Posted on 04/10/2019 7:16:07 AM PDT by vannrox
They use to hand them out as business cards are trade shows...
I use my old 3.5” floppies for target practice.
Bil Gates: Why would anyone need to access more than 640K of RAM?
I had a Roland electric piano from the 80s that came with a midi synthesizer with its own built-in floppy drive to record stuff on. The floppies were like 2.5”, so you couldn’t use them on anything else except other Roland machines.
The I recall the 3” disk format but there were other competing “mass” storage forms as well at the time including a mini-string tape transport, which used a small, short tape loop cartridge similar to 8 track (remember the trailing tapes going from the cartridge to the transport in your car when the tape got wrapped around the capstan?), a mini cassette system, all of which main claim was they were going to be less expensive to buy the external transport than the external floppy drive cost. All of them failed for the same reason, non-interchangeability with the main built-in 5 ¼” drive, not to mention poorly conceived designs and access speeds.
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Oldendays.wks
they make good coasters
I found an old oracle installation pack. It’s about 50 3.5” floppies!
Neither will my Harvard Graphics.
“First I heard of the 3” .”
That was kind of the point.
Lotus had a database program “Approach” that was excellent. It was relatively easy to use and design - I really liked it.
I might have heard of that.
Notes is a beyond awful product.
"What if" calculations through pages and pages of numbers made the Mac/PC industry and now we have IBM mainframes on our phones.
Recently saw a dated picture of an IBM storage unit with 5 megabytes capacity on a forklift being delivered. Cost unknown but for perspective one picture on your phone or one song would max it out.
;-)
I remember having some friends over one night a while back. We were discussing old outdated technology, both hardware and software and telling tales of tech support nightmares.
There was a girl there who was amazed at the way we were discussing that stuff. Almost as if it were a religious thing.
Then I suddenly remembered something I had tucked away in a corner of my closet. I asked her if she wanted to see my 8 inch Shugart.
I’ve NEVER been slapped so hard in my life....
“I had a Roland electric piano from the 80s that came with a midi synthesizer with its own built-in floppy drive to record stuff on. The floppies were like 2.5”, so you couldn’t use them on anything else except other Roland machines.”
That’s interesting, I have heard of Roland 3.5 inch floppy drives (and possibly disks) that looked identical, but were incompatible with everything else, but I didn’t know that Roland also used an entirely different diskette size. I’m guessing that, maybe, the cost of producing an entirely different floppy format was high, and in the end, it was just cheaper to take an existing format and modify it to not work with anything else? (Why Roland? Why?)
Ironically, while I’m reading this, I’m taking a break from soldering up a reproduction of a Roland midi interface card for an MPU-401 (the breakout boxes were often kept, but the interface cards got thrown out), while I listen to midi files of old DOS game music on my Sound Canvas. In the last couple years, I’ve been into building the kind of vintage DOS gaming rigs that were simply too expensive for normal people to own when they were new. I got into that as a hobby when I realized that modern computer operating systems make the hardware too abstract to teach my son how computers really work. The craziest part is that after I build a couple more of the midi interface cards, is that we are going to be building an accurate reproduction of an IBM PC 5150 motherboard from scratch. I never would have expected that I would literally be building my own computer (rather than just assembling it from off-the-shelf cards and components). Hopefully, my son will gain an advantage learning about computers in this way over people his age, even if he doesn’t go into a particularly tech related field.
Huh, never heard of these. Although I did have a internal ZIP drive in my 97 Thinkpad flex bay (second hard drive, second battery, floppy disk, and even third party stuff like that ZIP drive). I think if you had a CD drive it had to go in there too, but don’t remember for sure.
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