Do you still have a 5 1/4 floppy drive?

[Ghery]

All you youngsters sending zingers have no idea of how happy we were to move from cassette and punched paper tape to floppies. Software was efficient back then because it needed to be. Now its just hacks cobbling together code they find on github and calling it "engineering.? Sigh.

New stuff. See the next...

Cassettes? Those were leading edge!
I remember doing Fortran programming using decks of punch cards. Each program held together with elastic bands so the cards would stay in order for loading into the reader.

Me, too. And the T shirt I'm wearing today is a picture of an 80 column card with the caption underneath saying, "Old School". And I have to explain it to people!

 

[wsuffa]

New stuff. See the next...



Me, too. And the T shirt I'm wearing today is a picture of an 80 column card with the caption underneath saying, "Old School". And I have to explain it to people!

Geeky, but I think my dad outdid that.

When I was born my dad sent out the birth announcement. On 80 column cards with name/date/weight punched & printed on them. I found one recently going through a box of stuff from the house.

 

[Ghery]

Geeky, but I think my dad outdid that.

When I was born my dad sent out the birth announcement. On 80 column cards with name/date/weight punched & printed on them. I found one recently going through a box of stuff from the house.

My Junior year in college I used to get my Shell Oil bills on a punch card that wasn't interpreted across the top. One month I sent it back to them with the payment and the holes interpreted (we had an interpreter up in the computer center on campus). They never sent one on a punch card again. I don't know if they got the message that if I could interpret it, I could change it, or if it was dumb luck that I happened to choose the last month they used punch cards (which I suspect was the case).

 

[Sac Arrow]

Wow, this could turn in to the next Monkey Race! Maybe have a GA flight relay of the discs to either Matthew or Palmpilot?

 

[Matthew]

Just to bother one of the OCD guys I used to work with, I always kept a 5.25" floppy stuck to a filing cabinet with a magnet.

 

[Matthew]

Wow, this could turn in to the next Monkey Race! Maybe have a GA flight relay of the discs to either Matthew or Palmpilot?

I think it would be more fun to relay Matthew and Palmpilot to the discs.

 

[Sac Arrow]

I think it would be more fun to relay Matthew and Palmpilot to the discs.

You have a point there, because that could potentially turn in to a BBQ event.

 

[Dave Theisen]

Wow, this could turn in to the next Monkey Race! Maybe have a GA flight relay of the discs to either Matthew or Palmpilot?

Do you get five bucks at the end?

 

[Doug Reid]

Vic20 anyone ?

 

[flyingron]

Meh - I remember hauling around RK05 disks and others like them.

14" bad boys that held 2.5 MB.

And don't forget the Bernoulli boxes.

Yep, I though it was a ton of storage when I bought mine. It's not even 2.5MB to the user. DEC only formatted them to 4800 blocks (2.4M). UNIX ran them up to the full 4872.
Prior to that I had a DECTAPE with 500 blocks of storage on it (my first account had a disk quota of only 4K bytes).

I may still have one system with a 5 1/4 floppy in it but I haven't powered it up in years.

 

[wanttaja]

Vic20 anyone ?

I made what was then a considerable amount of money with the Vic20....paid for my first airplane, in fact.

http://www.wanttaja.com/ifr.html

Ron Wanttaja

 

[Spring Ford]

Your article mentioned the change in processing speed that has occurred over the years. The other day I came across an example of it.

A $30 (maybe less) Raspberry Pi can emulate in software a 6502 system running at a notional 290MHz. The original hardware was 3MHz. The emulation is of a slave processor and so almost no OS or hardware emulation was required. All display, disk and kbd stuff etc. is handled by the host computer.

https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/pitubedirect
https://github.com/hoglet67/PiTubeDirect/wiki

 

[flyingron]

I have sitting on my desk a 2/3 scale model of a PDP-11/70 front panel (complete with facsimile of all the switches and lights). It's driven by a Raspberry Pi hidden behind it, it simulates the 11/70 processor down to all the lights. I can boot up a dozen or so vintage operating systems including several versions of UNIX, RSX-11M, and the RSTS (Really Sh-tty Timesharing System) running Basic Plus.

 

[Crashnburn]

Cassettes? Those were leading edge!earuea
I remember doing Fortran programming using decks of punch cards. Each program held together with elastic bands so the cards would stay in order for loading into the reader.

That was how I wrote my Fortran 4 programs in the early 70's for my undergraduate engineering degree. I had boxes of card decks in my dresser for years after that class.

 

[Ghery]

That was how I wrote my Fortran 4 programs in the early 70's for my undergraduate engineering degree. I had boxes of card decks in my dresser for years after that class.

They made great note cards, too. I don't miss them at all.

 

[jsstevens]

PL/1 on 80 column cards, RPG II on 96 column cards. So many cards.

 

[kgruber]

This is one of the animations on the 5 1/4.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4osor82clmeqpb7/cluck.mp4?dl=0
From the demented mind of a 14-year-old, 32 years ago!!

My son.........Stefan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Gruber

 

[TonyG]

Fun fact on floppy drives and modern aviation. Hopefully I've got the details right.

The guy that invented the most commonly used drivers for the early 5 1/4" floppy drives back in the 70's was a guy named John Torode. This fellow went on to start several other companies, most of which were in the semiconductor world, and were bought out. He is apparently a pretty avid pilot and takes a keen interest in aviation.

So he's got a few aviation-related companies that he's started:

• Dynon (no kidding!)
• and Vashon Aircraft

By all accounts (ok, by one account, my wife was a sys admin at a chip-making company that bought out one of his companies, and he was still around transitioning things), he's a great guy. Super smart, down to earth, and kind.

Pretty cool.

--Tony

 

[Palmpilot]

This is one of the animations on the 5 1/4.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4osor82clmeqpb7/cluck.mp4?dl=0
From the demented mind of a 14-year-old, 32 years ago!!

My son.........Stefan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Gruber

Oddly enough, that's the animation that I viewed when I was checking for file corruption.

Having been born and raised in Seattle, I have been well acquainted with the tendency for zany creations there!

 

[NoHeat]

I’d bet there are still planes flying with floppy drives (Iomega Zip brand) that were intended for updating the Avidyne MFD.

 

[kayoh190]

I love how these threads always turn into "who's the biggest old fart on PoA"?

 

[asicer]

I made what was then a considerable amount of money with the Vic20....paid for my first airplane, in fact.

http://www.wanttaja.com/ifr.html

Ron Wanttaja

Hey, look what I found on the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/IFR_1983_Academy_Software_cr_1103

 

[flyingron]

I've had this sitting on my desk for decades. It's rare people know what it is:

 

[NoHeat]

I've had this sitting on my desk for decades. It's rare people know what it is:

Is this it?

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/462604192949994259/

 

[flyingron]

Is this it?

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/462604192949994259/

Yep. Part of my job at two different employers was getting rid of the card processing equipment. I snagged the above from one of the last keypunches at Rutgers University when I was in the administration there.