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!rant
1980s - This thing can store entire programs !!
2017 - This thing can't even store my git ignore !
(Still remember when my dad used to bring games for me in these floppy disks from his office and my pc had a floppy reader XD)
7 -
Nothing has ever taken the place of floppy disks' drive letters (A: and B:) . They will fovever have their place in our hearts and in the alphabet.
10 -
1998 talk: Copy the Internet
I was surfing the web on my good old windows 98 pc, a younger friend comes to my place and sees me using IE. Sudently he asks:
Friend: What is that program?
Me: It's Internet Explorer.
Fr: - What is it for?
Me: - Well, you can write something here, (url), to go to different sites, search for stuff you like, participate in foruns, etc...
Fr: - Oh yeah, I know what that is, my cousin also has that in his PC, but I don't.
...(Little pause)...
- Can you copy the internet for me? Because I don't have it.
Me: You can't copy the Internet! You need a phone connection.
Fr - But I'll give you a floppy disk, you put that program there, and then I can use it too.
Me - The shortcut won't give you Internet!
I think I ended up copying the shortcut of IE to him, just to prove my point.
The funny thing is that the link really worked because he also had IE in his machine, while not in the workspace, however it was exactly in the same folder location as mine, but obviously he didn't had a wired phone connection.
Fr - "Maybe I need to copy something more! The program opens but it doesn't show anything."7 -
[This makes me sound really bad at first, please read the whole thing]
Back when I first started freelancing I worked for a client who ran a game server hosting company. My job was to improve their system for updating game servers. This was one of my first clients and I didn't dare to question the fact that he was getting me to work on the production environment as they didn't have a development one setup. I came to regret that decision when out of no where during the first test, files just start deleting. I panicked as one would and tried to stop the webserver it was running on but oh no, he hasn't given me access to any of that. I thought well shit, I might as well see where I fucked up since it was midnight for him and I wasn't able to get a hold of him. I looked at every single line hundreds of times trying to see why it would have started deleting files. I found no cause. Exhausted, (This was 6am by this point) I pretty much passed out. I woke up around 5 hours later with my face on my keyboard (I know you've all done that) only to see a good 30 messages from the client screaming at me. It turns out that during that time every single client's game server had been deleted. Before responding and begging for forgiveness, I decided to take another crack at finding the root of the problem. It wasn't my fault. I had found the cause! It turns out a previous programmer had a script that would run "rm -rf" + (insert file name here) on the old server files, only he had fucked up the line and it would run "rm -rf /". I have never felt more relieved in my life. This script had been disabled by the original programmer but the client had set it to run again so that I could remake the system. Now, I was never told about this specific script as it was for a game they didn't host anymore.
I realise this is getting very long so I'll speed it up a bit.
He didn't want to take the blame and said I added the code and it was all my fault. He told me I could be on live chat support for 3 months at his company or pay $10,000. Out of all of this I had at least made sure to document what I was doing and backup every single file before I touched them which managed to save my ass when it came to him threatening legal action. I showed him my proof which resulted in him trying to guilt trip me to work for him for free as he had lost about 80% of his clients. By this point I had been abused constantly for 4 weeks by this son of a bitch. As I was underage he had said that if we went to court he'd take my parents house and make them live on the street. So how does one respond? A simple "Fuck off you cunt" and a block.
That was over 8 years ago and I haven't heard from him since.
If you've made it this far, congrats, you deserve a cookie!6 -
I designed a logo for a family member's business with the expectation that I would receive payment once the work was completed. I wasn't expecting a lot, I only really do freelance work for software but I know my way around Illustrator. I'm not one to charge family anywhere near full price and I felt no contract was needed. We were back and fourth for a little bit, getting the logo to his liking. Silly me during all of this didn't watermark any of the images I was sending (didn't think I'd have to, you know... Family) and a little while later he's gone and ordered shirts with the logo on it without paying or even contacting me. When I confronted him about it, he pulls out the whole "No contract was made" bullshit. It's ridiculous how arrogant people can be, I was asking for $50. I put a good 15 hours into it with all the alterations he wanted. 15 hours I could have spent on actual clients.
TLDR; Designed a logo for a family member without a contract, he decided not to pay.17 -
So. A while ago I was on OkCupid, trying to find the Pierre to my Marie Curie (without the whole brain getting crushed under a horse carriage wheel obviously) and I decided the best way was to have my profile lead with my passion for technology. It turned out pretty unique, if I do say so myself.
At the end of it, I amassed some interesting and unique messages:
- A Java pickup line (that I never responded to. Yes I'm a very basic Devranter)
- A request to turn the man's software into hardware (to which I politely informed him that this was scientifically impossible unless a reader proves me wrong)
- Another impossible request to turn his floppy disk into a hard drive (how outdated too, why not HDD to SSD for faster speed amirite? That was awful don't mind me)
- A sincere request to help troubleshoot a laptop (Honestly I would've helped with help requests but this is a dating site...)
