<p>…it has a slot for a floppy disk.</p>
<p>Found one the other day to show to DS since his computer only has DVD slots.</p>
<p>Big floppy floppy or little hard floppy?</p>
<p>We have one computer (still in occasional use) that has a big floppy floppy slot (and by that, I’m assuming you mean the 5.25" ones; we don’t have any computers which took 8" floppies). For that matter, we still have one computer – not set up at the moment – which not only takes 5.25" floppies, but the ones that it takes are single-sided and single density!</p>
<p>I saved a real floppy floppy (must be over 20 years old) - showed it my CS major son a couple of years ago so he’d know where the phrase floppy disk came from. We do have one old computer with an A drive but seldom if ever use it except to play card games and track down old photos that weren’t copied elsewhere. I think I have an old external A drive that came with my work laptop several years ago.</p>
<p>I showed a 5-inch floppy to my D and her friends - they thought it was “for music recording”. LOL. We have a laptop with a floppy drive (the 3-inch kind) which I used to do my taxes on, but then our antivirus program became bigger than its hard drive…</p>
<p>I showed my son an acoustical coupler modem where you would put the phone into these rubber thingies. I don’t even think they make phones that fit into these anymore. I think it was 300 baud. I have a 1200 baud hayes modem too. Think the Smithsonian is looking for donations :-)</p>
<p>NJres: little hard floppy. My computer is coming up on its 10th bday.</p>
<p>We have computers in the office from the 1980s that are still running. I have a computer on my desk with a magtape reader/writer and I still use it on a regular basis. I remember using paper tape ASR-33s. I would love to show one to the kids.</p>
<p>I went into Youtube and typed in ASR33 and they have a video of a PDP-11/40, a DecWriter (high-speed terminal at 30 CPS) and an ASR-33 banging away. Brings back memories of high-school. They also had a stack of RL-01s or RL-02s on the floor. These were huge hard disks that held 5 or 10 megabytes of storage. My son has seen a lot of the stuff from the 90s because I used to bring him into the office a lot but he hasn’t seen stuff from the 70s and 80s outside of museums.</p>
<p>BC, at least you’re not required to use punch-cards to program your FORTRAN homework! We’ll grab a beer together one day, and I can regal you some college stories of having to go to a separate building to collect my print-outs!</p>
<p>And I once took out an old slide rule to show the kids. I think they still are in shock trying to figure that thing out! :)</p>
<p>Don’t forget BASIC & COBOL! I still remember when I was in the infirmary with mono & not allowed to complete my final project until after winter break so had to get an “I” for CompSci. I tried & tried to make the program run & finally went to the prof in tears & he literally smacked his head because he had forgotten me & taken out the master program so my program COULDN’T run since there was no longer any data for it to run with!</p>
<p>That was the last CompSci course I took.</p>
<p>Not sure many folks can figure out slide rules. I recall using them in calculus when our HS teacher wanted to make us appreciate calculators.</p>
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<p>My high-school had a roomful of keypunch machines and I think that we were taught how to use them. They were mainly for students that wanted to learn it as a skill to be fulltime keypunch operators but I believe that we got exposure in the programming courses. We normally used a time-sharing machine which involved entry via ASR-33.</p>
<p>We used Punch cards at Boston College in the old days when they had an IBM 360. I think that I did some programming using cards but I quickly discovered RJE (remote job entry) that was accessed through their time-sharing system. I could just go into an editor and create a job and submit it to the mainframe. Remember, this was an editor that ran on a DecWriter - there was no screen so you didn’t have WYSIWYG editing - just character-cell editing. But it was way better than the KeyPunch machine. I did help out other students with their programs too and that involved Fortran even though I couldn’t program well in it.</p>
<p>Slide-rules were most useful in high-school science classes. We had calculators in college. I had several of them but they seem to have disappeared or gone bad (dirt or sand or something got in). There’s a place in the Northeast (either Maine or Canada) that sells Slide Rules. They are popular as graduation gifts for engineers. They collect new slide rules from around the world that were manufactured decades ago and resell them. I was thinking of buying one for my son.</p>
<p>There is a Java implementation of a slide rule floating around on the web but it’s nice to have one to use in your hands.</p>
<p>As an aside, we still have to support EBCDIC - those IBM mainframes are still around and they’re still selling them.</p>
<p>My home computer is a 9-year old Dell Dimension with a state of the art 9.5 gigabyte hard drive, and, yes, an A drive for hard floppy disks. It also has a zip drive; do they even make those anymore? No DVD drive; just CD-ROM. (Everything still works just fine with the addition of an external hard drive plugged into a USB port. A USB 1 port, of course.) I think it came with Windows Millenium, or maybe even Windows 98, but I switched to Windows XP a long time ago.</p>
<p>I thought this was going to be a joke thread.</p>
<p>My computer is so old…</p>
<p>… instead of an on/off switch, it has a crank.</p>
<p>… instead of an online calculator, it has a slide rule.</p>
<p>… instead of Flight Simulator, it has Chariot Simulator.</p>
<p>… the default font is hieroglyphics.</p>
<p>And I thought it was going to be a “Match Game” type:</p>
<p>All together now! “How old is it?”</p>
<p>… the error messages are in Latin.</p>
<p>… it has a Black and White Screen of Death.</p>
<p>… the printer uses clay tablets.</p>
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<p>I think it was Asteroids (arcade machine): They got “color” on the screen by putting yellow transparent film across the top inch or so of the screen.</p>
<p>One of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard was by a columnist in our local paper. He wrote that he remarked to his daughter “when I was young, the only computers we had were so big they nearly filled up an entire room.”</p>
<p>Little Emily’s eyes grew wide as she pondered that for several seconds before asking “how big was the mouse?”</p>
<p>Until just a few years ago I had a Hyundai computer with a 20 MB hard drive, and an amber monochrome monitor. It was pretty sweet, actually.</p>