Quaint and Arcane Terms
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I remember using 8" Floppies (much room for innuendo there, feel free), and also the joy when 1.2 meg 5.25" floppies were available.
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
Did you ever fling an 8" as a weapon? Deadly...
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I read an earlier post about GOTO statements. How many people remember using GOSUB? Are you old enough to remember having to do an IPL? Did you ever POKE and PEEK? And how long has it been since you saw "Insert next disk into Drive A:" Some of the parvenu will never has come across these, whilst the greybeards will look back fondly...(or possibly with contempt).
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
Dave, you are a font of wisdom, but sometimes it is best to forget the past and just move on. Otherwise someone will always pull the Hollerith card. And no one wants to see 7HFORTRAN.
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
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I actually have no clue. You got me. Please elucidate.
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
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I read an earlier post about GOTO statements. How many people remember using GOSUB? Are you old enough to remember having to do an IPL? Did you ever POKE and PEEK? And how long has it been since you saw "Insert next disk into Drive A:" Some of the parvenu will never has come across these, whilst the greybeards will look back fondly...(or possibly with contempt).
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
Nothing can beat the thrill of successfully booting an old Digital Equipment PDP-8, a 12-bit computer with 4096 bytes of RAM. First, use the front panel switches to toggle in the binary code for the paper tape loader you wrote in assembler and translated to binary. Then run that loader to read a disk bootstrap loader that you programmed, hand assembled and manually punched to paper tape, from the paper tape reader. Finally run the disk bootstrap loader to get the vendor's operating system from disk. Now you can use the KSR-33 tele-type to interact with the OS. Programming continues to get easier, but you never forget the early days.
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I read an earlier post about GOTO statements. How many people remember using GOSUB? Are you old enough to remember having to do an IPL? Did you ever POKE and PEEK? And how long has it been since you saw "Insert next disk into Drive A:" Some of the parvenu will never has come across these, whilst the greybeards will look back fondly...(or possibly with contempt).
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
Remember PEEK and POKE on my Sharp PC1211
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No - coding in pure HEX with a light pen (lacking of keyboard) as I've done in 80th would evantually count - but that isn't the question here ...
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I actually have no clue. You got me. Please elucidate.
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
The missing capacity represents the inner tracks on the floppy which are unusable. The disk rotates at a constant angular velocity, so clearly the inner tracks travel past the heads at a lower linear speed compared with the outer, hence the bit density increases as you move from the outside tracks to the inside. It was found that, for the innermost tracks, this went beyond the capabilities of the medium and the recording heads. So the simple solution was to not use the innermost tracks.
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I read an earlier post about GOTO statements. How many people remember using GOSUB? Are you old enough to remember having to do an IPL? Did you ever POKE and PEEK? And how long has it been since you saw "Insert next disk into Drive A:" Some of the parvenu will never has come across these, whilst the greybeards will look back fondly...(or possibly with contempt).
------------------------------------ I will never again mention that I was the poster of the One Millionth Lounge Post, nor that it was complete drivel. Dalek Dave CCC Link[^] Trolls[^]
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Nothing can beat the thrill of successfully booting an old Digital Equipment PDP-8, a 12-bit computer with 4096 bytes of RAM. First, use the front panel switches to toggle in the binary code for the paper tape loader you wrote in assembler and translated to binary. Then run that loader to read a disk bootstrap loader that you programmed, hand assembled and manually punched to paper tape, from the paper tape reader. Finally run the disk bootstrap loader to get the vendor's operating system from disk. Now you can use the KSR-33 tele-type to interact with the OS. Programming continues to get easier, but you never forget the early days.
Ah, yes. The heady smell of warm machine oil from the teletype and the oil papertapes brings back memories. A friend actually gave me a small baggie of papertape punch dots he had saved from those days. Contemplated getting one of those heated aroma units to put them in...
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11
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BTDTGTTS! but with an Elliott 903. What about Friden Flexowriters and punch cards (KDF9), paper tape (mind those chads!) for playing moon lander on an ASR 33 Teletype (Elliott 903, later ICL1906A)), Handwritten coding sheets submitted for processing (ICL1903). Hex keypad (Nascom II) NEC Spinwriters (competitor to the IBM Golfball) on early Z80 machines for word processing (Exidy Sorcerer), Payroll systems in Algol60 (Sorcerer), 10Mb Winchester disks in something the size of a 2-drawer filing cabinet and costing £10000... 8in floppies holding 128Kbyte (256Kbyte if double sided!), 5 1/4 floppies (hard and soft sectored, single or double sided, Micropolis drives and format, Sirius/Victor floppies using variable speed drives to get more storage, Oh the list goes on forever! I feel honoured (and humbled, not to mention OLD) to have been involved right from the very beginning of the PC revolution, since before the IBM PC, and the mobile phone, or even the CD player. What was so great about it all, was that it was all genuinely new, and often really pushing the envelope of what was possible at the time. Whilst that still goes on unabated, the focus of that kind of progress is now in the areas that used to be covered by the large mainframes (like the CDC7600 at Manchester Uni), dramatic improvements in PC performance are now much harder to achieve, not least because each leap is swallowed up by the latest OS 'improvements' - try running windows 3.11 on modern hardware - goes so fast you often can't see the screen updates! (I'll get me coat...)
You can even run windows 3.11 blasting fast in your smartphone.