- A sincere request to help debug a student project followed with a link to a GitHub repo
- Another sincere request with studying for a computer exam
- And lastly, my favourite: a sincere job offer by a guy who went from flirtatious to desperate for a programmer in a minute. He was looking for *insert python, big data, buzzwords here* and asked me for a LinkedIn. I proceeded to inquire exactly what he wanted me to do. He then asks me to WRITE a Python tutorial and that he would pay a few cents per word written so he could publish it. Literally no programming involved.
Needless to say I went to look elsewhere.26 -
A friend of mine took part in development of a website for a real estate agency. Their database was stored on a floppy disk.7
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Found this beast in my dads office 😂
P.S: he still has 7'' floppy disks
He is been in this computer business for 30years :D
3 -
Any code I make for clients is under a strict license unless specified otherwise. It's a straight forward license pretty much stating that they can't sell it or claim it as their own. I've had a few clients break that license but one stood out. I had made a piece of software that cost her over $2,500 due to the amount of hours that went into it. The transaction went along smoothly so there was nothing to be alarmed about. She came back for more work about 6 months later and I decided to do some checking up on her to see how her business was going. Immediately smack bang on the home page was my software being sold for $30/month. Needless to say I was outraged. She said there was no talk of a license which I responded with pulling out the contract that she signed where it explained that signing the contract meant she was in agreement with the specified license. 2 months after this started, I'm being awarded any profits made from said software along with her closing down the website. As much of a bitch as she was, it wasn't worth my time trying to get more out of her.5
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Playing Civilization on my dad's 386 running Windows 3.11.
I remember installing various games from like 8 floppy disks each. What really confused me was that in every single game I installed, the language was really weird and I could hardly understand half of it. Always asked myself why the hell every single game developer put the same horrible German-ish fantasy language full of errors in their games.
It was much later that I realized I've always been setting the language to Dutch, thinking it was German ("Deutsch"). Yeah, my English skills were horrible back then.
8 -
It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.
The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.
Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.
At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.
To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.
The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.
We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.
Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.
After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.
We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.
End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.
We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.
We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)
PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.4 -
Found this sweet floppy at my parents place yesterday.
I dont even know if 1.44MB was alot, average or a little back then.
27 -
When will people understand that you can't get quality software made for $5 by some random from Fiverr? Just as I'm about to confirm a quick Freelance job they tell me they've found someone on Fiverr that will do it for a fraction of the amount. It's happening more and more. Don't get me wrong, I'm still getting plenty of work but I see it as a bit of an insult. Comparing the quality of work I do with someone who pumps out 5 programs an hour.
And yes, I do realise there are people on Fiverr that do care about their work, there just doesn't seem to be many of them.9 -
I wasn't the brightest when I started with computers...
I had one in my room for homework and such (an old one that mom had for work and then upgraded to a laptop).
It ran SO FREAKING SLOW and didn't have Internet (I was maybe 6, no need to pay AOL anymore than we already did).
I had a floppy disk that said" Quicken" on it... Brilliant little 6 year old me thought that JUST BY INSERTING the floppy, I could speed my computer up. Not by installing THE FINANCIAL SOFTWARE, just by putting the floppy in the drive...
I've come a little ways since then...
Note: I accidentally installed it and thought I was going to break my computer because I couldn't uninstall it (pulling the floppy out obviously didn't uninstall it)... All my experience prior to this was watching my teacher use Mac at school4 -
Today I visited my best friend. His little son of 6yo also loves computers and technology.
I thought it would be fun to show him some old stuff, like a floppy disk 💾
I almost peed my pants laughing when he said: "Wow cool!! You 3D-printed a save button!!" 😂3 -
Fun fact: a 4TB HDD replaces about 2,744,000 1.44MB floppy disks. (Floppy size based on free space left on floppy after format in DOS 6.22 as FAT16.)5
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Listening to professor tell stories about when he used to develop, is like listening old war stories.
Back when I was in university, this teacher would tell us different stories about his days as a developer. This was one of the last ones, and I think it has not changed much since then.
*Phone rings*
Professor: Hello?
Client: I don't know what the fuck you take me for!
Professor: Oh, hello Client_Name. What seems to be the problem.
Client: This doesn't work! There's nothing here!
Professor: Ok, do you see the program file?
Client: No. I just said that there's nothing here.
They proceed to go over the issue and how to get the program to run. Or at least show up on the PC. This goes on for about 30 minutes.
Suddenly my professor has a thought.
Professor: Have you tried inserting the Floppy disk from the other side? Try flipping it.
Client: ...4 -
Life Before the Computer
An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity
A keyboard was a piano!
Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3-inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out!
Compress was something you did to garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for awhile!
Log on was adding wood to a fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a backup happened to your commode!
Cut - you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu!
