Yes, I’m old… sigh…
And I really DO need to clean out some cabinets…
You youngsters may not recognize this…
That is a real floppy disk…
And the up close version you can see it’s a start up disk for DOS ver 3.30 from 1987…
And I actually do have the book somewhere around here too…
And DOS commands STILL work on Windoze, regardless of what MS says…
Don’t believe me???
Here’s the command prompt where I typed defrag (a DOS 3.3 command) into Windoze ver 7 and guess what…
YMMV, I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night (Yea!), IANALL, nor I do I play one on TV…
And yes, I no longer run ANY MS IOS on anything, I’ve gone to the dark side…LOL
5.25″, probably SSDD. 360K storage (180K if single density rather than double density.)
Pretty sure I have some of those around here too, somewhere…
The sad part is I still have a stack of 5.25″ half height floppy drives sitting on a shelf. I still have a couple of FULL height 5.25″ drives in a TRS-80 Model IV that needs its capacitors replaced in order to be functional.
I can’t throw stones in the “being old” glass house. 🙂
I finally ditched the TRS-80, but I think I have a C64 on a shelf high enough I’d have to get on a ladder to look at.
But I got “ruthless” last summer and filled my truck for the dump.
I’m old enough to remember and use 5 1/4″ floppy disks. I once erased my 286 computer memory when tasked with wiping the disks of information for re-use. Switching from Drive A to Drive C to compare and delete. I lost my place and erased my computer’s contents completely. I felt so stupid…
That 286 was fast. Ran at 12, but the computer program Lightning sped up to 14. My boss had a 386 and ran at 20. A true big dog !
I once (in 1984 or 1985) formatted all of my backup discs and then formatted my hard drive, in the computer I ran a college admissions office from.
The cause: I too lost my place in what I was doing, switching out floppy disk after floppy disc.
Fortunately, I was the boss; otherwise, the butt-chewing would have been epic.
One good thing came of that: my secretary lost her fear of the computer, because she realized nothing she could do would be as bad as what I had done.
It was a Tandy 2000, with an 80186 chip, 256K memory, 10 MB hard drive, and a 1.2 MB floppy drive. That made me a power user!
You kids and your newfangled floppy discs.
We used to have to stick bits of magnetic meteorites on a strip of mammoth hide to load DOS on the Babbage computers in our caves!
I’ve not seen either size of floppy disc in a very long time.
I’ve owned computers with the 5.25″ and the 3.5 floppy discs (in the single, double, and high density flavors), and had the somewhat dubious pleasure of using 8″ floppies at work.
I have a couple of computers needing to be scrapped out. An old Dell had problems with not recognizing the start button. The usual fixes worked until last week, so I’m salvaging the newish hard drive and anything else useful for the future.
The Y2K vintage Sony desktop works, but is seriously underpowered. It’ll join the Dell at the county eWaste dump.
Floppy disks? Luxury! Kids like you don’t know you’re born! We had to boot our Burroughs medium system mainframe using punched cards. Does anyone else remember the importance of the diagonal stripe on cards?
and numbering the cards in the note field.
Nothing like being one of the CS geeks on campus, when some a$$hole ran up behind you and you suddenly had to play 1000+ card pickup, praying that the cards didn’t get blown away or into a convenient mud puddle, cursing said a$$hole fluently.
After a few episodes, I got wise, got a 128k Mac and a 300 baud modem, and from then on dialed into the MicroVAX systems from the apartment off-campus.
“I’ve worked with Microsoft before Windows, and Apple before Macintosh.”
Good times….
UNIX on an Amdahl which had replaced an IBM 360.
My dad spent $5,000 buying a computer that used 8″ floppy disks and did exactly one thing. Word process. It was the size of a small desk but he was a college professor and used it to work on his book and organize his notes.
Meanwhile, I’ve tried to go to the dark side multiple times, but after much frustration, reading through manuals, digging around the web, running and installing programs, invariably there something I can’t do easily and I eventually abandon the project and go back to my Windows. I’m more interested in getting stuff done than in figuring out a way to get it done without Windows. Gives me time to read Old NFO’s blog.
