this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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I found this old software on a medium I don't recognize at my church. Does anyone know if this has value to anybody? this

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[–] [email protected] 229 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

It's the guts of 3.5" floppies, like these, they usually stored 720kB, then 1.44MB, but the latest versions (double sided) were 2.88MB.

The larger one at the bottom is from a 5 1/4" (orange in this picture, the big daddy in the picture is 8", first type I used, with COBOL)

... and now you kids know where the "save" button icon came from.

They were not meant to be removed from their protective envelopes, they're probably damaged now.

[–] InverseParallax 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hear, hear.

As in, wha? Did you say something? taps cane on the floor

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] emogu 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your belt onions are looking spiffy today

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Which was the style at the time...

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This reminds me of when I got a new PC when I was younger and I was shocked... "WHAT?! THEY COME WITH 128MB RAM NOW??!!!??! AND THEY HAVE A DVD TRAY?!!? No more floppy disks!!!!"

Fuck, those were nice times (except for dial-up internet).

[–] MyDearWatson616 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I remember having a CD burner, dvd burner, floppy drive, and Zip drive for those rare occasions.

[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 6 points 1 year ago

I remember backing up all my documents on a zip drive and feeling like we reached peak storage.

Last month I bought two 6TB drives into my house because of all my photos/videos.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Felt like we could store the whole world on 100mb zip disks

[–] Dick_Justice 4 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I still have a working zip drive.

[–] cousinofjah 2 points 1 year ago

I still have a bunch of zip disks that I want to examine. Think they're still good?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There’s nothing quite like passing around copies of games that are eight-diskettes large and finding out that disk #8 is unreadable after a 30min install. Good times.

[–] PlutoniumAcid 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have the original floppy set for MS Office 4.3 for Windows 3.11.

Fourty-three 3.5" disks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Hahaha, mfw the last few disks is the same face the morning after a spicy burrito.

[–] dirthawker0 5 points 1 year ago

I got all excited when the cost of hard drives got down to $10/MB.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The part that's wild to me is I have an SD card in a computer in my pocket that cost $10 or so and is basically disposable but it's larger than the hard drive in my first computer from 25 years ago

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You can get a 128GB pendrive for like 15€...

That's crazy.

[–] PlutoniumAcid 2 points 1 year ago

I remember upgrading my Macintosh computer from 512kB to A FULL MEGABYTE! Wow, what a difference, suddenly I could run two programs at once - even three small ones.

Ah, the eighties... Those were the days.

[–] breathless_RACEHORSE 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Started with the 8" bastards on a dedicated word processor (with a 12" CRT, green phospher glow, and typwriter style printer built right into the top of the unit!) that my dad had for medical filekeeping at his office.

It's been amazing watching storage tech from those to zip drives, and now, floppies of any kind are dying.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My daughter found a 3.5" floppy in a drawer a couple of years ago (she was 20) and went "What is this? It looks just like a 'Save' button!" :)

[–] AndrewZabar 2 points 1 year ago

I hope you smacked her for that lol.

[–] Thteven 9 points 1 year ago

My parents first computer was 3 feet tall and cost $30,000. I liked to play frogger on it lmao.

[–] jungle 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Don't forget the cassettes before that. (Sinclair 1000 / ZX-81)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Having worked in a datacenter somewhat recently, I can assure you that cassettes are still in use. Now, they manage to fit tens of TB in a 4"x4" square.

[–] breathless_RACEHORSE 3 points 1 year ago

Oregon Trail, on cassette, on a RadioShack TRS-80 in the school library.

Gaming heaven.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

First game I ever played was on those 8” floppies. It was a turtle game where you would type in DOS commands and make it move. I can’t remember the command prompts but it was fun enter like forward 1000 and it would blast across the screen.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

That’s it! Ha ha wow haven’t seen that since elementary school.

[–] jungle 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Logo wasn't a game but a programming language.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

As far as I can remember, it was both, as it was an educational tool developed to teach children the basics of programming while playing it as a game.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Good old turtle. You could also program loops, so you could make fancy shapes like circles.

[–] grabyourmotherskeys 2 points 1 year ago

I learned this and BASIC at around the same time.

[–] cousinofjah 2 points 1 year ago

That sounds like Logo

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Logo ? Anyway there was a this "programming langue" with a turtle and it had like 6 commands : move forward/backwards, turn left/right, pen up/down :-D

[–] AndrewZabar 1 points 1 year ago

I remember that! As others have posted, Logo.

[–] BilboBargains 4 points 1 year ago

If you play them backwards a satanic message is heard before the media bursts into flames.