I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper
And the memory in my head
I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead!3 -
!rant
So the other day, my mother came to visit me after a while of not seeing each other. And one thing we used to do together was go searching through old weird junk stores. We go searching through one, and there was a box of floppy discs. I was excited, because I haven't seen one since I was a little kid. I brought it to her attention, and she said, "Wow. A floppy disc!" I laughed and read the disc aloud, "Oh man. Only 1MB." Then proceeded to laugh even more. And she said "I remember thinking 'theres no way anyone would ever take up that much space!'"
That just absolutely blows my mind haha.1 -
Some time 199x, when I was still a little kiddo, my dad bought a PC. It had a big ass HDD (dimensions-wise), 1x 3.5" floppy disk drive and a 5.25" floppy disk drive. It ran DOS. Dad managed to hook up a dot matrix Epson printer to it and used the computer for writing... whatever, really :)
Then dad got some of those 5" floppies with games and installed them on our PC. Mach3, Indy, Entity and Atlantis were my favourite ones. Later we got Wolfenstein 3-D, but that was just too scary, too intense for me.
All that was years before we got Windows 3.0 installed there.
-
When I was getting my CS degree, in the first year (2003-2004) all projects had to be delivered in an envelop containing the printed document and a floppy disk with the code/program inside. Yes, a floppy disk.
So whenever I couldn't finish the project on time, I just dropped a corrupted floppy disk on the envelop, this way I got at least one more week to work on the project and when professor came to me like "Hey, your floppy didn't work" I was like "no way! oh man, I think I have a copy here, try this one instead".
Oh those good old times that will never come back.4 -
It happened! I found the answer I needed on page 4 of Google! Mind you it was among results such as "Watch Visual Studio S02E14 for FREE"3
-
Whenever something goes mainstream and becomes buzzword there are annoying consequences of it.
First, it’s harder to find anything meaningful about the topic.
Second, suddenly everyone is an expert and web search starts to show not related products like promo codes, stupid videos, tutorials for dumb.
Third, old content that was interesting is lost under pile of shit or gets deleted.
I feel like I’m living in middle ages and before I try to watch something interesting it’s deleted by Spanish inquisition and replaced by some crap.
Most of expert content I have in favorites is returning 404 and youtube videos are deleted or private so from some time I started to backup all content I read or watch and find interesting in public networks.
Fortunately I have couple of terabytes of storage to backup interesting topics but I’m not happy that I’m back to times when I was saving internet page to floppy disk to show it to my friend later.
What a fucking nightmare.3 -
I found and bought this floppy disk in an old supermarket. This brings back my memories where flash drive are so expensive I can only afford to buy multiple floppy disk.
3 -
I have to confess. I'm a distro hopper. I've been a distro hopper ever since last year, and it got me tired. I spend entire hours checking distrowatch, partitioning, setting up hardware and drivers and passwords... I've tried to stop, I swear, but every time I do, there goes a new Solus release, an Openbox Debian based new branch, a forensic floppy disk that I know that I won't ever use for real. I just love assigning swap, fighting with rEFInd icons, testing modules, navigate trough different configs... Oh God, I even set up a virtual OpenBSD, just to see what it can do.
My friends have been telling me to stop, because I don't take care of our relation, that I'm becoming a monster. It's shameful and embarrassing to me when they ask me about my day and I say "you know, installing Manjaro on my desktop, and Lubuntu to that crappy old Asus I have for backups" I think I'm going to lose my head some day, this sickness is driving me straight down to the Slackware pits. I should stop it before I try Ratpoison environment but truth be told; I mean not to stop. I'm a distro hopper.
I ride my way live, unstable and restless.6 -
Ages ago, it was still in the last millenium which will not end soon at that point of tine, I had a 10MB HDD in my first computer. It was a gift and second hand, and DOS 3.2 was installed on it, and my younger self, unable to talk or write english, had that cool game on it (Pitfall, if I remember correctly). But that game was not enough, so I tried to enter all the filenames in all the folders to find other games on that machine. Some commands were ther which I have not understand correctly, and one of them was 'format'. Typed in 'format' and pressed enter, an error message appears that I have to enter a drive letter as argument. Because I had known only A: for the floppy drive and C: for the HDD i tried at first with the floppy. Nothing happens, vecause there was no disk in the drive. Then I entered C: ...
Poof, everything deleted...
I was unable to setup that pc again and my so beloved game was gone also.. still sad about it, because that machine would be a real treasure today but it is gone a long time ago.1 -
It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.
Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.
It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.
God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂
When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back. -
So I pulled an OLD ibm out of a trailer, that is literally falling down, today. Anyway, this cpu had been rained on and been in extremes of heat, and cold, so much so that there was moss growing on it.
I pulled it out and plugged it in, with the original plug *that was rusted in*, and.. it worked. The screen and everything worked perfectly! The floppy disk that hadn't been used in over 14 years and was stuck inside the reader, worked...
Mind blown!
As the old saying goes, they don't make 'em like they used to.3 -
Wow, Japan is on the verge of a technological breakthrough!
ref.: https://engadget.com/japan-will-no-...
