Re:The floppy disk orphaned by Linux
by drblast on Friday July 26, 2019 @02:12PM
(#20536971)
You don't have to feel old! Unless you had to razor blade a cutout in a single sided 5.25" floppy so you could write to the back...
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I was apparently fancy, I was given a notcher when I got my C128 as a kid :P
Re:The floppy disk orphaned by Linux
by emanuensis on Friday July 26, 2019 @06:58PM
(#20539080)
Eh, i skipped the whole 5" era - i guess i saw them as too fragile. i developed and wrote my dissertation on 8"ers (mostly the "newer" ones with a capacity of 1MB).
But i also, in that same endeavor, used a TTY for I/O and used its tape punch (by holding the tape still) to edit snippets.
Of course earlier i used to play sonnets on an IBM 1620 (which was free for use after midnight) with sorted decks of Holleriths. To edit them i would use the adjacent keypunch (also holding to edit).
Hah. I remember using 5.25" floppies (just barely), but I was quite young at the time.
This was really something you could do? The back surface of the floppy was inaccessible, but was still usable despite not intentionally being so?
That reminds me of this, except real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwEuQAMVfZc