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This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
by giu 16y ago
This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.
- redthrowaway 16y agoMe too. My first thought at seeing that question was, "I am too young to feel this old."
- saint-loup 16y agoMy thoughts exactly.
- DanI-S 16y agoThe singularity is coming!
- leppie 16y agoMe too :\
- rbanffy 16y agoI started in computing with an Apple II+ (not really - my II+ was only the first to have floppies). I always wondered why those poor CP/M (and MSX) users had to put up with such nonsense as drive letters ;-)
- trezor 16y agoI started out with an Amiga before moving to the PC. The Amiga (while still dealing with device-roots) at least had a more flexible system. fd0: was floppy 1. If you had an additional drive, that would be fd1: etc. The best part was that you could also access devices by file-system label, so if you needed to make sure you were accessing not only a floppy, but the device labelled "WorkbenchExtras" you would simply do WorkbenchExtras: Needless to say, this made multi-disk tasks & scripting rather pleasant, easy and cut out lots of boilerplate and checking. It was a nice system and I kinda miss it. Edit: df0: was floppy 1. dh0: was first harddrive, etc. Not that in changes much.
- rbanffy 16y agoI have to agree with you. Only now I got to play with an Amiga (a 500 became part of my collection) and it's really very sophisticated for the time it was released. Just to imagine most today's PCs deal with cruft that dates back to the CP/M days is... disgusting. Apple's ProDOS also had something like that - the volumes were named and you accessed files with /VOLUMENAME/FILE.DAT paths.
- seabee 16y agoDon't forget the ASSIGN utility which created new device roots from one (or more!) existing folders, or with deferrment i.e. when assigning Fonts: to df0:Fonts, the OS remembers the disk referred to, and will ask you for that specific disk if you remove it and subsequently access Fonts:. It made working with floppies a lot more pleasant. SUBST on Windows is similar, but with 1/10th of the power and just single drive letters. I miss the Amiga too, but it simply never kept up the pace.
- rbanffy 16y agoI think it was overcome by PCs when they started offering VGA graphics. The Amiga architecture was much more "intimate" with video generation than PCs and, thus, were not so easy upgrade as newer hardware became available.
- trezor 16y agoOh I do remember, and I was notorious for ASSIGNing things to my RAM: drive for performance-reasons once I got a 10MB memory upgrade to my Amiga 1200. I just thought it might be slightly out of scope for the discussion at large, so I decided not to include it ;)
- camiller 16y agoIIRC on the Apple the floppies were normally S6D1 and S6D2 (if you had two), unless you installed your floppy controller card in a slot other than Slot 6, which was the norm.
- rbanffy 16y agoThat would be DOS 3.x. You could specify a file under (Apple's) DOS with "long_filename,S6,D1". File names could have up to 33 chars and had type information (one byte) so as not to rely on naming conventions.
- camiller 16y agoLong file names were under Apple ProDOS Apple DOS was still 8.3 (I think).
- rbanffy 16y agoNo. Apple DOS filenames were limited to 30 chars. ProDOS was limited at 15 chars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS My 33 figure was wrong (either me or Wikipedia). Maybe the directory entry had 33 bytes (30 for the file name, 1 for type, and two for track and sector)
- Natsu 16y agoSame here and I'm not much older than you. Worse, my current computer has an A:\ drive. I don't know why I keep a 3.5" floppy drive around, exactly, because I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years, but I do have one. And that's nothing compared to the 8088 that's collecting dust. It has two floppy drives, a 10 MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive, a CGA card & monitor, a math coprocessor and as much RAM as it can hold. I don't know if it still works, though. It did work roughly a decade ago, which is the last time it was actually turned on. Pity we got rid of the Apple ][ GS back in the 90s. It might be a collector's item by now.
- ido 16y agoThat's pretty high end for an 8088! Is it a PC or PC-XT?
- rapind 16y agoI'm betting XT. It sounds identical to what my father had.
- jmaygarden 16y agoIt does sound like an XT. The first PC I used was an XT-286; the precursor to the AT. It had a massive 20 MB hard drive! I still recall that the expensive accounting software for which my father purchased the computer required an ISA card to run it. Now that's anti-piracy!
- NickPollard 16y agoOne of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.
- motters 16y agoThe movement from camera film to digital cameras was a largely unnoticed revolution which took place within the last decade.
- patrickyeon 16y agoIn industry, that may be so (I seem to recall one of the Star Wars prequels being the first feature movie done entirely with digital cameras). For end-user video cameras (handicams, or whatnot), we've been storing to magnetic tape for a good bit longer though.
- CrLf 16y agoBeing digital doesn't mean using solid state storage. Magnetic tape is probably still the most used medium for digital video cameras. For example, Betacam SX is still used.
- joezydeco 16y agoI was in the same boat. My son found an old disposable camera in a drawer, and I couldn't find a decent way to explain it to him with out the WTF? look on his face.
- Vivtek 16y agoHa! I took a Hungarian class with my daughter a couple of years ago; I think she was 8, which is why she needed me to sit in with her, given it was a college class at IU. (I should explain that her mother is Hungarian, and so this was more in the way of language practice and grammar instruction, not that my daughter is a super-genius. Although, of course, she is.) Anyway, one of the dialog exercises was to talk about hobbies, and one of the hobbies was record collections, with a picture. She had absolutely no idea what the picture was supposed to be, until I explained to her that they were like CDs. The other students in the class exploded with laughter.
- rmc 16y agoFriend of mine was trying to fix an ancient computer that had a 5¼" floppy drive. He thought it was a slot loading CD drive. The CD is stuck in there now.
- tmgrhm 16y agoI'm 18 and could instantly answer the question. Not sure how to feel about this.
- motters 16y agoIt's a good illustration of how fast technology moves.
- sidek 16y agoI'm not yet done high school , and it makes me feel old too.
- jacoblyles 16y agoAn accelerating rate of innovation will do that to you.