11 -
My first PC was a USSR clone of the IBM XT 5160-086 PC, but with a different design, and beefier RAM. I was shown a game in it (barbarian), and the next evening I really wanted to play again, so I inserted the floppy disk, booted up into DOS and Norton Commander, and was stuck. It's my first ever interaction with a computer. So i typed "computer, please give me barbarian".
I was way ahead of the time you could say :) -
My small collection
2 DD 8" floppy disks
2 MD 2-D 5" 1/4 floppy disks
2 HD 3" 1/2 floppy disks
1 Jaz disk
1 unassembled 3" 1/2 floppy disk
1 PalmOne sticker to learn the letters of Graffiti 2 (I had a M100, but I do not anything related to it anymore.)
5 -
Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)
Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.7 -
Do arcade games (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Berserk) count? I got my allowance in quarters.
Atari 2600? Ti/99 with a tape drive to play a game at my friend's house?
Having to buy a 5.25" floppy in the HS bookstore for typing class on the TRaSh-80s and finding a way to put a break in the program and save it to disk so I got top score on assignments?
Tron. That's what really did it for me. To this day, I like to imagine there is a vast world inside the computer.
After a BASIC programming class in HS, I got an Apple IIGS and started writing my own load menus for these little games I'd find around FIDO and newsgroups. Instead of "PR#6, brun gumball" a nice styled menu would show where you could press the number of the game you wanted to play.
I bought a book on Apple assembler and promptly got disillusioned with full blown programming (in 1988), instead sticking to BASIC and, later, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, CSS, and Python.
Who remembers sharing hacked PCP accounts to dial out of state BBSes?
Applied Engineering customers and 300 baud chatroom lurkers represent.
User #243, God's Country chat2 -
I grew up as internet became a thing, so I had a very early exposure to computers. There's actually a video of me crawling onto an old computer which still had a 5.25" floppy drive. By the age of 4 I actually started using it properly, my mum said I once talked about pressing enter in my sleep 😂 I'm glad I was born in
a time (94) to witness technology evolve at such a crazy scale. Kids these days will never know what kind of privilege it was to have a 128MB pendrive 😛2 -
Year: 2006
Dad bought a 2nd hand computer from his office.
Configurations:
OS: Windows 98
RAM: 256MB
HDD: *Forgot*
15" CRT Monitor
Floppy Disk Drive
And the best moment of joy was when my then best friend who had 2 PCs with one of them was the best configured system of that era with wireless mouse and keyboard (wireless was extremely costly and rare then), comes to my house with a PC Game (WWE some year) and tells me that this game only works in 98.
Also, one of the most Proud moment I ever felt for my computer.1 -
Not dev, but IT...
Just found out that one section of my place of work still uses floppy disks. No I’m not fucking kidding. The other sad part? We still have the outdated computers to read them. 😩😂
Please, send help or a job application...5 -
My First !Experience : Disappointment with a computer
My mum kept tons of floppies but we didnt have a computer at home. Went to my friends house, who had one, and had Encarta 95 (its like a fun wikipedia for kids). When I mentioned I had floppies, he asked for one, since he didnt have one. We copied Encarta to that floppy hoping we would cheat in the next computer science test. We even tested it.
After we were certain that all works (you should know we were surprised that it could fit in one floppy), we got to school, put the disk in and voila
we had copied a shortcut :)4 -
When I was 6 years old, my dad brought home a computer. It had windows 95 and he gave me 3 floppy disks to work with and here we are now.
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I once had a client that lived near by and I had setup a server in his office. One day he calls me begging for help because it keeps turning off... He put it in a sealed foam box to try to reduce it's noise. Temps were 80+ Celsius (176f) within 5 minutes of it booting.2
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*packing for a school-hosted graduation celebration with friends*
let's see, first rule of packing for a trip, count on every slim chance happening...
List of things now in backpack:
3 changes of clothes (1-night trip for an all night party in <100-MILE-AWAY MAJOR CITY>)
Laptop
3DS
3x 4-port USB Hubs
10-port power strip (not fully in bag, but mostly so.)
Extra pair of shoes
3.5" external floppy drive
First aid kit
SAK
precision driver set
soldering set
multitool
pliers (1x farmer's, 1x bent needlenose)
multimeter
empty laptop HDD (250GB)
magnet in Altoids tin (can't have it trashing the HDD!)
VGA to RGB (Composite ends) adapter
Composite/S-VIDEO USB capture card
Portable USB chargers (1x 30k mAh 2-port, 1x superslim 3k mAh 1-port)
Enough phone chargers to replace all chargers within 30 miles
Smelling salts
2x 16GB thumbdrives
Boot disc set
$200
School IDs (for bag's ID slot)
3 pairs of decent earbuds (no el cheapo $1 ones because they break trying to get them out of the package)
Serial to USB adapter
Rehydration salts
Magnesium fire striker
Plenty of pens and pencils
Emergency radio locator beacon
Emergency cellular locator beacon
SD/eMMC/CF/TF/MCP(D) USB reader
external HDD reader (2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE/SATA, external power)
am i missing anything?11 -
I swear it's like my company's NAS is just a room full of 3.5" Floppy Diskette drives somehow hooked up in a RAID 10 configuration.4
-
Well it's not really a work experience but that makes me think of that time I deleted all the fonts from school's computer (5y/o)... I wanted to make space by deleting useless stuff, but after that every text document showed in Windings or whatever the fuck this symbol font name was. Well then the TA had to transfer them from another computer with a floppy disk, it took forever xD I felt like I was going to prison that day2
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I think I still have a 64MB HDD somewhere on a shelf at my late grandpa's house.
Now they make CPUs with caches of that capacity...
o tempora..
EDIT:
FFS! This CPU cache contains >44 floppy disks! I've never even had that many!!!
11 -
It's 2017 and every keyboard on Earth still has vertically unaligned keys !
And if you think it's for ergonomic reason, you're wrong ! It's just something we inherited from goddamn typewriters.
It's time to let that go !
Far far away in the past.
Right next to floppy disks, MySpace and Nicolas Cage !6 -
TIL one of the first few issues on the ISS was that they had a laptop that wouldn't boot. The (pirated, some say) copy of Norton Ghost they had on a floppy was also suffering from bad sectors, so it wouldn't boot. These guys had an entire floppy image beamed up from base to replace a copy of Norton Ghost. (Some say this was a pirated copy of Norton Ghost, as none of the floppies had the official label, instead all had either hand-written or custom-made labels.)
Then they had codepage issues.1 -
I remember I was a child trying to tinker around the only computer that we had. No one knew how to install the Windows OS from scratch with the drivers and everything else (they were installed on floppy disks) so when no one was around I managed to do it everything. I remember such joy, felt like a hacker 😂
Now I'm a web developer and I feel like a moron each time I'm sitting on a defect I can't solve so I'd say these were good times 😜1 -
Instead of asking how old people are, how about this:
Post the specs of the first computer you regularly used. I will start.
Tandy 1000 SX. Not one, but TWO 5 1/4" floppy drives. An 8088 CPU and 640K of RAM. The operating system was MS-DOS 3.2, which was always in the A: drive.
We used it to make papers for school in Wordstar, and my parents made spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3. We learned to type on it. We played Space Quest, King's Quest, Carmen Sandiego, and Lords of Conquest on it. We transcribed BASIC programs from the, "BASIC Training" column in 3-2-1 Contact magazine.
We LOVED that computer.8 -
First time using a computer:
Booting up some Mickey Mouse game from a floppy disk when I was 4 on my dads gateway 2000.
First time coding:
Writing html in dream weaver at 14.
Edit: holy shit dreamweaver still exists?4 -
if the stars align, i will have a dobie sometime early 2024. i want to only go through ethical breeders, so the wait has been long, but it’s worth it. i’ve never had a dog before and i’m SO excited !!!
pic is of momma and one of her puppers from a previous litter, but we will be keeping the ears floppy :)
16 -
We had a lab in middle school, 5th grade, I think, where they had a few Apple IIe computers.
I remember one day looking over at a smart friend's screen and he was playing a flight simulator. I'd never seen anything like it before. When I asked him how he did it, he showed me a computer magazine where all the code was published for it. He had typed the whole thing in and saved it to a floppy.
It was part of a turning point for me when I was deciding between social groups: wanting to be a dumb jock or wanting to be smart. Thanks to that kid's example, I chose being smart. It cost me dates with the hot girls later in high school when I should have been carrying a pager for all the teachers who needed me to fix their computers for them, but I made sure to cry all the way to the bank when I was eventually making six figures. -
What are your thoughts on the "save icon", should it be updated?
I am aware of the discussions regarding this but am interested what you guys think.3 -
We code hard in these cubicles
My style’s nerd-chic, I’m a programmin’ freak
We code hard in these cubicles
Only two hours to your deadline?
Don’t sweat my technique.
Sippin’ morning coffee with that JAVA swirl.
Born to code; my first words were “Hello World”
Since 95, been JAVA codin’ stayin’ proud
Started on floppy disks, now we take it to the cloud.
On my desktop, JAVA’s what’s bobbin’ and weavin’
We got another winning app before I get to OddEven.
Blazin’ code like a forest fire, climbin’ a tree
Setting standards like I Triple E….
Boot it on up, I use the force like Luke,
Got so much love for my homeboy Duke.
GNU Public Licensed, it’s open source,
Stop by my desk when you need a crash course
Written once and my script runs anywhere,
Straight thuggin’, mean muggin’ in my Aeron chair.
All the best lines of code, you know I wrote ‘em
I’ll run you out of town on your dial-up modem.
Cause…
We code hard in these cubicles
Me and my crew code hyphy hardcore
We code hard in these cubicles
It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve seen the 404.
