bigalw Loc: Essex - UK

BUT !!!, seems such a waste, I even tried giving them away for free to a local charity shop, nah

:cry:

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

Jerry, funny you should mention that! I not only have some 3.5" floppies, some 5.24 floppies and a couple of 8" floppies.. But, on facebook someone posted a photo of a stack of slides in a slide holder for a projector and wanted to know what kind of old floppy disk these were (they seemed to have celuloid photos of her when she was a young child and could she get them onto some usable format like print or something.. lol....I explaind that they were slides designed to be projected on to a screen or other viewer and she could and should get them copied to digital and the preserve the originals in a humidity and temperature controled environment (safe deposit box etc).
I had a good laugh over the statement that they looked like some kind of 3.5 inch floppy.

Nelson.I Loc: Monument, Colorado, USA

Ah, the good old days when the professor would come in and hand me a formula and say, "Wire this up to the Reeves REAC please." You young whipper snappers don't know what programming is these days. Why, when I was a lad every bit was precious because they were so darned expensive. You could actually find the particular bit you just programmed on an IBM 360/44. Darned things were huge! Today? Today you can by more bits for less than a buck than existed when I was young.

:lol:

warrior Loc: Paso Robles CA

I still have one from 9/11.

Brucej67 Loc: Cary, NC

I did numerical counting on the first Abacus. :lol: :lol: :lol:

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

Yep, I used to be a systems engineer for Control Data Corp in OKC.. I worked on the Phoenix line.. a wonderful and huge 96 mb hard drive with a fixed and a removable plater designed for main frames.. I also supervised the head lab where floppy disk head were manufactured in a clean room and the head alignment was verified with an electron microscope... I developed a way for the heads that were out of alignment to be correctly aligned using the microscope and cut the rejection factor from 10% to less than 1%. Nice bonus lol.

BatManPete Loc: Way Up North!

Late '70's. . . . early 80's......
Data Conversion was the money maker...
Word Processing was the name of the game. . .
8 to 10 different vendors pedaling Word Processors....
All thought they had the Greatest, Best, Fast, Efficient, bla...bla...bla!!. I agreed with all products for Word Processing accomplishments.
Me.......... I never owned any of those boxes....
My angle was CONVERSION OF DATA . . . FROM ONE KIND OF WORD PROCESSOR TO THE NEXT NEW AND BESTESS . . . "OH HAPPY DAYS!"
====
I purchased an ALTERTEXT conversion box... $9,000.00 . . . Read an input disk from a certain WP machine and convert it to a different WP machine... the newest and best on the market.
Ya.. rite.. Along came another Conversion Box . . . CROMWELL... created by a person from Indiana. Price? $850.00 cash... Met the person at a Print/Graphics show in Chicago, Ill. Ditched the ALTERTEXT. No more buying $450.00 8" pre-programed to convert ASCII data from one format A to format B machine. I could create my own conversion tables. Save them.... and tweak them for any new format that showed up on the market. I must have had 25+ different tables to accommodate what was being created by word processing companies. The ASCII alphabet consisted of 256 different ASCII characters. Read the input character and if needed, convert to the output code. See "ascii code tables"... We read the input code and if needed changed it to the correct outpout ascii code. Those days word processing persons were charging by the page. I was charging by the character. Ranged from $.0003 to $.03, depending how many thousand characters counted. [State Govts. and Insurance Companies were my best clients. It was a continuous cycle of word-processor machines coming and going.] And then a person named Bill Gates reared up.... pretty much standardized keyboards on computers... and caused the end of 20+ different word processor machine companies....
END OF HAPPY DAYS..... ONTO SOMETHING ELSE...

llamb Loc: Northeast Ohio

I designed it! The prototype was a disaster: it had the beads running vertical and they always slid down due to something some kid named Newton was tinkering with. ;-)

Brucej67 Loc: Cary, NC

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

What's on it?

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Some day a grandson/granddaughter/grandnephew/grandneuce will ask you about what your life was. So go through all those to buold the story of your life. What were doing when you took that picture AND why. All that stuff up on the high, back shelves, in the attic tell our life stories. Retirement leaves time to recollect and compose stuff for those young ones. That stuff is your history.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

Yep, lol and then they will put it on the back shelf for years and years... then lose it.. and later say, "You know, I had a bunch of photos that were taken by my Grandad, I wonder where I put them. ----- Oh NO!!! They were in that box in the attic that I threw away when we moved!!!"
I guess the safest thing to do is to develop the collection and then put it somewhere so that it will be in their inheritence down the road.. Funny thing, when it is part of an inheritence, it seems to mean more to them than when they turn 21 or get married or hit some other life moment and you just give them to them....

llamb Loc: Northeast Ohio

They're still blank, but it doesn't matter; the composite material is decomposing/separating/checking.

Bruce M. Loc: Longueuil, Quebec, CANADA

I have an Original Windows 3.1 in sealed plastic wrap, on 3.5 floppies. In 100 years it may be worth something to THE RIGHT COLLECTOR.......

jimmya Loc: Phoenix

Most computers these days don't even come with a disc drive. Yes I understand how things seem so important at the time. Rather like my daughter, no age 30, wonders why she ever listened to "that???!!!"