I'm too young for floppies, never used em
I will however be personally offended if they change the universal save icon
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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The best part about them was the sound. Like, you knew your machine was doing something when it was writing to a floppy, there was that mechanical sound.
For your listening pleasure: https://youtu.be/ZnFQZa8SKP8
There was this guy who made music using floppies and other old stuff. Pretty cool.
Edit: I think I meant this other guy, but the first one's good too.
Wow that Floppotron is something else! 8bit Symphonic orchestra vibes.
I love these kinds of whacky music machines, I'm sure you've seen this one before: https://youtu.be/IvUU8joBb1Q
You should check out zip disks. Floppies could only hold 1.5 mb of data, but zip disks started out at 100 mb and ended up being able to hold upwards of 650 mb.
Only the cool kids had those (lol), but they don't get a whole lot of recognition.
Those were floppies, too! The storage medium was a flexible magnetic film, same as floppies and unlike the rigid platters found in hard disk drives.
SyQuest competed with the ZIP drive with its EZ Drive, which used a lone hard-disk platter in a removable plastic cartridge as its storage medium.
Both drives suffered from various mechanical problems, high cost of storage media, and low storage capacity, and were ultimately outcompeted by optical discs, which have in turn been replaced by USB flash memory cards (although optical discs are still useful when you need to receive some bytes from someone you don't trust not to destroy your computer).
My dad was a cool kid, who would have thought?
I remember when physical save buttons were a thing
As in the βrecordβ button on a tape deck?
I just meant floppies ;)
The bomb icon hasn't changed in 300 years, so maybe?
Is the bomb icon still used somewhere? I thought it died with the classic Mac OS.
And the symbol for video is a film strip. I guess we could change the symbols for everything into little pictures of hard drives, but that seems counterintuitive.
That raises a mildly interesting point.
It used to be that different kinds of information were stored on very different media: paper for text, canvas for paintings, film strips for photographs and video, tape and vinyl records for audio, floppy disks for computer files, and so on. That's where the icons come from.
On the other hand, now that high-capacity hard disks and flash memory exist, many different kinds of information can be and often are stored on the same device. You can't easily tell what kind of information is stored on it just by looking at it; you have to actually read it.
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This thought comforts me.
and that IS HOW IT SHOULD BE!
I dunno why, I like how floppy disks look
I'd be perfectly fine with floppy disks still if they had been able to remotely keep up with CD-DVD in speed and size.
But also isn't Modern Computing basically built upon an entire foundation of 30+ year old structures? I mean not just the Floppy Icon but on Windows A:\ is a reserved letter for the Floppy Drive, and that was a legacy from DOS.
The unix/linux root directories are also good examples, perhaps dating even earlier.
Drive letters in general are a legacy holdover from MS-DOS. The Windows NT kernel doesn't use them. It is a user-space DLL that maps the kernel's single tree into drive letters.
All other operating systems use a single tree with mount points instead. Windows supports mount points as well, but its default behavior is to assign a drive letter.
Drive letters are still useful, though, if you have multiple drives and
- they're removable drives (optical disc drives, USB drives, etc), or
- they're internal, but you want to keep them separate (i.e. not RAID).
Other platforms deal with this by reserving a subtree for mount points (/media on Linux, /Volumes on macOS), which is functionally equivalent to drive letters. This does have the advantage that mounted volumes are identified by a name rather than just a single letter, but on the other hand, the path to the mounted volume is longer and less convenient to type.
Also, you cannot create a file named "con" in Windows, even in the latest versions. It's a holdover from DOS where that word was reserved for the console. For example, you could type "copy con file.txt" to quickly create a text file from the command line and start entering text.
You actually can, if you bypass some translation. \\?\C:\CON is a perfectly valid file pathβ¦and creating a file at that path will prevent almost all software from opening it! You can see it in File Explorer, but you can't delete it without a command prompt.
There's another interesting fact here: MS-DOS 1.0 didn't have directories.. To print a text file, you could just do TYPE foo.txt > LPT1, since LPT1 wasn't in a directory (like /dev on Linux).
MS-DOS 2.0 added directories. However, to remain backwards compatible with 1.0, devices were still "global". You could still run TYPE foo.txt > LPT1 regardless of which directory you were in.
This is why you can't create files names CON, LPT1, etc. in Windows. They're reserved globally, which is a holdover from the original MS-DOS version from 1983.
Cant wait to drop the floppy disk knowledge on the future grandkids
Looks like bots have made it to lemmy lol
Now it really feels like the old homeland
And this tweet is from 2014 π
I mean, at least the first sentence is true, since we will have destroyed ourselves by then.
Now do podcasts
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