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Anyone else old enough to remember the 8 inch floppies on TRS-80 Model II? Heh how far we've come, it's incredible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model

by ck2 4y ago

Anyone else old enough to remember the 8 inch floppies on TRS-80 Model II? Heh how far we've come, it's incredible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_II

tgv 4y ago
How desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read the multi-megabyte documentation.
jscipione 4y ago
No, I’m not old enough to remember 8” floppies but I watched Adrian’s Digital Basement’s repair of the TRS model-2 including restoring the 8” floppy drive, connecting it to 24V, using a adapter to hook it up to a PC to make a boot disk. [0] Unfortunately once Adrian got the Model-2 working and booted to TRS DOS he didn’t test any other software on the machine. My experience with Tandy machines was playing Burger Time off a cartridge as a kid, no 8” floppies. [0] https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs
virgulino 4y ago
I remember laughing out loud the first time I handled an 8-inch floppy. The very definition of a FLOPPY disk. It was a little disturbing. I was already in the era of the 5.25" double-sided floppy back then.
drewzero1 4y ago
I was cleaning around a stack of DEC tapes at work a few weeks ago and found an 8 inch floppy. Having grown up with the 5 1/4" disks it was a bit surreal to hold the bigger one... almost felt like I'd shrunk a little!

by ck2 4y ago

tgv 4y ago

How desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read the multi-megabyte documentation.

jscipione 4y ago

No, I’m not old enough to remember 8” floppies but I watched Adrian’s Digital Basement’s repair of the TRS model-2 including restoring the 8” floppy drive, connecting it to 24V, using a adapter to hook it up to a PC to make a boot disk. [0] Unfortunately once Adrian got the Model-2 working and booted to TRS DOS he didn’t test any other software on the machine. My experience with Tandy machines was playing Burger Time off a cartridge as a kid, no 8” floppies. [0] https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs https://youtu.be/TfEzjcG_0gs

virgulino 4y ago

I remember laughing out loud the first time I handled an 8-inch floppy. The very definition of a FLOPPY disk. It was a little disturbing. I was already in the era of the 5.25" double-sided floppy back then.

drewzero1 4y ago

I was cleaning around a stack of DEC tapes at work a few weeks ago and found an 8 inch floppy. Having grown up with the 5 1/4" disks it was a bit surreal to hold the bigger one... almost felt like I'd shrunk a little!