Although I still have a few 3.5” floppies still lying around upstairs, I haven’t seen an 8” or 5.25” disk in probably twenty years. The 3.5” floppies I have upstairs include my copy of Wolfenstein. I’ll probably die and still have those disks.
I remember loading up a dozen disks, sometimes more, to install programs. I always remember gathering them altogether before beginning installation and then freaking out when I was missing one.
“Where the hell is disk 17? I know I had it just a minute ago. Fuck. Where is it?” My computer would sit there silently, waiting for me to get my act together and insert disk 17.
Then, when I found it and inserted it, I’d get a message on the screen, “Please insert disk 3.”
“Disk 3? What the hell do you need disk 3 again for?” I’d grumble, moan, and swear, searching my pile for disk 3 because there was obviously something I needed off it for the program to install correctly. I never understood why these programs weren’t done sequentially. I suspect it was some sadistic programmer who enjoyed torturing folks this way.
Windows 95 had 13 specially sized floppy disks (1.68mb instead of 1.44mb) and an additional 14 floppy disks just for Service Pack 1. Microsoft Office 97 was on 44 floppy disks.
For the record, I used cassette tapes on my computers in elementary school. I learned COBOL, FORTRAN, and Basic in computer class in high school. Computer classes were for programming. They weren’t for learning to type and using Microsoft Word. I used to think it was cool when magazines would put Basic code into their magazines and you could type them in up in class.
The first computer I ever owned booted up on a 5.25” floppy disk. If you didn’t have the disk inserted, you couldn’t do anything. This was also the computer I used to first connect to the internet. I thought my computer was cool because it had two floppy drives so I wouldn’t have to worry about switching disks while working.
I used my A and B drives. I still occasionally use my A drive, but only on the old Windows 2000 computer upstairs. I keep it so I can play old games without the hassle. I get to hear this noise when using my floppies.
My first laptop, which I still have, had a greyscale screen. Color screens were just coming out on laptops and were far too expensive for me.
I got angry when Mindspring did not know what telnet was in 1998. Five different techs had never heard of a BBS before. I ended up having to create my own way to telnet once connected to the internet via dialup because the Mindspring software was garbage. That was the last time I ever called tech support for anything. I taught myself what I needed to know. It was also the last time I installed anything from my ISP. All their software is useless and unnecessary. Come to think of it, they didn’t know what Usenet or IRC were either. Useless twats. Great, now I’m missing DALnet again. Well, DALnet when it was good pre-2002.
I pirated music off the radio. Everyone I knew did this too. Then we shared them. We made mix tapes from our records (LPs). I listened to them when traveling on band trips on my Sony Walkman. My mom bought me a slick new Walkman for my 16th birthday in 1986. It cost $150 and was the only present I got, or wanted, that year. It finally broke around 2002. I also wore out 4 copies of Led Zeppelin’s In Through The Out Door in it.
Thanks to reddit, I’ve now wasted several hours of my life thinking of this stuff.
