I just found my old Zip Disk reader. Who remembers writing words using upside down numerals to a pager?
I remember salivating over the Maxoptix Tahiti 1GB magneto-optical drive, when they became available on the surplus market. I bought one for some ridiculous amount of money (probably $1,000), and bought a bunch of the ridiculously expensive cartridges, and then watched as CDs took over. The drive was amazingly unreliable, so I was happy to replace it (except for all the money I wasted).
I just got out of mainframe work a couple months ago. JCL lives on, even if the cards are virtual. Really hard to add a fiver to your job now. 
I overclocked a 133mhz to 166 once.
Didn’t make my warez download any faster though.
I have a (non functional) Cauzin SoftStrip reader.
And a :CueCat!
I’ve got a 10-disk magazine of them from our company’s old System/36!
I remember saving and loading BASIC programs from a cassette tape player hooked up to my old TI99/4a system back in the early 80s…
I still have a couple of the more geriatric computers in the basement collection connected to a 10Base-2 loop. The household server is dual-NIC (gigabit ether on the motherboard, PCI card 10Base-2 NIC in a slot) and it functions as a router between the two networks.
Pretty amusing to browse the web using a 30-year-old Commodore Amiga.
I still have to explain to people what the pre-PC computers were like. How you’d turn them on and…nothing. You had to have a disk in the drive first and the computer ran whatever was on the disk, there was no hard drive. Hell, with my Apple IIe, there wasn’t even a fan (until we added an external one mounted on the side vent).
Having to turn the computer off, put in a new disk and turn it back on if you wanted to use a different program. Of course the near instant shut down/boot up time made up for that.
And try explaining to anyone under 35ish what computers were like before Windows. How do you even explain DOS. They’ll never understand how world changing Windows was. There were a few (ASCII Based) GUIs, but they weren’t in the same league as Windows. It’s like the difference between 1st grader T-ball and the Professional Football. Different in nearly every aspect. Even if Win 3.1 was essentially still DOS based*.
** funny thing, a know-it-all ‘computer genius’ in one of my classes was so impressed with Windows, he deleted DOS. Borked his computer. I’m still surprised deleting dos was even possible.
In 1989 I had a computer in my dorm room, connected to the outside world using a Token Ring network. I could browse Usenet from the comfort of my dorm.
The U.S. military stopped using 8" floppies just last year. I saw some in the 1990s. At the same time they were still using disk packs for back ups. Found a video.
Yep, the paper tapes got run thru something called “Photon machines,” which were constantly breaking down. At my first job they had a full-time employee just to man the Photon machines.
They also had a Compugraphic 7500 Headliner. Over the years there was much debate as to whether Compugraphic or Varityper was the better rig.
Got any Bernoulli drives?
I learned how to program on a computer that used paper tape. The teacher had written a program where you would input the word you wanted, and it would punch it out into the paper tape. Wish I had kept one of them!
Sometimes when we had a typo, we would retrieve one of the punched-out chads and tape it over one of the holes. Very high tech.
On the IIe you didn’t actually have to turn the computer off and back on, although that’s what a lot of people did. You could just put a new disk in and press Ctrl-“Open Apple”-Reset, if I remember correctly. That was sort of the Apple version of Ctrl-Alt-Del.
When I was in intern at IBM in 2001, they still used token ring in their offices. I think token ring was becoming fairly uncommon even 19 years ago. I assume they were using it because a) IBM invented token ring, IIRC, b) That’s what the buildings were wired for. I remember they used these big, thick cables that snapped into the wall socket.
Something to do with launch codes in the nuclear silos. 
I guess if there’s one place you want “tried and true” the, that’s it!
747s and other types of planes still use 3.5" floppies to update stuff like navigation databases on a monthly basis. There are newer avionics systems that can get their updates (known as “software parts” in that industry) by various wireless methods, but AFAIK, the upgrade isn’t exactly trivial, so it’s held off for the “heavy check” when the plane is stripped down to the rivets.
As I remember correctly, nothing more than “deltree C:\DOS” and typing “y” for confirmation was necessary, and DOS was gone.
Weird. On my old DOS machines before the days of hard drives, no rebooting was required to change disks. As a general rule, computers read programs from disk completely into memory; it doesn’t constantly reread the disk just to keep running a program. If the program it’s running needs to constantly re-read the disk for some kind of data file that’s one thing, but on an OS level there was no need to reboot or really do anything at all when you switched disks. I typically started with “Dir” just to see what was on it as soon as I popped it in.
This includes my original single-floppy Compaq luggable, as well as my lightning fast 80286 with TWO (count em: ONE, TWO baby!) floppy drives. Or possibly 8088; the 286 may have been my first machine with a hard drive, a whopping 10 megabytes.
My friend walked into the computer section of some department store, saw a placard offering books for you to learn DOS and asked if they also had books on the DON’TS. This was the same person who, upon getting a new Windows 3 computer, looked through the directories and decided (I think there was some OCD involved) that it was a mess and spent several hours sorting out all the files into an arrangement that looked sensible. Rendering the system inoperable, of course.
Never did much with the IIe, but remember PR#6 on the II+
On the old Apple computers, basically every disk was bootable. Well, maybe not literally every disk, but disks for commercially distributed software were. So you could just put a disk in the drive, power on the computer, and it would just run whatever was on the disk without you needing to enter any commands. Unlike IBM/DOS machines where you had to boot from your DOS disk, then swap disks to run the program you actually wanted to run. Probably an early example of Apple trying to be more user friendly. IIRC Apple did have its own DOS-like command line driven OS you could run if you were an “expert” user, and you probably didn’t strictly have to reboot to run something off a new disk, but that was how everyone did it in the school computer lab.
And things like assemblers which had to be read into the machine before your program was were put on mylar paper tape, so it had less chance of ripping.
The LGP-21 I used in high school had a paper tape reader. The Friden Flexiwriters we used to communicate with the machine had a paper tape punch which you punched one line at a time as you coded. It had no assembler until I wrote one.