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

  • jsveiga
    link
    fedilink
    English
    229
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    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.

    • redimk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      331 year ago

      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
        link
        English
        241 year ago

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

        • @Potatos_are_not_friends
          link
          English
          61 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.

        • @cousinofjah
          link
          English
          21 year ago

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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        101 year ago

        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
          link
          English
          21 year ago

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

          Fourty-three 3.5" disks.

      • @dirthawker0
        link
        English
        51 year ago

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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        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

      • @PlutoniumAcid
        link
        English
        21 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
      link
      English
      141 year ago

      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.

      • jsveiga
        link
        fedilink
        English
        151 year ago

        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
          link
          English
          21 year ago

          I hope you smacked her for that lol.

      • @Thteven
        link
        English
        91 year ago

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

    • jungle
      link
      English
      101 year ago

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

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)
        link
        fedilink
        English
        71 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
        link
        English
        31 year ago

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

        Gaming heaven.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      81 year ago

      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.

        • jungle
          link
          English
          21 year ago

          Logo wasn’t a game but a programming language.

          • jsveiga
            link
            fedilink
            English
            61 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]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        51 year ago

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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 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
        link
        English
        11 year ago

        I remember that! As others have posted, Logo.

    • @BilboBargains
      link
      English
      41 year ago

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