6 ms·

There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, every

by causi 4y ago

There is nothing in the modern hardware ecosystem quite as satisfying as the feeling and sound of a 3.5 inch floppy ka-chunking into a floppy drive. Sure, everything being silent magic these days is nice, but I never felt so in touch with a computer as I did as a child dragging files off a floppy drive and hearing the drive start to buzz and hum. It was like being able to touch the data itself.

jghn 4y ago
To this day I still once in a while hear something using the old Mac floppy drive reading noises to indicate "computer is doing something"
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future. I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.
- masfuerte 4y ago
  I've had several hard drives fail over the years. They all signalled their impending doom by making interesting noises so I never lost any data. When my SSD fails I think I'm going to miss the noises.
  - toast0 4y ago
    I've worked with lots of (enterprisy) hard drives and SSDs. The hard drive failure rate was easily 10x the rate of the SSDs, but the SSDs basically never gave symptoms of impending doom. They just disappeared from the data channel. We did have one group of drives that gave symptoms... 50% of the batch dropped dead within 2 weeks of entering service, a good number failed over the time it took to get the rest of them replaced. And one drive that had very poor throughput for several minutes did show SMART metrics that it was reallocating sectors, but we took it as a sign of death and replaced it; I think it might have worked fine once it calmed down, but we'll never know.
    - dusted 4y ago
      This, SSD failure modes are scary! Even enterprise SSDs will just go from "all ok" to "no device connected" at any random time. So far, most of the HDDs I've seen fail, gave _some_ indication prior to it, via smart or "strange" behaviour.
      - causi 4y ago
        Which is weird because the only microSD card I've ever had fail on me locked itself into write-protect mode, allowing me to get my data. I wonder why SSDs don't do the same.
        toast0 4y ago
        They're supposed to, and I've heard anecdotes that they sometimes do, but it seems like many of the failures I've experienced were firmware failures (in some cases, upgrading firmware on remaining drives seemed to result in lower failure rates anyway). Firmware failures have no rules; spinner drives sometimes have them too, and they might disappear from the bus as well, although usually those will "just" disappear after a reboot, not in the middle of a request.
      - kencausey 4y ago
        Anecdata is interesting. Here's mine, I've recently had a spate of a few Dell system 3-5 years old getting progressively more sluggish. Quick tests don't turn up issues. When I'm given the time required I use the hard drive manufacturer's testing utility and do thorough testing at which point damaged sectors start to turn up, not too many but enough to cause seek issues or something. I use chkdsk to attempt to recover data and mark the problematic sectors and at least for a while the system are a bit better. Of course, as soon as possible replacements are needed.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      One day I rebooted my desktop and my C drive SSD was just gone. No warnings of any kind, great performance until it died. I've always distrusted SSDs, and manufacturers continue to use lower quality controllers and flash, including sometimes changing a currently great drive to use cheaper components and sell it as the exact same device. Meanwhile games load from my spinning rust within a minute, and SSDs never seem to actually improve that that much, because the code responsible for parsing and loading RAM seems to matter more.
- bombolo 4y ago
  You think hard drives were loud? My dad had a dot matrix printer.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    Loud is a typist typing away ferociously on an IBM Model M.
    - kwhitefoot 4y ago
      You should have heard my teleprinter. Hooked up to my Nascom-2 with the UART driving a transistor that in turn drove a reed relay for the 170 V (I think) signal. It was only five bit code so I had to write a driver for it.
  - refurb 4y ago
    They still use them at a lot of checkin gates. You can tell boarding is about to start because the dot matrix starts printing the final passenger manifest.
  - kloch 4y ago
    Thanks, now I feel really old. Seriously though, until very recently you could hear dot matrix printers at most airline gates. They used them to print out manifests to hand to the crew right before the plane departs.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  I recently replaced an 80MB hard drive in a 1991 computer with a Compact Flash card. The computer is now silent, with no moving parts at all. It's much more enjoyable to use.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
I shoot on DVCAM tape a bit, and I have to say there are few things as mechanically satisfying as putting one of the full-size DVCAM tapes into the camera and hoisting it onto your shoulder.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Turning your V8 over and having it cough into life is very satisfying.
StapleHorse 4y ago
I got you. https://youtu.be/EV41cwEzqO4?t=42 https://youtu.be/EV41cwEzqO4?t=42 not my video though
rr888 4y ago
Similarly its terrifying when you hear the drive clunking away on a bad disk when you know there will be an error before the screen shows it.
- shagie 4y ago
  In a lab that I hung out in as a student... there was a wang semi compatible (it only had 512k of base ram rather than 640k) that linux was ported to (there was some fun with LILO if I recall correctly). This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made. The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.
dual_dingo 4y ago
At around 1990 as a high school student I was working in a wholesale supermarket and in the office they had a microcomputer (IIRC a MicroVAX) which had audible database transactions. Every time one of the cashiers scanned an item, you could hear the hard disk move into place to write out the data. I found that endless fascinating for the same reason.
- vincent-manis 4y ago
  One of the earliest computers I worked on (ca. 1968) was an IBM 1130. Its disk drive (5MB, I think) used a voice coil. I'd set up a Fortran compile, then walk to the other end of the (smallish) building to get a coffee. There was a particular clunk kind of sound as the compiler started to write out the object file. When I heard that, it was time to go back to the machine room.
jcadam 4y ago
The sound of a disk II digesting a 5.25 floppy is even better.
calimoro78 4y ago
The same cannot be said of computer fans unfortunately -- they were annoying then and are annoying now.
userbinator 4y ago
