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A 144 (no decimal!) MB floppy!?!?

Really? I didn't know there were people on here younger than me. Or maybe I did but forgot. I started on here when I was 14, but started interest(and even bought a system) at 13. I'm 16 now, headed to 17 in May. Wow. I love how on the forums our age doesn't matter. Just a bunch of computer geeks together talking about our hobby and lending a hand.

--Ryan
On the internet itself age doesn't matter. However. I kind of like being the youngest here. I can get away with more! :chainsaw: :jumping6:
 
Bubble memory?
I listed bubble memory, or do you not rememer bubble memory? When it came out everyone was gaga about how it would revolutionize storage.

Never amounted to much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory

Other than Cauzin, weren't there other weird on paper formats?

Can't believe I forgot the classic:

Paper Tape

Not to mention all the different tape formats that have come and gone for backup purposes.
 
I listed bubble memory, or do you not rememer bubble memory? When it came out everyone was gaga about how it would revolutionize storage.


Bubble memory is ghetto. You can build it yourself. I've seen little plastic bottles full of the little magnetic cores that you would spend hours stringing on to little wires and soldering them to the circuit board. Then you cross your fingers and prepare for the smoke tes-- :boom:
 
Bubble memory is ghetto. You can build it yourself. I've seen little plastic bottles full of the little magnetic cores that you would spend hours stringing on to little wires and soldering them to the circuit board. Then you cross your fingers and prepare for the smoke tes-- :boom:
That's core memory. Bubble memory is solid state. Kind-of a variation on the EPROM.
 
Bubble memory is ghetto. You can build it yourself. I've seen little plastic bottles full of the little magnetic cores that you would spend hours stringing on to little wires and soldering them to the circuit board.

Are you thinking of CORE memory. I don't think bubble memory works this way. Bubble memory uses a pattern of magnetic bars imprinted on the surface of garnet.

Not something I'm likely to try.
 
Whoops :whoops: ! I got confused. Core memory is ghetto, then.


VCRs as mass storage devices? Could work. Anyone ever tried that?

It was, as a backup medium. I used one with a VHS VCR at one time, but it was slow--and of course, didn't do verify-with-write, so it had to incorporate quite a bit of redundancy.

Delay line memory--mercury and magnetostrictive. Williams tubes. Thin-film. Capacitive and core-rope ROM.

I think this is what Grady Booch calls "tribal memory".
 
LS120 Meg drive remembered

LS120 Meg drive remembered

Of the large size floppies, (not dimensional but storage space), I remember the LS120. I bought one of those crappy drives at Best Buy at a premium price back in the 90's, and the 120 meg floppies were expensive as well. (I think around $10. each, as I recall and the drive was like $190. or so. Yikes! But it seemed to be the way to go, at the time. I needed more and more storage space. Well, the LS120, at least in my situation, was more than slow - it dragged on and on. It took forever to get even a directory off the floppy. I learned to really dislike the thing. But I got myself locked into the system by purchasing so many disks that I couldn't get out. I had too much invested in the blasted things.
Anyway, here's an old Cyrix powered 133 Mhz machine with my LS120 (it's the whiter looking drive toward the center). It appears just like a standard 1.44 M floppy, and it will even work as a standard 1.44 M floppy drive, but it's specialty was the 120 M floppies.
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/picture.php?albumid=14&pictureid=287
Here's a 120 meg floppy for it. I saved about a half dozen of these things for posterity. They work also as a 1.44 meg floppy. A tad wasteful, - kind of like having a silver plated floppy :)
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/picture.php?albumid=14&pictureid=288
 
Of the large size floppies, (not dimensional but storage space), I remember the LS120.

They work also as a 1.44 meg floppy. A tad wasteful, - kind of like having a silver plated floppy :)

I use a USB LS-120 drive as my primary floppy drive on my OS X Mac. I don't need it often; but when I do, it's useful. Not as sleek as the newer slimline USB bus-powered floppy drives, but I get the bonus of 120 MB of storage if I really need it to transfer to my non-Internet-connected network. (My server is an older Intel-branded one that came with an LS-120 as its standard floppy drive.
 
The LS120 does spin a standard 1.44M (sic) floppy much faster than a standard legacy drive, so it it does have an advantage (at least for the IDE versions). It won't do "funny" formats, such as you'd find on CP/M systems, but it will read (but not format) PC98 "DOS-V" diskettes, just like most USB floppy drives.

