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Here's where I put on my old-man hat. You youngsters reading this might be flabbergasted, but this is how things worked in the olden-days, before the Internet.
by bane 11y ago
Here's where I put on my old-man hat. You youngsters reading this might be flabbergasted, but this is how things worked in the olden-days, before the Internet.
An example, there use to be this guy names Fred Fish who would compile Amiga freeware onto floppies and trade them at Amiga user group meetings. I believe he lived in Idaho. Where he got the freeware was anybody's guess. But through a thin network of people trading software, the Fish disks (as they became known) spread far and wide. I didn't have an Amiga, but one of my friends did, and he had probably 30 Fish disks, which composed most of the library of software he used (there were about 1000 of these disks).
Generally, they weren't transmitted by BBS, nobody had internet. These were literally n-th generation copies of the original disks Fred Fish first put together on his computer and gave out at his local group and to his friends. People from around the world ended up with Fish disks, which are usually reverently numbered according to the release packages that Fred put together.
People used to organize "copy parties" where we'd all haul our huge computers, tower-CRT monitor, sometimes speakers, over to somebody's house and we'd spend all night copying floppies and sharing software and .mod files and whatever else. Showing off games and drinking and smoking and doing all other kinds of crazy things. Fish disks were common sights at these parties and everybody wanted to fill out their collection or get the latest one...which may have percolated thousands of miles and over oceans -- by hand to get to this party.
The movie "Hackers" is a terrible movie from a technical standpoint, but it really nails the feel of this culture. Competitive and cooperative, doing something a little bit wrong, mostly at night. Viruses in those days were designed to spread in this kind of environment of social sharing, embedding themselves in weird spots on floppy disks and taking up just hundreds of bytes.
Modems started to kill lots of it off, and widespread Internet killed off the rest. But it was an amazing time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish
- sehugg 11y agoOur middle school had "Computer Club" one morning a week, so you'd try to get there early and grab the 128k Apple //e so you could copy a disk with only two swaps.
- gregrata 11y agoWow. Fred Fish and his Fish Disks! Haven't thought of that for years. Used to love them - a huge amount of my Amiga software in the mid to late 80's came from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fish The disks: ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/amiga/fish/ ... and now really sad to hear that he's not with us any more.
- agumonkey 11y agoI'd love this to be brought back. Often I feel we're too reliant on connectivity, something that felt amazing (booting from PXE, package repository, github etc) but now I feel it would be a good thing to be able to git the web and have a complete (obviously not complete, but a core set) local copy. ps: wikipedia dumps is less than 64GiB, less than 100 with user/talk pages. A 256GB flash memory device (SD or key) is less than 100$.
- keithpeter 11y agoDebian distribute most of their 'main' repository as ISO images - the first DVD will allow you to install a desktop and then you can 'register' DVD2 and DVD3 and install a huge range of software for your computer without an internet connection. The snag is updates: you get a delta DVD for each point release. When I tried the system out, I ended up needing about 200Mb off the update DVD! To my knowledge, Debian is the only major distro that has this alternative available.
- agumonkey 11y agoDebian does so much it's scary. I guess that's a remnant practice from the past when DVD distribution was the main way to get the debian system. I remember usbkey as a medium too (maybe less expensive for one shot needs), but I'm not sure it was a linux distro or something else.
- keithpeter 11y agoI sincerely hope that the Debian project continues to distribute the 3 DVD set for a few releases more! PS: I can remember swapping punched paper tapes with ascii art on them to run on the teletypes...
- pmelendez 11y ago> how things worked in the olden-days, before the Internet. That's exactly the problem in Cuba. It feels like a time capsule from the 80's. It is not only about PCs and networking. We are talking about people that have to craft their own spare parts for cars from 50s-60s. They have a submarine cable from Venezuela that gives them networking but giving the sad state of Internet connection in Venezuela I guess that is not of much help anyway.
- huxley 11y agoI remember typing in programs from magazines and printouts we'd get from friends. My "computing" teacher in Junior High School used to get floppies and tapes sent to him from some friends in American universities, so we got to play around with the source code for some games on the Commodore PET. I still remember cutting notches in our 5.25" floppies to make them double sided. We had acoustic couplers but living in rural Nova Scotia we couldn't afford the long-distance charges and none of us were ever good enough to be phreakers. Good times.
- basicplus2 11y agoI remember the only problem with cutting the notch to make the disc double sided was it turned the other way when upside down and the dust collected by the fabric hair brush unloaded all the dust back onto the disc :)
- beachstartup 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Sneakernet
- jahnu 11y agoBack in 1992 or 1993 I got a CD-ROM drive for my Amiga and a CD with Fish disks 1-600 I think. Even though it was shortly before the Web started to take off you can't imagine how amazing it was at the time to explore all those disks.
- bliti 11y agoI would certainly enjoy if this still happened locally. Not saying I prefer it over the web, but sharing things face-to-face is way more fun than putting it on Github (of all places) and letting people download a zip. One thing missing from the good ole' days is the interaction between programmers. Now days, you have to join some startup-club to get to talk code with others. You end up being pitched by 30 different founders to build their idea. No thank you. Same as LAN parties. I guess end of rant...
- pjmlp 11y agoI remember those days. Oh boy now I feel old! :)
- jotm 11y agoFloppies, huh? We did that with CDs - whoever had a CD writer was a god among the users :-). I remember a guy from a radio station coming with a hard drive full of songs (though most were probably illegally ripped), that was the biggest collection anyone has ever seen, and it spread around like fire :-)
- antihero 11y agoI also remember getting baskets of floppy disks with cracked games from car boot sales with my dad in the late 90s.
- samstave 11y agoYep, fun times -- However when PCLink and BBSs came about I was grounded for a month because I racked up a $926.00 phone bill calling long distance from Tahoe to San Jose to play The Pit and Trade Wars. eventually convinced my high school to setup a CAD lab and have a school BBS. We had a backdoor site on the BBS that we hosted early warez from ~1991 that was local to Tahoe.