I still have a few 8-inch floppies that I keep for historical reasons. I think they were 256KB. I also have a paper punch boot loader tape.... And my midterm Fortran-II cards.
Damn, I'm old.....

Ah... FORTRAN cards, floppy discs and dialing the telephone. Thanks for the nostalgia trip. I wish I had kept samples of all of the above, just as relics on the shelf. I should probably set a CD aside for that purpose.

I still have my Fortran punch cards and program listings from my first round at college. Good luck finding a card reader.

My wife was a key punch operator in the sixties. I was a musician and had little concept of (or interest in) what a key punch machine was, but I listened attentatively to her stories of star wheels and bit buckets. In the '80s while working in a mainframe computer facility my customer scrapped a key punch machine (IBM 129). I asked if I could have it and they were pleased to help me load it into the back of my truck. I thought it would be great to take it home to my wife so she could play with it and reminisce. I unloaded into my garage with the help of a neighbor and had her cover her eyes and just listen while I loaded a card and typed a few characters. When she saw it, she typed a few characters and asked me when I was going to get rid of it.

In 2002 mid project (AutoCAD, not Vegas) one of my Zip drives failed causing me to lose four hours work. It indicated that the drive was beinig accessed when I saved but the write never completed. I straight away, moved all my data off Zip disks to hard drive and have not touched one since. For a while I used CD-Rs as removable portable media.

I've been doing a pretty good job of maintaining data integrity with multiple hard drives in different physical locations. Now the real question: when I decide to publish that economics research paper I did in college in the mid '80s am I going to find a way to run WordStar and Lotus 123 version 2 on a current system? I transferred the files from the 720kB floppy disks.

"I still have my Fortran punch cards and program listings from my first round at college. Good luck finding a card reader."

But that's the beauty of punched cards and paper tape. You can see the bits! A colleague from work, many years ago, took some punched paper tape home for a weekend to resurrect something after we no longer had a reader.

Now that reminds me of registration day at college one day. We were all handed a standard IBM punchcard with our student data on it and we carried it around from station to station while registering for classes. At each station they'd run it through a card reader to get our information, apparently in an attempt to save time by avoiding having to fill out forms by hand. Some of the students were wondering exactly what was on their cards, so i offered to read the cards for them. I attracted quite a crowd and probably had at least 100 ask me to read their cards too. Of course, they were all very amazed at the talent i had.

When we were finally done my buddy pulled me aside and asked how i knew how to do that, and how i was able to read them so quickly. I picked up his card from his pocket, held it in front of his eyes, and pointed out the line of ASCII text printed along the bottom 1/8" of the card, which obviously no one else had noticed.

I've still got all my old hard drives. There might even be an mfm in there somewhere.

Sooner or later I'll hoomk 'em up and see what's what, if anything.

My very first filming attempt was with a wind-up 8mm cine camera. Once you finished filming you take the 16mm reel out and flip it around and re thread and shoot on the otherside of the 16mm. If I remember each side could record 3 or 4 minutes a side. Then you send it to Kodak to process and they slice it into 2x 8mm strips which they join together and you then have 8 minutes of silent movie.

hey lightads, maybe that'll be sony's next step for 3d when the novelty wears off? double recording on a 60min tape...

*'humour' - just in case anyone out there doesn't know me by now ;-)

You can still rock up on a shoot with a Sony Mavica and a flashlight for lighting and just sus out the clients anxiety.

"double recording on a 60min tape..."

I presume you would turn the tape around like an audio cassette.

When i was working at a video store we had a customer all set to purchase a VHS VCR (back in the day they were a $450 item!), but changed her mind at the last minute. Her reason? She asked us if she could get another 6 hours on the same tape by flipping it over and recording on side 2. We told her no, there's no side 2 on video tape. That was a deal killer for her.

My very old hard drives used to have IDE connections, can anyone still remember them :?

As a kid we used to hire a 16mm projector with a cines cope lens to watch Clint Eastwood in "The Good Bad and Ugly" and " A Few Dollars More". We never hassled about progressive or interlaced back then.

Those were the daze

IDE???? That's the *NEW* stuff! lol. I worked with RLL/MFM drive connections for a decade before that new-fangled IDE jazz came along.