Don't copy that Floppy

Sh1tbag OToole

Back in 2002 or so I bought a 16Mb USB key, people hadn't a notion what it was. Twas state of the art back then and people thought they would never catch on because you could buy a CD burner relatively cheap and CD's could store a whole lot more, were less than €1 so you wouldn't mind giving them away

Yet today we have boardsies alive who never used floppies, tapes, vinyl or even CD's as in 2002 P2P filesharing already existed. I'm making this poll to see how fast we are moving towards a boring cloud-based clusterf*ck of a world where nobody uses any physical storage media.

smash

I remember being in awe when I got my first Zip drive.

Shint0

Mixtapes. Just push play and record. When the cassette ribbon would get spliced in the player and started to unravel you would have to try to ingeniously stick it back together, wind it all back up again and hope for the best but usually started spouting some kind of satanic verses so you knew it was doomed

kneemos

Vinyl is coming back apparently.

Permabear

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Your Face

I only listen to Wagner on wax cylinders.

smash

Permabear wrote: »

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Plus, you can buy a 2tb drive for around €100 once off. It would cost twice that a year to get the equivalent with Dropbox.

Estrellita

I'm of the mixed tape and floppy disks era. This world disgusts me now. I hope the next time I go to hospital I never come out of it :mad:

Capt'n Midnight

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

They already have the contents of your Dropbox account.

cowboyBuilder

I found a 3.5" floppy when I was back in Dublin ...I used it as a coaster . such memories !!

1.4 MB !!! , I rememeber getting Doom zipped on 3 of them

The_Valeyard

Remember using over a dozen floppy drives to copy over Duke Nukem 3D. Just to play an hilariously violent game with bad pixilated tits

Agricola

I remember ordering a USB stick from Komplett when I was in college in the early 00's. Don't know what the storage capacity was but it was ridiculously small anyway, and it cost me €50. The height of sophistication it was, considering I handed in some projects to lecturers on floppies when I was in first year. Jaysus, that's as alien to kids now as telexs and vinyl was to me. Off to get me pipe.

Estrellita

Here you motoring through your thirties (the wrong side), thinking you still have it.. then one of your children asks you "what is this?!" while they hold up a floppy disk they found. Little f*cker

stimpson

smash wrote: »

I remember being in awe when I got my first Zip drive.

Yeah, Zip drives were great.

"What's that clicking noise? It's probably nothing.

MY PORNOGRAPHY!!! My beloved pornography!!!!

Why Jesus, why?????"

JeffKenna

I used to tape songs and shows from the radio...I often play podcasts now and think god it's nearly too easy

LightsStillOn

kneemos wrote: »

Vinyl is coming back apparently.

Aye, sales at something like a 30 year high. CD sales keep falling and vinyl keeps going up, built to last those chunky black things!

pawrick

Was tempted to buy a minidisc player when they came out - thank god I didn't waste my money on one

_Brian

kneemos wrote: »

Vinyl is coming back apparently.

Vinyl coming back is a pointless marketing ploy and nothing else..

The music will be digitally recorded, mixed, transferred onto vinyl, replayed though a digital stereo unit..

Chances are along the way that the frequencies which were captured and replayed through the original analogue style equipment won't be captured or replayed and so the whole "richness and depth of sound" they had won't be there.. In general digital equipment is tuned to capture and reproduce audible frequencies only..

At least, thats how it was explained to me...

smash

There was nothing better than your mate getting a new C64 game and heading off in to town to pick up some blank cassettes so you could copy it.

Then heading in to reads to photocopy the instruction manual with all the codes you needed to play the game.

Tigger

My copy of appetite for destruction was copied off a reel to reel

hidinginthebush

Poxy floppy discs! They were just on the way out when I was mid way through college, so I'd still use them a bit. You'd have your lab reports etc saved on one only to pop it in to the computer and it would register as blank ಠ_ಠ

beauf

Vinyl record is hardly a storage format. A media format certainly.

Sh1tbag OToole

beauf wrote: »

Vinyl record is hardly a storage format. A media format certainly.

