[gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On 02/01/2012 07:36 AM, Dale wrote: When 3.1 came out, I changed jobs. Swapping 15 floppies is no fun to me. Funny, reinstalling fixed the problems back then and it still is the best way to fix windoze. I installed a Windows 95 beta from floppies :-) Microsoft shipped them DMF formatted (1.68MB instead of 1.44MB) but still, they were way too many; around 30 disks or more. And before doing that, I had to make copies of every single one in case they go bad. Good times :-P
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:07:41 +0100, Frank Steinmetzger wrote: I still punched holes in 5.25 disks to make them two-sided in a 1541. As if the 1541 wasn't slow and unreliable enough as standard. -- Neil Bothwick FINE: Tax for doing wrong. Tax: fine for doing fine. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:29:47 +0700, Pandu Poluan wrote: My earliest new and shiny then would be a honkin' big desktop horizontal all-steel box, with a Turbo switch that toggles a front-panel (7-segment LED) display between 4.77 and 8.00 Did the switch do anything else, apart from change the numbers on the front? -- Neil Bothwick Politicians are like nappies Both should be changed regularly, and for the same reason signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Monday 30 January 2012 04:23:27 David Relson wrote: You mean those small floppies? Remember the big 8 inchers? And those Winchester disks? -- Rgds Peter Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Jan 30, 2012 4:39 PM, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:29:47 +0700, Pandu Poluan wrote: My earliest new and shiny then would be a honkin' big desktop horizontal all-steel box, with a Turbo switch that toggles a front-panel (7-segment LED) display between 4.77 and 8.00 Did the switch do anything else, apart from change the numbers on the front? Well, it *did* change the speed from slow to not-that-slow :-P Do it several times back-to-back, and you'll lock the system to hardware reset ;-) Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
David Relson wrote: My earliest new and shiny then would be a honkin' big desktop horizontal all-steel box, with a Turbo switch that toggles a front-panel (7-segment LED) display between 4.77 and 8.00 And of floppies that really *are* floppy (5.25)... And of copy-protected diskettes and CopyIIpc and CopyWrite... As you can see, I have a severely traumatic childhood... Rgds, You mean those small floppies? Remember the big 8 inchers? In the early days, putting a computer together took more than a screw driver. Remember soldering irons and PC board kits with discrete components? I do believe I still have an S-100 bus machine in my attic. Regards, David I still have my breedboard. You know, the thing you run the traces with wires with. Heck, I got a couple small ones that still have circuits on them. One is a temp circuit that turns a fan on when it gets above a certain temp. I think my pump controller is still out there too. We used to have well water out here. It was nasty so we had a HUGE filter. I'm talking truck size filter. It held about 2,000 gallons of water if you take out for the filter media. Dang, that has been a while back there. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words! Miss the compile output? Hint: EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS=--quiet-build=n
[gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
Dale: I got a friend that wants me to put Linux on his rig. It has a floppy drive and he does use it for files he has on floppies. I haven't used a floppy in a long time. How good is support nowadays? hafi@i5_64 ~ $ mount /mnt/floppy/ mount: block device /dev/fd0 is write-protected, mounting read-only Works good as always. Sometimes i look on old treasures. For 5.25 i must use my old machine, because my new one vhas only a 3.5 drive. I will be putting KDE on it. Does it sort of automount or anything? I do not use automount. Or KDE. Or Gnome. Or XFCE... ;) Does it function anything like a CD/DVD? I am mounting a CD/DVD manually too. :-D Hartmut -- Usenet-ABC-Wiki http://www.usenet-abc.de/wiki/ Von Usern fuer User :-)
[gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On 01/29/2012 12:04 PM, Dale wrote: Mark Knecht wrote: A single USB thumb drive for $20 would likely hold every floppy he ever made, and maybe 10-20 times more. Why waste time making sorting through CDs, etc? H, super point. May suggest that. I got to boot something to see what this rig has in it. It may be a older system. I'm pretty sure I saw USB tho. I bet USB has a better life span than floppies too. Boy that's the truth. All of my three (working) old machines still have floppy drives, but my next one won't. And good riddance, too. Last time I made a floppy boot disk (years ago) I had to format about a dozen floppies before I found a good one :p BTW, the floppy drives I have don't send any interrupt when I insert a disk, so automounting is a non starter. Maybe the newer USB external floppy drives do, dunno, but I'm not tempted to try one.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 5:08 PM, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/29/2012 12:04 PM, Dale wrote: Mark Knecht wrote: A single USB thumb drive for $20 would likely hold every floppy he ever made, and maybe 10-20 times more. Why waste time making sorting through CDs, etc? H, super point. May suggest that. I got to boot something to see what this rig has in it. It may be a older system. I'm pretty sure I saw USB tho. I bet USB has a better life span than floppies too. Boy that's the truth. All of my three (working) old machines still have floppy drives, but my next one won't. Yeah, I haven't had a box with a floppy drive in quite some time. And good riddance, too. Last time I made a floppy boot disk (years ago) I had to format about a dozen floppies before I found a good one :p FWIW, you could probably have fixed them by using superformat to do a low-level format. And you coulda made yourself some disks capable of holding a whopping *two megabytes!* BTW, the floppy drives I have don't send any interrupt when I insert a disk, so automounting is a non starter. Maybe the newer USB external floppy drives do, dunno, but I'm not tempted to try one. Possibly. Thing is, the spec for floppies which plugged into PC clones didn't really allow for any kind of notification. It just plugged into an MFM controller, which swept the read/write head around to the commands of the host machine. I do know that the USB drives make assumptions about floppy sector/track layouts, which I found to be a bit of a bummer. -- :wq
[gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On 01/29/2012 02:41 PM, Michael Mol wrote: an MFM controller Michael, I think you must be older than you look :p
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:41 PM, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/29/2012 02:41 PM, Michael Mol wrote: an MFM controller Michael, I think you must be older than you look :p 28. Just got started earlier than most. Also studied history. :) -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:46:58 -0500 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:41 PM, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/29/2012 02:41 PM, Michael Mol wrote: an MFM controller Michael, I think you must be older than you look :p 28. Just got started earlier than most. Also studied history. :) So if you saw them when they were still new and shiny that means at the time you must have been 2 years old! Child prodigy? :-) -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 7:02 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:46:58 -0500 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:41 PM, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/29/2012 02:41 PM, Michael Mol wrote: an MFM controller Michael, I think you must be older than you look :p 28. Just got started earlier than most. Also studied history. :) So if you saw them when they were still new and shiny that means at the time you must have been 2 years old! Child prodigy? I didn't see anything new and shiny until I had the money to buy it myself...Though we did get a Tandy RLX1000 when I was five or six. When I was (I think) 12, I spent my $200 in savings to buy most of a second-hand K6-200 when the original owner was upgrading to (I think) a Celeron 300. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Jan 30, 2012 7:19 AM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 7:02 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:46:58 -0500 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:41 PM, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/29/2012 02:41 PM, Michael Mol wrote: an MFM controller Michael, I think you must be older than you look :p 28. Just got started earlier than most. Also studied history. :) So if you saw them when they were still new and shiny that means at the time you must have been 2 years old! Child prodigy? I didn't see anything new and shiny until I had the money to buy it myself...Though we did get a Tandy RLX1000 when I was five or six. When I was (I think) 12, I spent my $200 in savings to buy most of a second-hand K6-200 when the original owner was upgrading to (I think) a Celeron 300. My earliest new and shiny then would be a honkin' big desktop horizontal all-steel box, with a Turbo switch that toggles a front-panel (7-segment LED) display between 4.77 and 8.00 And of floppies that really *are* floppy (5.25)... And of copy-protected diskettes and CopyIIpc and CopyWrite... As you can see, I have a severely traumatic childhood... Rgds,
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 8:29 PM, Pandu Poluan pa...@poluan.info wrote: On Jan 30, 2012 7:19 AM, Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 7:02 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:46:58 -0500 Michael Mol mike...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:41 PM, walt w41...@gmail.com wrote: On 01/29/2012 02:41 PM, Michael Mol wrote: an MFM controller Michael, I think you must be older than you look :p 28. Just got started earlier than most. Also studied history. :) So if you saw them when they were still new and shiny that means at the time you must have been 2 years old! Child prodigy? I didn't see anything new and shiny until I had the money to buy it myself...Though we did get a Tandy RLX1000 when I was five or six. When I was (I think) 12, I spent my $200 in savings to buy most of a second-hand K6-200 when the original owner was upgrading to (I think) a Celeron 300. My earliest new and shiny then would be a honkin' big desktop horizontal all-steel box, with a Turbo switch that toggles a front-panel (7-segment LED) display between 4.77 and 8.00 And of floppies that really *are* floppy (5.25)... And of copy-protected diskettes and CopyIIpc and CopyWrite... As you can see, I have a severely traumatic childhood... PC, XT or AT? Fastest system I ever used what dropped down to 4.77MHz was a 33MHz 386.. -- :wq
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
My earliest new and shiny then would be a honkin' big desktop horizontal all-steel box, with a Turbo switch that toggles a front-panel (7-segment LED) display between 4.77 and 8.00 And of floppies that really *are* floppy (5.25)... And of copy-protected diskettes and CopyIIpc and CopyWrite... As you can see, I have a severely traumatic childhood... Rgds, You mean those small floppies? Remember the big 8 inchers? In the early days, putting a computer together took more than a screw driver. Remember soldering irons and PC board kits with discrete components? I do believe I still have an S-100 bus machine in my attic. Regards, David
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Floppy support question for old farts. lol
On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 08:29:47AM +0700, Pandu Poluan wrote: Michael, I think you must be older than you look :p 28. […] Same here. My earliest new and shiny then would be a honkin' big desktop horizontal all-steel box, with a Turbo switch that toggles a front-panel (7-segment LED) display between 4.77 and 8.00 And of floppies that really *are* floppy (5.25)... I still punched holes in 5.25 disks to make them two-sided in a 1541. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' I forbid any use of my email addresses with Facebook services. Today’s stress is the good old times of the day after tomorrow.
