Community poll forum: What's your favorite old-school storage device?

Zip is as new as I want! I have 5-1/4s and 3-1/2s with years of storage. I'm happy and they're happy.

i would like to use the120 that came with my panasonic toughbook,running xp pro,do i need a special driver?

Do you really use the 8 in. floppies? Or are they a collectors item? I inchers, but not a bit of data on them .... ohhhhh well. Curious, what is the storage capacity of the giants?

I remember not long after I started in IT, I drppoed a full box (5000) uniterpreted assembler source cards - that cost me a few beers before I got the programmer off my back! We also had a paper tape punch and reader back then - though not often used. We also used 8" floppies for OS upgrades, our main storage was 2400ft open reels of 1/2" tape and our disks ranged from EDS8 to EDS60 (8 Mbyte to 60 Mbytes) removable hard disks. We had 34 tape decks and 12 disk drives, plus two card readers & 6 160 column line printers. The mainframe has about 350k or Core Store. I even remember one of our prgammers have some ferrite core from a LEO II in his desk.

Well, maybe nightmares since I'm the one who had to fix the card readers and puches after some one jamed them up with warped cards. And then explain to them that there is no way to use a card once it has jamed. You can get the same reaction today when you tell some one that they just wiped out thier HD. John

Without question, the best data storage device of all time is pencil and paper. Why? Because physically it lasts for millenia; it's not device-dependent; the information is written in languages that are stable over periods of centuries -- and there are zero supply constraints on the media!

Really, this is no joke. How many worthwhile things were recorded ONLY on old floppies that can no longer be read? (Even if there were a drive to read them on, those things were notorious for losing their physical integrity and formatting over a span of only a few years; by now their contents are hash.) Optical media are an improvement, but their archival performance is an open question -- especially for rewritable media, which are after all designed NOT to be archival.

Some of the oldest documents known are on paper. It deteriorates physically unless it's well made and stored under good conditions, but we're still talking centuries here. Even a garden-variety xerox copy will be around for a very, very long time, unless it's destroyed by carelessness or intention...which is true for any data storage medium. Have you ever seen an antique book, one that was printed before this country was born? Have you ever held one in your hands, and read it? I have. Not only is the "data" still as readable as the day it was printed, there is an emotional connection to its originator, and everyone else who's opened it since...but that's off the topic.

And the humble pencil -- graphite is a mineral pigment, and those have a "shelf life" measured in geological time. Same with archival inks.

It's not just text, but images. Ordinary snapshots, decently stored, last for generations; we still have the earliest photographs, made over a century and a half ago. But if Matthew Brady had had a modern digital camera, his visual record of the Civil War would be long since lost.

Bottom line: we're putting our "eggs" -- the shared memories of our civilization -- into a brand-new, oh-wow-cool high-tech basket that has about as much longevity as a TV dinner. I only hope that somebody, somewhere, is making hard copyies and tucking them away.

Cassettes are my favorite, because my dad used to read books out loud to my siblings and I, and he taped many of them. Most of these books have now been converted to mp3s, but only after the tapes were threatening to wear out from constant use.

At one time I had 4 of these - average cost about $35 on ebay - and eight or ten 250MB disks. I'd leave a Shark permanently connected to each of my PCs and use a disk transfer data among them.

I never got it to work with XP, and the USB flash devices have consigned all my Sharks to parts bin, but in its day, it put Iomega to shame.

and don't forget the ever important Big Chief Tablet with a No. 2 pencil...

Punced tape what fun, well NOT. The telephone company used to record long distance phone calls on 3" wide paper tape. Then take rolls of punched tape about 3' in daimater and put in a tape readed to read in to a computer. If somthing happned to the roll of tape the charges for the calls would be lost. Some where in the mid 1970s the switched to mag tape. John

I have run across an enormous amount of obscure data storage devices.. some of my favotites:

1: VCR BACKUP
a card that you could put into your computer that would read and write to a VCR using a VHS tape as the media. it was so "popular" that some tv programs would broadcast the media imbedded in a program and all you had to do to use it was record the program and play it back through the PC and you got all kinds of nifty little basic programs.

2:The Causin Strip
I love the Causin Strip reader.. it is a device that would feed little strips of paper with strange looking barcodes on them through itself and would read the data into the serial port of the PC.. it was usually 10 to 20 strips for a several hundred line basic program.. The way cool part was when you bought this thing you would get a subscription to a magazine called "The Causin Effect" and you got allot of little strips to read through the reader every month.. and if you wanted to back up data this thing was just so easy! all you did was run whatever program you wanted to back up through the encoder program and the program would print it out on your (Epson compatible) dot matrix printer.. the whole time I had this thing I tried backing up 2 programs to it probably around 50K each... 1/2 box of tractor paper and 2 printer ribbons later I decided that I wasn't going to do that again.

3: the Saba Hand Scanner (or any hand scanner for that matter)

The Saba hand scanner was an OCR device for basic programmers so you didn't have to type in all those nifty games that you found in those 100 great games in BASIC books or whatever.. all you did was run the software and start sliding this thing over anything printed in a clear system font and 123 it would display into any chosen program... it was only about 70% accurate if you were lucky... it went over like a lead balloon

ok now for an ecologic ranting
4:PAPER

WHY???!?!? in this day and age do we use this stuff???
it needs to go away.. I know that it isn't feesable to remove it completely but at least cut WAY down on it... people just print to much.. and it is so inefficent..
SAVE A TREE! SEND AN EMAIL!

4a: FAX MACHINES

this one goes hand in hand with Paper.... but it deserves an honorable mention.. Fax machines combine all the joys of a sheetfed scanner, a bad photocopier and a modem rolled into one horrible package(end of rant)

I am sure I will think of others later but this is all I have time for now

J.R.

the stuff I was talking about were my favorites.. the Cassette was used on enumerable Commodore 64s and TRS80s from the late 70s and early 80s these things were pretty much the only game in town back then... and as soon as affordable floppy drives came out these were replaced...


on another note I remember my first hard drive

it was a 14" 8 platter external hard drive from corvus link

this thing sounded like a jet engine when it was turned on it held a Whopping (at the time) 10 megabytes!

I remember those days fondly

J.R.

My first computer job was working at Burroughs refurb center. Rebuilds of various items and they were a different world to me at the time. It was all there, modules(real discrete componets), cards(wire wrap), hard drives(big as a refrigator), printers(those wavy. output gvt. check types) and of course my favorite, bank machines. You know the ones that took a old bankbook and typed on it. My big job was rebuilds of "crashed" HD drives, the same drives that maybe found on those bankbook terminals or as a small server to data control.

When, I say crash, I do mean crash. Since these HDs were "cermanic" and coated on one side. I took the either severly scracthed surface media disk or broken(smashed) and replaced it. Using a .001 feeler guage to gap the heads from touching the surface as the heads never moved, they were placed apart for the tracks to record. Hey, this is hi-tech stuff. Then run a test of hex output, etc. to get an exact match since
go or no go was the rule. You try to read 250 lines and see what's different. Dang!!! And of course I "boot strap" loaded it with paper tape data, finally got mylar tape. Ohhh!!!, stuff cuts your hand when new. That's it for now, I'm showing my age, where's my Rebel. -----Willy

I have the drive and a half dozen unused disks...interested? Let me know
E-mail me corfguy@comcast.net