Scrolling idly & scanned this post quickly, then had a “WTF” moment, picturing some poor Doper having to archive porn footage.
i remeber the day we gave up 3.5 disks…we were trying to play “return to zork” which came on something like 45 disks and wed been installing the game for 2 hours and all of a sudden on disk 28 something messed up and we had to delete everything and start over so we did and same thing happened but on disk 35
we went to circuit city where we bought the game and while we were there waiting my cousin seen a 2x cd rom with a 16 bit soundcard and 6 or 7 games and zork was one of them and since they were giving us a gift card … he decided to buy it at 220$
i bought one a couple of weeks later for 1 25 from walmart …
10 megabyte floppy drive? Seriously? That is at least six+ times larger than any floppy ever made.
I may have it confused with our 1st upgrade which was a 10Mb Hard drive. 1983 was lifetime ago.
i remember buying a 1.2 gig hard drive and put every game i owned it and only used 2 percent … and i remarked i don’t think they’ll ever make games big enough to fill them … i think the biggest game i had was civilization 2 and that was maybe 150 mb because it had video clips in it
Speaking of calculators, anyone ever use a Compometer Calculator? We had one in the computer lab of my high school, more recent than the pictures in the wiki article. Quite large, and you could put it in an infinite loop by dividing by 0. We also had an Olivetti slightly programmable calculator - big but not as big.
Not quite true. There were 2.88 MB floppies. And Superdisk drives could format 3.5" floppies to 32 MB. With its own disks (debatable whether you want to call them floppies, but they did contain a flexible magnetic disc), it could store up to 240 MB.
I used something pretty close when I worked at Filene’s in the bookkeeping department, circa 1972 or so.
Hunt the Wumpus is familiar but I feel like I played it on a different platform. I had TI Invaders, a Soccer game, some basic dungeon exploration game and I forget what else. Plus I wrote 2 text base games and a 8 bit horse race game in basic. All very simple.
What are those almost impossibly complicated calculators that look like pepper grinders, with a crank on top? I want one and I have no idea why.
Defragging.
Argh, defrag could take so long. Chkdsk (Check disk) was almost as bad.
Defragging is no longer a thing? 
It was a great way to get free time at work. Sorry boss, but the damn computer was so slow I had to defrag the drive. Got you at least an hour of BS time and sometimes you could defrag it twice just for good measure.
It must be gone because even spell check doesn’t recognize defrag as a word. 
Damn I’m old.
I don’t think it’s much of a thing anymore unless you’re a real pack rat.
My machine is almost 8 years old and I still have 300 of 500g free and I’ve never even thought about defragging.
But it did have an effect when you had a 500MB drive.
ETA: Whoops, I just checked and it’s scheduled to run once a week in the middle of the night when I have the machine shut off, lol.
I wonder if that’s what’s running when I turn my machine on in the morning on that day of the week. I’ll have to wait until next week to find out. Disk shows as 0% fragmented.
Yeah, I think automatic defrag as a background task is standard since Win 7.
Defragging was to reduce the seeking and latency issues relating to having a file in a thousand different sectors on a disk. These days, the rising popularity of SSD storage has greatly reduced the mechanical issues related to fragmentation. There are other overhead issues with structural fragmentation on a SSD, but for the most part they have much less of an effect on performance (speed).
Ahhh, sigh…Filene’s. I miss it so. Have you ever tried to explain Filene’s Basement to someone who hasn’t been there? Thanks for stirring up the memories.
(Boston denizen 1973-1985)
I will tell one of my Filene’s Basement stories.
About 15 or 20 years ago I was working in an office about 4 blocks down Washington St. (near the corner of Essex St.)
My co-worker, “Rick” called me into his office. “Jaycat,” he said in a hushed and frantic voice. “I have split my pants!”
Now, Rick was quite a rotund little fellow. Maybe 5’6", 240 lbs., something like that. He asked me if I would take his pants downstairs to the tailor shop to have them mended.
“Rick,” says I, “wouldn’t it be quicker if I just went up to Filene’s Basement and bought you a new pair?” He agreed, and informed me of his pants size, which was something like a 46 waist and a 28 inseam. He gave me $50 and sent me on my way.
It was a beautiful summer day and I didn’t mind getting out of the office for a while. So I sort of dawdled, window-shopping up and down Washington St. Finally I climbed down the stairs into Filene’s Basement.
It’s important to note that Filene’s Basement operated on the “continuous markdown” system. The longer an item went unsold, the further it got marked down, until the stuff that nobody wanted was practically free.
I corralled a salesperson and described what I wanted, dark dress pants, 46x28. She looked doubtful. “Let me see what there is in the back room.” I waited maybe 15 minutes. Sure enough, she found a pair in Rick’s size! And for the princely sum of $4, drastically marked down.
Rick was greatly relieved when I returned to the office, new pants in hand. And he was astonished when I handed him $46 in change!
In the '60s, Curtas were used by a lot of rally drivers to do their time/speed/distance calculations.