use them these days as ~900KB encrypted stores (with duplicates!) of
> >>> small things like encryption keys and certificates.  Something about
> >>> sorting the things and working with them without them being in my
> >>> $HOME is nice to me.
> >>>
> >>>   -- Mike
> >>> _______________________________________________
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> >>>
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> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
> --
> Sent from my mobile device
>
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness
Doing pretty well on all 3 pursuits
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