Phantom Of The Floperra

gelandangan · Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 4:26 pm Post subject: Phantom Of The Floperra

Phantom Of The Floppera

Got nothing to do with gun, but, for some computer savvy oldies, this is amazing!!

Ominivision1 · Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 4:52 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

hahaha. that was neat.

English Mike · Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 8:39 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

I used to work with those 5¼ inch floppies - a 1mb hard drive was "state of the art" technology back then.

Vince · Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 11:11 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

I still have some of the 5.25" floppies lying around here somewhere gathering dust. Very Happy

Cheers, Vince

gelandangan · Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 1:10 am Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

My 5 1/4 is in the state of the FART just before I replace them with 3 1/2 inches.

Remember the 8 inch stuff?

Vince · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 6:24 am Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

Yup...sure do, but I never actually used them.

Cheers, Vince

Dimitri · Super Member Joined: Nov 25, 2005 Posts: 5946

Funny story, being back in college I am apparently a old fart according to the students, seeing as the first time I went to college, all of our projects and tests for CAD/CAM were submitted on floppies, now they are all submitted on CD-R's and USB keys. I shouldn't have told them that. Embarassed

Heck my first USB key was "state of the art" in highschool, the first 128 MEGAbyte drives to come out, at a price of 150$. Operating systems didn't even have built in support for generic USB based flash drives, I needed to carry around a floppy to install the drivers for it before being able to use it. Laughing

Now I carry around a aluminum encased 8GB USB key with software running right from the drive and on the fly full disk 256-bit AES encryption, how times change. ROFL

Dimitri

Ominivision1 · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 9:11 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

Dimitri:
I too spent 4 years in college and now days with my 3rd oldest graduating from college, it's no longer any type of hardware base storage.........it's in the cloud now.

Also, Linux had support for usb, floppy, cd's and dvd, with kernel 2.2.0 back in 1999. I should know because I contributed part of the code to the kernel back then. If you wanted to mount an unknown device. Read...

/bin/less /var/log/dmesg will show what the kernel detected/

/bin/mount will show what is mounted

/bin/cat /etc/fstab will show what it may know how to use

/sbin/fdisk -l

or

/bin/cat /proc/partitions

(or more specifically

/bin/egrep '[sh]d[a-z]+$' /proc/partitions

or for the newbies........"fdisk -l" to list all disks and their partitions.

Pumpkinslinger · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 9:16 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

The first data storage device I ever used was a punch card...

gelandangan · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 9:22 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

Pumpkinslinger wrote:

The first data storage device I ever used was a punch card...

Back then i was the office boy who file them boxes of punch cards and tapes away.

Yep, this forum is FULL of old farts.

Ominivision1 · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 9:30 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

gelandangan wrote:

Yep, this forum is FULL of old farts.

Dimitri · Super Member Joined: Nov 25, 2005 Posts: 5946

Ominivision1 wrote:

Also, Linux had support for usb, floppy, cd's and dvd, with kernel 2.2.0 back in 1999.

I was 15 when I started to use Linux, came in a neat box with the 2.4.20 kernel packaged by SuSE 8.2 "Professional". The Ethernet drivers wouldn't work, on my new nForce2 motherboard (remember the old Abit NF7-S that had all of those capacitor problems?), so I went to a internet cafe and downloaded the drivers to a CDR. But other then that I never had a problem with Linux.

I used Linux almost exclusively for 5 years after that, till I started to use CAD/CAM and had to go to Windows. Now I use a live CD for my Linux needs. Also allows me to keep a portable OS for use on other people's computer's that I use, so I don't have to deal with their annoying settings.

When taking my USB key to my highschool or anywhere else I had fond memories of carrying a floppy disk to install the drivers, as Windows and Mac at the time could not support it directly.

Dimitri

PaulS · Posted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 10:43 pm Post subject: Re: Phantom Of The Floperra

I have a computer with two 160K (not 180 - 160K) floppy drives and the discs that contain the 4 OSs that I can use with it. This was back when hard drives were used for main frames and not personal computers - the first PC hard drive I had was so big it had to be two drives - one at 33meg and the other at 27 meg. It was pointless to have any more than 1 meg of RAM because there was no OS that could access it. I got my first computer in 1978. You had to program to do anything other than play games with it - so I learned to program.
One of the first programs was a reloading database - go figure...