RRC Archives

pigsteak wrote:so all you young whiners still complaining about floppies...are ye old enough to have used the true 5 1/4" floppies?

Yup - in elementary school, we played Oregon Trail from 5 1/4" floppies. What a sweet game.

Yea me too. Great times, but I was in Junior High.

pigsteak wrote:so all you young whiners still complaining about floppies...are ye old enough to have used the true 5 1/4" floppies?

Ya I loved those things. I had hundreds of those 5 1/4" with pirated games for my Vic 20 and Commodore 64. Nothing better than buying a pack of single sided disk, taking a hole puncher to the left side of the disk to make it double sided. Good times!

Our IBM only had two 5¼" drives ( A: and B: ), and I had to load one diskette into each just to boot DOS. My dad wrote a program for me that printed out the alphabet in big wavy letters and had the PC speaker (the little beep inside the case) play the alphabet song when I would type in my first name. The genetics made me a nerd from birth

PS: We got our next computer ~13 years later; it was a 486DX (math co-processor!) with a 1X CD-ROM. Gangster++

pigsteak wrote:so all you young whiners still complaining about floppies...are ye old enough to have used the true 5 1/4" floppies? sadly, I am.

how about tapes or punch cards? sadly, my first research job involved reprocessing data off punch cards that were older than i was.

First computer = cassette tapes. Plus worked with 8" floppies as well. First network was a 286 and a 386, via rs232 and lantasic.

lol...ok, so some are even older, in PC years, than I.

cassettes...ouch wes...I do remember my OLDER brother using those.

yasmeen....wanna hear it? my first programming class in, cough, cough, high school used the 5 inchers. my bro had an amiga sitting on the kitchen table, and man did that thing roar.....

Wes wrote:First computer = cassette tapes. Plus worked with 8" floppies as well. First network was a 286 and a 386, via rs232 and lantasic.

When piggie mentioned 5 1/4 floppies, I was totally thinking about those 8" monsters! Not only have I handled 8" floppies, I"ve been around for the loading of OS upgrades to a DEC PDP minicomputer via removable HD platter stacks! And as a kid, I got to play with junk punch tape and punch cards that my dad would bring home from work. He even used to program in FORTRAN! He he he! snork!

Shut up. I still program in fortran. Stupid bosses. Hmmph.

I learned Basic in high school and Fortran in college. One of my classmates dropped out and started Yahoo. Ever feel like you may have missed the boat?