The computer would stop, demand the other program disk to complete the operation, and then you could continue.
When an ex-boss furnished me with a computer with a 10 meg hard drive to compile some records, I felt I was sitting on the edge of the future. I even had Boreland Sidekick, which simplified many DOS commands and was a breakthrough program since it was TSR.
At work had DOS 1.0. Came with IBM PC. Slip case book which contained the assembler code for the BIOS. Good times.
By dark side do you mean (whispers) Apple?
I remember those when the Navy was going that direction . We had to go see the ship’s 3M coordinator (he had a better title- can’t remember) to have him print up our MRC Cards . I took a class in High School, Intro Computing using an Apple II Plus , mainly because there was a hot girl taking the class , I was failing the class miserably and dropped it. I admire anybody who really “gets” computers , I sure as heck don’t .
Alright, Alright, my beard is totally white. My first one was a Timex Sinclair ZX1000. One (1)k of memory. Next was a VIC 20 and on to bigger and better things a Commodore Door 64, 64 whoppin k of memory, basic programming and, are you ready, CP/M. My first “PC” had two 360 floppies and cost $3000.00. I figured that’d be my last one, next year they came out with a 10M hard drive and I was off again.
We shared a similar computer path. I had a portable cassette connected to my ZX1000 for storage. Progressed to the VIC 20 then multiple Commodore 64’s. I recall blowing multiple power supplies (or something internal) in those. I also recall software “modules” that plugged into the back. Magic Desk was awesome. Used the 64 for RTTY a couple of years in Africa. The office used 8″ floppies for our message terminal. I don’t recall the capacities on those, but it wasn’t much. Good times. Sort of…
8” floppies on the DEC cad system I used in the early 80’s.
I see your DOS disk and raise you an 8087 co-processor chip, with its pin-socket daughter card.
If you’ve ever seen how Jacquard looms work, you’ll see how roughly half of Herman Hollerith’s punch card patent applications were blocked by Joseph Marie Jacquard’s patents – nearly 150 years earlier! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_ijmjx7Xys
Another fun trick to flummox the n00bs was that since the boot instructions on those DOS disks resided on the perimeter of the disk, if you didn’t try to store information on that disk (the cutout in the cardboard write-protected the OS disk – remember the A:\ and B:\ drives?) then you could stick the OS disk to the steel shroud of the PC *with a magnet* – to keep it handy! Now, as long as you remembered to keep the magnet near the large center hole of the disk you were fine. But n00bs who mimicked you and stuck their disk to their PC shroud with the magnet near the edge of the square could hose the magnetic 1s and 0s on their OS disk.
I worked in the robot lab (where we rebuilt and repaired them).
EDS gave us an IBM-PC running DOS while the plant ran on a VAX.
I had brought in my Commodore for a about a year to print labels and drawer tags and controlled inventory using a database I had created.
The first thing I did was back up the 10M hard drive with a box of 5.25 floppies.
The hard drive failed a week later.
I was not commended on my foresight. I was accused of breaking the computer. Fortunately EDS backed me up and told my boss I did the right thing.
I was visiting my son, then the yeoman on a 688 LA Class that was to deploy the next day. He showed me his closet office and the computer they had issued him. It had a boot failure and he was concerned because IT said they’d be out in a couple days, which would delay the deployment.
I asked if they kept a spare hard drive, whereupon he slapped his forehead and remembered they had a backup hard drive in the captains safe.
Remember the default command we entered to jump to, load, and run the low level format routine on a lot of hard drive controller cards (like Western Digital’s) for the early 10/20/40 meg MFM hard drives?
DEBUG G=C800:5
Why oh why do I remember details like this that are now utterly useless?!
How about having to replace your 8250 UART chip in their computer with a National Semiconductor 16550 (specifically the NS16550AFN as the stamped part number) in order to be able to reliably use serial communications at a higher rate than 9,600 bps without dropping characters? (This was for things like the U.S. Robotics 14.4kbps modem and higher speeds that came out later.) I STARTED with an acoustic couple 300 baud modem, then had a Hayes 300 (luxury) and upgraded through 1,200, 2,400, skipped 9,600, and finally went all-in with the 14.4k, then 28.8k, then 56k.
