It's funny to talk about the 20 year old hackers who didn't ever have the experience of installing Word Perfect 5.x from 30-40 floppies, but let me tell you that those kids are going to feel just as old pretty soon. My daughter, who is about to turn one, is puzzled by why my Macbook Air doesn't do anything when she touches the screen. She doesn't recognize my dad's old Treo, which he gave her as a toy, as a phone, but will put a thin slab block up to her ear. We don't have cable at home, so she watches all her shows on Netflix and iTunes.
Novell Netware 2.15 came on 49 360k floppies. I remember generating individualized network clients based on the chipset of your network interface card with SHGEN-1 and SHGEN-2. To this day I have no idea why the last disk it asked for was SHGEN-2 and then it said, "Your shell is now on SHGEN-1."
I'm only in my mid 20s and I already feel totally left behind by the rise of mobile computing. Every experience I've had of the web on a mobile device has been incredibly frustrating. The idea of a phone or tablet as one's primary computing device makes me feel about 90 years old.
My uncle told me that two of its nephews play "phone" together by putting their whole hand flat against their ear instead of the usual thumb/pinky finger gesture...
lol I'm a 36 year old hacker who forgets quickly myself. After 4 iPhones, I used a Galaxy S3 for a few weeks. When I got the iPhone 5S, for several days I kept pushing the right lower side expecting a back action.
On my iPad mini, I keep trying to unlock it with my fingerprint.
I think in DefCon 18, Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon was talking about using Lua in Nmap. He said that the description mentioned that all of it and the doc could fit in a floppy disk.. And then he said "For the younger audience, a floppy disk is.." at which point the audience exploded in laughter.
I'm 26 now, but my oldest brother is 18 years older than me and almost all of us in the family are engineers so I had different technologies around the house. (Not old enough to see "drum memory", though).
Also, even if you only had one physical floppy drive, it would still respond to A: and B:, albeit as split personalities. What I mean is that you could stick your programs disk in there and type A:EDITOR.EXE to run some editing program, and then go to save your document and type B:MYDOC.TXT as the filename, and DOS would know that you wanted to write this file to a different floppy, so it would day, "Insert disk for drive B and press enter", prompting you to swap the floppies. Then, when the editor program needed to access some of its files again, it would try to access, say, A:LIBRARY.OVL, and DOS would know that meant it was time to prompt the user to swap disks again.
At that time (okay, a little later, but there was some overlap), I was using RISC OS. Its disk format allowed for each disk to have a name, which would be used in fully qualified filenames (e.g. ADFS::MyData.$.Docs.Resume). The OS could then ask for the disk by name (MyData).
When I got my first IBM PC in early 1982, IBM only offered single sided single density floppy drives with 160KB each.
But double sided drives were already available on the market. The only problem was that the PC BIOS and DOS didn't support the second side.
So I bought a PC with no floppy drives and picked up a couple of double sided drives at a local distributor for $300 each.
As I'd hoped, they worked fine as single sided drives too, so I was able to boot DOS. Then I got to work on supporting the other side.
It seemed a bit complicated to try to merge the two sides into a single FAT filesystem, so I wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident program) that mapped the other two sides onto additional drive letters.
That turned out to be surprisingly easy. So the four sides on my two floppy drives were A:, B:, C:, and D: drives.
Later I got an awesome Tallgrass 10MB hard drive for only $5000, and that became my E: drive.
Now I knew my storage problems were over: I would never run out of space with that thing!
I now officially christen this the "old guy thread of the day".
Back in my day, kid, we didn't have no stinking floppies for our PCs. All we had was cassette recorders, and we were happy to have 'em!
Reading this question took me down memory lane to doing a lot of PR#6. Couldn't remember if that command was for floppies or cassettes. Had to look it up. It was how we did I/O on the Apple II. As I remember, you changed the number (PR#3, PR#4, etc) based on the physical slot the peripheral was plugged into. This was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and real men wore skirts.
If I remember correctly, "PR#6" was basically just a command that executed the code at $c600. Each peripheral card had a 256-byte address space which was mapped into $cx00 where x was the slot number. Slot 6 was the standard slot for the disk controller -- it may even have been wired in, in later machines. So "PR#6" basically executed the firmware boot loader for the floppy drive.
See, my first computer was a Tandy 1000 and it just ran off of floppies and RAM. No hard drive. My mind was blown when we upgraded to a Windows 3.1 system that not only had a hard drive, but also a 3.5" floppy drive. WHOA, SMALLER DISKS.
A friend of my Father's was a mainframe guru, back in the day, and he told us about "cylinder" hard drives that would take several hours to power down because the torsional stress on them would get too high if slowed down too quickly. Also tape drives that were spinning so quickly they could be dangerous.