...and the feeling of relief at the fact that, unlike a USB drive, it'll never turn into something else like a keyboard and perhaps do something malicious.
virgulino 4y ago
Behold the Floppotron! https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY
pjot 4y ago
The speakers buzzing just before getting a SMS text is the closest I’ve gotten to predicting the future.
- open-paren 4y ago
  Speaking of that... Why did that go away? Less 3g? Moore speakers with better insulation?
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) isn't a thing anymore.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    It was a peculiarity of the 2G signal. While the frequency of the signal itself was high enough that it did not interfere with speakers, the channel was shared between phones using TDMA, in which the channel is divided in fixed-size slots, and a phone transmits in only one of these slots while remaining silent for the rest of them. It's the envelope of these transmissions (transmit for a while, stay silent for a while, repeat) which caused the interference with the speakers. According to Wikipedia (if I understood it correctly), the interval between the start of one transmission and the next one is 4.615 ms, or 9.230 ms for half-rate, which corresponds to 217 Hz or 108 Hz (if I did the calculations right), well within audible range. Newer cellular standards use CDMA or OFDMA instead of TDMA, so they do not have that same low-frequency on-off behavior.
    - dezgeg 4y ago
      Well, TDD, which means the base station and the phones take turns transmitting on a single frequency, is still possible in 4G and 5G. How often the switch happens is configurable by the operator and in 4G can range from 1ms for phones and 4ms for base station, to 3 ms for phones and 2 ms for base station. So, just the directional switching shouldn't be the full story (and even though I used to work on base station radio software goes beyond my understanding. Too near the digital processing side, I guess :)
wrycoder 4y ago
I liked the old floppies. They were great for backing up personal data. They were easy to write on and store in special trays. I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one. Anyone have a good way?
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  We had the same problem with floppies, yes you could write on them more easily. But we were still forced to have multiple of them stashed in draws, the same way we did with CD's. Solution is to buy a portable SSD drive and be done with it.
- eternityforest 4y ago
  I'm surprised they don't make NFC Floppies that look exactly like a real floppy, but store a few MB you access with NFC. Since everything is mobile first it would be a really nice way to hand someone a PDF, although credit card size is more practical. It's fast enough for a megabyte or two, and sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. I have not found any good way to keep track of flash either, aside from using fewer and larger ones so it's all in one place.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - causi 4y ago
    sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. Yeah, what the hell is with that? If I need to send files between phones I can use an app, but there's no telling when they'll stop developing it and it'll stop working. It's gotten to the point it's easer to copy a file onto my network drive and then recopy it to the destination device. When I'm away from home, though, I usually have to grab an actual USB cable.
    - cesarb 4y ago
      > > sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. > Yeah, what the hell is with that? Back in the early 2000s, we had IrDA which could easily transfer files from one device to another through OBEX. Not much later, we had the same OBEX but now on top of Bluetooth. We still have Bluetooth; it should be easy to send files between phones (and even computers) through OBEX. Last time I tried, however, it was a pain, failing more than half of the time. I gave up, and now use syncthing for that.
theamk 4y ago
The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers. But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would open the .doc assignment file in notepad as binary, delete some random data, then save it to floppy. It would be 2-5 days till the professor would get back to you saying "the floppy you gave me was corrupted, please resubmit your work ASAP" and that gave us enough time to finish it. Thank you for your sacrifice floppies.
  - shakow 4y ago
    I'm surprised this was your experience, because I lost many more USB thumbdrives (especially in the early 2000's) than I lost floppies.
    - patates 4y ago
      You mean lost, as in they got misplaced, right? I used to transfer files a lot with usb sticks and had one fail only once.
      - shakow 4y ago
        No, I mean lost as in “broke down”. I may be a statistical anomaly, but although modern USB sticks are pretty reliable, I experienced an awful track record w.r.t. the ones from the 2000's-2010's.
Gigachad 4y ago
The Apple Pay bell sound is the most satisfying modern sound. It also makes use of the vibration motor to make it feel like an actual bell has been struck in your phone
kkielhofner 4y ago
I've fallen deeper and deeper into the nostalgia of retro computing YouTube channels. They're amazing (and make YouTube tolerable). They have all kinds of interesting devices and adapters to make SD cards appear as SCSI HDs for old Macs (or whatever), I think even floppies and such going as far back as the Apple II. One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0]. Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein. [0] - https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-drives-song-back-to-updated-retrocomputers/ https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-...
Tor3 4y ago
The memories I have are more connected to the sound of the floppy drives on an Apple II, it was very special. It's probably connected to the fact that I was relatively young, and the feeling of using an active computer and software - but there was something special with the Apple II, I think I connected the stripes of colours with the sound somehow. But it was magic to listen to that sound while loading a floppy. Which is why the emulators don't really work for me..
xupybd 4y ago
I found similar enjoyment in mini-disks.
quickthrower2 4y ago
I found the zip drive way more satisfying! Minidisc wasn’t bad either. CDs are the least satisfying though. Fiddly, easily scratched, long time to spin up, can get wedged into tray, laptop CD drives are flimsy too.
- causi 4y ago
  There's something that reminds one a little of a knight stabbing a dragon with a sword when you're forced to yell "When I say stop I mean STOP, you son of a bitch!" and ram an extended paperclip into the manual eject hole.
charlesrocket 4y ago
MO is not really modern, but the sound is great.

