'Moe' said:

'way2lazy2care' said:

'NewBreed' said:

I'm 25 but after seeing that I feel as though I'm half way to old age… Slightly depressed now…

I'm 23 and I feel similarly. Of course if I never messed up my registry so it no longer recognized thumb drives I never would have known the A/B other than an educated guess on what other types of drives have existed in computers.

'Sirisian' said:

Also I don't know about your guys but I didn't hear about a zip drive until like the beginning of university when I got a job and found a zip drive reader in the back of a utility closet. "What is this piece of archaic technology?" My boss: "You see this was a form of data storage like the floppy disk. The university never really supported them. It could store a few 100 MB…" Apparently they never caught on in my high school since I never saw them.

In the late 90s there was a bunch of competing, higher storage, floppy disk format replacements and none of them ever caught on. I remember one was called the Jaz drive.

I still have an old zip disk drive somewhere in one of the boxes of forgotten technology I share with my paw. Probably sitting next to Merlin.

/nostalgic for my wasted youth

I thought the Jazz drives were 2 GB tape drives or something like that and the regular zip disks were 100 MB or so? I do remember there being an LS-120 drive that could take regular floppies or special floppies that could store 120 MB.

Man, I'm so glad we are beyond those days. I remember trying to store bitmaps and wave files on disks. You'd be hard pressed to fit anything at all on them.

I think there were both 1GB and 2GB Jaz drives, but I don't think they were tape. Tape drives were something else, I don't know how much the held, but that's what my Dad use to use in the early 90's to backup our computer. I do remember hearing something about super floppy disks, but I don't think that went anywhere.

Both Zip and Jaz drives came from Iomega, and the eventual "click of death" syndrome of Zip drives (destroying your drive and usually the disk held in it at the same time) along with the falling prices of both CD burners and CD-R/RW media pretty much shovelled that one into the hole. The thing that made Zip take off was actually its cheap media, at around $20 for 100MB..

Iomega did have a tape drive system though. It was called "Ditto," and I think the biggest problem with it was availability of media outside of resellers in large cities.

There were a ton of "bigger than floppy" disks, even back in the late 80s/early 90s - Bernoulli drives (also Iomega!), the NeXT "2.44MB" floppy and MO disks, the aforementioned LS120 drive, SyQuest's multiple failed solutions, and a few others. Every computer magazine had pages upon pages of ads for these things because the sales margins were ridiculous - both on the original drives and the $20 - $500/disk media pricing.

I'm pretty sure (but can't confirm right now) that Sony's Minidisc format was even used for computer storage for a very short period of time instead of just music storage like it ended up being in North America before the iPod killed it.

LOL!

'Mihulik' said:

I hated that noise especially early mornings when I didn't want to wake my parents up since they would force me to turn the PC off and go to bed again.:-D

Reminds me of the 56k modem. Whoever thought that not putting a volume control on those things was a good idea should die. I ended up ripping the speaker off. Still worked.

How fortunate that it still worked.

There is a volume control on them. You just needed to send the command to the modem. IIRC the AT command was: "ATLx". L being "volume level" and x was a number from 0 to 3.

Wait! That doesn't make me OLD, disk drives are NEW technology!!!

It's a big step up from the standard method of storing code on cassette tape, and I hear that some computers even have a dedicated "hard disk drive" to load the OS so you don't have to keep swapping out disks..

Ah, The Future!

a lot of people still store data on cassettes. They actually make a lot of sense for backing up and archiving data. 1.5TB of uncompressed data the physical size of a small novel for $80 ain't bad. When you consider how big that would be in blu-rays it would be like 30-60 blu-ray disks, which would cost more and take up more space even before you factored in any sort of cases to hold the blu-rays.

Shows you how far we've come when magnetic tape is still better than optical media

The Commodore 64 is my favorite life experience.

I've kept a couple of the old 8" Floppy Disks for a keepsake.

a lot of people still store data on cassettes.

They do? I thought hard disks are used these days. Just slap a few RAID SAN devices and be done with it, access over network using your protocol of choice.

Shows you how far we've come when magnetic tape is still better than optical media There is nothing inherently better about optics.

There is a volume control on them. You just needed to send the command to the modem. IIRC the AT command was: "ATLx". L being "volume level" and x was a number from 0 to 3.
Except that on some modems these had the following effect:
0) Off - no clue if modem is dialing or busy
1) Rock concert
2) Controlled demolition
3) Airport called to keep it down