• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

For the Laughs and tears.... 5.25" drive is thought to be a cd-rom

salamontagne

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 27, 2010
Messages
245
Location
Harwinton,CT
A good friend of mine just left...We'd been chit-chatting all morning when my friends 8088 came up.......

"Wow, thats the weirdest looking cd-rom ive ever seen!"

Shes only about 6 years younger then me, sadly....
 
Sadly,that's not such a unique statement.Most folks have never seen the 1.2MB Floppy Disks.(Or any "Floppy Disks" at all!)The very idea of a "Disk" holding so little information is VERY foreign.
cgrape2
 
Well honestly they are the same size and fit in the same bay. One of the Dosboxen in front of me has both a CD and a 5 1/4 and apart from the "handle" on the FD they look about the same.

In fact I've made a similar mistake. Sometimes I don't look at things so carefully and there was a computer sitting in someone's shed and I agreed to take it, while thinking it was fairly old because it had a 5 1/4 floppy drive. My son, standing beside me, pointed out that it was one of those CD drives with no drawer and just a slot. Too bad. Oh well, I got a couple of parts anyway.
 
I suppose there never were 5.25" floptical disks? :-D

attachment.php


And here I thought all along that you could put in either a floppy 'or' a CD!

^That's a joke, of course :)
 
I'm actually surprised that that one kid in the youtube video Tezza once posted (at least I think it was him...) didn't put a CD into the drive. I guess it just didn't fit in right.
 
And here I thought all along that you could put in either a floppy 'or' a CD!
You mean you can't ??? Sure you can; I've done it - sometimes hard to get out again though...

What I find funny and sad is when some people think it's funny and sad that someone else isn't as "smart" as _they_ themselves think they are...
 
A caddy-loading CD drive would be just as foreign to today's young eyes.

Apple-CDdrive-300.jpg


Also there are some early CD-ROM drives where the entire drive slides out when you push eject, instead of just the loading tray.
 
A caddy-loading CD drive would be just as foreign to today's young eyes.

I actually saw one when I visited someone the year I stayed in the US. However, the slot wasn't that stylish, and I think it was just using general SCSI and not particulay made for apple...
 
attachment.php


And here I thought all along that you could put in either a floppy 'or' a CD!

^That's a joke, of course :)
Actually, I had an idea like this.
Sometimes I'm thinking it would be cool to have a modern PC which looks like some vintage PC. I think it's perfectly doable (though a lot of work) to fit a modern mobo into some vintage case, but there's one big problem: modern PC can't exist without a CD/DVD/BD drive, and such drives definitely don't look vintage.
Solution? Find one of those "slot" drives, and disguise it as a 5.25" FDD by attaching an FDD front panel to it!
 
Actually, I had an idea like this.
Sometimes I'm thinking it would be cool to have a modern PC which looks like some vintage PC. I think it's perfectly doable (though a lot of work) to fit a modern mobo into some vintage case, but there's one big problem: modern PC can't exist without a CD/DVD/BD drive, and such drives definitely don't look vintage.
Solution? Find one of those "slot" drives, and disguise it as a 5.25" FDD by attaching an FDD front panel to it!

Done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68_z80yZ2w8
 
What an awesome video link!
I love stuff like that, really impressive :)

Now, what I'd like is a PC with 8-track, cassette, and a 45 & LP record slots - for all my retro music needs :)

I have an 8-track, LP player (also plays 45s), and tape deck hooked up to my PC, guess now I just need to integrate them...
 
I was explaining my work in getting the 4FDC working for 5.25" drive support to a fellow Computer Science student, who proceeded to explain to me how the 3.5" floppy disk was created because it was shirtpocket size, even though it's capacity (at 1.44 MB) was a fraction of the 5.25" floppy. I had a hard time convincing him that there was actually less data stored on 8" floppies than on 3.5" HD floppies.
 
A caddy-loading CD drive would be just as foreign to today's young eyes.

Apple-CDdrive-300.jpg


Also there are some early CD-ROM drives where the entire drive slides out when you push eject, instead of just the loading tray.

We had one of those for our IIsi back in the day, during some move in the late '90s i lost the caddy and threw the drive away like an idiot, i id like to get ahold of one again
 
The first time I saw a caddy CD drive I went "wow, something that takes this shoddy optical garbage and makes it almost as durable as a (3.5") floppy! too bad disks don't come in these by default, and there isn't a DVD drive that takes them.."

I had a guy over (not a friend, really) who I decided to play a computer game with. I was about 9 years old (he was like 16) and don't recall what game it was. I hopped on a machine and he hopped on a machine. I informed him that he must insert a CD into the drive. I assumed he knew what he was doing, but apparently not. Instead of asking what to do, he promptly took the CD and shoved it into the 5.25" floppy drive so far that it couldn't be retrieved from the outside, and then closed the handle. ;/
 
Back
Top