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69 Comments
- derrickkendall, on 03/05/2009, -0/+16a very good read! I didn't know Magnetic Tape had a storage capacity of up to a tb and was so versitle.
floppys were a bitch, I remember having to use them, a nightmare to hold multiple large (for the day) files. What a relief now days with gigs of thumbdrives, I rarely even use cds/dvds to transfer. Only for backup - kaosethema, on 03/05/2009, -0/+10i'm old enough to remember punch cards. my sister took me along to her college for a class which included crunching stats on a computer the size of a house.
dugg for inspiring that memory - willski, on 03/05/2009, -0/+9For what it's worth, this contains a lot of hardware that I pissed money away on from the 80s til today. I remember what a pain in the ass it was to pull data off of audio tapes on my old TI-99/4A
- shadowspawn, on 03/05/2009, -0/+8Booo. No love for the SyQuest drives? These were damn popular in the day in certain industries. I never see these. I see Zip drives, but never any of the SyQuest drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology and http://www.answers.com/topic/syquest-disk - diggopolous, on 03/05/2009, -0/+8The electric bill came in the mail as a punched card that you returned with your payment. Yeah, I'm that old too. OK I'm older than old - I remember punched PAPER tape! thanks for the memories and now get off my lawn.
- inactive, on 03/05/2009, -0/+7I remember 5 1/4 floppies and even using regular audio cassette tapes on my TI-99/4A. As expensive as floppy drives were, it was a convenient alternative to the floppy, just a portable cassette recorder and a .99 cent tape and it sounded like a dial-up modem as it recorded and read data to and from the tape.
May the old f*cks continue the nostalgia. - Smokeydabear, on 03/05/2009, -0/+7I remember my father freaking the ***** out if I didn't put a 5.25 floppy back into the cardboard sleeve, of if I left one in the computer. He thought it would ruin them.
- cosmicr, on 03/05/2009, -0/+71881 was in the 19th century.
- inactive, on 03/05/2009, -0/+5Heck yeah. Cassettes were a blast, and getting by in a high density floppy era with only a double density drive was rather fun :)
- Smokeydabear, on 03/05/2009, -0/+5Eat a dick, *****.
- npk9, on 03/05/2009, -0/+5Don't touch the center of 5 1/4 floppy!!! You could ruin the data with the static charge that you've been collecting!!!
- TheRealMisterd, on 03/05/2009, -0/+4I'm surprised they didn't mention the ZIP drive's infamous defect: The click of death.
Imagine a bad ZIP drive cartridge that could break a perfectly good ZIP drive reader!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death
"Iomega received thousands of complaints about the click of death, but denied all responsibility!" - mydigglogin, on 03/05/2009, -1/+5Day of the Tentacle!
- Floodle, on 03/05/2009, -0/+4"Approximate Years in Use: 1976 - 1982" for the 5.25" Floppy Disk - very innacurate, they were widely in use up until around 1989/90
- Goochman, on 03/05/2009, -0/+3I still hvae a bunch of 5 1/4s from my Atari days. Never had to use a punch card (thankfully!) but loading a game from cassette was painful - start, walk away for 20 mins and hope it worked - if not, rewind and try again...........
- willski, on 03/05/2009, -0/+3I remember loading Adventure for the TI-99/4A using the cassette tape. It usually took about three tries, but when it worked, it was some hardcore text-based adventure.
- lornefs, on 03/05/2009, -0/+3I remember carrying around my high school COBOL assignment as a stack of punch cards.
I also had a job for Bell Canada where I ran a machine to sort the punch cards that they used to store everyone's phone records.
Yeah, I'm old. - Homerr, on 03/05/2009, -0/+3Where is the 3.5" form factor hard drive?
- skunkit, on 03/05/2009, -0/+3Why doesn't my corsair flash voyager have one of those chain things for the cap...
