LGR - Floppy Disks
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- What makes floppy disks special? Why not just emulate the games or use something more reliable? A nostalgic, rambling retrospective.
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Music used is "Glam Bucket" and "Bark":
• Underworld Glam Bucket
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Floppy disks AND drives made towards the end of the floppy era were terrible quality because they were made with one thing in mind: being cheap. The last package of brand-new Sony disks I bought around 2006 literally had about 3 disks in the pack of 10 that actually worked. The rest were completely unusable.
oh hi i 8-bit guy! nice to see you here!
The 8-Bit Guy hi the 8-Bit Guy
8-bit guy, you're drunk- go home xD
First off, why were floppies still being made if they were that unreliable?
Second off, if a single CD or DVD costs less than a dollar, why are they stupidly reliable compared to a floppy?
Had gotten about 100 to 200 floppies for free with a mail-in rebate around 2001/2002. The one I used worked fine. I did take a magnet from a hard drive to a fe of them to see if they would still work, the did not.
I've been able to get numerous 5.25 floppies to read again, mostly Commodore, by carefully taking the disk out of its case and gently wiping one side with a little alcohol and a soft cloth, letting it dry, and then doing the other side. Its not perfect, but it's worked many times and saved many disks.
I have not however been able to save a single 3.5 disk that starts to fail to read. It surprises me too because it was the newer technology and you would have thought the enclosed case would better preserve the media...
My experience is very much the same. Far more 3.5" disks that are too far gone to be recoverable.
I suppose the higher density of 3.5" makes it harder to salvage.
As other commenters have said -- it's the data density. The more data you pack into a smaller physical area, the more sensitive and fragile the medium becomes. I bet you'll have a similar experience with 1.2MB 5.25" floppies as with the 1.44MB 3.5"... In fact, once upon a time you could format a 3.5" to 1.7MB and in the process, you risked data corruption on every write, which is why very few people ever did it.
I have ran into this issue myself when using old Apple IIGSs and the like, from my own experience, as long as the 5.25" disk wasn't physically damaged or put onto a magnet, it usually works pretty well, but 3.5" floppies, especially the newer "high density" 1.44mb ones seem to just go down hill very fast once things start to go wrong, it happened to my copy of Microsoft Word 6.1 I had on 8 3.5" floppies, one disk failed, making the program unable to install.
*****
It's true that they are reliable, but even then, they won't last for decades. Disc rot is a real thing because the metal it's made out of eventually oxidizes down the years. Depending on how well you treat your CDs, when they'll finally fall apart varies.
It's the sad, but inevitable truth we all face: all storage mediums eventually fail and lose everything.
Even though I'm only 16 I know exactly how you feel with floppies. They just have more to them than a CD or flash drive. All of them have lived a long life, of being held, inserted into drives, loaded, saved on. Maybe a young kid excitedly stuffing a disk into his C64 to play a hot new game, or a student diligently typing his college thesis on an Apple II. And you can feel all those memories just from holding it.
I get boxes of floppies with my vintage computer hauls all the time. I've found many things still intact while looking through them, like graphs, RSVPs, drawings, poems, even novels. It gives me a fuzzy feeling, perhaps even nostalgia, knowing that someone lovingly typed all those things on the computer in front of me, all those years ago.
ElementaIChaos (MOVED CHANNEL) YES COPY
Man, I have this same sentiment for physical media in general. It's quickly going extinct at the hands of the relentless tide of convenience that brought it into existance in the first place.
There's a really personal experience that happens when you handle something you associate with joy, usefulness, or even just familiarity. I like to soak it up whenever I can, while I still can.
I'm thinking about even going through the hell-on-earth to get a physical game for the Vita for this reason alone!
trashEverything same here. Physical Vita games are getting really hard to find. The only places that have them around me are gamestops and they just recently put them out on shelves. They kept them in shoe boxes behind the counter because they didn't have room for them.
