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Dear wife cleaned out the room her mother lived in till she died in October 2010. While doing so she found a plug in floppy disc drive. I had a laptop over a decade ago without a floppy drive and I used the contraption. Until Sunday I thought the thing had been thrown out but it wasn't. Now I'll throw it out.
The other hidden treasure Dear Wife found was almost twenty three dollars in small change.
Comments
May I suggest recycling? I
May I suggest recycling? I think most communities now have some sort of recycling program for outdated electronics equipment. It saves landfill space and keeps the metals, etc, out of the environment. Some electronics retailers will also do it.
Kris
{I leave a trail of Kudos as I browse the site. Be careful where you step!}
On the other hand
Personally, I'd hang on to it, but then I'm that kind of person.
True story... I have tons of old computers and parts, going back to the dawn of history (1978), when I built my first computer. I'll not digress here, you're safe. However, during the '90s I found a box full of 5.25" drives while looking for something else and decided to throw them all out, as all my boxes then had 3.5" drives and I didn't think I needed 'the old format'.
Ten years later, I'm in need of a specific bit of software to retrieve something from an old PDA, and I found it... on a pile of 5.25" discs. D'oh! The moral of this story: you never know when you might need to go back to an old format.
Now, does anybody need a Zip drive? I have spares...
Penny
Hehe.
gives Penny a hug for the zip drive comment.
I don't think anyone should get rid of quality CRT monitors since we haven't found an adequate replacement yet. LCD's are garbage in that they can't display Blacks properly. Once OLED becomes mainstream in TV's maybe we'll be able to talk about it.
I know size doesn't matter, but
a 3 1/2 inch floppy isn't really much fun.
Remeber the double sided 5 and a quarter inch ones?
Some came in High Density!
And a few earlier word processing systems -- WANG comes to mind -- used a EIGHT inch floppy disk!
And that IS disk/disc not a, um, you know!
Go have some tastly prawns and work on your mega tomboy skills.
John in Wauwatosa
P.S. Yes Dr Wang had a sucessful -- now gone -- small computer/word processor firm. He was earlier one of the developers of magnetic CORE memory.
John in Wauwatosa
I'll have you know,
my "MegaTomboy skills" are almost as polished as your "Cheeky Man skills" are. = )
^ lol
You both had me laughing so much I snorted milk out my nose. I remember floppies being expensive and clipping with a hole punch to get two sides. Oh and keep the change.
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Eight inch floppy disks
When I bought Sorcim's SuperCalc program for my Eagle II CP/M computer, it came on 8" floppy disks. I had to pay a computer store to copy it to the 5 1/4" 96 tpi floppies the Eagle used. No such thing as copy protection then. One problem with the 5 1/4" disks was that almost every brand of computer used a different format.
Remembering older drive formats
My story comes prolly a bit more recently than others. In 1990 I moved back to my training hospital to be the manager of the Operating Suite. The technology there was an electric typewriter although it did have an 8" monochrome screen, a golf ball typeface.
I introduced the new PC that had a monochrome screen and had two 5 1/4" floppy drives. One disk was for the DoS and the other was for memory. Each disk held 512K. The clock speed of the PC was 2MHz.
Compare that with what we have today.
I also remember that the Admin Dept. had a Winchester drive that was able to be swapped out or exchanged. This was a 12" very heavy platter that looked similar to some elaborate sort of record turntable. It was able to store about 300MB of info. An incredible amount, at that time.
Robyn B
Sydney