Talk about "Call back the past"

Rob Keeble

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GTA Ontario Canada
Look at what i found in the process of looking for a specific book in my stash of books and stuff

uploadfromtaptalk1377094417816.jpg

Man this took me back over 30 years dont know why I am keeping it.

Contains my test programs in assembler for two specific printed circuit boards i was involved in making for a telecontrol system back in the day.
Serial interface and an SDLC controller to interface our telecontrol racks to the IBM network.

What a walk down memory lane. Boy them were exciting days as technology developed in leaps and bounds.

Ah well put it back where it was for another how many years...lol

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There is hardware around, but wonder if the media is still readable.

http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html

We had a developer at place I worked when I first got into IT that complained about his backups getting corrupt and was demanding a new PC. After some investigation we found he was using 5.25" floppies for his nightly backup. He'd backup nightly, then promptly stick the 5.25" disk to the side of his metal file cabinet with a large magnet. :doh:
 
We had a developer at place I worked when I first got into IT that complained about his backups getting corrupt and was demanding a new PC. After some investigation we found he was using 5.25" floppies for his nightly backup. He'd backup nightly, then promptly stick the 5.25" disk to the side of his metal file cabinet with a large magnet. :doh:

:rofl:
I had a 5 1/4 disk labeled "Emergency Recovery Disk" (or close - can't remember exactly) that I kept stuck to a filing cabinet with a magnet. This would of course elicit the expected gasps of horror at which point I would stick it into a spare computer and use it to boot up the machine. The trick is that the boot sector was only on the outside of the disk as as long as you put the magnet dead smack center (and it wasn't tooo strong) you still had a fair chunk of usable space that wasn't affected.

disclaimer: I got the idea from someone on a newsgroup back in the day, it wasn't my idea originally.

Then there was sending control codes to the drive controller to make "music" - the best one I saw was someone had managed to make the drive sound like a toilet flushing - on the down side I think that one eventually made it into a virus that did that after deleting your data (I didn't write either of those!!).
 
For one school year I would carry my disc containing my student grades to the guidance office. All year the office would call me back because my grades were not there. Every time one of the staff would follow me back and watch me download the grades then carry it back and it would work. Finally one of the tech people came down to watch and okay end my procedure and I carried the disc down and it didn't work! Well long story short, I carried a telescoping magnet with a pen clip in my shirt pocket and of course would slip that disc there for convenience sake!
 
"Orphan Media". Do you have anything that could still attempt to read it?

I have a Dell that still has a 3" floppy slot... I have a pile of disks from some of my past companies where I kept spreadsheets and records of some of my activities as security back ups...

Rob, you could always see if you can read it and transfer to a disc.
 
8" floppy?! at a place i used to work at, we used 12" floppies to back up our system 36. when i started as an operator, the company i worked for still used punch cards, and we thought that 6250 bpi tapes (that's bits per inch larry) were the cat's whiskers (can only use part of that phrase). things have changed just a touch....:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
 
I just picked up that that wasn't a 3" floppy, but somewhat larger... way back when I first got into forwarding and shipping, we shipped a lot of disc drives and controllers around the world.... a disc drive looked almost like a washing machine and the controllers were the size of refrigerators...
We could get 4 drives and 2 controllers in an igloo(shipping container) for the airlines.... total weight was about 4,000 lbs per container.
 
Don't have anything to read it Brent and Darren that's hardware is fine if one has something to spin the disk with :)

I do still have my SDK 80 85 development kit pcb purchased back in 1978. (note pic liked to is not mine) It took my entire first year bursary money to pay for it. At the time they were still teaching us Valve or Tube theory. I did not have a clue what the word microprocessor meant all I had was a gut feel that this was to be something I better teach myself. Had a huge return on investment from that expense. Loads of fun too. I remember my friends thought I was totally nuts spending the money on a printed circuit board with a few chips on it. Some day I am going to power it up and see if I can get anything to work have not written a program for I don't know how many years. :rofl:
 
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