Floppies :)

Mike13Foxtrot

Mike13Foxtrot

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So i had some old floppies and LS120 disks. Had 2 LS120 drives 1 IDE and 1 in an enclosure for Parallel Port. Had an old put together VIA Epia system, years ago it was kind of a bookshelf PC running Suse. So needed old 32 bit Distro. Grabbed Bodhi Linux got so far then said that it could not as not a true 86 architecture. So grabbed Debian Woody. That was a whole rabbit hole, got so far then when selecting Language it would not longer see the USB keyboard. Needed PS2. Have adapters somewhere. Gave it up for the night. The next day whipped into a St Vincent DePaul thrift store they usually have bins of old keyboards. Grabbed one for 4 bucks yet right next to the bin was an old HP Compaq desktop for 15. no HD but full system. Took that, setting up installed MX 32 bit Libretto, on an old 40GB IDE drive. Plugged in the LS120 into the IDE and poof.

1 out of ten floppies had data loss, none of the LS120 did. Ended up being a lot of shareware, from BBS days. So no real anything. But got the Parallel mounted but after 2 floppies it crapped out. You could hear the heads whining a bit too much. Was in a baggy with a 10 dollar price on it think I got it about 2006.

Take away from this is the fact of the current installs of Linux Distros. As to that Debian Woody is an absolute nightmare of commands to set up disks, set boot, set swap, mount them individually, then write the info, then begin format, but it made you test the disk before that. Was taking forever. Then got to a point and dropped the keyboard, thankfully. On the Compaq system with MX it was simple pretty much the same as current versions. Funny though as MX 21 is Debian based...
 


You can still use floppies today...they come in very handy for wobbly tables.
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Ran down to do a load of laundry in my basement. Just found 4 boxes of LS-120 disks. 120MB on each. 20 total. Not much fits on them anymore. But I also found 4 disks. 2 each versions of the original DOOM. Win 3.1 DOS 3, and 6. Was not thinking doing retro though I have enough stuff, including a new in box 400W ATX power supply. Though anything modern I will have to use a floppy emulator and USB to load DOOM. Just built my first Keyboard TenKeyless. So that is kinda what I do, tech hardware.
 
what is a floppy disk? just kidding. I used to have a stack of them, including 25 3.5 floppies to install Lotus. Optical drives are being phased out, not sure I can even find a working floppy drive now. Although I did but a zip drive to see what was on a couple old 100Meg zip disks.
Way to go experimenting with such old equipment and congrats that it works.
 
One of the first pieces of equipment I worked on was a dual 8 in disk drive. Each disk could hold 1.2 meg. Very heavy. Things have come a long ways in the last 40 years....
 
The only real reason why those keep getting made is that the airline industry uses them, or at least that is what I read.
 
There are folks out there still using them. If you invested in a piece of equipment that is still functioning makes no sense to replace. I kept a floppy drive in a closet for years. Tossed it after not having been touched for a decade. I'm sure DVD's will follow. They are great to hang in cherry trees to keep the birds away though. Try that with a flash drive....:)
 
jpnilson said:
Try that with a flash drive...
Click to expand...
That's the thing though, DVDs have been replaced already, but they are cheap. There are factors than how desirable something is. For example, it would take a very long time to replace the internet.
 
APTI said:
what is a floppy disk? just kidding. I used to have a stack of them, including 25 3.5 floppies to install Lotus. Optical drives are being phased out, not sure I can even find a working floppy drive now. Although I did but a zip drive to see what was on a couple old 100Meg zip disks.
Way to go experimenting with such old equipment and congrats that it works.
Click to expand...
Have oodles of old PC tech. 1 30 gallon tub downstairs had 10 CD and DVD drives and cables. Along with 2 boxes of 100 floppies. More. Even have an old 3DFX Graphics card, some ATI cards. My basement looks like an old PC Store. Even have a ribbon printer, takes the rolls of paper with the holes in the edges that get pulled along. These are 24 inch cylinders of 18 inch wide paper green and white lines. It actually made a great Drafting/Architecture printer.
 
Vimmer said:
That's the thing though, DVDs have been replaced already, but they are cheap. There are factors than how desirable something is. For example, it would take a very long time to replace the internet.
Click to expand...
Flash drive is much faster and cheaper per byte. Replacing the Internet? The Internet isn't really just one thing. Under the hood its really a political and regulatory nightmare. Having used the Internet from close to the beginning it has changed in ways no one ever imagined. I suspect a decade from now it will be dramatically different. If you think about it a floppy, dvd and flash drive are really the same thing but because of speed, capacity and other factors they appear to be different things.
 
