My first computer was an NEC APCIII, the APC standing for Advanced Personal Computer.
And for its time, which was 1983, it was advanced.
It ran on floppy disks. I had trays of them, each carefully marked. Word Processing, for example, took about 9 disks to run. Each function of the software required a separate disk to be installed.
But in 1983, the APC was state of the art and so were floppy disks
So it was with a bit of nostalgia that I read that the Sony Corporation is going to discontinue the manufacturing of the floppy disk.
Not that I have had much use for the floppy – and neither has anyone else.
The floppy disk held 1.4mb of data. The postage stamp sized card in my digital Leica holds 16GB of data. I don’t think that the floppy would hold even one RAW photo. Look at your iPod and then realize that the floppy does not have enough capacity to hold even one song per disk.
How far we have come, and how fast.
But we have left in our wake an endless stream of discarded technologies that were once cutting edge and are now utterly worthless.
And, in keeping with Moore’s Law, we can only expect this rate of change to continue to accelerate. LPs were good for some 75 years, the iPad, probably for 75 months, maybe less, before we look at it the way we look at floppys. ‘iPad? Jeez, look at the SIZE of that thing! I can’t believe we dragged those things around with us’, like the Compaq computer my friend Jack Hitt used to cary with him. It was the size of a sewing machine and weighed about 50 pounds with a green screen the size of, well, an iPhone. And THAT was state-of-the-art when I had my APC, which took three massive shipping cartons to move around. (And I know, because I took it with me to France.. .twice!) Not to mention the iron block of a step-down transformer that was required to change 220v to 110v.
Ah, those were the days.
So goodbye floppy!
But what about all the material that was recorded, and still remains, somewhere on the floppy and other now obsolete media? Gone forever, no doubt. The videos of my ex-wedding, recorded on Hi8 are now, thank God, almost unreadable as that platform vanishes.
But over at The BBC, (where we are headed next week), they recorded the entire Domesday Book on an Acorn Computer and Video Disc Drive in 1986, thinking they were planning for the future!
Ha!
Today it’s unreadable.
Fortunately, the original Domesday Book, written by hand in 1086 is still accessible.
7 Comments
fosca April 29, 2010
heyho,
i love the speed that technology advances with but also see the danger that we could possibly lose our past when what we stored to the various strains of ever larger and faster media gets deleted accidentally. photogaphy on film is still available, even from 150 years ago. will digital produced media be available to our children in many years into the future?
and rachelle, this one is just for you. maybe you spend a second thought on the merrits of facebook and other social community platforms.
http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/online-spying.htm
Rachelle April 28, 2010
Another interesting observation … “email” to today’s teens is pretty much obsolete. They’re using FaceBook exclusively because of the lack of spam and the fact that they have much more control over who has their information.
(I’ll see if I can dig up the article and send it to you)
Rachelle April 28, 2010
Omigoodness … the floppy! I recently discovered a whole box of these while moving. All of my college work and essays … which might be an entertaining journey down memory lane if I could find a computer that would read them.
Also found a box of VHS tapes and a couple of beta tapes … felt kinda old at the end of that day. ;o)
steve April 28, 2010
i’ll save you the story of the TI-99.
how about an early cellphone story instead?
we were one of the first to have a michigan bell cellular phone installed into one of our vehicles- a 4-door fleetwood brougham (of course it was black). yep, the one with the massive chrome front bumper which happened to make a great counterweight to the suitcase-sized “guts” the cellphone required that was mounted in the trunk weighing in at ~ 75lbs.
the antenna required a hole be drilled through the trunk lid which had people looking because you simply didn’t see a ten inch antenna hanging on cars back then (you saw plenty of 10′ cb whips though).
the handset was much like the old trimline that at&t offered back then, cradle and all, bolted to the floor.
a 5 minute local call cost about $5, 3 minutes of which were full of static.
this was back in the day when a beeper was just that, not even a numeric display.
30 years = light years.
Pencilgod April 28, 2010
http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/zx81/zx81.htm
Pencilgod April 28, 2010
My first computer was the 1981 Sinclair ZX81 it came with a standard 1-kb of ram but I upgraded to the massive 16-kb expansion pack. The programs were saved to audio tape and loaded via my, then, new Sony walkman.
Ironic that that storage format, the audio tape, is still being made and in fact sales are up according to a story I saw recently.
Ironic too that programs are still being written for the Sinclair computers and enthusiasts of have made emulators so they can still play their favorite games on the modern PC.
Content really is king.
Karen April 28, 2010
Michael: I really enjoy these daily posts. They make me think and get my day off to a great start.