This takes me back to the C64 days when we had various daughterboards and custom software that would allow us to copy the disks that used the inherent drive problems part of their copy protection. It was rather ingenious. A game publisher would know the error codes thrown by reading from an area that was out of the normal operating range, then convert that error into a direction to read data from another part of the disk. It made copying the disks outright (without assistance) nearly impossible because the copying process would toss out the "bad commands" assuming they were being misread by the drive. Now, THAT would be a fun video - old drive-based copy protection schemes and the hardware and software solutions that got around them. Once again, thanks for the walk down memory lane!
i love being old enough to have held both versions of floppys in my hands....old school "floppy" floppy discs ftw
The most satisfying part of Floppy disks to me is how you pop them into and out of the slot. It is much more quick and satisfying than the slightly janky motion of casettes, the automated slide of CDs, or the little plug of a USB drive. (I'm 22, so Casettes, Floppy disks, CDs, and USB drives are the only mediums I have actually used in my life)
I am 34 now and grown up with floppies. The most ones i used were the 3,5" versions.
I am an retro-guy and love old films, series, music and so on.
But i am really really glad that we dont have them anymore.
The datalost, readfailures and loudness of the drives makes me crazy...
My earliest gaming memories include putting 5 1/4 inch floppies into my dad's Comnmodore 64, then 128, then Amigs. I didn't get my first console until like 1998 or so, so my childhood WAS floppies holding my favorite games like Forbidden Forest, Shadow of the Beast 3, Leander or even Agony. When I occasionally emulate amiga software (have no room for the hardware) I always turn on drive sound emulation, since the buzzing of the amiga df0 and df1 were such a big part of my life growing up.
I remember using the 3 inch floppy disk up till probably the early 2000s i cant remember exactly when i stopped. i used to use them to bring papers i worked on at home to class or in high school computer code i was working on because it was a lot easier for thing that didn't take up more than the 4 MB such as some basic code segments or a few term papers or homework on a floppy than burn it to a CD that in most cases could only be written to once. then the year i started college in 2004 i got my first USB jump drive a whopping 128 MB of storage.
This video is something that people can watch any number of years from now and connect with the emotions through your earnest narration. I'd title it, "Requiem for the Floppy." Thanks Clint, great video.
so many good memories, like spending all the afternoon on a friends house copying dozens of disks and compacting on ARJ or PKUNZIP on dos (a single command to zip on 1.44 mb files was like 2 lines because the ammount of parameters to do that) to store just one single game, and then many times a single diskette malfunction when i got home and then all my weekend was ruined LOL. i had tons of those plastic cases to store my disks as well. also i remember buying a 10 disks pack on computer shops, good times
Floppy disks are fun and nostalgic for me. The first computer that my family got back in the late 80s had both 5 1/4 and a 3 1/2 drives. My mind automatically equates those disks with fun, enjoyment, and entertainment.
As an younger person, I may not have fond memories of myself using floppy disks, but every time I see one, my father in his office working while I played around comes to mind. It always feels strange how even tough I never actually used them, other than for fun, they make me feel good.
Holy crap dude, been watching your channel for awhile now but this video is freakin' RAD...Long Live the Floppy!!
What a nostalgic summary! I never quite understood what exactly what they were and why it was being used growing up in a time when I at least knew there were other better alternatives like CDs so they would be of the more mysterious and cooler looking things that would be lying around my house. They became toys more than tools when I was a kid and would always say Don't Copy That Floppy!... Good times.
well said well said... i also enjoy the feel of a floppy in my hands. especially if it is one that i'm told "works" that is a very rare and special treat
I remember making some basic games on a game building software and putting them on floppy disks purely for the old school cartridge nostalgia. Good times.
That's true what's said here. For me, floppy disks reminds my childhood when I had Amiga 600 (and some of my friends had Amiga 500). There was floppy disks in MF2DD. The sounds that floppy drive made while loading my favourite games would not be forgotten!
|Guru meditation| A+A+Ctrl
The first camera pan reminded of these ghost shows. Idk why lol. And also the way he said "what is it about floppy disks?" Made it sound like he was going to say they are haunted. Lol
I got tears in my eyes now. You sir, are an artist!
