Re:Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk
by soylentcola on Friday February 26, 2016 @08:39AM
(#11181264)
One of the things that drove me nuts using the earlier Macs at my college was the lack of an eject button. Sure, I understand the reasoning now, but when some crappy Hypercard project I was bungling made the computer freeze, I had no way to remove the floppy short of rebooting the whole computer and waiting or hunting around for a paperclip to push into the little manual eject hole.
Still, seeing how many people in my office will just pull USB flash drives without ejecting them I almost see the appeal now.
That latter bit is actually so common that Windows was changed to accommodate it, as Raymond Chen wrote at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031216-00/?p=...
I loved how only of my early optical drives had a notch tastefully designed into the front that allowed me to pry the drive open with any sufficiently rigid object, rather than deal with the "pointy thing into small hole" that everything later on had.
My first interaction with a Mac (late '90s), I watched the Mac user:
* Drag the disc icon to the trash can to eject the disc.
* Pull the power cord since there were no other way they knew of to turn it off.
Mac's reputation as a usable computer was severely impacted, needless to say :).
After hearing Woz talk about how the early Macs were resistant to malware because most of the OS lived in ROM, i find myself thinking that rather than the Amiga being the last of the "micros" the Mac ended up being so. This in that it was designed more like a C64 than a PC.
I hope that ~25 years later that these Internet points I grant you can ease the pain of your memory.
My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac.
I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that looked something like a game. It wasn't, and I went to hit the ... wait, there's no eject button?
After a fruitless few minutes during which I failed to notice the eject key on the keyboard (of all places!) I eventually opted for tweezers, and gently teased the floppy out of the drive.
Imagine my surprise when I restarted the Mac to find it was unable to start, having apparently completely forgotten about it's own HD! The thing had to go back for servicing before it would even boot properly, iirc.
My reputation as the house's resident computer expert was severely impacted, needless to say.