Inheriting a project can make me go beeee-serk
Ain’t got four hours to transfer their Framework.
The cleaners killed the lights, Man, that ain’t nice,
Gonna knock this program out, just like Kimbo Slice
I program all night, just like a champ,
Look alive under this IKEA lamp.
I code HARDER in the midnight hour,
E7 on the vending machine fuels my power.
Ps3 to Smartphones, our code use never ends,
JAVA’s there when I beat you in “Words with Friends”.
My developing skills are so fresh please discuss,
You better step your game up on that C++.
We know better than to use Dot N-E-T,
Even Dan Brown can’t code as hard as me.
You know JAVA’s gettin’ bigger, that’s a promise not a threat,
Let me code it on your brain
We code hard in these cubicles,
it’s the core component…of what we implement.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Straight to your JAVA Runtime Environment.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Keep the syntax light and the algorithm tight.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Gotta use JAVA if it’s gonna run right.
We code hard in these cubicles
JAVA keeps adapting, you know it’s built to last.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Robust and secure, so our swag’s on blast
CODE HARD10 -
Restored from my backup. My home town 2004 setup, floppy disk drives, sound blaster audio card, dial up us robotics modem, nokia 3310 on the chair, lg hifi with cassette tape and cd, unitra amplifier, equalizer and sound columns. Panorama made using olympus c-720 uz.
Funny times ^^
Edit:
high res image
https://vane.pl/content/images/...
4 -
Are desktop PCs becoming a legacy, a history, just like floppy disks or CDs? Do you have one? Do you really need it?
I do have a decent tower pc in my balcony since last year. Haven't used it since early August and I honestly don't know what would I use it for once I bring it back in28 -
I was about 8. A family member was like a secretary, but not exactly. There are was a term used, but I can't remember. It's not really that important.
Anyways, I was like 8. Their job consisted of backing data up on.... Floppy disks. The software they used to back this data up just used a console and you had to input commands. Well this was amazing to me at the time. So they taught me the order of the commands and let me do it. Was the most fascinating thing to me. And it definitely planted the seed of interest in computers.
Some other early experiences also involve me hanging around the IT guy that worked with my relative. He taught me a little bit, such as some keyboard short cuts.2 -
I was very young, but my grandma had picked up an old apple 2 with asteroids on a 3.5 in floppy (maybe 1990) and it was really the first time playing games that it occurred to me that I could make them. From then on, I decided that I wanted to work in a space where my imagination was unbound and I could build anything I wanted from the ground up without any help. I've matured a bit since then, but I still find that basic love every now and again when I'm not dealing with red tape or fixing bugs in other people's code.2
-
I saved my uni work onto a floppy disk (2001) and walked a mile into university library to print it. When I got there and put it into the computer it had corrupted and the disk was unreadable! Luckily I had a back up on my computer so had to walk the mile back, saved again onto two different floppy disks this time and walked the mile back. This time I managed to print it and deliver the work 5 minutes before the deadline.
-
I'm working on a big glass fastening machine. The PLC's software (ladder) is saved on those floppy disks. I'm screwed.
-
I have a LOT of Floppies but no floppy drive that works with my current Win7 machine, and my XP one is in multiple boxes for parts... so for now I can only stare at NetWare 4 to 4.2, WfW 3.11 and DOS 6-22.
Smart me made VMs on his XP machine and transferred them to his Win7 one.
I also have data tapes... now that is NEVER gonna work on my Win7 so... anyone knows how it could *possibly* work out?
Also... I got documentation on Compaq servers... those are nice.
AAAAAAND since I’m a huge MIDI nerd... I have a SC-55mkII hooked on the UM-ONE mkII and those shitty cans that I’m gonna switch (hopefully) soon for a nice pair of Cakewalks MA-15Ds.
Also, I’m looking for one of them 5150s because 80s IBM and since I also like keyboards... the one and only Model M.
Anyone can hook me up with a cheap one?1 -
Not exactly a story since I was too young to remember, but my parents told me that I was really enjoyed playing with the games my father made for the good old commodore 64 we had.
He basically had two 5" floppy holders full of his own games and programs he used to make. Unfortunately we only have the disks now. :(
The first memory of me using the computer though, is when my father bought a computer for his office (was win 95 with the "you are now safe to switch off your computer" message) and I was sneaking in to play with paint because it was so cool back then. -
It was when i was 4th grade. We had windows 95 computers in school. I used tk do assignments on them and submitted with a floppy disk. Yeah, copy paste started there...
-
I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.
I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).
I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.
As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.
These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.1 -
When the docs are on a different Pompey Pirates floppy that you didn't copy at the monthly computer club.1
-
My first computer was an old Pentium 2 running windows 98 with no internet and just a CD Rom and Floppy Drive. Got it for my 7th Birthday I think and immediately wanted to make it do my biding.
Didn't work out. Had no clue what the words on screen meant and batch scripts looked like sorcery to me.