And to think that back 20 years ago my dad got our first PC in our household and it had two floppy drives. one 5 inch drive and one 3.5 inch drive in one half height drive bay. Sheesh, you could cram thousands of floppies worth of information onto an average sized SD card these days. Here's why, One High Density 3.5 inch floppy can hold about 1.44 megabyte of information (1.44 MB!!, not 1.44 GB!!). An SD card today can hold anywhere in the neighbourhood of 16 to 64 GB, even 128 GB of information! thats like a tower of floppy disks several storeys high. My iMac has a 1TB hard disk and that's unimaginably bigger still! Computer storage has changed beyond all recognition and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Ever heard of Moore's Law? They seem to double nearly every year and a half. There's a certain grain of truth to that. I'm sure you can wrap your head around that but I just thought I'd share with you my opinion on computer storage in today's world.
Great video! I still use my C64 regularly, and while I have a modern device (the 1541 Ultimate that loads from MicroSD or USB devices) I still like to copy things back to real floppies as well.
Clint, as I was enjoying a game of Quake on my old Windows 98 laptop this evening, it made me think of a possible topic for a future episode: Do you have any tips for preserving all those computers and software on your shelves to ensure that they'll be working for years to come? Do you have a system for backing up your software? Do you have to regularly clean/maintain the machines? Ever had a machine just quit on you, due to 'old age'? Or do you just go about it like real life where all you can do is enjoy it while you can?
I remember when I was really young my Dad had all these games on disks for his Amiga. I couldn't write or read back then, I just memorized the games by their cover. One day I thought about just scribbling something on the disk in hopes of creating my own game. Needles to say I went to bed that night as some sad child. XD
love the vids man, keep it up...i look forward to watching these every week
so freaking good. glad I got to use floppies for a short time in the early 00s
I never really played games on those things, but I always remember them as "important configuration files" since any time back in the late 90's and very early 2000's my grandfather would pull out the giant case full of a rainbow of floppydisks to fix whatever nonsense broke the computer that time.
We definitively need SD card slots with that floppy disk drive feel of inserting and ejecting it, and yes an eject button as well.
I have some fond memories of wrestling with the Apple II, trying to get my disk back.
"No, you can't eat that! My book report is on there and the school is too cheap to buy new disks!"
Also remember my dad making a backup of Win 95 on 1.44 MB floppies. He had between 80 and 100 or more disks after it was done. Good times!
I still have a few hundred floppies (C64) and 10 years ago or so, I made the effort to go through most of them and copy all the data to a harddrive.. Many of these ~30 year old disks seem to still work today.. :)
Came from the floppy video on a floppy. Didn’t watch this video somehow and when I heard this video in the other one, I was “those first few notes of the background music sound familiar...” low and behold, glam bucket is an ambient song from nfs undercover’s soundtrack...
My special events coordinator found about 100 5.25 diskettes at the theatre in our University - He asked me if I had a PC old enough to read them (Goddamn better believe that I did) so I installed a floppy emulator and went through the more interesting diskettes and made images of them. Of the 50 or so that went through my drive, 3 were completely unusable (two were able to be formatted and, I guess, reused?) and a few had bad sectors but could be recovered.
The VAST MAJORITY were read no problem. These are diskettes with tags like, "1986-1987 Database backup" and other dates stemming from about 30 years ago.
Limited indeed, but they held up well. At least these ones did.
Also, the 3.5 inch ones flew very well when thrown, much better than CDROMS.
I haven't used floppies since high school, mostly for copying games to my graphing calculators but also for turning in some report research, having them fail was a pain in the butt.
Totally feel you on this one, LGR.
Call me crazy, but sometimes when I think really hard or try to remember something I emulate the mechanical sound of a diskette drive or a really old 20 megabyte harddisk. This is how much I miss those sounds and the medium itself of said era. XD
Pony Fox i dont, i dont remember the size but it was a ķ6 computer with a 5.25 harddrive in the top of the case, prob from around 1998. the electrical sounds plus that harddrive sounded like it would either electrocute me, or crash all the data any minute like that electrical sound of the circuit boards is like nails on a blackboard for some reason. dont know if it was because it was aged, this was about 2005 but it was horrible
I understand this feeling deeply LGR.. thanks for the video!