by causi 4y ago

jghn 4y ago

To this day I still once in a while hear something using the old Mac floppy drive reading noises to indicate "computer is doing something"

kitsunesoba 4y ago

Similarly, hard drive seeking noise used to feel something like the heartbeat of the computer. When it went silent and all you heard was fans you knew something was up and a force reboot was likely in your near future. I don't really miss it all that much though, mainly because HD noise could range anywhere from barely audible clicks and whirrs all the way up to an angry animal of some sort, with most drives leaning closer to the latter than the former. The cheap drives bundled in bargain basement sorts of machines were some of the worst.

masfuerte 4y ago
I've had several hard drives fail over the years. They all signalled their impending doom by making interesting noises so I never lost any data. When my SSD fails I think I'm going to miss the noises.
- toast0 4y ago
  I've worked with lots of (enterprisy) hard drives and SSDs. The hard drive failure rate was easily 10x the rate of the SSDs, but the SSDs basically never gave symptoms of impending doom. They just disappeared from the data channel. We did have one group of drives that gave symptoms... 50% of the batch dropped dead within 2 weeks of entering service, a good number failed over the time it took to get the rest of them replaced. And one drive that had very poor throughput for several minutes did show SMART metrics that it was reallocating sectors, but we took it as a sign of death and replaced it; I think it might have worked fine once it calmed down, but we'll never know.
  - dusted 4y ago
    This, SSD failure modes are scary! Even enterprise SSDs will just go from "all ok" to "no device connected" at any random time. So far, most of the HDDs I've seen fail, gave _some_ indication prior to it, via smart or "strange" behaviour.
    - causi 4y ago
      Which is weird because the only microSD card I've ever had fail on me locked itself into write-protect mode, allowing me to get my data. I wonder why SSDs don't do the same.
      - toast0 4y ago
        They're supposed to, and I've heard anecdotes that they sometimes do, but it seems like many of the failures I've experienced were firmware failures (in some cases, upgrading firmware on remaining drives seemed to result in lower failure rates anyway). Firmware failures have no rules; spinner drives sometimes have them too, and they might disappear from the bus as well, although usually those will "just" disappear after a reboot, not in the middle of a request.
    - kencausey 4y ago
      Anecdata is interesting. Here's mine, I've recently had a spate of a few Dell system 3-5 years old getting progressively more sluggish. Quick tests don't turn up issues. When I'm given the time required I use the hard drive manufacturer's testing utility and do thorough testing at which point damaged sectors start to turn up, not too many but enough to cause seek issues or something. I use chkdsk to attempt to recover data and mark the problematic sectors and at least for a while the system are a bit better. Of course, as soon as possible replacements are needed.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    One day I rebooted my desktop and my C drive SSD was just gone. No warnings of any kind, great performance until it died. I've always distrusted SSDs, and manufacturers continue to use lower quality controllers and flash, including sometimes changing a currently great drive to use cheaper components and sell it as the exact same device. Meanwhile games load from my spinning rust within a minute, and SSDs never seem to actually improve that that much, because the code responsible for parsing and loading RAM seems to matter more.
bombolo 4y ago
You think hard drives were loud? My dad had a dot matrix printer.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Loud is a typist typing away ferociously on an IBM Model M.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    You should have heard my teleprinter. Hooked up to my Nascom-2 with the UART driving a transistor that in turn drove a reed relay for the 170 V (I think) signal. It was only five bit code so I had to write a driver for it.
- refurb 4y ago
  They still use them at a lot of checkin gates. You can tell boarding is about to start because the dot matrix starts printing the final passenger manifest.
- kloch 4y ago
  Thanks, now I feel really old. Seriously though, until very recently you could hear dot matrix printers at most airline gates. They used them to print out manifests to hand to the crew right before the plane departs.
Symbiote 4y ago
I recently replaced an 80MB hard drive in a 1991 computer with a Compact Flash card. The computer is now silent, with no moving parts at all. It's much more enjoyable to use.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

