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Community weekly poll: What's your favorite old-school storage device?
- 4/26/05 10:44 AM
I'll second that
by Davidjp - 4/26/05 3:02 PM In reply to: You gusy must have been born yesterday! by W3ZJYou and I must have been produced in the same era. Ours had 8Kb of memory and took two engineers two days to upgrade it to 16kb which, incidentally, cost around UK£250K. Oh, happy days!!!!
Key (computer) cards and cassette tape for data backup
by growler - 4/26/05 2:49 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
a) I still have stacks of old key cards that I use to scratch in my BASIC programs. Back in the late 70's, our high school had two thermal printer based terminals and one computer card reader. Since the use of the terminals were shared among all students taking a computer science course, I use to pencil in my programs on computer cards. Yes, the school had one key card puncher, but, again there was only one and I couldn't take what looked like a 500 lb puncher home with me!
b) Cassette tape for data backup. I learnt a great deal of programming in BASIC and assembly (Zilog Z80) on my Microace (a U-build it version of the Sinclair ZX80) and the ZX81. It had the option of loading/restoring your code onto a cassette tape recorder. I recall just having to tinker with the volume so that the output on the line-out was within tolerance of the systems so that the programs would load correctly. I recall even building a circuit (posted in some electronics magazine) on a 'line conditioner' so that you would get more reliable load/restores!
But, those 'old days' had really prepared me for my eventual career in computer engineering and VLSI engineering work because it was during those weekend nights where I learnt the basic of machine language, assembly language, address mapping, static RAM interfaces, etc. by building peripherals that attached to the old Sinclair ZX81.
2.25
by mathew2k - 4/26/05 2:56 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Does anyone remember the 2.25", 50,000 bit, first forerunner of the computer disk? It was used in the first dedicated word processors to come out with actual storage capabilities, @ 1988-89. Then the 720 K, 3.5" floppy came out, in 1990, followed in less than a year by the 3.5", 1.44 MB floppy that most of you will remember. (DId I mention that I'm a dinosaur?) I still have my old disks and the old Smith Corona word processor. It all still works perfectly.
BUT, I have a LOT of text stored on those old disks, some 20 or more disks filled. Is there any chance at all of finding some way to transfer that text onto a 3.5" floppy, or any other medium? I'm hoping for any means other than tediously retrieving the text by using the original word processor, printing it out on that ULTRA-SLOW and NOISY old "daisy wheel" typewriter/word processor, and then manually typing each and every last word of more than 1,000 total pages of text into my computer??
Seriously, I'd have to live to be two years older than Methuselah to do all of that printing out and typing...
Maybe one of you folks will know a more efficient way to do it? Thanks for any good suggestions. Matt
Disk Drive
by Jimrg - 4/26/05 3:01 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
How about an old RKO5 disk (Digital corporation)around 1976, Lots of good memories from that 'old' boy
Here's one it seems EVERYONE forgot!!!
by timh111 - 4/26/05 3:05 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
We loved the smell of it and it was VERY messy to work with. CARBON PAPER!!!! My teachers would save them, reuse them and make additional copies from them!! I would say that qualifies as "Storage Device". Do you agree??
Commodore CDTV
by Ringtone Zone - 4/26/05 3:09 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
A friend of mine recently purchased a commodore CDTV unit for $1 at a garage sale. It's really heavy, and has tons of ins and outs on the back, I guess it was quite the machine back in it's day. We haven't quite figured out if it can burn CD's yet. It's so old, you have to put the CD into a cartridge before loading it. Ahh I just found a website about it. http://www.cdtv.org.uk Looks like it has a cult following.
Floppys weren't so bad
by guylauten - 4/26/05 3:18 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Well I remember being thrilled with my first 8" floppy drive, much less my first 5.25". The first storage media I used regularly was punched paper tape on a reader connected to an original TeleType machine (a real tty) that was online at 50 baud (50 baud!) to a timeshared IBM 360. The development cycle for a simple BASIC program was about 3 weeks. Now I build racks that hold 64Tb of ATA133 hard drives and I speak of gigabytes like they're hardly worth notice. I guess it's all a matter of perspective...
Paper Tape
by arcanha - 4/26/05 4:18 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Not as much fun as shuffling somebodies punch cards but trying to keep those in good condition was almost impossible.
Still when you no longer needed them they made great streamers off the roof.
160K Floppies and Cassette Tapes
by dasarge - 4/26/05 4:26 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
When I thought I had it made, I could store info on the cassette and the 160ks we could cut a notch in and use both sides. We really were getting away with something then.
Phase Change Dual
by amanda1000 - 4/26/05 4:53 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Here is one that no one mentioned. PD disks. Phase Change Dual Disks. They operated off a SCSI 2 card,and came in cartridges, and last time I checked maxed out at a mere 8x ReWriteable speed. Mine, which I still have, with two PD cartridges that operates at 4x, still works.
3" discs
by Accomble - 4/26/05 5:45 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had a well-loved and well-used Amtstrad PCW which used 3-inch floppy discs -- yes, discs, it was and English machine!
Whenever I said "3-inch discs" someone would correct me: 'Surely you mean 3 and a half inch disks!'.
favorite old-school storage device
by adevajosed - 4/26/05 5:56 PM In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
ever reliable floppy disk
My oldest and still have some. Punch cards.
by R. Proffitt - 4/26/05 6:14 PM
In reply to: What's your favorite old-school storage device? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
They are stored away in some box with other items from some class in Fortran IV.
Today my favorite storage device in an 1 GB USB memory key. It goes with me everywhere.
Bob
Remember "bubble memory"?
by Willy - 4/26/05 10:06 PM In reply to: My oldest and still have some. Punch cards. by R. Proffitt
I never fixed one, but worked on the terminals at a newspaper. I worked for a newspaper and the terminal were given to the reporters for thier tasks. Us techs couldn't do much other than to prove the terminals were doing what they're suppose to. You got it, no spare parts, the only spares were other terminals. -----Willy
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