I am the same way with cassettes and their players. When I record my music onto tape, there are imperfections. Also the decks have to be maintained and well lubricated. That is something I enjoy. I also prefer a physical album and prefer to buy old used blanks if I can find them. like the Memorex DB60 lines of tapes.
Holy shit, you can turn Amish people into old hardware enthusiasts with that speech.
I literally tossed a box two months ago and yep needed one last week trying to revive a windows 98 pc. I searched the office for all week and finally found a couple that have to be 25 years old. Both floppy discs work.
I have a LOT of floppies, some of them I still use to this day just for the fun of it
Your videos are amazing. Thank you for what you do.
I remember when I was a kid I had 6 or 7 Floppy disk holders loaded with games and other programs...I have no clue what happen to all of it.
Great vid. The data disc fully embodies human geometry and ingenuity
As much as I like the modern act of downloading games, i will miss the days of physical stuff like this
2:18 - OK not gonna lie, felt some feelings when that "Memorex" label came into view...
Year 2050 we will see an SSD as "save" icon!!!
Save flappy bird lol
Fully agree, I share the same sentiments
I remember when my dad upgraded to zip discs and thought they were the future and would be around way longer than floppies.
I use them quite often at work to load programs to cnc mills
I remember most of my games on the Amega 1200 Cannon fodder lol one of of my favourite games on it
When i was younger, i once copied all the shortcuts of my pc games (the hulk 2003, little fighter 2 are the only ones i remember) and i thought i put the whole game on the floppy disk XD Those were the days lol.
Hope to see more hot floppy action in the future.
Brilliant, and I entirely agree! Personally, I haven't handled a floppy disk for... years. Really I cannot remember the last time - to guess I'd say 2004/5 maybe. This makes me sad. Keep up the good work LGR :)
You're holding a piece of history, what allowed those games to exist. A floppy disk is a screenshot in time.
+Lazy Game Reviews Have you seen what some people are doing with Floppy Disk Drives where they manipulate the pitch and frequency of the drives mechanisms to make music? Search for "Floppy Drive Music" in TH-cam. There's some killer stuff out there!
You summaried what it feels to me being human.
I once had four floppies just for my keyboard instillation.
XD What kind of keyboard drivers were those?
ClammyMantis488 It was a Microsoft keyboard. A fantastic keyboard and worked like a charm for years till it hibernated in storage. It came with four floppies for its installation. Mid installation, the screen will tell you to put the second floppy, then it continued installation till the 3rd then 4th floppies were used.
You have no idea how exciting it is when Windows started looking for and installing drivers automatically. That was a God sent feature that I appreciate to this day.
Gotta love progress! :)
***** Plug and play is awesome! When it works.
Sandwich Guy ...
There was once a time when installing printers and getting them to work was worse than Satan worshiping. I remember the first time Windows had those automatic installs (i think it was with Vista or maybe 7 for me) and I plugged in a new printer and just looked at the magic working in front of my eyes. A minute or so later, the printer was ready to go. I was beside myself.
By the way, I found a pic of they keyboard I had: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Natural_keyboard#/media/File:MicrosoftNaturalKeyboardGen1.jpg
But wiki page says it was released in 98 and I could swear I had it beofre then. Maybe it was a different model. All I remember is that it was made by Microsoft and it had that shape. While that shape may look weird, I can attest it was very comfortable to use.
Good times.
You have the most awesomiestest..est collection of software ever!
You should make a video on the problems of floppies. like aligning the drives
I still have 2x floppy disks readers which still working xD, i sometimes put to just listen this amazing sound of reading
Great video, well written
*sheds a single nerdy tear
I feel like this was almost a erotic novel about floppy disks...