I shoot on DVCAM tape a bit, and I have to say there are few things as mechanically satisfying as putting one of the full-size DVCAM tapes into the camera and hoisting it onto your shoulder.

WalterBright 4y ago
Turning your V8 over and having it cough into life is very satisfying.

StapleHorse 4y ago

I got you. https://youtu.be/EV41cwEzqO4?t=42 https://youtu.be/EV41cwEzqO4?t=42 not my video though

rr888 4y ago

Similarly its terrifying when you hear the drive clunking away on a bad disk when you know there will be an error before the screen shows it.

shagie 4y ago
In a lab that I hung out in as a student... there was a wang semi compatible (it only had 512k of base ram rather than 640k) that linux was ported to (there was some fun with LILO if I recall correctly). This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made. The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.

dual_dingo 4y ago

At around 1990 as a high school student I was working in a wholesale supermarket and in the office they had a microcomputer (IIRC a MicroVAX) which had audible database transactions. Every time one of the cashiers scanned an item, you could hear the hard disk move into place to write out the data. I found that endless fascinating for the same reason.

vincent-manis 4y ago
One of the earliest computers I worked on (ca. 1968) was an IBM 1130. Its disk drive (5MB, I think) used a voice coil. I'd set up a Fortran compile, then walk to the other end of the (smallish) building to get a coffee. There was a particular clunk kind of sound as the compiler started to write out the object file. When I heard that, it was time to go back to the machine room.

jcadam 4y ago

The sound of a disk II digesting a 5.25 floppy is even better.

calimoro78 4y ago

The same cannot be said of computer fans unfortunately -- they were annoying then and are annoying now.

userbinator 4y ago

...and the feeling of relief at the fact that, unlike a USB drive, it'll never turn into something else like a keyboard and perhaps do something malicious.

virgulino 4y ago

Behold the Floppotron! https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY

pjot 4y ago

The speakers buzzing just before getting a SMS text is the closest I’ve gotten to predicting the future.

open-paren 4y ago
Speaking of that... Why did that go away? Less 3g? Moore speakers with better insulation?
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) isn't a thing anymore.
- cesarb 4y ago
  It was a peculiarity of the 2G signal. While the frequency of the signal itself was high enough that it did not interfere with speakers, the channel was shared between phones using TDMA, in which the channel is divided in fixed-size slots, and a phone transmits in only one of these slots while remaining silent for the rest of them. It's the envelope of these transmissions (transmit for a while, stay silent for a while, repeat) which caused the interference with the speakers. According to Wikipedia (if I understood it correctly), the interval between the start of one transmission and the next one is 4.615 ms, or 9.230 ms for half-rate, which corresponds to 217 Hz or 108 Hz (if I did the calculations right), well within audible range. Newer cellular standards use CDMA or OFDMA instead of TDMA, so they do not have that same low-frequency on-off behavior.
  - dezgeg 4y ago
    Well, TDD, which means the base station and the phones take turns transmitting on a single frequency, is still possible in 4G and 5G. How often the switch happens is configurable by the operator and in 4G can range from 1ms for phones and 4ms for base station, to 3 ms for phones and 2 ms for base station. So, just the directional switching shouldn't be the full story (and even though I used to work on base station radio software goes beyond my understanding. Too near the digital processing side, I guess :)

wrycoder 4y ago

I liked the old floppies. They were great for backing up personal data. They were easy to write on and store in special trays. I still haven’t discovered a convenient way to handle flash drives. They are to small to write on, and so I have a pile of them tossed in a box, and I have to search through them to find the right one. Anyone have a good way?

