Computer nostalgia :D
Mama Koala and I went to the mall this morning so that I could post my box of heavy things back to Beijing. My suitcase is about to explode so I thought it best to post a few things back home first. While I was in the post office buying some blank CDs to make Mama Koala some music CDs, I blinked when I saw this:
Egads! A little floppy disk that fits 1.4 meg on it. My computer at home doesn't even have a plug-able in-able external A-drive and I can't guarantee that my work computer has an a-drive on it. I still have a heap of blank floppy discs at home though - feels bad to chuck them out. I wonder what's on them. Embarrassingly bad Mary-Sue-esque scribblings no doubt :)
Whoever looks for floppy disks these days must have a time finding them :)
When I was in primary school, I wrote in my diary: "Dad is mean, he won't buy me a Vic-20. :) Gawd. How embarrassing.
We had a Vic-20 at school but Papa Koala never did buy me a Vic-20.
Yet how did he resist with commercials like this.
The Vic-20 was an 8-bit home computer sold by Commodore Business Machines. Apparently it was the first microcomputer to sell one million units. It had 5 KB RAM. My god :) Look at that fabulous screen :)
Papa Koala bought us a Commodore 64. :) It had a princiely 64 kilobytes of RAM. Bwahahahaha.
Commercial is here. I still remember the jingle well :) 'Are you keeping up with the Commodore, or is there a Commodore keeping up with you?"
The Commodore 64 was an 8-bit home computer released by Commodore International in August, 1982. Apparently between 1982 and 1994, sales for the Commodore 64 totalled around 30 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time.
Our family started with a chocolate brown, traditional Commodore 64.
That used a datacassette :D
On that machine we played Kongo Kong and Prime Maze.
Then Papa Koala bought us an SX-64 which used an 5.25 inch floppy disc.
I have to laugh. I remember that saving and loading things seemed to take FOREVER as as the drive whirred and clicked and whirred and clicked and we often got disk errors.
In 1971 when IBM introduced the 8-inch floppy disk, the initial capacity was about 100K bytes (100,000 characters). Hee! In 1979 the Radio Shack TRS-80 II computer system had an internal 8-inch floppy drive capable of storing 500K of data. Double hee!
I adored our SX-64 soooo much and spent hours and hours and hours on the word processor and playing video games. I loved Bowling and I loved Montezuma's Revenge:
Jumpman:
I spent hours on those games and got quite good at them. :)
Then we got a Commodore Amiga. The first game I saw on that was Marble Madness, which had (for the day), dazzlingly eye-popping graphics :)
The Amiga 1000, was released in 1985 as a successor to the Commodore 64 and as a rival to the Atari ST. When I was a kid, everyone either had a Commodore 64 or an Atari. Commodore went well for so long but according to wikipedia, by the mid-nineties other platforms, most of all the PC, reduced or eliminated this advantage.
In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T. It's interesting how a company that was as dominant as Commodore went bankrupt. I suppose the space moves so fast and the competitors are so hungry and aggressive that it's really hard to maintain the lead.
I actually can't remember the size of the discs for the Amiga but it's possible that it was a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk. These seemed to be faster than the 5.25 but they also took bloody ages and whirred and clicked forever :)
When the 3.5 disc was initially released, it only held about 400K although it can now hold 1.4Meg per disk. Hee! :) I still remember the pain of the 'old days' when I was constantly running out of disc space. Just word documents alone were enough to make a disc full and I'd be grrrring and argggging as I figured out how to split all my files among pitiful little discs with only 1.4 meg storage space.
Then, once when my computer crashed and I lost all my files, bro got me an iomega zip drive. These held 100 meg each but were sooooooooooooo slow to save things onto
These days we save things on CD-ROMS, DVD-ROMS and super small thumb drives which have ever-expanding disk space
I remember when the CD was first introduced and there were so many ridiculous programmes out there showing people pouring tomato sauce, water and coffee on CDs and going on about how durable and indestructible they are. Ha! These days, my old CDs are showing signs of discolouration and CDs definitely degrade over time :)
My mind is kind of blown by how quickly the technological developments have moved. It wasn't THAT long ago that I was using the 1.4 meg floppies, not THAT long ago that we were using the 5.25 inch floppies. In particular, the 1 gig thumb drives are now storing 8 gig.
