Shoutbox

lol
I honestly didn't expect to learn anything new, but I never saw it as *bold* and _underlined_. I guess they all do the same job anyway. It's funny how much we take for granted without thinking about it.

Do we live in a clueless world?

The Computer Museum in Boston is a very cool place and should not be judged by this anecdote. In 1995, I was there with my father. In a place with the first virtual reality machine ever built, Danny Hillis' Tinkertoy computer, and other lovely objects, their star attraction is a giant plywood model of a computer that you can walk around in. In fact, you can go on a tour of it, led by a young gentleman who explains how computers work as you went.

The tour guide failed to make a stellar impression early in the tour (Did YOU know they're called microchips because they're really, really small?), but we hung on bravely. That is, until he got to explaining what a floppy is. He pulled a 3 1/2" disk out of his pocket and said:


Tour Guide: "A lot of people don't know why they call it a floppy because, you see here--" (shakes disk) "--it's not floppy. But you see that's just the outside." (pries case apart, removes interior, shakes it) "Inside, you see, it's floppy. That's why they call it that. You need floppies because sometimes the computer can have what's called a fall-down. I dunno why they call it a fall-down, but that's why you need the floppies or else you lose the stuff in the computer."

quote:

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Originally posted by multimillion2k
(...) That is, until he got to explaining what a floppy is. He pulled a 3 1/2" disk out of his pocket and said:

Tour Guide: "A lot of people don't know why they call it a floppy because, you see here--" (shakes disk) "--it's not floppy. But you see that's just the outside." (pries case apart, removes interior, shakes it) "Inside, you see, it's floppy. That's why they call it that. You need floppies because sometimes the computer can have what's called a fall-down. I dunno why they call it a fall-down, but that's why you need the floppies or else you lose the stuff in the computer."

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That's not entirly correct though. That computer history museum tour-guide needs to brush up his computer history lessons and don't give twisted facts to his public

It is called floppy because it does flop if you wave it. Thus it is not because the inside is floppy, it is because the outside was floppy.

The first floppy disks where much bigger then today's floppy disks (12", 8" and 5.25") and hadn't a hard outercase but a plastic and flexible outercase which flops when you shake it. That's were the name comes from.

But when the little 3" (very little known) and 3.5" (what we know  today as a floppy disc) discs came about, you could adapt that fact to the inside though, as that is still of the same material. although it isn't the original meaning anymore...

(other formats which were developped, but not always with success or use in practice: 2" and 4")

* The first floppy discs were 8 inch big...
* Then came the 5.25" floppy disc which some people here might remember (still with a floppy outer casing)
* After that a 3" floppy disc was developped. Not many know this as the disc was not very widely spread and not much of a succes. This was the first floppy disc with a hard plastic outer casing.
* Then the 3.5" floppy disc came about, the one we all know today.
(note that the designation 3.5" isn't entirly correct either. Since this floppy disc came about, the measurements are based upon ISO standards and those are in metric units and not Imperial units. The 3.5" disc must in fact measure 90.0mm by 94.0mm or thus 3.5433 inches in reality.)





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Fall-down (In PC context): When a PC falls down it is broken and information is most likely lost. Instead of saying "I dropped some computer components and now it is broken", one said: "my computer had a fall-down".

Bug / debugging: Some believe it is called like that because once in '45, a moth was detected between the relays of a Mark II computer which resulted in program failure. The guy's who removed it said they "debugged" the machine and thus had removed the fault, the "bug". But truth is that the word "bug" was already commonly used way before that to indicate faults in various equipment...

And I can go on for a long time with those (useless) PC history facts

Cookie and his history lessons
i remember my moms old computer that ran dos. it had a ton of games you could load of 5.25 inch floppies. i just threw out a pentium that had a 5.25 inch floppy. if i had a slot loading cdrom i woulda kept the bezel and put it over the cdrom

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Originally posted by lizard.boy
if i had a slot loading cdrom i woulda kept the bezel and put it over the cdrom

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It wouldn't fit though...

I still have a 5.25" floppy drive (working perfectly), and sometimes some people still come to ask me to copy the files from their old 5.25" discs

The 5 ¼'' ones were better than the current ones, they lasted longer. I have some that still work!




I just got a DVD recorder, it pwns any diskette

I remember the 5.25"! I was given one on my PC class (a long time ago ). I lost it when I sold my old computer.

Ah, those days...

Is cookie always like this? It's starting to freak me out. I'm afraid to ask for the time now, in case I get a history of the sundial..

My dad got an Amstrad in 86 I think, and he got a 20Mb hard drive put in - I remember the tech guy saying how that amount of space was plenty and computers would NEVER need that much space. It also had a 5¼" floppy which after a few years began screeching, and you'd take the disk out and there was perfect circle etched into it.. >
Everyone else seemed to have amigas in those days though. They had better games..

quote:

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Originally posted by multimillion2k
Is cookie always like this?

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yes he is, he is a walking talking encycolpedia of everything. In fact, he is more like the wikipedia because he learns stuff from other people too, and collates their data, so next time he is asked, he provides amazingly detailed information.

quote:

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Originally posted by multimillion2k
I'm afraid to ask for the time now, in case I get a history of the sundial..

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I used to have an Amiga, I had an Amiga 500, (the whole computer was built into the keyboard, which was quite clever if you think about it) unfortunatly, a friend came to my house, and he is a complete idiot, so for some reason he tried to put two floppy disks in at the same time and broke it.

We then got an Amiga 1200, which was really cool, (it to had the whole PC intergrated into the keyboard).

Speaking of broken diskettes, one of the games was Captain Planet, which was an AWESOME tv show that i watched when i grew up.