- jbmcb, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2Not very well researched and missing a lot of widely used formats you don't hear about anymore:
Punch cards were usually called Hollerinth cards, even after IBM was formed (it was originally called the Hollerinth company) Magneto-optical drives were in use since the mid-80's, they were very expensive but available.
Missing, as other posters said, the Syquest drives, which were widely used by graphic designers, much more so than Zip drives, which were more popular with music guys for some reason. Also, the Iomega Bournoulli drives, floptical drives (came standard on SGI Indy's) DLTs and their predecessors, the DEC TK series tape drives, 2.5" floppies used in word processors, DDS/DAT which are nearly ubiquitous, and, of course, ROM/RAM cartridges. - inactive, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2Adventure was pretty fun. I remember starting off and you were on a deserted beach with a bunch of flotsam and jetsom . . . never got too far on it, though.
That TI was an awesome computer. The only computer around where you could buy it and plug in those software modules as easy as a game on the Atari 2600. Remember Munch-Man or Parsec? That computer was head and shoulders above the TRS-80, the Commodore, the Apple, but alas, all the third-party developers headed for the Apple because they just opened up the system and told developers, have fun with it. The Apple II won out because of the selection of third-party software and because of TI's stingy closed architecture, but the TI was a better computer. - SkippyDoorknob, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2In the 70's my mom worked as a Keypunch Operator. Programmers (COBOL specifically in this case) would write out the code (by hand!) on special paper tablets - sort of a grid but with column markers and things that were suited for COBOL. Then each line of code would be transferred to a punch card by the keypunch operator.
Not sure why the programmers didn't just type the code in directly themselves. Maybe it was a carry-over from the boss/secretary office structure?
That all eventually went away and they were left with tons of unused punch cards. We had a giant stack of them at home that we used for notes, grocery lists, or whatever. - willski, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2Parsec was the first game I ever played I think. I also remember loading a cartridge to write BASIC code, and use the rudimentary spreadsheets.
It was a helluva machine.
And, fwiw, Adventure started in a flat in London. You had to climb out on a window ledge and say "YO HO HO AND A BOTTLE OF RUM" to get to the empty beach, filled with flotsam and jetsom. - trer, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2I still prefer my 3.5" floppy versions of X-wing and Tie Fighter over the "Collector's CD-Rom" versions.
- TheShad0w, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2Tape backup was the de facto standard in business. In many cases it still is. That is until the next cost effective super dense long term external storage device comes along. I'm hoping it will be holographic storage.. mainly because it just sounds like a cool and effective use of 3 dimensional space for storage.
- antdude, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2I freaked out when I saw a 8.5" floppy at school!
- lordmike, on 03/05/2009, -0/+2I liked the warnings on the Beagle Brothers' Apple II disks:
http://stevenf.com/beagle/diskcare.html
Do not set on fire.. do not feed to an alligator... do not use as a toilet paper roll holder... good times! - ttamshadbolt, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1yep, needs to be portable too
- arleym, on 03/06/2009, -0/+16 pages!? Sigh.
- ttamshadbolt, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1zip drives were titts back in the day :)
- jbmcb, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1> I think IBM was originally called CTR (Computing, Tabulating, and Recording), not the Hollerith company, though Hollerith founded it.
Actually his first company was the Tabulating Machine Company, which then merged with a few others to become CTR. His first machines were designed for the census department when he worked for them, and were known as Hollerith machines, IIRC. I think their widespread use in the census department popularized the term Hollerith card.
> I do remember Hollerith cards; we undergraduates weren't allowed on the Teletypes or primitive terminals of the time.
I never actually used a punch card (I learned programming on my trusty VIC-20 :) but I had a math teacher in middle school who gave pop quizzes on the backs of old punch cards. He claimed to have half a garage full of them, since his master's degree was in computer science from the early 70's, he stocked up.
> Now... one thing I only saw pictures of: does anyone out there remember the _Powers_ card, the Univac punched cards with circular holes?