I mean in this episode of The Pretender, it seems to take FOREVER for Jarod to save a WORD doc onto a 3.5 inch floppy :)
Egads! A little floppy disk that fits 1.4 meg on it. My computer at home doesn't even have a plug-able in-able external A-drive and I can't guarantee that my work computer has an a-drive on it. I still have a heap of blank floppy discs at home though - feels bad to chuck them out. I wonder what's on them. Embarrassingly bad Mary-Sue-esque scribblings no doubt :)
Whoever looks for floppy disks these days must have a time finding them :)
When I was in primary school, I wrote in my diary: "Dad is mean, he won't buy me a Vic-20. :) Gawd. How embarrassing.
We had a Vic-20 at school but Papa Koala never did buy me a Vic-20.
Yet how did he resist with commercials like this.
The Vic-20 was an 8-bit home computer sold by Commodore Business Machines. Apparently it was the first microcomputer to sell one million units. It had 5 KB RAM. My god :) Look at that fabulous screen :)
Papa Koala bought us a Commodore 64. :) It had a princiely 64 kilobytes of RAM. Bwahahahaha.
Commercial is here. I still remember the jingle well :) 'Are you keeping up with the Commodore, or is there a Commodore keeping up with you?"
The Commodore 64 was an 8-bit home computer released by Commodore International in August, 1982. Apparently between 1982 and 1994, sales for the Commodore 64 totalled around 30 million units, making it the best-selling single personal computer model of all time.
Our family started with a chocolate brown, traditional Commodore 64.
That used a datacassette :D
On that machine we played Kongo Kong and Prime Maze.
Then Papa Koala bought us an SX-64 which used an 5.25 inch floppy disc.
I have to laugh. I remember that saving and loading things seemed to take FOREVER as as the drive whirred and clicked and whirred and clicked and we often got disk errors.
In 1971 when IBM introduced the 8-inch floppy disk, the initial capacity was about 100K bytes (100,000 characters). Hee! In 1979 the Radio Shack TRS-80 II computer system had an internal 8-inch floppy drive capable of storing 500K of data. Double hee!
I adored our SX-64 soooo much and spent hours and hours and hours on the word processor and playing video games. I loved Bowling and I loved Montezuma's Revenge:
Jumpman:
I spent hours on those games and got quite good at them. :)
Then we got a Commodore Amiga. The first game I saw on that was Marble Madness, which had (for the day), dazzlingly eye-popping graphics :)
The Amiga 1000, was released in 1985 as a successor to the Commodore 64 and as a rival to the Atari ST. When I was a kid, everyone either had a Commodore 64 or an Atari. Commodore went well for so long but according to wikipedia, by the mid-nineties other platforms, most of all the PC, reduced or eliminated this advantage.
In 1994, Commodore filed for bankruptcy and its assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T. It's interesting how a company that was as dominant as Commodore went bankrupt. I suppose the space moves so fast and the competitors are so hungry and aggressive that it's really hard to maintain the lead.
I actually can't remember the size of the discs for the Amiga but it's possible that it was a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk. These seemed to be faster than the 5.25 but they also took bloody ages and whirred and clicked forever :)
When the 3.5 disc was initially released, it only held about 400K although it can now hold 1.4Meg per disk. Hee! :) I still remember the pain of the 'old days' when I was constantly running out of disc space. Just word documents alone were enough to make a disc full and I'd be grrrring and argggging as I figured out how to split all my files among pitiful little discs with only 1.4 meg storage space.
Then, once when my computer crashed and I lost all my files, bro got me an iomega zip drive. These held 100 meg each but were sooooooooooooo slow to save things onto
These days we save things on CD-ROMS, DVD-ROMS and super small thumb drives which have ever-expanding disk space
I remember when the CD was first introduced and there were so many ridiculous programmes out there showing people pouring tomato sauce, water and coffee on CDs and going on about how durable and indestructible they are. Ha! These days, my old CDs are showing signs of discolouration and CDs definitely degrade over time :)
My mind is kind of blown by how quickly the technological developments have moved. It wasn't THAT long ago that I was using the 1.4 meg floppies, not THAT long ago that we were using the 5.25 inch floppies. In particular, the 1 gig thumb drives are now storing 8 gig.
I mean in this episode of The Pretender, it seems to take FOREVER for Jarod to save a WORD doc onto a 3.5 inch floppy :)