Penn [Jillette] said "If not for Randi there would not be Penn & Teller as we are today."I still have PTSD from those Zip drives. You could hear your data disappearing into nothingness as you watched powerless the drive hacking away at your cartridge.
Are you referring to something like the GPRS staccato coming from speakers catching a cell phone call or the almost imperceptible flyback whine of a CRT?
Linux ext* series - mostly silent, but even periods of high disk usage tend to be on the quieter side - probably due to lots of caching
MacOS - continuous, low-pitched "gritty" sound
Windows FAT - periods of silence punctuated by occasional intermittent groans
Windows NTFS - low rhythmic grunting, more continuous than FAT
Windows 9x - rather quiet, although periods of heavy activity can produce quite high-pitched seeking sounds
Yep, was pretty easy to realize when you may have a bad sector on a floppy.
Even hard drives were more than loud enough you could tell when fragmentation was getting bad or the disk was starting to act suspect.
I/O Error :(
You listen to the initial slamming of the head to zero align it, then those happy little tuk, tuk sounds.
It all good, until it isn't!
Fun thought experiment. The 128 GB SD card on my desk could store a 1-bit bitmap of 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 pixels. Imagine shrinking that down to the size of the die, and how small each (logical) cell is.
Precise, but featureless digital clocks lack "soul" which you can actually see.
Humans can do amazing things! One of those things happens to be really precise, tiny parts literally willed into existing.
There was I believe at some point a game that shipped 1.5MB disks as a copy protection mechanism. But if you had this tool you could copy them anyway.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27412/how...
(Big fuckings to Wikipedia for erasing history, and kudos to archive.org for preserving it: https://web.archive.org/web/20241203124243/https://en.wikipe... )
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12768/wha...
2-5% more tracks, 12.5% more sectors.
And it also could involve manual manipulation of things holding the data.
I may not have ever worked with lots of switches or cards or big reel-to-reels, but for our family’s first computer we had a Radio Shack cassette player that I could hook to it to load software. It was an ordeal to put in a tape, rewind if necessary and coordinate pressing play on the cassette tape player with the load command I had to enter in to load a program. Those were the days!
I could also record and load my own programs from the tapes. Press the record and play buttons at the same time and hit enter on that keyboard!
Granted our first computer also had cartridges, but I only had a few for it.
It was like Christmas (or literally was Christmas) whenever we got new software from anywhere, whether it was from Radio Shack or a bookstore that had a few or more tapes available.
That’s why I started to program. It was fun, and it was the only way to get new software whenever I wanted it. Early on it was entering programs from the manual, but I learned quickly to write my own.
When I later got a 5 1/4” floppy drive, it was so awesome, especially once I got an Apple and could trade/copy disks from others, stores, a local college, and the library.
Even once we got a modem, you still had put the data somewhere, so it went on floppies.
Everything was physical and novel then. It was so awesome.
One of the better cassette loaders can be found in the 6809 based Tandy CoCo machines. When in the cassette times, I would stress test various machines.
My Atari was bog slow, reading a block at a time, with a pause between... And it was picky and really wanted the dedicated cassette drive. Not recommended at all..
Apples were pretty OK, along with the Tandy machines. The Tandy reader software, whoever wrote it, took full advantage of the nice CPU and 6 bit DAC. I could rest a finger on the tape, slowing it down, then listening to the wow, flutter and speed changes all over the place while the machine recovered. Almost always loaded correctly.
The Apples were not that robust, but worked well enough to not be a big bother.
Both Apple and Tandy machines had good commands for loading and saving right to regions of RAM.
On the Apple, with the spiffy Mini-assembler, it was possible to develop big programs a piece at a time, saving off stuff that worked.
Every so often, it made sense to read a bunch in and save off a nice chunk! Always felt good doing that.
Eventually, you load it all, patch it up, linker style, maybe moving bits around some, and then save it as a completed assembly program.
No source, just the data on the tape and what the mini-assembler would show you when you list memory.
Good times!
While I do have a full "digital" DJ setup to nothing beats (no pun intended) the satisfaction of mixing the black circular slabs with no crutches available in the digital world.
Every mistake and imperfection of the groove is there for the listener to hear, with little room for error.
AWS doesn't (or didn't) do April Fools day bits, so it didn't go anywhere, but the idea did amuse us in the team for a bit.
I have drives which can burn M-DVDs, but I'd need an M-BDR drive. The ones I have doesn't support M-DISCs.
I can totally see it working.
Aside from the fun of seeing all of the old contents of the drives, it’s also been fun to walk through the progression of storage devices through the years. Lots of cool sounds and form factors, including an early Conner hard drive (that I have unfortunately been unable to archive), which is built like a tank and makes some great noises as it spins up and seeks.
Also cool to learn a little more about how the various storage media worked. It all feels very simple when you abstract it all away into bytes and blocks, but there was some wild engineering in those things. If you stop to look back, it’s impressive that we’ve made it this far.
Do not recommend.
Back then, the storage is was much more 'real': it was slow, made noises, degraded noticeably because of stray magnetic fields etc, complicated mechanical parts. By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.