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jpnilson said:
Flash drive is much faster and cheaper per byte. Replacing the Internet? The Internet isn't really just one thing. Under the hood its really a political and regulatory nightmare. Having used the Internet from close to the beginning it has changed in ways no one ever imagined. I suspect a decade from now it will be dramatically different. If you think about it a floppy, dvd and flash drive are really the same thing but because of speed, capacity and other factors they appear to be different things.
Click to expand...
Well, there's that saying about old technology being slow to be replaced. I was just referring to how DVDs have been replaced by both blu-ray and 4k, but DVDs are still manufactured because they are the least expensive. For example, there are plenty of professional services for people who want to put wedding photos and videos onto a DVD, anyone can do that with DVD styler (mostly for windows), yet a lot of people don't want to mess with it.

Why disc technology is still used anyways has to both do with the first saying I mentioned, and the fact people like the more concrete feeling of having boxes with pictures. With music, vinyl records and spotify are the thing nowadays! I still do CDs because they are cheaper and reminiscent of my millenial childhood :) My car's CD player broke, but i found some guy in a junk shop who sold me a portable CD play for 10 bucks. Then, all had to do was hook up an 1/8" cable and buy the charger off offline, and I didn't have to throw away my CD collection.

And yeah i agree with that nightmare you speak of: the internet was just an addition to the existing phone lines anyways, unless you came up with something that was indisputably superior and offered more possibilities, there's no replacing that without severe infrastructure disasters. There are lots of networking protocols, yet even if there was a better one, it would probably take decades to replace the internet to the extent flash drives replaced disc technology.
 
SSD's are volatile 5-10 years... the floppies so far and the IDE HD's still have readable data. so by my count on the LS120 disks that is 25 years of data storage. I HD is from 2001. Not the most important stuff on them yet but there is that Floppy with the Original DOOM. And Version 1.1 DOOM that is hard to find has multi-monitor setup that they did not support later.
 
Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Blake Stone and many other titles were developed by a Brisbane family company name of Manaccom, founded in 1986 I think.

When Apple released the iStore, the family saw the writing on the wall and folded the company.

Instead they went into running and developing Australia's lottery options and thrived.
 
wizardfromoz said:
Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Blake Stone and many other titles were developed by a Brisbane family company name of Manaccom, founded in 1986 I think.
Click to expand...
Played them all. Including the New versions of DOOM 2016, DOOM Eternal, all the New Wolfensteins. DOOM 1.1 had multi-monitor support back then,
took some work, then nothing. Tech sometimes takes a step back. Innovations then boom. Some companies have no foresight. My Furnace is a Local Cincinnati Company Williamson, they built tanks of oil and gas furnaces, they last too long, they did not think the energy efficient ratings would last. They were wrong. The first cars were electric, then along comes Edison, Rockefeller saw the writing on the wall and pressured car companies to use his kerosene diesel for engines. Now we are all trying to go electric again. Until we perfect the Atomic Battery it will not be easy.
 
Lol, I am a handful of years older than you - you are preaching to the converted (you say choir I think). I agree.
 
Also, if the stuff is abandonware and rare, it's up to you to archive them properly at archive.org or some other location. Once something is uploaded, it's no longer rare. It's pretty much your solemn duty at this point!
 
KGIII said:
Also, if the stuff is abandonware and rare, it's up to you to archive them properly at archive.org or some other location. Once something is uploaded, it's no longer rare. It's pretty much your solemn duty at this point!
Click to expand...
Hehe he said DUTY........

Don't know how many working copies are floating around. Still have DOS original disks. 3.3, 6.2 I WIN 95 CD, 98, 98SE, 2000 Pro, WinME CD's Win XP DVD. Wolfenstein 3D....I ran a BBS for a while, Still have lots of Shareware also. Just ran across Red Hat for Dummies CD's A bunch of CD's and the manuals for "C" programming. A Plus certs. Found a Box of CPU's let alone the CPU's I have in a shadow box on the desk 12 x 24 inch. Pentiums I, II, III Slot ones, AMD's A Cyrix 486X CPU even. I have been doing hardware for a long time. As I have mentioned I have now built a TenKeyless Barebones KeyBoard. Even found that WAL Mart of all places has their own Mech Keyboard ONN, matches the MSI I am using at the moment, which the software will not work on.

But the Wally World's software is smooth, can control lighting on each individual key, Macro's work and all around easy. Go the ESC key breathing RED as it had a small PC Keycap on it, the function keys are dull yellow, arrow keys are breathing Green the Num Pad is light blue and the rest are darker blue. All on my Gaming Machine. Surprised me as it was half the cost of the MSI. Which I need to send Signal RGB a note on the MSI. None of their software works. That is why MB wise I have said I would rather ASROCK then MSI. Have built 2 Recent ASROCK PC's so far and their software works as well as the hardware.
 
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