1980s ad gets many things right about the future of computing...

Thread Starter

GopherT

Joined Nov 23, 2012
8,009
They got some things right:
the tablet, the touch screen, the graphics, even the clothing is not so bad.

Unfortunately, the ad is for 5.25" floppy disks.

 

BR-549

Joined Sep 22, 2013
4,928
I remember plugging in my first 5.5 in. drive. No more screechy tones listening to the audio cassette.

AND it only took 30 sec. or so to load a program.

It was very exciting to have a disk drive. The speed was like lightening.
 

Thread Starter

GopherT

Joined Nov 23, 2012
8,009
I remember plugging in my first 5.5 in. drive. No more screechy tones listening to the audio cassette.

AND it only took 30 sec. or so to load a program.

It was very exciting to have a disk drive. The speed was like lightening.
And, nothing got faster since. The files just keep getting bigger and bigger but the time to load files, or launch the OS seems to be the same or longer than in 1990.
 

Thread Starter

GopherT

Joined Nov 23, 2012
8,009
It's better than 8 inch.

So much plastic and magnetic material in each one. The chemical companies must have been drooling at the volume opportunity, then they got smaller, and smaller. Then the big CD/DVD era came... and went. Now we have the microSD card that can hold oodles of times more than these disks. Talk about putting ten pounds of potatoes in a 5 pound bag!
 

spinnaker

Joined Oct 29, 2009
7,830
The first TRS-80 5 1/4 floppies were single sided 35 track single density disks with a whopping 90K capacity.

My Atari was the same. A huge advance in technology over the cassette tapes for my PET!

And I wish I had disk on the PDP 11/02 systems I had to maintain. Code and database all loaded into memory from casette. It would take 30 minutes to load. If it crashed you started all over again. One of our sites had magnetic core. I liked that one. After a power failure I would just need to start up the application.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,079
My old Atari ST had a SCSI to SMD adapter so I could run these.
80MB+ of pure 8' hard drive computer fun.


I still have the Adaptec ACB-5580A SCSI-SMD adapter just in case I need to read data off an old CDC 8' or 14' disc pack. o_O
SMD ______________________________________________________ SCSI
 
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The first real computer I owned (after a TS-1000 ;)) was an HP 3000 series III --- complete with an industry standard tape drive and a brace of stand alone HDDs the size of top-loading laundry machines:eek: -- 'twas rather 'long in the tooth' in 1990 -- still, at 15 YOA, I felt quite privileged:) -- I wish I'd kept it...:(

Here's an image of a 'ringer' --- Sorry to see it languishing in what looks to be a tool shed:(

Nostalgically
HP

 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,079
I've got a few old SPARCstation workstation Pizza box cases I plan to strip and turning to retro looking Linux media servers with RPI2 cards inside. The things were build like a tank inside.

 

djsfantasi

Joined Apr 11, 2010
9,156
It's better than 8 inch.
Not if that's all you had. Ca 1980, I used a TRS-80 Model II to read order data from an IBM System 32 8" floppy, format it into orders and send them to the vendors via Western Union TWX. The TRS-80 ran Pickles & Trout CP/M and was programmed in assembly
 

ISB123

Joined May 21, 2014
1,236
Yes! People in graduate school lost lots of data in this years - less by the time the 3.5" disks came out. Anyhow, they would only send replacement disks, not 6 months of research.
I'd say that today's technology is made to fail on purpose, otherwise they wouldn't be making any money selling you the same thing in other package the next year.
 
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