Strip Poker was the important disc? :P
I will show this video to my kids when they will ask me what does the save symbol represents.
they could modernize floppy disks, make them bigger make them reliable and use them instead of DVD's for physical copy games
Nice love letter to the floppy.
We called the 3.5 inch ones Stiffies.
What is the best quality brand of floopies?? Maxwell?? Sony? Niponic?!?
Anyone remember taking a perforator to a "single sided" - "single density" disk?
Damn how’s you get away with this song? Perfect fit for the lgr channel, glad it made it through the bots.
I think floppies stick with us in memory because we never got anything to replace them, we got USB but they were too small to label and thus were never that fun to use. You couldn't have a box of labeled USB sticks unless you really really went out of your way. Might sound silly, but that label is where the magic was.
I guess you could easily label CDs and DVDs but they were fragile, had they been durable we would probably love them as much as floppies.
I have the same with the vinyl records.
My favorite channel on TH-cam by far. Retro PC Gaming and Duke Nukem, what more could you ask for?!
Floppy disks are like Jesus. They died so they could become the icon of saving.
Best allegory ever.
Amen
Hallelujah! Praise be to our saviour. The Holy Floppy Disk 💾
I will quote this, make tshirt and post it on Reddit.
this video:
aesthetics 10/10
comfy level 10/10
nostalgia 10/10
voiceover 10/10
man i love comfy
Being lazy: 0/10
How 'bout a Floppy Disk Emulator which emulates the slow loading and the noises? xD
*****
Those software exists already ;)
*****
Just a PHP Skript which loads the sites way slower :D ( github.com/DaveChild/Modem-Emulator )
+Diablokiller999 WinUAE already does this :)
+Diablokiller999 All you need is to use Internet Explorer! xD
+TylerTech that only emulates the slow loading, we need also the noises (unless you have an old modem) :P
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
"I have… loaded programs you people wouldn't believe… Strip Poker girls totally nude off the screen in my childhood room. I watched animation glitter in the dark near the edge of the demo line. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like.. *small fart*.. candy… in… a couch. Time… to code…"
Borin81 I feel like the only commenter who actually got those references :c
Borin81 Thank you, sir, for writing the best TH-cam comment ever.
Borin81 "I watched him code, all night. It was a long slow thing. He never whimpered, and he never quit. He took all the time he had, as though he love coding very much. Every second of it. Even the pain. Then he was debugged."
"It's a shame she won't load. But then again, who does?"
Not ready reading drive A
Abort, Retry, Fail?_
I never figured out the difference between the "Abort" and "Fail" options.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abort,_Retry,_Fail%3F#Responses
Don't forget (I)gnore :)
If only those options actually worked...most would just repeat the message over and over on the screen, or you would have to hit abort 10 times over.
Nowadays under Windows 'Ignore' leads to a crash almost every time. 'Abort' is a thing of choice, always.
I guess he didn’t have any film reels handy, as he was holding a 1/4” reel to reel audio tape.
oh look they 3d printed the "save" button
UltraGamez if you really think that you don't belong here
Mark White ofc I dont think that hahahah
UltraGamez goood.....
UltraGamez mainly for MS Office though :P... Open Office and Libre Office have switched it to HDD icon.
young_eng. those bastards
The sound of a strong floppy drive is the equivalent of receiving a firm handshake.
I remember using my Packard bell legend computer back in 1995. I had bought the shareware episode of biomenace from a drug store and liked hearing the 3 and a half inch floppy drive whirr and make loading noises lol.
I only own a couple of those 5 inchers, all of them for the C64.
Everything else I own is either the 3.5 inch ones or that really obscure size Amstrad insisted on using in the mid 80s.
Oh, and cassettes if they count. oh, those bloody cassettes.
Obligatory "Larry is everywhere" comment. Little wonder you like LGR, Larry. I still wonder if you'll ever do any more retro gaming stuff yourself.
"Hi, wanna play Popeye on the C64?"
"Nope, takes too long to load off cassette."
"Alex Kidd it is then."
Hey Larry, could you share this floppy disks video with Ashens please? I think he would really love this one.
Fuck I remember having to get a pencil in those cassette tapes and wind it back whenever it fucked up. Doesn't happen with CDs nowadays. Probably for the best but still something I feel is missing.
Ahem, you don't remember buying a magazine then, and typing in the source code they shared? Neither do I, but it was a thing.
LGR... what can I say? I showed this to my dad, and all he had to say was a resounding 'that's right...' with watery eyes.
You're doing something that needs to be done in this world; you are the curator that most of us only incorporate in our minds through a basement-dwelling personification of a human being. You bring it all to light (beautifully, might I add).
Keep the faith man. Sure, all of this will be dust in the wind eventually. Regardless, the flame needs to be maintained.
Thanks for the kind words :)
Dang that's deep.
What about God? Should we give importance to God or not? Has it been proved that God does not exist, with utmost conviction? Anybody?
@@Crazytesseract ???
Admit it, floppy disks just look cooler than CDs. Same with vinyl records.
imagine if floppy cds were a thing
@The Uncanny One: Oooooh, boy. You done walked into the wrong comment section.
The Uncanny One go the fuck away then
what is "embarrassing" about it?
Hey, I actually really like my optical media, and I think they look pretty cool!
Though I will say, floppy disks do look cool too.
Floppy disks remind me of a time when games seemed like they could actually be anything.
Garrette Very true. That was a point where it really did seem like an adventure every time you put one of those disks in.
Lazy Game Reviews LGR, you're a grown man. You should know better! Never end a sentence with a preposition!
geoff4376 ??? Is that a joke? There's no grammatical rule that establishes such a thing, it's just something some language snobs made up.
geoff4376 www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition :)
Dreadjaws
It's utterly pointless, it doesn't add clarity or function (or nostalgic value). It's the grammatical equivalent of 'no elbows on the dinner table'.
I guess they're like the vinyl records of computer technology; there's a tangibility to them; you can hold them and admire them, and (unlike a disc) you don't have to worry about fingerprints. They're also physically larger than flash drives, and likewise easier to handle (and harder to lose in your pocket).
The disk in drive A: needs to be formatted.
"but it is formatted you stupid machine!"
format a:
General failure reading drive A:
ABORT, RETRY, FAIL
ive always said that CDs should have been done like disketts. have the disk inside a permanent cace with lovely art and information on it, and when you need to read the CD, you just put the entire thing into the computer. that way the disk is never exposed and never get scratched unless you open the reading tab all the time.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)
+Snowfall Thecat *holds up movie/game/software/dlc/expansion pack case and one of those small square containers*
+Taylor Kingct That's storing something in it, not having it actually be inserted into the computer that way.
+Snowfall Thecat sony minidisk never took off
+WaFfLeFuR Not entirely true. MiniDisc as a consumer media format failed quickly, but MD players and blank discs were super popular before the iPod took hold. Particularly since later MD models were cheap and the blank media easy to record on. You could have hours of music on a handful of discs. I know many who used them as portable recording devices too. Loved mine and still keep it around. However once the 3rd and 4th generation iPods hit, the advantages didn't hold high and iTunes on windows was a game changer. Sony made you use proprietary software and files had to be converted. It took till the later models for MD to have any kind of MP3 like support. They were a fun bit of tech...
*HOLD UP*
You drive a mustang?
Nah, that was one owned by someone near me.
Any Commodore 64 fan no doubt misses the familiar grinding of a beloved 1541 disk drive.
I think that's why you can enable "Drive sound emulation" in VINE... It brings back memories of having to wait what nowadays would seem like an eternity for "Little Computer People" to load... Or is that just me?
***** WinUAE has this feature as well, it's pretty sweet.
Agreed I truly miss that sound of the 1541, and 1571 disk drives. The constant belt, and drive latch problems I had with my 2 1541 units, where how I cut my teeth as a kid learning to repair computers.
Lazy Game Reviews I seriously didn't know that - must be because I very rarely emulate the good old Commodore Amiga.