NoPicklez 4y ago
We had the same problem with floppies, yes you could write on them more easily. But we were still forced to have multiple of them stashed in draws, the same way we did with CD's. Solution is to buy a portable SSD drive and be done with it.
eternityforest 4y ago
I'm surprised they don't make NFC Floppies that look exactly like a real floppy, but store a few MB you access with NFC. Since everything is mobile first it would be a really nice way to hand someone a PDF, although credit card size is more practical. It's fast enough for a megabyte or two, and sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. I have not found any good way to keep track of flash either, aside from using fewer and larger ones so it's all in one place.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- causi 4y ago
  sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. Yeah, what the hell is with that? If I need to send files between phones I can use an app, but there's no telling when they'll stop developing it and it'll stop working. It's gotten to the point it's easer to copy a file onto my network drive and then recopy it to the destination device. When I'm away from home, though, I usually have to grab an actual USB cable.
  - cesarb 4y ago
    > > sending a file to someone 5 feet away is still a challenge. > Yeah, what the hell is with that? Back in the early 2000s, we had IrDA which could easily transfer files from one device to another through OBEX. Not much later, we had the same OBEX but now on top of Bluetooth. We still have Bluetooth; it should be easy to send files between phones (and even computers) through OBEX. Last time I tried, however, it was a pain, failing more than half of the time. I gave up, and now use syncthing for that.

theamk 4y ago

The ka-chunk was nice but was always immediate worry: "Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" The things got so much better when our school's machines got HDDs.. There was a good chance that there would be an old version of file floating around, or in the worst case you could retry read a few more times and maybe you'll get lucky and copy it to HDD.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>"Will it read today? Or am I going to lose another file or two?" Yeah, even in my poor country, people were quick to replace them with USB thumbdrives. Floppies were just too damn unreliable, especially when using school/public computers. But, for us students back then they provided a nice emergency escape. When we had to hand over our assignments on floppy, and we didn't complete them in time because lazy, we would open the .doc assignment file in notepad as binary, delete some random data, then save it to floppy. It would be 2-5 days till the professor would get back to you saying "the floppy you gave me was corrupted, please resubmit your work ASAP" and that gave us enough time to finish it. Thank you for your sacrifice floppies.
- shakow 4y ago
  I'm surprised this was your experience, because I lost many more USB thumbdrives (especially in the early 2000's) than I lost floppies.
  - patates 4y ago
    You mean lost, as in they got misplaced, right? I used to transfer files a lot with usb sticks and had one fail only once.
    - shakow 4y ago
      No, I mean lost as in “broke down”. I may be a statistical anomaly, but although modern USB sticks are pretty reliable, I experienced an awful track record w.r.t. the ones from the 2000's-2010's.

Gigachad 4y ago

The Apple Pay bell sound is the most satisfying modern sound. It also makes use of the vibration motor to make it feel like an actual bell has been struck in your phone

kkielhofner 4y ago

I've fallen deeper and deeper into the nostalgia of retro computing YouTube channels. They're amazing (and make YouTube tolerable). They have all kinds of interesting devices and adapters to make SD cards appear as SCSI HDs for old Macs (or whatever), I think even floppies and such going as far back as the Apple II. One of my favorite things is when they bolt on a HDD sound simulator that provides all of the conveniences of the SD card emulators while still providing something approximating that "HDD sound" we all remember[0]. Not quite the floppy "ca-chunk" and feel of (relatively) muscling the eject button but in the same vein. [0] - https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-drives-song-back-to-updated-retrocomputers/ https://hackaday.com/2022/09/26/tiny-dongle-brings-the-hard-...

Tor3 4y ago

The memories I have are more connected to the sound of the floppy drives on an Apple II, it was very special. It's probably connected to the fact that I was relatively young, and the feeling of using an active computer and software - but there was something special with the Apple II, I think I connected the stripes of colours with the sound somehow. But it was magic to listen to that sound while loading a floppy. Which is why the emulators don't really work for me..

xupybd 4y ago

I found similar enjoyment in mini-disks.

quickthrower2 4y ago

I found the zip drive way more satisfying! Minidisc wasn’t bad either. CDs are the least satisfying though. Fiddly, easily scratched, long time to spin up, can get wedged into tray, laptop CD drives are flimsy too.

causi 4y ago
There's something that reminds one a little of a knight stabbing a dragon with a sword when you're forced to yell "When I say stop I mean STOP, you son of a bitch!" and ram an extended paperclip into the manual eject hole.

charlesrocket 4y ago

MO is not really modern, but the sound is great.