I remember the time someone thought they'd save money by buying cheap paper for the high speed IBM 6400 line printer. The print head moved so fast it just shredded the paper into a fine dust that caked in every internal part. It sucked cleaning that out.
We're not very far away from "what is the blue 'Save' icon meant to be?" are we?
Kind of amazing really. Girlfriend's nephews are 6 and 9, pretty tech savvy (there's a lot in the house), but they had no idea what the slots in the front of their grandfather's computer were (and why should they?!).
When I was clearing out a cupboard the other day, my Son found an old cassette tape, he then proceeded to ask me what it was! I'm pretty sure in 20 more years we may see the same for CD ROMS or DVDs.
This particular post makes me feel so old though and I'm only 30 in a couple of weeks.
I remember buying Doom years ago and when I got the box it jangled round from all the discs inside of it.
I also remember when the first 24x speed CD drives came out, this is when hard drives were too expensive to load a full game on to so CD speed was important so your game didn't buffer as much.
Kids these days with their solid state iPads and 3D games consoles.
I know how you feel. My ten year old daughter did not realize you could network computers together with a cable. To her, everything is networked wirelessly.
Man, this question makes me feel old as hell--I'm 40, btw. It reminds me of the time when my friend's daughter asked what the car window handle was for. I was like, it rolls the windows up and down. She thought it was a new thing. Wow.
That's pretty fun. I'm glad the highest voted reply on superuser wasn't snarky about the answer. This sort of reminds me of the "Who the hell is Paul McCartney?" thing on Twitter recently... which is an order of magnitude more irritating than a kid who never saw a floppy drive.
The drive letter B: is also used by BartPE [1] as the default for its RAM disk. In fact, I think every time but one I encountered a Windows-era PC that had a B: drive it was a RAM disk, not a floppy drive.
A: and B: were more relevant when PCs didn't have hard drives. Back then usually the OS would be on A and your current game/app would be on B.
I still remember the first game that was soooo big it required both A and B, meaning you to take the OS boot disk out (which you of course always forgot to put back in after you were done.)
Good thing I had a dad who soldered Philips' Apple ][ clone together when I was 2 so that I don't feel that old for knowing this ;)
My first mass storage was a PhiDeck, a tape cassette drive that stored data digitally and that had motors to load and unload the heads and seek. It had a file system, of sorts, that fit in about 6K of RAM. Effective data rate was about 9600 bits/second, and it usually took 20-30 seconds to launch a program.
Primitive and slow as it was, it was still a vast improvement over audio cassettes.
Later, I wrote a software UART and interfaced my Z-80 system to a single Atari 810 disk drive. 96K of storage and tons faster. I got a lot of work done on that system.
One of my favorites memories is my dad trying to copy a BBC Model B compact audio cassette without a cable ... speaker to microphone! He started it and crept out the room quietly closing the door behind him. It did not work.
In 2008 I got to play with an old oscilloscope/i486 hybrid beast with dual 5.25 inch floppy drives still in use at my physics lab. You could save the measurements to B while running the code off A. AFAIK it is still in use.
When I bought a new computer in 2002, I specifically got one which still had a floppy drive, because I wanted to be sure I could play all my DOS games via boot disk [1].
DOSBox [2] was still in its infancy then, and the DOS emulation in Windows was...less than one hundred percent compatible with all the hardware tricks various DOS games used to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the hardware. (In the DOS days, it was common practice for application programs, especially games, to directly deal with I/O ports, interrupts, DMA, etc.)
[1] A DOS boot disk is similar to a bootable Linux CD / DVD -- removable media containing an OS. In this case, you mainly use it to customize the loaded drivers on a per-game basis. Regardless of how much physical memory you have, in DOS only 640K is conveniently addressable [3], so it's very important to selectively load only the drivers a specific game needs.
I remember zipping the game on cca. 30 floppies at friend's place, then going home and trying to unzip. Of course 27th or so would be corrupted. Sometimes it took me 3-4 round trips to friend's place and back, to get the game transferred :)
BTW, does anyone remember having to enter no. of cylinders in BIOS to make the HDD work :)
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 300bps|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EldieTurner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gabemart|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nandhp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] millerm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einhverfr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdcravens|12 years ago|reply
On my iPad mini, I keep trying to unlock it with my fingerprint.
[+] [-] diminoten|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Jugurtha|12 years ago|reply
I think in DefCon 18, Gordon "Fyodor" Lyon was talking about using Lua in Nmap. He said that the description mentioned that all of it and the doc could fit in a floppy disk.. And then he said "For the younger audience, a floppy disk is.." at which point the audience exploded in laughter.
