h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sure I know what heat is. It comes from stoves you know.

Actually the heat doesn't demagnetize them, the condensation that forms on them wipes them out, just open the cover and apply a thin layer of vaseline to the disk, JUST KIDDING, pack them around in a ziplock and don't open them outside, or let them cool down when you come inside. Though that is still a pain. Get one of the new portable MP3 players, preferably from C.Labs and use it to transfer files.

It still doesn't change my point that Flopies are useless in hot areas.
And BTY - try living /INSIDE/ the oven for a while, then you'll know what heat is. I yhe, keep it on High.

I wonder what happens to a harddisk in such circumstances...

We keep the air-condition on.

I'd swap my dusty old floppies for a life in an oven any day.
What did you do before CDs, did all your vinyl LPs and singles warp and sound like Captain Beefheart?

Most of MY vinyl already sound pretty weird but that may be the artists themselves..

108th Glasgow. Just down the road from the 1st... (A bit of history in that company, eh?)

I mean what does BB stand for?
Is it anything to do with those little airguns you could get from the ads in the back of DC comics?

Sorry. I should learn to read postings more carefully.

The BB stands for The Boys' Brigade. To explain it better than I ever could, take a visit to The Boys' Brigade UK and then 108th Glasgow Boys' Brigade.

Maybe now I'll read things fully and closely!

And not write HTML in places where its not supported!

I dunno about the 2.8" ones, but I definitely remember the 2" disks. They went into an early digital camera - the Canon Xapshot - and cost about $50 per box of 10. This was in the early 90s, perhaps 1992?, so not THAT long ago.

Also I'm sure I've seen 3" disks, 5" (not 5.25") and I dimly remember one larger than 8" from way in the dusty reaches of history.

Ah now it makes sense.
As a 'southern shandy-drinker' who knows little of these things am I right in thinking this makes you Rangers not Celtic? There's a vacancy going in the English FA Cup for a team that's worth playing...I wonder if anyone up there's thought of asking our FA abou t it.
Anyway, back on the subject of what to do with dead CD-ROMs. I saw something on telly the other day that recommends hanging them from plants in the garden to scare away crows. If it works that's brilliant, people who think of ideas like that should be celebrated.

8" disks can still be held in your hand. I remember, from way back when computers were still really big monsters, the 3' (indeed, foot, not inch) disk (or was it 3.5' disk? I forget). These were stainless steel things which needed two men to put them into the 'drive' (HUGE slots with a spoke in the middle to make the disk turn at an incredible 12+ rpm). Booting up was hell and the drives were simply never shut off unless you needed to change disks, though it was often quicker to just install a whole new drive in the bathroom or whatever other space was left unoccupied.

If you want to be really nostalgic, remember punched cards.....
72 characters per card, and really great fun if you dropped a stack of them and had forgotten to number them - kept you amused for hours sorting them into order. Mind you, they were very useful as bookmarks, coasters, paper aeroplanes and you could punch patterns in them, such as fish .
And that was a mere 20 years ago....
GULP! (I was young at the time and easily amused)

The drive for the 8" floppy was the same height as, and often next to, the computer monitor. At least, it was on the Intel MDS machines I used many years ago. Some times you had a pair of them as a separate machine attached to the computers. They don't make 'em like that any more. Thank God!

Yes, I remember punched cards (just), but they were almost completely defunct. When I was at school, the computing class consisted of myself and about 19 boys. Yes, I was the only girl who was interested. Not that we learned much. There was only one Commodore PET between us, so half the class programmed punch cards and the other half played games on the PET (beats programming in BASIC). These cards were sent off to what was then the Lanchester Polytechnic (we're talking Coventry, England, for those that don't know). It took a week for the cards to come back, you waited until the following week to find out what went wrong and fix it. It could take a whole term to get a program to run.

Sounds depressingly familiar. Kids these days, don't know they're born..... when I were a lad..... etc, etc.

Is the Immac any good for removing hair from your legs? Roll on total multi-functionality. Steve Jobs by the way is not that stoooopid. He knows that every one needs a floppy, and that if you have a colour coded machine then you'll want your USB floppy to match. That is what makes him brilliant by the way. He gives people what they want. Not what they need. The PC market has shot its self in the foot in this respect. It means so many things to so many different people. It can never be a generic product like a screw driver or hoover. The Imac is aimed squarely at generation y (your age group!) who have "grown up" with the concept of computers as tools and (hopefully) are more interested in doing something useful with it rather than tinkering with the hardware and occasionally running some software to see if it works. Macs have always had a perceved focus... kinda greative media type thingy, whilst its a limited market it is a stable and loyal one. Lets face it who would generation y identify with: the creative individual with flair or the techno geek with halitosis. (When do we get a spell checker?)

So this has become the Monthy Python forum has it with all those stories from the old days ??

O.K. here it goes(and this is 100 % true, I suffered in IT).

The first company I worked for - around 1980 - used punchcards to the extreme. Programmers would hand over 4.000 cards to us operator's and wait for their compilation-listings. This was NOTHING however to the incredible amount of punchcards the government sent us. You see in those days it was explicitly forbidden for any company who did a job for the government to keep the data on tape/disk/whatever because that was not considered 'safe'.

Now every couple of years there are elections here and in the early eighties the government made a national pastime out of voting(about every year). And we were the ones who made the voting-cards(if that's the proper expression). In those days the population of the Netherlands consisted of about 12.000.000 people of which we serviced 5.000.000 (in fact there were about 7.000.000 voters but the big cities did it all themselves).

One pallet would hold about 250.000 cards so we had over 20 'batches'
or groups. One group would take about 3 hours to read so you had better put on your walkman to get rid of the noise - but they hadn't been invented yet...! Even worse, these cards were kept in the townhalls all over Holland and sent to us when there was an election. What happened with them in the meantime defies the imagination. I have actually experienced a permanent error(you had to start again from scratch) on one of the last couple of cards so many times that the only thing that kept me from burning all of them was the overtime-pay...

Yes I do believe some things have improved over the years, but then again just when it was getting better they introduced Windows...

TM.