***** Lazy Game Reviews
That emulation of the sound might bring you fond memories for a few minutes but it will quickly become annoying. It's not very accurate to the actual sound sound produced by an Amiga drive, which is noticeable in real life, something you have fond memories of, but is never really annoying in person. That emulation sound will get annoying eventually.
Nice look back at floppy disks. I favorited it. Reading these comments I totally think LGR should have plopped a microphone by a C64/Amiga/DOS machine. That sound is certainly part of the experience just as much as the look or feel. Especially if you were an Amiga user which had such a unique sound and because few had a hard drive you were always using them. They could be terrifying even. When a disk was corrupted you knew it was coming based on the first note of the read-write error. You clinched your fists and prayed that it was not what you were thinking...
Too bad the 3 1/2's were sold as smaller but bigger and better and turned out to be pieces of junk in the long haul and they took up MORE space due to their thickness. I tend to like the 5 1/4 inch ones more and I never really had that much contact with them as a kid. A floppy should flop. But it hasn't been that long since we stopped using them. Most people were still bringing power points to school with a floppy disk into 2004. Some of us even invested into a zip drive and thought we were cool stuff because some schools had them too... yeah... that one lasted... hahaha...
I came here from LGR Blerbs
Another sad reminder that one day physical media will be obsolete
2018 A soon appearance of 30 TB SSDs is anticipated on the market. Prepare to throw your hard drives away too.
ruslan smirnov it still expensive af so no.
Hell no. Those cloud storage things is saved in physical media. lolz.
@@ruslansmirnov9006 And I'm over here with 200gb HDD, 2gb ram, and Windows 7, thinking I'm all set for my PC needs. I mean technically I am, but every PC gamer I talk to gets mad at me because I "need" better hardware.
I would find it hard to believe, that kids nowadays, could feel even remotely as in awe as I was the first time I loaded up Shufflepuck Cafe on my Amiga. The artwork on the disk, then that mechanical grinding as the disk loaded, almost hearing each individual byte loading into memory. Then that glorious splash screen. It was like looking into the distant future!
Somehow I don't think an Xbone or a PS4 can come even remotely close to that feeling.
Well heck even worse "kids nowadays" are most likely not even going to be able to recognize a floppy disk on sight (or audio/VHS cassette tape, vinyl record, ...) unless they regularly are in contact with somebody who cares to keep those things around. I have a 1 1/2 year old niece who picks up any rectangular shaped object and uses it like a smartphone, both holding it in her hands to push the imaginary touch screen, or the way she holds it up to her ear and pretends to talk to a phantom. Something that was unimaginable when I was a kid is just as regular as a rotary-dial phone would have been. There's something really strange about it.
Captain Southbird I mean no offense but this is terrifying to me. 1 1/2 half seems way to young for emulating this behavior. Do her parents spend anytime with her and no phone?
Nah, don't get too worked up about. My sister / her mother actually is very strongly into her playing with non-electronic toys like stuff animals, a plastic play farm, etc. and limiting her television time, encouraging going outside, etc. A recent story is she was in a doctor's office and while all the kids were engaged in their iPads, she was pushing chairs around, because that was just more interesting to her.
Nonetheless, daddy's using his iPhone a lot for his work, so it's totally understandable the kid's going to pick up on these motions and behaviors.
Sure, and when we could hear our 56K modems dialling up, you had a sense of the mechanics (electronics) behind it, and realise that you were using the phone line to send sounds to communicate with other computers. Now, people think the internet comes from WiFi.
There was a time when people used to have to crank the engines of their cars to start them. Now we turn an ignition, undoubtedly we've lost some of the realism of the car 'experience' but it's progression in design.
When we see things from our lives being phased out, we aren't sad because those things could still be relevant, because they cannot, we're sad because we realise how obsolete we too are getting. It is a simple reminder of expendability and mortality.