I'm 26 now, but my oldest brother is 18 years older than me and almost all of us in the family are engineers so I had different technologies around the house. (Not old enough to see "drum memory", though).
[+] [-] raldi|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danellis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stratoscope|12 years ago|reply
But double sided drives were already available on the market. The only problem was that the PC BIOS and DOS didn't support the second side.
So I bought a PC with no floppy drives and picked up a couple of double sided drives at a local distributor for $300 each.
As I'd hoped, they worked fine as single sided drives too, so I was able to boot DOS. Then I got to work on supporting the other side.
It seemed a bit complicated to try to merge the two sides into a single FAT filesystem, so I wrote a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident program) that mapped the other two sides onto additional drive letters.
That turned out to be surprisingly easy. So the four sides on my two floppy drives were A:, B:, C:, and D: drives.
Later I got an awesome Tallgrass 10MB hard drive for only $5000, and that became my E: drive.
Now I knew my storage problems were over: I would never run out of space with that thing!
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|12 years ago|reply
Back in my day, kid, we didn't have no stinking floppies for our PCs. All we had was cassette recorders, and we were happy to have 'em!
Reading this question took me down memory lane to doing a lot of PR#6. Couldn't remember if that command was for floppies or cassettes. Had to look it up. It was how we did I/O on the Apple II. As I remember, you changed the number (PR#3, PR#4, etc) based on the physical slot the peripheral was plugged into. This was back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and real men wore skirts.
[+] [-] CurtHagenlocher|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gutsy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanDav|12 years ago|reply
Sounds almost like heavy engineering!
[+] [-] adestefan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfarrell|12 years ago|reply
"The Story of Mel" is both inspiring and humbling. A "real programmer"
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html
[+] [-] btilly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamben|12 years ago|reply
Kind of amazing really. Girlfriend's nephews are 6 and 9, pretty tech savvy (there's a lot in the house), but they had no idea what the slots in the front of their grandfather's computer were (and why should they?!).
[+] [-] adamlj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] return0|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etfb|12 years ago|reply
Oh gods, I'm so old.
[+] [-] chrislomax|12 years ago|reply
This particular post makes me feel so old though and I'm only 30 in a couple of weeks.
I remember buying Doom years ago and when I got the box it jangled round from all the discs inside of it.
I also remember when the first 24x speed CD drives came out, this is when hard drives were too expensive to load a full game on to so CD speed was important so your game didn't buffer as much.
Kids these days with their solid state iPads and 3D games consoles.
Blurgh
[+] [-] RexRollman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glhaynes|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tshile|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snorkel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericcumbee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mililani|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceautery|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] networked|12 years ago|reply
[1] A bootable live Windows XP/Server 2003 environment. See http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/.
[+] [-] mtrimpe|12 years ago|reply
I still remember the first game that was soooo big it required both A and B, meaning you to take the OS boot disk out (which you of course always forgot to put back in after you were done.)
Good thing I had a dad who soldered Philips' Apple ][ clone together when I was 2 so that I don't feel that old for knowing this ;)
[+] [-] endgame|12 years ago|reply
Also its bootdrv.com is one of the smallest useful programs I've ever seen, clocking in at seven bytes.
[+] [-] kabdib|12 years ago|reply
Primitive and slow as it was, it was still a vast improvement over audio cassettes.
Later, I wrote a software UART and interfaced my Z-80 system to a single Atari 810 disk drive. 96K of storage and tons faster. I got a lot of work done on that system.
[+] [-] lttlrck|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iv_08|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csense|12 years ago|reply
DOSBox [2] was still in its infancy then, and the DOS emulation in Windows was...less than one hundred percent compatible with all the hardware tricks various DOS games used to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of the hardware. (In the DOS days, it was common practice for application programs, especially games, to directly deal with I/O ports, interrupts, DMA, etc.)
[1] A DOS boot disk is similar to a bootable Linux CD / DVD -- removable media containing an OS. In this case, you mainly use it to customize the loaded drivers on a per-game basis. Regardless of how much physical memory you have, in DOS only 640K is conveniently addressable [3], so it's very important to selectively load only the drivers a specific game needs.
[2] http://www.classicdosgames.com/interviews/peterveenstra.html
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory
[+] [-] lobo_tuerto|12 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE
[+] [-] DiabloD3|12 years ago|reply
Doctor Who on 8 floppies
[+] [-] jerryr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afandian|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkersilver|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colomon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anilmujagic|12 years ago|reply
BTW, does anyone remember having to enter no. of cylinders in BIOS to make the HDD work :)
[+] [-] thearn4|12 years ago|reply