I do miss some of the sounds that let you know machines were doing something - but we also had indication lights, too - mostly gone now, for disk drives. Heck my first laptop had a second LCD to show battery level without the machine even being on.

Many modern laptops still do this though. Dell XPS had some LEDs on the side and a button on the case that when pressed would light up the LEDs as a percentage indicator of battery charge, and my 2 year old Lenovo has this feature built into the motherboard EC controller and Bios that when I press any key on the keyboard when the laptop is OFF, it wakes the laptop's own display to show battery percentage. Modern laptops have many neat features.

0 - https://ttkb.co/soft/drivelight/

Some large OEMs with the resources to do the design effort could use a large passive heatsink on even surprisingly late processor (i. e. Pentium 4) because they could make a holistic design with shrouds and baffles and know you were getting just enough airflow from a case fan elsewhere to keep the CPU within spec.

Early ATX designs, in fact, were often based on "the PSU has its fan placed so that it will draw air over the CPU heatsink and out the back"

Enthusiasts, obviously, went for brute force designs.

It provided some hope that an unresponsive computer was in the middle of a monumental task. Any flicker of light or change on cadence was reassurance that progress was being made and would complete should you wait just a little bit longer.

For kid me, the sound of floppy drives, hard drives, and optical drives were simply mesmerizing to witness. Those were the sounds of the computer performing magic before my eyes and ears.

When I was on call, however, pager storms resulted in the phone being muted quickly. Nothing helps the stress of triaging production issues like the high pitched scream of suppressors and cancellers being disabled.

It's silly at this point in time but windows 3.11 (the first version of windows I used) also feel decidedly "modern" where as DOS is "old" (even though less than 10 years separated my first experiences with them, and both were way longer than 10 years ago).

The HD floppy is to formatted 1.44MB, not 1.2MB, and unformatted capacity was 2.0MB.

People did not program word processors themselves as they didn't exist, typewriters did.

Later, pre disk, magazines type-ins and software on (magnetic) tapes were common means of software distribution.

How to tell me your under 30 without telling me you're under 30 :D

Inside a hard disc drive, there are aluminum or glass discs.

Everything is relative. Relative to 8 inch floppies, 5.25 inch ones aren’t very floppy. 8 inch ones visually bend under their own weight.

In the meanwhile, I'll have your geek card. Thx!

That's funny. I had to laugh that off.

Now the type in magazines at the time were amazing - especially with error checking "co-routines" to make sure you did it right. But there were bugs in printed material that a month or two later you could fix from the errors section. Best use case of a subscription model assuming you didn't want to fix it yourself or redo it all etc... Also as a side to that there was a barcode scanner for the code for a few publications.

Fun times.

[1] 2 sides / disk * 18 tracks / side * 80 sectors / track * 512 bytes / sector = 1,474,560 bytes = 1440 * 1024 bytes

The unformatted capacity isn't measured in MB. A floppy is analog media.

The controller deals with an analog signal from/to the floppy drive, which in turn is translated with the floppy's surface itself through the drive's header.

There's a variety of physical formats by which to coerce data into tracks.

https://adventofcomputing.com/flop-cast/

Not quite. The Disk II Interface Card wasn't available till 1978. It supported two drives. But the card and drives were options. A couple ads re-affirming my memory:

https://brian.carnell.com/articles/2021/apple-ii-ad-1978/

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d9/92/81/d99281c7517692b48093...

The second ad has this copy:

> Apple II'™ is a completely self-contained computer system with BASIC in ROM, color graphics, ASCII key board, light-weight, efficient switching power supply and molded case. It is supplied with BASIC in ROM, up to 48K bytes of RAM, and with cassette tape, video and game I/O interfaces built-in. Also included are two game paddles and a demonstration cassette.

I owned an Apple II fully loaded and upgraded to a II+. (I actually still have most of it in a closet and someday need to get it functional again.)

The Disk II Interface Card was another one of Woz's legendary designs:

https://www.bigmessowires.com/2021/11/12/the-amazing-disk-ii...

Also it's not exactly remarkably virtuous to be willing to obsolete an old thing when you own the new thing. Most companies even artificially obsolete their stuff as fast as possible just to make you buy the new thing. Then I saw the domain. Why was this even posted?