Captain Southbird Good to hear. All the best Capt. Southy. :)
I've gone through shit in life with no problems, but this almost made me cryWhat the fuck
This fucking Kindle..
you, sir...are the best youtuber of all time...period! love the channel...so many memories. i miss the good old days of amiga where i had games with 10+ disks like "monkey island 2" or "indiana jones - fate of atlantis"...a chore indeed but nevertheless those where fun times.
keep up the great work...and if i might ask: is there a possibility of a "moonstone" review in the near future?
Thanks!
And yes, Moonstone is one I hope to cover someday.
I haven't used floppies in well over a decade now, although I certainly remember 'em.
For me, their legacy is that the first hard drive on a computer is forever the C:\ drive, skipping A:\ and B:\ entirely so that the floppy drives few use anymore still have a spot saved for them. (It's kind of a wonder that modern variants of Windows haven't started assigning CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives those slots automatically; they're basically doing the same thing, barring the ability to write back to the discs.)
Of course, some can also do writing, and with a properly formatted disc, they can basically work as an arbitrary read/write drive not unlike a floppy or other such removable media system. As for the drive letter thing, this is one of the last vestiges of DOS that somehow or another has managed to survive through time, even though technically all modern versions of Windows address drive partitions internally using unique identifiers now. Drive letters made enough sense for a purely command line based OS (although whether you use letters, numbers, or something else, as long as it's easy to type, it's irrelevant.) There's not a lot of practical reason for drive letters at this point other than legacy and some rare instances where they're useful in a fully-specified path. (But again, you could use almost any other system for referencing the root of a drive.)
Windows uses E for Disc Drives at least on my PC.
It could be because some people still use floppies. Whenever I used a USB floppy drive, it was always designated to A:\>.
I would bet that some people would think it's weird for modern computers to still have a command-line interface in some way, shape, or form. I don't mind it all that much, which could be because the first computer OS I've used was Windows 3 back in the early 90's.
***** On that note, I believe since Windows XP, only 1.44MB 3.5" drives are supported. (Although in any mass manufacturing, that's the only drive format that made it to USB, and also managed to live the longest.) I haven't used a USB floppy drive on a Windows system in quite a while, so I can't remember the default letter assignment. I would assume it would be naturally picked by Windows as any arbitrary free letter using whatever system is uses to map any USB drive, but I could be wrong. (Also might vary what version of Windows we're talking about.)
I don't think it's weird to have a CLI in a desktop computer OS, it still makes a lot of sense for scripting and general power users. I was mostly noting that drive letters are just a legacy from the bloodline that Windows comes from, which of course is DOS.
As an aside, my first computer had Windows 3.1. The machine had a 100MB hard drive. I remember being so annoyed with Windows because it took up so much space (but my dad insisted it stay on there, probably for Word or something) and I remember thinking there was no way this stupid Windows thing would ever be useful.
Classic80sStuff Not really "always", it depended on a lot of factors. By default a single hard drive with a single partition and no special flags added to MSCDEX (or whatever driver you used) meant a "D:" assignment. But I had a Pentium-era machine that had two hard drives in it, and that left it with C: and D: for those drives, so the CD-ROM had to be at least E:. Some OEMs even sometimes assigned arbitrary letters to the CD-ROM (which was totally possible to do) and you'd see like an R: or some apparently nonsensical assignment.
This is poetry.
Thank you for your elucidation and acumen on the floppy.
I was born in 1988 so I think I was late for the floppy disk train but I do get it. This is how I feel about books. Physical, hold in your hands books. Whether they are game manuals or full sized novels. The smell, the feel of the paper, the differences between manuals, soft covers, paper backs, leather backs or hard covers in terms of textures and even reading the printed words inside is far more engaging then any digital download. They also feel so much more tangible then kindles or just reading them online. So I guess this was a big time digression but it felt relevant to my hazy 4 am mind.
That made me all misty-eyed!
I always taped over the square cutout on floppy disks so I could copy them. Hacking 1986 style!
I was taping one of the two holes of the high density disks so I can use them to my Amiga as double density. Double density disks were so rare and expensive on mid '90s.