You can store plenty of bits using QPSK or other modulation on them if you wish

Hellrazer

smash wrote: »

There was nothing better than your mate getting a new C64 game and heading off in to town to pick up some blank cassettes so you could copy it.

Then heading in to reads to photocopy the instruction manual with all the codes you needed to play the game.

Worse still..sitting there twirling a philips screwdriver in the tape deck hole because it loaded for 30 minutes and then just stopped because the head was out of alignment!!!!

Is it scary that I used all of those media???

I feel old!!

johnnyskeleton

Tigger wrote: »

My copy of appetite for destruction was copied off a reel to reel

I liketa moove it moove it....wait a second

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Vojera

I read a list recently of things that younger generations won't understand and one of them is that the save icon is actually a floppy disk.

I remember having to hand in college assignments on floppies and occasionally having them be too large to fit if they had a lot of pictures.

monkeysnapper

pawrick wrote: »

Was tempted to buy a minidisc player when they came out - thank god I didn't waste my money on one

I must have bought yours because I got 2 of them , both didn't last **** .

A few years later a friend of mine offered me hers for free as she bought a funny looking white yolk with a wheel .

I kindly declined her offer

Sky King

I am looking forward to the day I can show some kid an old floppy disk and convince them I 3D printed the save icon.

Lia_lia

I remember my Dad bought a MiniDisc player/recorder and thought it was THE best thing ever. Still have lots of floppy discs in my Mother's house!

Sky King

Lia_lia wrote: »

I remember my Dad bought a MiniDisc player/recorder and thought it was THE best thing ever. Still have lots of floppy discs in my Mother's house!

Ah minidiscs - the versatility of a CD combined with the robustness of a tape cassette . Great invention!

Alf Veedersane

Used to get a handful of tapes from the junior /leaving cert tape tests every year so out came the tissue to stuff into the little tabs at the top and I had a world of storage again to ready for Sunday mornings and The Beatbox.

Good times.



The Beatbox >>>> The Dropbox

Daenarys

pawrick wrote: »

Was tempted to buy a minidisc player when they came out - thank god I didn't waste my money on one

I wish I'd had your wisdom. What a lump of sh!t€........

smash

Alf Veedersane wrote: »

Used to get a handful of tapes from the junior /leaving cert tape tests every year so out came the tissue to stuff into the little tabs at the top and I had a world of storage again to ready for Sunday mornings and The Beatbox.

Good times.

The Beatbox >>>> The Dropbox

Tissue? A bit of seoltape fixed that problem!

Alf Veedersane

smash wrote: »

Tissue? A bit of seoltape fixed that problem!

Posh baaaastard

Alun

Where's the option for 8" floppies? I've still got some up in the attic somewhere

SEPT 23 1989

Can you really appreciate the technology of today without serving your time using all those things listed on the poll?

smash

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

Can you really appreciate the technology of today without serving your time using all those things listed on the poll?

You and you can't. Storage methods today aren't much more reliable than they were 20 years ago.

endacl

kneemos wrote: »

Vinyl is coming back apparently.

Never went away for many of us.

CINCLANTFLT

Used all of them, but a mini disc was the one I "invested" in around 2000... I had mp3 files on my PC, but I wanted to have someway of bringing loads of music with me at once and portable mp3 players at the time had very little storage... By 2002/2003 we had iPods and that was the end of the mini disc player...

degsie

Anybody remember 8" floppies?

Lia_lia

Still use my "iPod video" from 2005. Works perfectly!

Ronald Wilson Reagan

Alun wrote: »

Where's the option for 8" floppies? I've still got some up in the attic somewhere

They are still used for missile control by the US military.

uck51js9zml2yt

kneemos wrote: »

Vinyl is coming back apparently.

I have some on my kitchen floor

Jimoslimos

Had a 40Mb Clik! drive (Iomega) for laptop PCMIA card slot. Capacity not as much as the 100/250 Zips for the PC but the Clik discs were much smaller and very very slim.

Permabear wrote: »

This post had been deleted.

Aside from the privacy issues, I cannot fathom how anyone can be confident that their cloud provider won't go out of business taking all your critical data with them. IT sector is littered with boom/bust and here today gone tomorrow companies.

Yeah you know those mad photos you uploaded to Bebo years ago...

