nixCraft 🐧Forget sleek USBs! This clunky device was once the pinnacle of tech. Why does that look like a toaster?? 🤔
Bob Thomson@nixCraft can hear the noise looking at that. They would seem so so slow now but coming from an 8 bit micro and cassettes they were amazing.
Scraft161@nixCraft
More like the computer's mailbox if anything.
More like the computer's mailbox if anything.
Starman@nixCraft how many mb can it hold?
Bonkers@GoldenStar @nixCraft about a megabyte. But it was plenty at the time.
Dark Photon Studio@GoldenStar @nixCraft Megabytes? Try kilobytes.
hetoug@GoldenStar @nixCraft 120kb per side. You had to flip them over - if you had the double sided disks
ZitruskeksIt's a IBM 6580 Displaywriter System from 1980 with a IBM 6360 dual 8inch drive storing 2 x 1.2MB on two floppies.
Joana de Castro Arnaud@GoldenStar @nixCraft Up to 1.2 MB, for the later versions; same for 5 1/4'' diskettes. 3 1/2'' diskettes went up to 1.44 MB.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
For comparison, a single photo taken by a mobile phone would have to be split into 4 or 5 diskettes to fit!
Cyber PingU 
@GoldenStar @nixCraft "mb" 😂 They were 1.2 mb when in high density format, otherwise the half or less
Dreit@GoldenStar @nixCraft milibits? A lot of them!
Condor Puma SerpienteI miss it some days
trisweb@nixCraft the real question is, why doesn’t more of our tech capture the sublime toaster aesthetic?
Mads Fog Albrechtslund@nixCraft Until recently (like 5 years ago) the US military still used 8” floppies to coordinate nuclear lunches:
https://www.engadget.com/2019-10-18-us-military-nuclear-missiles-floppy-disks.html
Alexander Dyas@nixCraft I had a job for a summer back in the day repairing disk drives, albeit 3 1/2”. I had to align the heads with a special, very expensive disk with an analogue signal on it. I’d see some sort of measurement on the screen of the test PC, and I’d have to twiddle a screw on the heads to align them.
That was just at the cusp of it still being worth doing manually, and not just replacing the drive.
I can still smell the PC peripheral dust, no other dust smells like that.
synlogic@nixCraft once ladies had tried the 8 inch floppy it was hard for them to settle for the 5.25 inchers
Alexey Kudryavtsev@nixCraft in near future:
Forget Devin, in the past, code used to be written with the help of people 😂
Forget Devin, in the past, code used to be written with the help of people 😂
zwangseinweisung
Francis 🏴☠️ Gulotta@nixCraft the question should be; why doesn’t modern tech look like toasters?
@nixCraft To be fair, i'd prefer that compared to the crappy card reader thingy i actually have on my desk.
Laukidh@nixCraft that floppy drive is so tiny compared to the one I had on dad’s TI-99
T Alex Beamish@nixCraft Well, an 8" floppy *was* high tech in '77 when I started programming -- a *removable* disk? So advanced! And the 5 1/4" diskette was so small and cute when it came out a few years later.
theM0ntarCann0n@nixCraft not only a toaster but also a VERY stoned one.
🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 🐧 🥦@nixCraft Looks like a toaster.
Androcat@nixCraft I can't tell if she has a small hand and a 4,25" or a huge hand and an 8".
Probertd8@nixCraft Now those discs were floppy!
Meowcity.club's domain got revoked@nixCraft Idk abt you but I'd rather have more than 1.2 MB data than have toaster
Mickrob9777Wonder whatever happened to all those floppies
madmax@nixCraft hostname "localtoast"
Ridley Kemp@nixCraft Used to run CPM off those things.
mmphosis
Mike Hicks@nixCraft Well, much like a toaster's heating elements, the motor is running directly off the line voltage
hittamul
Paul.@nixCraft I used them. THey were good.
Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴♂️📷 🗺️@nixCraft
I never used 8 inch floppies, I started with 5.25 inch ones
I remember there was a tech decvice called a toaster, something to do with images I think
I never used 8 inch floppies, I started with 5.25 inch ones
I remember there was a tech decvice called a toaster, something to do with images I think
Phyxis@nixCraft @the5thColumnist VideoToaster, Amiga. Super popular with cable companies.
Jonathan Kamens 86 47@nixCraft My son does lighting for school plays. During a recent conversation with him about the risk of bulk updates to the computerized lighting cues, I asked if it was possible for them to back up the cues in case they screwed something up and needed to restore from backup. He said yes, the lighting board has a floppy drive they use for backups. 👀
LittleScrapsoftheNorth@nixCraft yup I used one of those on my first office job in the 80’s.
xs4me2Sigh… how time flies…
Zen Zero ☯️ ◯
kleinertod
Amanda Hugankiss@nixCraft I seem to remember they could hold a massive 512k?
Zoidberg Rodríguez
Niclas Hedhman8" floppies were in fact so floppy that if the slot were horizontal you needed two hands to insert them. I never worked with those other than seeing them used at customer/suppliers of my first job.
The 5.25" floppies were less floppy and were used both horizontally and vertically.
Don't recall the size of the 8", but guess it was in the ~200kB range.
5.25" were 90kB (single sided, single density), 180kB (single sided, double density) and 360kB (DS/DD). Also some other odd formats.