Remember those thrilling days of yesteryear?

I remember when I had a Mac 512Ke that you had to save files on an 800K floppy.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

I remember envying people in another department. They had a 10MB hard drive in their computer, I had to work from 360k floppies.!

My 512Ke didn't have an internal HD, so I bought an external HD. Don't remember the size, but it was probably 10MB. Normally on the 512Ke, you had to load a series of floppies to boot & you were constantly swapping floppies to load an app, print, etc. By using the external HD, it would hold the system files.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Tom,

Please refresh my memory. Was it the 'e' in the 512Ke that allowed it to read 800k instead of just 400k?

Jim

Please refresh my memory. Was it the 'e' in the 512Ke that allowed it to read 800k instead of just 400k?

You are correct. It could read/write 400K single side and 800K double side floppies. Here's the specs on the 512Ke.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/stats/mac_512ke.html

I remember that 800K discs were almost 2X the cost of 400K discs. But I found a computer store that sold 400Ks in bulk (50 in a box) where the opposite side was coated, but not tested/verified. They were only slightly more expensive than regular 400Ks.I never had a data problem with files copied to the back side.

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Thanx, Tom

I had a roomate that called Baltimore the armpit of america. Is that correct?

I still have some Syquest, Bernoulli and Zip drives floating around. Every now and then someone discovers a disk with data they just have to recover and they no longer own a drive and or Mac that can read it.

I hated tape backups.

Even have some oddball MO drives and media floating around, the 640MB and 1GB HP drive.

Lyon is the armpit of France.... no idea about the US but I might have thought Detroit...

****, I remember those HP optical drives, lol. I ran across some Syquest discs about a month back, what were those, 135MB?

Syquest, oh yes I remember them.

They had so many different versions at the end my head was spinning about as fast as their disks.

The original 44 then 88 then 200 form factor. Then they came out with a smaller size which was 105 and 270. Then the Syjet or something like that at which point I gave up. I think it was the Syjet that was the 135MB one's that looked to be the same form factor as the 105 and 270. I think I have a drive and a box of disks that we were tossing at work in the basement. I saved them for some derranged reason though haven't even attached the drive to anything.

I guess Zip and Jazz were a bit better. I have a Cisco micro webserver in my collection that ran using a single 100MB Zip disk. Very weird concept and Cisco no less.

Does anyone who remembers what could be done with 10MB RAM, a 40MB hard disc and a snail-pace processor, get disappointed by how little progress has been made by software, considering the ~1000x increase in hardware speed and capacity? I suspect that programmers "these days" are lazy, and don't use all the streamlining tricks and hacks that were essential in the Days Gone By. Yeah, rmgman - do we really need 4.82GB (102,238 items) in the system folder?!

I used to create 3D animations on my LCII (with the aforementioned 10MB RAM and 40MB HD)...with a 12" screen in "thousands of colours" using StrataVision3D. Then I'd have to go out and lick road clean wit' tongue. Kids of today etc, etc....

I very much liked those 3.5"(ish) magneto optical 256MB (I think) discs - very cute and much less prone to the "oh my god, I've slid that lever all the way across without waiting for the SyQuest disc to spin down so I've destroyed the disc and probably the drive too" syndrome. But that 256MB drive was prone to squirting 240 Volts out of the SCSI port, which often led to some shocking results😮! I have no idea how it didn't kill the Mac it was connected to (by then I was working on a gorgeous Quadra 840AV) - it nearly killed me on at least one occasion. By about 1998ish there were so many competing drive formats around that (at work) we had a stack of various SCSI drives about 2 feet high!

It's disappointing that Apple are planning to kill of the Mac Pro line completely (in my uninformed opinion!).

Yes I remember those days as well. My first new Mac as an LC with the 12" colour monitor followed by a Classic.

We used the Classic to run a BBS software called FirstClass back in the early 90's, it started out with two 2400 baud modems allowing two people to access the thing at the same time. There was no 'cheap' internet back then. A couple of years later I did a major upgrade to a IIsi with a 4 port hurdler card with 4 phone lines. By now I was a really good customer of the phone company.

Around then I was able to get a dedicated network connection at a friends internet hosting company so that setup was swapped over to a Macintosh II and everything was done via their network.