Also, to everyone talking about how much we had to pay for how relatively little computing power we got compared to today: Right there with you. Converted to today’s dollars, I let a fortune go into computing equipment. Probably wouldn’t change a thing though if I were sent back in time to do it all over.
The first computer I worked on was a PDP-8, and then a Northstar Horizon. I’ve still got the disks for the Northstar containing my programs packed away somewhere. I then got hired to work on a IBM PC and have been in the PC world, DOS, Windows, & Linux; ever since.
In passing, I used punched cards and put a diagonal strip across the top to make sure they were in order, but that was only for university classes.
Yes…a true “floppy” disk. Came in two varieties. 5 inch and 8 inch. Still have an ancient desktop that can run both the 5 inch and the 3.5 inch hard plastic “floppy” disk,where I play with DOS just for S and Gs.
Never, ever mastered any kind of computers; not motivated. Way back, I kinda/sorta could wire control boards for 80 column card sorters. Remember hanging shards?
Wow! You guys and your rabbit holes… I caught myself looking up some RSX-11 stuff from back in ’79. I’m also moving on to the “Dark Side” after getting fed up with Microsoft’s shenanigans.
Nice – but do remember how to double-side a single-side floppy.. 🙂
Punched paper tape…
LOL oh Lord, talk about a stiff keyboard, damn teletype
Giant floppies (school computer), floppy floppies (home computer), non-floppy “floppies” that were never to be called “hard disks,” and the day of terror and fear when the profs in college said “no more dot matrix, and no paper with little nubbies on the sides from the perforated paper tapes the printer used to feed the paper through. This when campus had two (2) non-dot-matrix printers for student use, one in a dorm and one in a lab.
Dayum… most of y’all are as old as I am…talk about a bunch of dinosaurs! And yes, writing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS on an IBM 5150… sigh… And used ‘Lightning’ program floppy to get a whole 8mhz clock speed.
That might be worth something as a collector’s item. You could put it up on eBay.
I don’t have any 5 1/4’s left but I’ve got a bunch of original 3 1/2’s. Several versions of DOS and Windows, some old games, applications.
I’m not a hoarder, but I have a problem with throwing away things I paid money for that still work. I have three 17″ CRT monitors in the attic, two outdated AT form factor desktop computer cases and an 80386 based IBM Thinkpad laptop that still works when it’s plugged in even though the battery won’t hold a charge. It still has Windows XP installed on it IIRC…along with a plethora of miscellaneous components: hard drives, a Pentium motherboard with no CPU, Video cards, Modems, etc.
I’ve been saying for years that I need to get rid of all that old junk but I just haven’t been able to make myself do it.
You can absolutely get some money for those old systems if sold as “Authentic, working, and tested computers, of their time period.” There are retro computing enthusiasts that will pay for the old equipment to have the complete experience and not have to run the stuff in an emulator.
There are also companies and agencies ( *cough* FAA *cough* ) running legacy software that need to find working original equipment so they can continue using things like hardware dongles that demand actual hardware to get the right signal levels back. New hardware and emulation can not get the job done.
I’ve got the DOS 3.3 on 3.5″ floppy somewhere in the basement from our family’s first computer.
Sailor/Ag- Good point, sell the pieces to collectors!
TOS- Wow!!!
A few years ago I sold some of my old Apple Newtons and an emate through eBay. Almost got new prices for them from collectors. One went to Japan and another to France.
> dark side
—
If you remember the BeBox and BeOS from the 1990s, a group of Be aficionados reverse-engineered the entire OS using the printed API documentation. The new version is called Haiku, and runs all the old software.
Be software is mostly 30 years old and hard to find, but they’ve ported Qt to Haiku and added an emulation layer that lets them run lightly-modified versions of LibreOffice and Firefox.
Hardware support is still a bit sparse, about like Linux 25 years ago. But it’s tiny and crazy fast even on ancient hardware, and and it has been rock solid for the year I’ve been running it on a spare laptop.