People don't know radios anymore:

Originally posted by @moonbus
Do you still have floppy disks? I mean the big ones that were really flexible.

You mean the 8"? We threw away the last ones at the institute a few years back, when the reader was irretrievably lost...

I still own a working 5(1/4)" floppy drive and a heap of disks, but the young coleagues get big eyes when you who them a 3 (1/2)" sik telling them you stored data files in the kb range 🙂

LOL, I started with a radio shack TRS-80 model 1, level 2.

There was no hard drive, and no floppy discs. It had a 16K ram, the operating system was on a chip, and software was stored and loaded into the computer from a cassette tape.

Needless to say, program code was very precise and tight. Not much room to play around in there.

And this was only back in the late seventies and early eighties, so not really all that long ago.

It is sobering to think that my Nokia C5 not-very-smart phone has more computing power than the mainframes NASA was using to steer the moonshots. Source code was very tight and elegantly efficient in those days. Now we have GB of RAM and bloat-code.

Originally posted by @moonbus
It is sobering to think that my Nokia C5 not-very-smart phone has more computing power than the mainframes NASA was using to steer the moonshots. Source code was very tight and elegantly efficient in those days. Now we have GB of RAM and bloat-code.

For sure. I was an Apollo tech, tracking and timing, but I saw the first single board comp, it was called Nova, and all TTL logic on a board about 2 feet by 2 feet or so, maybe a bit smaller. Not sure of the exact power of the device but it was in the vicinity of a commodore 64 MAYBE🙂 I'd like to see one, probably in some museum or other, to see if there was some kind of CPU chip or if it was totally TTL (a bunch of logic chips)

https://s1.postimg.org/5uj559l5tr/DSCN2114.jpg

https://s1.postimg.org/6tz8ifpmpr/DSCN2115.jpg

Yeah, I've got a bag of flopsies somewhere. Only one laptop with a floppy-drive in it to read them though.

Originally posted by @moonbus
Yeah, I've got a bag of flopsies somewhere. Only one laptop with a floppy-drive in it to read them though.

Jebesus, a laptop with a floppy drive. 1994?

My brother bought a Sony Betamax thingy when they first came out ( I think it was the mid 70s). He spent a small fortune on it. He still has it along with some LP sized discs. It still works. Boy did he "miss the boat" on that one. 😉

Originally posted by @great-big-stees
My brother bought a Sony Betamax thingy when they first came out ( I think it was the mid 70s). He spent a small fortune on it. He still has it along with some LP sized discs. It still works. Boy did he "miss the boat" on that one. 😉

You mean the one with the disc the size of a small car tire? complete with plastic storage case?

That technology is similar, if more primative, than DVD's and such so the mechanics would be similar, nothing like the rubber wheels and rubbing, spinning parts of a VHS or Beta tape machine so it makes sense it still works. Nothing touching the disc (I think), run by laser so there would be no wear on a spinning tape head or alignment problems like VHS or Beta.

Beta tape players were superior to VHS but fell victim to intense adverstising.

Superior in that the signal is reversed from VHS, that is to say a max signal is max brightness on Beta but opposite on VHS so that when a piece of the magnetic coating gets rubbed off for whatever reason the dropout on the screen is a white blip on VHS but a black blip on Beta so defects are less visible.

Still, all in all very complex mechanically, either one, and therefore prone to mechanical failure. Today's DVD's are much more reliable with 1/10th the mechanical parts and most of those are plastic.

Originally posted by @great-big-stees
My brother bought a Sony Betamax thingy when they first came out ( I think it was the mid 70s). He spent a small fortune on it. He still has it along with some LP sized discs. It still works. Boy did he "miss the boat" on that one. 😉

Say, does anyone here remember laserdisc and quad-stereo? My ex-brother-in-law was a salesman for that stuff. It was way over-priced, the consumer market wasn't ready for it, and the movie and music industries weren't producing enough interesting material to play on it. Bombed out big time.

Originally posted by @sonhouse
Jebesus, a laptop with a floppy drive. 1994?

Ca. 1997 I think. It is still creaking along with W2K (service pack 2) but the Ethernet port failed, so it's pretty much immune to Internet viruses/trojans/worms/ransomware attacks. It has a Com 1 port though, so I use it to configure Cisco kit via serial cable.

Originally posted by @moonbus
Ca. 1997 I think. It is still creaking along with W2K (service pack 2) but the Ethernet port failed, so it's pretty much immune to Internet viruses/trojans/worms/ransomware attacks. It has a Com 1 port though, so I use it to configure Cisco kit via serial cable.

Well I was close🙂 You do know you can get a nice used almost modern lap for a hundred bucks? In fact I did just that, a nice Lenovo which I use for my recording work. I record musicians and myself, the Lenova does a fine job on my DAW, Cakewalk Platinum Sonar, and an I/O box by Tascam with 8 channels of preamps for mics and built in limiter so you don't crash into the digital ceiling which an earlier version did, I had to ride the level knobs every second and still got the crashes, the new one does not do that, much easier to record with. I also use a Tascam Dr-44WL mini recorder, 4 track with 2 built in mics and 2 XLR pro mic plugs also with mic preamps and able to record both CD level, 44.1 K/16 bit and 96K/24 bit, well above CD level, the level of DVD sound of movies. I use that little guy to record my acoustic guitar compositions to upload to Sound Cloud where I have three hours of compositions there, 62 tracks now, can't do any more till I get a paying account. You get 3 hours of upload time for free.

I like acoustic guitar. Is your music accessible or private audience only?

Originally posted by @mwmiller
LOL, I started with a radio shack TRS-80 model 1, level 2.

There was no hard drive, and no floppy discs. It had a 16K ram, the operating system was on a chip, and software was stored and loaded into the computer from a cassette tape.

Needless to say, program code was very precise and tight. Not much room to play around in there.

And this was only back in the late seventies and early eighties, so not really all that long ago.

TRS-80 FTW!

That was an awesome little fat keyboard / computer. It had cheesy games playable thru a cartridge slot on the side. It had my first programming language: Color Basic. And it had a CGA video adapter; 4 whole colors on the screen, simultaneously! (mind...blown...at the time)

You had color! Oh, we used to dream of color. When I learned BASIC and Fortran IV on the HP timeshare system, all we had was a dark screen with a bright green cursor. No mouse, of course.