Back when I , was young..

[ribbets]

An old friend, brought over a IBM AT that I sold her (new) many ,many years ago.. It won't boot anymore.. can you fix it ,my grand daughters love to play with it... And I said "HEAVEN.. Please let me take it apart and maybe, just maybe.. (dead battery) No Way,, Since august 1985 , this computer has been used, at least once a year. straight DOS, no windows but a menu generator called Point and Shoot, which I still had. Can you believe that the hard drive finally crashed because it was full... truncated some of the files and I managed to recover most of them and re-installed some of them.. and best of all ,after three hours of work.. It booted to " Welcome to the Hal 9000 ",Dave don't touch that", " Do you want todays almanac and horescope"
FANTASTIC !!!!!
Wonder if anything built today would last 21 years, with just a $ 1.50 worth of batteries and a few clicks on the keyboard ?
Dave

 

[carlsson]

In the compuer club, we had a joke:
If the hard drive is full, type D: and you'll get another hard drive!

In many cases, it was true as well!

 

[chuckcmagee]

That D: drive thing was true very frequently in the mid 90s. I would think I was pulling their leg, and, boing, there really was another partition on the drive. Vendors loved to split up the hard drive for awhile.

 

[atari2600a]

#include <twocents.h>

The FAT16 filing system exceeded what hard disks grew to back then (hence FAT32, which was replaced by NTFS in Win2000 due to FAT being too slow)

This is why multiple partitions was needed. (Just thought I'd mention this. I know it's pretty obvious, but I'm, um, I don't know, obsessive compulsive about completeness I guess?)

 

[chuckcmagee]

Hehe, yes, all us geeks already know why they went "partition happy". I did the same on purpose for some time, then I got tired of all the "left over" space at the end of each partition. No way to consolidate the unused space (no easy way, anyway).

 

[Micom 2000]

Old of course is relative, saith the most elder on the VCF. I have many boxes predating 1985, some with hard drives which happily boot up when I ressurect them. On my comparatively newer Atari Mega ST(and Mac, and Amiga) I use a Syquest EZ 135 which has atari catridges with something like 6 partitions due to the ST HD size restrictions. A newer HD Driver program overcame that but I've never upgraded.

My #2 box in general use has a Samsung overlay to get past the 2mb MSDos HD restriction whose 8gb HD is partitioned into 4.

A local computer store guy an I were talking about floppies and quickly both came to the conclusion that the older floppies were higher quality and retain their data better, The few floppies which I've run across bit-rot with were almost 30 years old. One of my original DR Gem set (sob :{ ) included. I imagine that is also true to some extent with the older HDs.

Lawrence