Hell even the options menu in German was a cryptic puzzle to me.
Got a little better in the meantime. -
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.
During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.
I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.
I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.
Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)
I never want that to happen again -
We had an ADAM/Colecovision unit before this, but I don't really count it, as it was more of a console for us than a computer.
In 1986 dad brought home a Tandy 1000 SX. It had an Intel 8088 processor, 64k of memory, and no hard drive. With dual 5.25" floppy drives, our write-protected DOS 3.1 disk stayed in drive A almost all the time. Games and other software were run from drive B, or from the external cassette drive. For really big games, like Conquest of Camelot and Space Quest 3, we were frequently prompted to swap disks in B: before the game could continue.
Space Quest, King's Quest, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, several editions of Carmen Sandiego, and at least a dozen other games dominated our gaming use. We wrote papers with WordStar, and my parents maintained their budget with Lotus 1-2-3.
A year or two later, Dad installed a 10 MB hard drive, and we started booting DOS off that instead. Heady days.1 -
Java Life Rap Video
https://m.youtube.com/watch/...
SPOKEN:
In the cubicles representin’ for my JAVA homies…
In by nine, out when the deadlines are met, check it.
CHORUS:
We code hard in these cubicles
My style’s nerd-chic, I’m a programmin’ freak
We code hard in these cubicles
Only two hours to your deadline? Don’t sweat my technique.
Sippin’ morning coffee with that JAVA swirl.
Born to code; my first words were “Hello World”
Since 95, been JAVA codin’ stayin’ proud
Started on floppy disks, now we take it to the cloud.
On my desktop, JAVA’s what’s bobbin’ and weavin’
We got another winning app before I get to OddEven.
Blazin’ code like a forest fire, climbin’ a tree
Setting standards like I Triple E….
Boot it on up, I use the force like Luke,
Got so much love for my homeboy Duke.
GNU Public Licensed, it’s open source,
Stop by my desk when you need a crash course
Written once and my script runs anywhere,
Straight thuggin’, mean muggin’ in my Aeron chair.
All the best lines of code, you know I wrote ‘em
I’ll run you out of town on your dial-up modem.
CHORUS:
‘Cause…
We code hard in these cubicles
Me and my crew code hyphy hardcore
We code hard in these cubicles
It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve seen the 404.
Inheriting a project can make me go beeee-serk
Ain’t got four hours to transfer their Framework.
The cleaners killed the lights, Man, that ain’t nice,
Gonna knock this program out, just like Kimbo Slice
I program all night, just like a champ,
Look alive under this IKEA lamp.
I code HARDER in the midnight hour,
E7 on the vending machine fuels my power.
Ps3 to Smartphones, our code use never ends,
JAVA’s there when I beat you in “Words with Friends”.
My developing skills are so fresh please discuss,
You better step your game up on that C++.
We know better than to use Dot N-E-T,
Even Dan Brown can’t code as hard as me.
You know JAVA’s gettin’ bigger, that’s a promise not a threat,
Let me code it on your brain
WHISPERED:
so you’ll never forget.
CHORUS:
We code hard in these cubicles,
it’s the core component…of what we implement.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Straight to your JAVA Runtime Environment.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Keep the syntax light and the algorithm tight.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Gotta use JAVA if it’s gonna run right.
We code hard in these cubicles
JAVA keeps adapting, you know it’s built to last.
We code hard in these cubicles,
Robust and secure, so our swag’s on blast
CODE HARD1 -
In college, during Novell's heyday, I was working on my Certified Network Administrator certification (totally worthless, in retrospect). As I was becoming an expert in all things Novell, I found a security flaw. Using Visual Basic it was possible to code up an exact replica of the Novell login screen that launched at boot time from a batch file stored on a floppy. You could log peoples' usernames and passwords all day as long as they didn't realize your floppy was in the drive, which worked in certain computer lab setups on campus. I wasn't in it for stealing info or being a criminal. I just did it for the lulz. But if I had gained access to a few of the right computers in admin offices on campus, I could've gotten access to anyone's student profiles and grades.
-
Do you remember the question: How can I get the Counter Strike game in a Floppy disk? and.. what is done there they copied the shortcut into the floppy Lol2
-
Tandy 1000SX. 1986. I got home from school, and Dad had set it up. He got us a subscription to 321 Contact magazine, so we could learn some programming on it.
I remember playing the space quest games, King's Quest 4, Lords of Conquest, Conquest of Camelot, Carmen Sandiego, and a lot of others. Eventually we got a 10 MB hard drive for it, but for years, we booted its dual 5.25" floppy setup with a DOS 3.2 floppy. -
I was probably 5 or so.
This was during the time when i heard that dial up modem sound from my dad's "computer room" every night when i went to bed.
The computer had a huge CRT monitor which made that annoying high pitch noise but i loved playing with it so much i didn't mind.
My dad installed a Croatian knock off version of Super Mario from a floppy disk he got from a magazine (i still have it lol).