The_Valeyard wrote: »

Remember using over a dozen floppy drives to copy over Duke Nukem 3D. Just to play an hilariously violent game with bad pixilated tits

Shake it baby!

afatbollix

My first MP3 player had 16mb. I upgraded it to 32mb. Cost a fortune to double that amount of space.

I was one of the first kids to do the leaving cert on a laptop. I had to save all the exams to a USB stick and bring it to the office to be printed They didn't check the USB stick and thankfully all my notes were on it.

Remembering back they made me put it on a DVD rom too. My laptop now doesnt even have a cd drive.

Capt'n Midnight

Never used 8 track or Minidisk.

5 1/4 disks only hold 160KB when you use them with a BBC micro.
But you can get 320KB if you cut a notch and turn them over to use the other side.

Also cutting a hole in a 720KB 3.5 inch to get 1.44MB on to it.

And formatting 1.44MB floppies to handle 1.68MB or even more , one TSR used to get up to 2MB.


And all the hens teeth that was 2.88MB and LS120 drives.


I really *HATE* tape, the sort of hate that only comes from having to use so many incompatible formats and programs.

"what do mean I can't restore the index ?" - wasn't enough space on the server so had to restore EVERYTHING over the network to a workstation and then stop when that ONE file arrived, it was still HOURS quicker than re-indexing the tape.

"what do you mean I can't reuse the tape ?" - Different models of drive using the same types of tape but refusing to erase a tape written by the other drive, would only write to degaussed tapes

"wait , I can't restore a backup if the NT now has a newer service pack ?" - oh yeah this one was a real beauty.

"OK I've plugged the tape drive into the parallel port" - I hope you've no plans for the rest of the day

Capt'n Midnight

Abort, Retry, Ignore?

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, still I sat there doing spreadsheets.
Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer,
I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store,
Only this and nothing more.

Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond'ring, fearing,
Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more.
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token.
"Save!" I said, "You cursed mother! Save my data from before!"
One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
Just, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

Was this some occult illusion, some maniacal intrusion?
These were choices undesired, ones I'd never faced before.
Carefully I weighed the choices as the disk made impish noises.
The cursor flashed, insistent, waiting, baiting me to type some more.
Clearly I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more,
>From "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

With fingers pale and trembling, slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
Praying for some guarantee, timidly, I pressed a key.
But on the screen there still persisted words appearing as before.
Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore,
Saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

I tried to catch the chips off guard, and pressed again, but twice as hard.
I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore.
Now in mighty desperation, trying random combinations,
Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before.
Cursor blinking, angrily winking, blinking nonsense as before.
Reading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted.
Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
And then I saw a dreadful sight: a lightning bolt cut through the night.
A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to my very core.
The lightning zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
Not even, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

To this day I do not know the place to which lost data go.
What demonic nether world us wrought where lost data will be stored,
Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, into black holes?
But sure as there's C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
You will be one day be left to wander, lost on some Plutonian shore,
Pleading, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

FanadMan

My dads old car in the 70s had an 8 track player - remember playing with that as a kid.

My first proper IT job I had to try and migrate a local businesses system from 8" disks to 3.5". Was a total nightmare cos all I had was old manuals and one cousin that worked in IT (my tech support ).

I personally had an old 8086 Phillips P3105 system. Taught myself DOS and how to use dBase on it. God.....it was terrible. All I wanted to do was play games but it only had CGA graphics and an amber monochrome monitor. Some games were playable but looked terrible. Also, my house was quite cold during the winter so it used to take many reboots for it to heat up enough to work

Had all the other storage but minidisk and ZIP drives had to be the worst. Minidisk was dead before it got going. Stopped using mine quickly and went back to tape.
Had so many ZIP disks die with the click of death. A real soul destroying sound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v04nBp5u_Zg

Robsweezie

i love a good floppy dick

Dyr

stimpson wrote: »

Yeah, Zip drives were great.

"What's that clicking noise? It's probably nothing.

MY PORNOGRAPHY!!! My beloved pornography!!!!

Why Jesus, why?????"

Storing porn? Ya sure it was'nt a Jaz drive?

Oh yeah, early 2000s tech joke.