Anyone tried an IDE LS240 on Windows XP or Vista?
 
The LS120 does spin a standard 1.44M (sic) floppy much faster than a standard legacy drive, so it it does have an advantage (at least for the IDE versions). It won't do "funny" formats, such as you'd find on CP/M systems, but it will read (but not format) PC98 "DOS-V" diskettes, just like most USB floppy drives.

Anyone tried an IDE LS240 on Windows XP or Vista?

I used an IDE LS120 drive in an XP box but it was for reading a bunch of floppies but it felt a lot faster as opposed to a regular floppy drive.
I tried booting the NeXTSTEP installation and driver floppies and it took a quarter of the time it normally took me.
 
Of the large size floppies, (not dimensional but storage space), I remember the LS120. I bought one of those crappy drives at Best Buy at a premium price back in the 90's, and the 120 meg floppies were expensive as well. (I think around $10. each, as I recall and the drive was like $190. or so. Yikes! But it seemed to be the way to go, at the time. I needed more and more storage space. Well, the LS120, at least in my situation, was more than slow - it dragged on and on. It took forever to get even a directory off the floppy. I learned to really dislike the thing. But I got myself locked into the system by purchasing so many disks that I couldn't get out. I had too much invested in the blasted things.
Anyway, here's an old Cyrix powered 133 Mhz machine with my LS120 (it's the whiter looking drive toward the center). It appears just like a standard 1.44 M floppy, and it will even work as a standard 1.44 M floppy drive, but it's specialty was the 120 M floppies.
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/picture.php?albumid=14&pictureid=287
Here's a 120 meg floppy for it. I saved about a half dozen of these things for posterity. They work also as a 1.44 meg floppy. A tad wasteful, - kind of like having a silver plated floppy :)
http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/picture.php?albumid=14&pictureid=288
But they look cool! Interesting stuff
 
My first mass storage that I owned was a Techtran dual-cassette drive. Meant to take the place of paper tape, was RS232C and could go to 2400 bps and do tape searches and offline tape-to-tape copy. It used what amounts to audio cassettes.

Anybody forget mag card? NCR CRAM, IBM Mag card typewriters. IBM Photostore (the one I knew was at Lawrence Livermore). Not to mention Data cell drives and that peculiar IBM mag tape-in-a-beercan stored in a pigeon coop thingie (the model number escapes me). Dynamic shift registers, magnetostrictive delay, acoustic delay memories? EBAM? SCROLL?

Bubble memory generated a bit of a buzz, but it was short-lived after it was obvious that (a) controlling the beast wasn't simple (b) it was a circulating memory so random access wasn't blazingly fast (c) it was power-hungry and (c) it was expensive.

The military types liked it for its ruggedness. But there's no accounting for taste.
 
Did someone mention cassette tape?

Also, when I was volunteering at a computer workshop we got to beta test a lot of hardware and software. One piece of software I wish I still had was Adobe Photoshop 3 for BeOS.

However, one piece of beta hardware we had was a floppy drive that had 10MB floppies. It could read/write normal 1440 KB floppies as well. We had it hooked up to an old Mac Quadra.

My dad worked with an IBM hard drive when he was working at ROLM. It was the size of a cloths washer. Had 6 platters on a giant drum that you'd load into the carrier. They used it to transfer programs from their punch card compiler/computer.

He still has a few programs on cards and one on paper tape. :)

I used to joke that the first computer virus was a couple of grad students and a trip wire.
 
I still use magneto optical storage.
I got a 650mb SMO-S501 MO drive with a single double sided cartridge I use for backing up one of my SGI systems and another smaller 128mb drive I use to store stuff on my pc or mac.
 
Also, when I was volunteering at a computer workshop we got to beta test a lot of hardware and software. One piece of software I wish I still had was Adobe Photoshop 3 for BeOS.

That would be freakin' sweet. I love BeOS - have it currently installed on a PIII Dell, and am in the process of installing / dual-booting BeOS PPC on a Power Computing clone (not as easy as it sounds, especially considering that BeOS was originally intended to be Mac-Centric).

I have something that I've never seen before, a dual Bernoulli drive. Made by Iomega and in the same style case as an IBM 5150, which is a clue to it's age. Don't have any disks for it, but I doubt it works.
 
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