Haven't seen them, but check this out:
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/univac/ - uncoolcentral, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1IBM Punch Card art sucks!
http://www.suckypublicart.com/
Power to the pirates!
http://www.ayebm.com/ - Chalks777, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1read the article please.
- peterjmag, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1Dugg for Maniac Mansion.
- bjboth, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1Dang, I've not seen one of those since my 286 had one installed back in 1990...thanks for the links! I'd totally forgotten about SyQuest.
- fragomatik, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1Ah the ubiquitous Right-Hand-Corner-Cut IBM punchcards...what a ***** nightmare they were when trying to debug a bad batch-file. When I worked in large bank back in the early 70s, the average "job" consisted of a stack of cards as long as your arm. On the other hand, if you were really good you could do some "quick" coding using a "standard" JCL deck and a few blank cards and a hand-held card punch. Much more robust than punched-paper-tape (PPT), but PPT made dandy celebration streamers :)
- MeccaYdna, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1Punch cards were awesome since they used an octal number system. Bring back the octals!!
- raydar, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1I'm surprised they forgot to mention Core Memory. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_memory
"Magnetic core memory, or ferrite-core memory, is an early form of random access computer memory. It uses small magnetic ceramic rings, the cores, through which wires are threaded to store information via the polarity of the magnetic field they contain. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core.
Although computer memory long ago moved to silicon chips, memory is still occasionally called "core". This is most obvious in the naming of the core dump, which refers to the contents of memory recorded at the time of a program error."... - totalnet, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1I remember using the SyQuest EZ135 at the video post house that I used to work at. We loved the thing because it had 35MB more storage than the ZIP100. But our clients kept bring in data in ZIP100 format.
- 7aji, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1don't put it near TV
- totalnet, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1Hmm, they mention 2.5 portable hard drive. But never mention the hard drive itself. Since that is really the longest around storage technology we still use today. It's the most common mean of storage around. Very few new computers that doesn't come with it.
BTW, I remember someone had the bright idea using VHS VCR as a data storage device. - tinkafoo, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1So where are the 3590 tapes I still use for the mainframe at work?!
- dkybruce, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1Patience is a 1541 Commodore Drive
- waydee, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1Doesn't seem like so long ago I was loading Police Quest from a 5.25 floppy in DR-DOS :(
- DerekJ212, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1lol @ no SSD
- SanTe, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1Only to those who were rich enough to have one. The rest of us made do with our 1530 Datasette (pictured in the article). I read online a while back that only 5% of Commodore 64 owners ever owned a 1541 disk drive. Don't know how accurate that is, but most of us used those painfully slow cassette drives for many years because they were so cheap. I had to save up for a couple of years to buy a 1541.
- jejones, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1Actually, Herman Hollerith adapted Jacquard loom punched cards for the US census of, um, was it 1890 or 1900? I think IBM was originally called CTR (Computing, Tabulating, and Recording), not the Hollerith company, though Hollerith founded it.
I do remember Hollerith cards; we undergraduates weren't allowed on the Teletypes or primitive terminals of the time. I even had a program drum card with both A and B programs, thank you very much! (A was for source code, B for data). I saw the System/3 96-column cards a couple of times; a nearby junior high must have had one, because they occasionally blew out of the trash barrels.
Now... one thing I only saw pictures of: does anyone out there remember the _Powers_ card, the Univac punched cards with circular holes? - wright3279, on 03/05/2009, -0/+1I used punch cards on Univac computers in Vietnam. Had to first sort on a sorter, merge with the main deck on a collator, then feed into the computer. No keyboard, no monitor. Plus the humidity made the cards swell and therefore jam the mechanisms. Memories.
- deadsenator, on 03/06/2009, -0/+1Hey, check out the "Print" version. All on one page!
Oh, and I'll mention Adblock Plus, but I didn't really see very many ads after I turned it off to check, either. -
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