1.44MB was the effective capacity of floppies until they died out. There was stuff like VGACopy that could format them with higher capacity (since floppy controller access was fairly low level), but it was an uncommon thing among tinkerers, the disks themselves were not marketed for more than 1.44MB, and I doubt they were tested above their nominal capacity (and even at that they were not exactly known as super reliably).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Sholes-G...
What a marvel of engineering. All I got is plastic boxes. Thinking about it I'm not sure if having the next paragraph written by a different person is actually a good idea. Organizing your notes into a book undisturbed by better men is sure to impress a lot more. I would hope the final draft of my book about antique hardware wouldn't quote someone who remembers the bad parts better than the good.
why?
> I also remember when moderately long text had to be split across files (even multiple floppies if you were writing a book).
2MB is 2 million bytes, The average book is something like 0.5
> I remember having to choose what languages my OS installation was going to be able to display.
This is a bad thing?
> Farther back I remember not having the spare cash for...
lol, irrelevant!
> Our current generation of PCs is probably within a factor of two of the minimum spec necessary for robust machine translation and natural language interfaces.
I have no idea what you just said. People for the most part read/write text and watch videos. This would work much better if we eliminated compute entirely.
> I enjoy using the old hardware but it really doesn't do most of the jobs we have now.
imho the way to look at old hardware is to look at only the good features we've lost. For example, I cant think of anything I want from a c64 except from sprite collision and having menu entries starting with function keys [F1] because that worked so insanely fast compared to a mouse. The rest was just coping with the state of the art.