As we've been doing things nostalgic...

I finished the archeological dig of what is to be my new office and came across some more 8 inch floppies. DEC Vax Basic anyone? Full set of five discs - so about 600KB between them!

I also cleaned out some of the s***e I've accumulated over the years I never knew I had an unopened set of 5.25 floppies for MS Mail, although I installed the bugger from 3.5s enough times.

In South Africa they call the 3.5" ones stiffies.

You can imagine the look on my face the first time I was sat in a meeting and someone asked if I had a stiffy :eek:

i have used the middle sized ones before. our junior school computer programes ran from them!!

In South Africa they call the 3.5" ones stiffies.

You can imagine the look on my face the first time I was sat in a meeting and someone asked if I had a stiffy :eek:

Ive had the same problem

Didn't know they made 8" discs! Thats a monster! The BBC they had when I was at primary school used 5.25" discs. I loved those drives. Put the disc in and pull down a clip or swing a lever round to keep the disk in place. Awesome.

Didn't know they made 8" discs! Thats a monster! The BBC they had when I was at primary school used 5.25" discs. I loved those drives. Put the disc in and pull down a clip or swing a lever round to keep the disk in place. Awesome.

You young uns, tssk!

Still using them eh Rob? Backwards as well as upside down, I don't know....

Steve

It's not backwards. It's tried and tested technology.

Yep, go with what you know! :P

Steve

There's nothing wrong with MS-DOS 3.3, CP/M, Windows 3.1, or Windows NT 3.51 for servers.

Who needs all of these quad core 64 bit thingies.

As Bill gates once said:

There will never be a need for more than 640kb of RAM

And also:

The world wide web is a passing fad and will never catch on

Well done good to see some pictures of these beauties again, its been years since I saw a 8" disk . I remember them fondly from my very first IT job, looking after an ancient IBM main frame I remember the manual for that thing came in rin binders on a bookshelf, must have been close to 100 big ring binders.....

I'll have to look and see if I can find a TU58 cassette to complete the set

I remember 8" floppys, from my days as an ME29 operator. Oh the joys of the TME operating system.

and talking of mainframes, what about EDS80 disk packs. 80MB of data on a disk the size of an LP and 6 inches thick with 5 platters. Or the older EDS60, same size disk but nearly 1 foot deep with about 15 platters that held 60MB of data.

I cant remember the name of the backup system we used on that main frame, maybe someone else could identify it, it was basically a big blue box about the size of a wardrobe which took two magazines of very chunky disks or casettes cant remember which, loaded at the front and basically it would go down the magazines load in a disk write to it and eject the disk drop down a level and load the next one. I remember the back up would run overnight, considering the data was all just ascii text I cant imagine it was large amounts of data.

The mainframe was in a airconditioned seperate room frolm the rest of the IT department though And the birds nest at the back was amazing. The building no longer exists at all, the factory there has been replaced by a small retail park with a MFI pets at home staples and mcdonalds. MFI bed section now resides where our mainframe did back then...

There's nothing wrong with MS-DOS 3.3, CP/M, Windows 3.1, or Windows NT 3.51 for servers.

3.51???

What was wrong with NT 3.5???

Come to think of it, what was wrong with MS LAN Manager

Dec VAX for me..... oh VMS and it's journaling file system. Navigating around that was fun.. set Def [disk0000.mydir] etc etc etc

And you'll be amazed how many companies still run OpenVms. I believe that some of the clusters have uptimes of over 10 years!

I still support customers who back up OpenVMS servers. I used to fix VAX 11-750's and Microvaxes, and I have memories of carrying a huge case full of TU58 tape cassettes for diagnostics.

Nostalgia Ain't what it used to be..........

Phil

3.51???

What was wrong with NT 3.5???

Come to think of it, what was wrong with MS LAN Manager

Microsoft? Who are they?

What's wrong with FORTRAN IV? :D

First computer I worked on was an IBM 360.

Floppy discs - try punched cards :eek::eek::eek::eek:

Hehe I remember punched cards, and Fortran IV. Assigned GOTOs eh

Hehe I remember punched cards, and Fortran IV. Assigned GOTOs eh

Dredging through my memory bank from 38 years ago :eek::eek:

//JOB

//FOR

etc.......................

And the horror if you dropped a pile of punched cards - trying to get them back in the correct order :eek::eek::mad:

Punch cards, like paper tape, were a 100% redundant data storage media, as the paper and card were only there to keep the holes apart!

Phil

Im not old enough to have worked with paper tape and punched cards, would love to have seen them in operation though....

Punched cards were on the way out when I started work.

At Uni we had teletypes with paper tape readers and punches, and one green screen VDU. When I got to work there were lots of IBM 3270s but programs were still carried from one office to another on punched cards. Later we got to submitting jobs via TSO with the JCL as an electronic file, but if a program got lost it might still have to be reloaded from the cards. We got a PDP in about 1984, and a Vax a couple of years later, just for the manufacturing department. Thus began my involvement with mini computers. I didn't see a network in operation until I joined my current employer, in 1988 (and then it was thick Ethernet, with vampire taps). The PDP was for producing programs for NC machines - some of which used literally miles of paper tape. Happy days

Im not old enough to have worked with paper tape and punched cards, would love to have seen them in operation though....

Our old library used to have punched cards to identify library books (pre-barcodes!). Remember being taught how to read the holes to work out the unique number

Just about remember 8" floppies, but 5 1/4", 3 1/2" and 3" were the ones I remember most clearly

Chris

Paper tape..................when I started as an Auxiliary Coastguard in 1982 we still used paper tape in the Telex machine:eek:

And we had this new-fangled thing called a fax machine - it took about 6 minutes to transmit one page :rofl: