[ale] a moment of silence please
Lightner, Jeff
jlightner at water.com
Wed Apr 28 09:03:51 EDT 2010
I still have copies of Lotus 123 and Symphony (including manuals) from
my accounting days. I'm pretty sure I still have the Novell 2.15 SFT
disks that were an "upgrade" over the earlier Novell we'd been running
at one time. I have a couple of boxes full of 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch
floppies for various purposes.
The first PC I used on a regular basis was an IBM PC-XT with dual full
height 5 1/4" floppies. When they let me use the one with the 10 MB
hard drive I thought I was in heaven. DOS 2.0 and Lotus 123 v1A.
Back in those days DOS didn't ask you if you were really really sure
before doing things. You had to format all your floppies as there was
no such thing as preformatted yet. If you were on the C: drive and
typed "format" and left out the "A:" it would merrily start formatting
the hard drive on the assumption that you obviously meant the current
drive.
DOS 3 introduced the safeguard against that. These days everyone
complains that M$ asks questions about everything but I'm sure it was a
reaction to many an irate customer from the early days.
Windows 3.11 in 9th Grade comment made me feel really old as I remember
upgraded from that to Windows 95 in what seems to me to be "just a few
years ago" long after I had left the 9th grade.
-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
William Fragakis
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 8:39 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts - Yes!We run Linux!
Subject: Re: [ale] a moment of silence please
On an upcoming episode of "Hoarders"...
wf
On Wed, 2010-04-28 at 07:24 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> 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
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> Ale mailing list
> >>> Ale at ale.org
> >>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> >>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> >>>
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> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Ale mailing list
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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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