Every time you died you'd have to start the game again by typing "mario" in CMD. Me and my sister played it so much we became pros.
He also tried explaining how he codes in Turbo C but i guess i was too young to understand it. -
Just arrived my new computer. I bought it from an unknown company online and it's always ok.
Ty god of computer, i will sacrifice a floppy for you tonight.1 -
!rant
I have an old laptop with a built-in floppy drive which I want to use to recover data from a bunch of AtariST Double Density disks.
Can anyone recommend a Linux distro and package for getting the job done? This is the only job it needs to do before being donated to a museum ;)5 -
Our first computer ran MSDOS. All I remember about it is playing "Wolf 3D" and this platform game I cannot recall the name of where you were in a land made of sweets. I could never remember the commands to start the games. Me and my Dad played Wolf and could never get past the guards with machine guns. My Mum used the PC for "word processing", I think she carried her work around on 5 inch floppy disks.3
-
I think i was like 7 or 8 yo. When school vacation started, my mom joined me in this computer centre near her workplace.
I belive it was a Windows 95 system powered probably by Pentium 2 and i remember playing Aladdin, mario and a fun racing car game.
I remember i liked a lady teacher there and being scared of the male teacher from whom I learned about basic computer peripheral terms like CPU, floppy disc drive etc. -
My parents bought a C64 when I was about 8. After getting bored of Flimbo's Quest and Klax, I started looking at the manual and discovered a world of creativity.
I remember slavishly copying dozens of lines of Basic code. After what seemed like hours I was rewarded with a tiny sprite of a balloon floating across the screen.
My sister thought I was crazy; I thought it was the best thing ever.
We never had a tape or floppy drive, so I copied the same code out at least half a dozen times! -
TIL all x86-compatible CPUs have ISA support and the ability to be reset by the keyboard controller via A20 line, all thanks to not wanting to alienate a single person who refuses to upgrade.
you can put ISA or AGP devices straight onto the fucking LPC bus and it'll work on most CPUs. Y'know, on the same bus as the TPM in most?
you already know i'm gonna put a floppy controller, a parallel port, and an IDE controller on the PCI-e bus with an ISA daughterboard12 -
Playing Sierra Online games like Kings Quest and Thexdar on an Epson 8088 with duel 5 1/4 floppy drives and no hard drive. I don't miss the days of having to swap disks when moving between different areas in the games.
I remember when my dad got a 486 DX/2 with a 300 MB hard drive and I could fit all my games on it. Prior to that on the 286 that had a 40 MB drive I created a batch file with a menu to select a game that would unzip the game and launch it, then when I exited the game it would zip it back up and delete the directory. -
1) Reader Rabbit on an Apple IIGS in the late 80s. I might've been in Kindergarten. Found the boxes stored in an unreachable storage area at my dad's house recently. Knowing how he took care of things, it probably still works. He won't let me touch it.
2) Fast forward to early middle school, Ultima VII on an NEC desktop, 90s. That game was great but also a pain in the ass. Had to make a startup floppy disk to help with memory allocation and something else. Learned DOS things. For some reason the disk wouldn't work from one day to the next so would have to reconfigure it frequently. Also learned the hard way not to fork too much with autoexec.bat during this period. -
PC component idea: a component that has build in memory that you can load up with a disc image file and have a software or hardware switch that you can use to have your BIOS detect whether it is in a DVD drive mode or Floppy risk drive mode so you can virtually mount ISO images for example and boot off of that device...
Niece but pls someone make7 -
My first interaction with Computers started in 1996/1997 and it was Dangerous Dave, PacMan, Mario, Pre that pulled me in so deep. We had multiple Floppy Disks and each of them used to go awry after a few months of use. Had to keep deleting stuff to fit all my Favourite Games
A year later I learnt the basics of MS-DOS and GWBasic. Looking at seniors do C Programming on Borland Turbo made me feel scared and one of them said it is the real language to make Games, and all types of Animation stuff. I was very intrigued but only for a while. I kept playing Games which was what I was fit for at that time -
I think I was around the age of 11, and got a brand new C64 with 1541 floppy. The manual of the included floppy disc with some programs described the program startup with 'load "name",8,1'
So I typed (exactly that) 'load "name",8,1' and got '?FILE NOT FOUND ERROR', did it again, same error.
After half an hour of reading the manual and trying it several times, I gave up and went to a friend with a C64. I told him the disc doesn't work, if he could help me out.
He put the floppy disc in and typed 'load "frogger",8,1' and seeing the command I realized what a tremendous idiot I was.
Surely it worked, he could play frogger.
Went home desperate and broken with my disc and from that day on I could operate that machine.
I soon started to play around with basic and a bit of assembler. -
An entirely sentient AI. Saved on a floppy disk.
People in the late 90s had quite the colourful imagination about the future...2 -
Anyone know any good alternatives for WinImage? People online say to use ISO manipulation tools, but I need to extract files from a set of 232 floppy images.
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