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
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.
God damn I'm old.
Hear, hear.
As in, wha? Did you say something? taps cane on the floor
Come in!
Your belt onions are looking spiffy today
Which was the style at the time...
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).
I remember having a CD burner, dvd burner, floppy drive, and Zip drive for those rare occasions.
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.
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.
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.
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!" :)
My parents first computer was 3 feet tall and cost $30,000. I liked to play frogger on it lmao.
Don't forget the cassettes before that. (Sinclair 1000 / ZX-81)
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.
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.
That’s it! Ha ha wow haven’t seen that since elementary school.
Interesting they look like three and a half inch floppies out of their sleeves
That's definitely what it is, but why was it removed from the plastic housing? It would never last long without the protection, and even if it was being bulk-written to, you wouldn't do it outside the housing.
Very strange.
Someone probably had no idea what they were doing. Like, at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros
The box is from some fancy Apple software from long before most of you were born.
The contents are just the skeletal remains of assorted species of the Save Icon.
Nobody ever asks why it's the C:\
Pour one out for A:\ and B:\
Originally, personal computers only had a floppy disk drive, which got letter A, and later models could have two floppy drives, so A and B. When hard disk drives appeared they got assigned to letter C (and typically D for a secondary HDD). E then became customary for optical drives (CD-ROM, DVD-ROM etc.)
My heart aches for those floppies’ demise.
Yeah, as others have said, floppies without cases.
Just to be clear, floppy cases were never meant to be removed. They were glued together in such a way that it wasn't possible to take the case off without breaking the case. And these disks can't be read without the cases. Basically, the cases were considered part of the disk (just like the plastic casing of a an audio cassette or VHS is integral to the functioning of the medium.) I have to imagine whoever took these out of their cases had a misunderstanding about how computers on the order of thinking a CD-ROM tray is a drink holder or trying to print a document by laying the monitor face-down on the bed of a copy machine.
If you wanted to read the 3.5" disks, you might be able to do so if you can procure a proper floppy drive and some sacrificial floppy disks. It'd probably take some finesse and careful gluing skills.
But that all assumes that these disks haven't lost their data already. Floppies tend to just plain old degrade over time. So the data very is very likely heavily corrupted.
I have heard of really specialized hardware to read data off of degraded disks, but that's probably "you have to know a guy/gal" level of specialization. If you really wanted to go that route, I think you'd probably want to know if what you have there is "valuable" (basically not already available on Archive.org and also interesting like unreleased source code or something.) But if you thought you had something like that and wanted to pursue it, you could @ Jason Scott (@textfiles@mastodon.archive.org) on Mastodon. If anybody has a lead on how to read those, it's him.
They were probably disassembled for showcase. They weren't the most resilient of things and eventually enough area of the disk would degrade as to make the disk unusable. Eventually as in, really fast. Every office had a pile of defective floppies marked as corrupted to prevent people from losing their data to them. Essentially you could format and write on them but reading was impossible or returned garbled data. They were comonly disassembled to showcase how they worked and to experiment as they were a cheap source of ferromagnetic coated cellulose.
@TootSweet @TheScribbler what monster did this
Jason Scott! I can't express how honored I am that your apparently first post on Lemmy is a response to me!
Also, yes, monstrous. ;)
That looks like a floppy disk with the protective casing removed...
might be a floppy disk, but without the case
As everyone else said, they’re floppy disks with the plastic case removed.
Since you found them in a church, could they have belonged to a church bell system? I’ve seen other church bell systems in the past where the songs came on weird mediums.
This is just a random guess, I don’t know why anyone would remove the casing.
either that or the porn is hidden there
Beagle Bros was a software company that developed useful quirky software for the Apple ][ computer. They had a schtick that all of their manuals and promotional materials were styled like flyers from "old West" salesmen. They were actually pretty funny if you were in on the joke.
12 megabytes of RAM, 500 megabyte hard drive, built-in spreadhseet capabilities and a modem that transmits it over 28,000 bps
Well, I feel old.
3.5” floppy discs which have been removed from their plastic shells.
Wow this makes me feel old
Looks like floppy disks without the shell. How big are they?
the disk that lies inside a floppy disk (a 5.25 floppy disk judging by the size)
Looks like the physical storage medium of a 3 1/2 inch diskette. Which is usually called a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk, except with this one it's a bit of a misnomer, since this iteration has a rigid case, unlike the older 8 inch and 5 1/4 inch versions. Or should have, it appears to be removed in OP's case.
The disk itself is flexible, hence the floppy disk. In contrast a hard disk had rigid platters, hence hard. The outer casing has nothing to do with it.
Thanks, everyone. I thought that's what they were, but thought there was maybe something I didn't know. I think we'll probably just trash them.
Yeah, floppy without the case was my immediate guess too. Not sure why they would have been stored this way though. It's a bit weird.
old floppy disks of different sizes. the bottom looks like 5 1/4" the ones on top with the metal centers are all 3 1/2". Both standards needed sleeves to be read. Many of these are likely trash now but that wouldn't stop me from trying to load them.
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