On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:45:11 -0500, Broderick Crawford ilililililil wrote:

> What's a floppy drive?

It's what we used to save files on when our computers were still
steam-driven.

Mark South wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:45:11 -0500, Broderick Crawford ilililililil wrote:
>
>> What's a floppy drive?
>
> It's what we used to save files on when our computers were still
> steam-driven.

Back then I had several programs on one floppy disk, and one floppy was
good for a month's worth of documents. Now I get emails with attached
documents > 10MiB every day.

On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:08:24 +0100, Andreas wrote:

> Mark South wrote:
>> On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:45:11 -0500, Broderick Crawford ilililililil wrote:
>>
>>> What's a floppy drive?
>>
>> It's what we used to save files on when our computers were still
>> steam-driven.
>
> Back then I had several programs on one floppy disk, and one floppy was
> good for a month's worth of documents. Now I get emails with attached
> documents > 10MiB every day.

There is a book on my shelf that I wrote in the decade before this one,
using emacs, LaTeX, dvivga, and an ePS capable drawing program. I still
have the entire source for the book on a floppy in my desk drawer. The
floppy has over a MB of free space.

And it was written on a 386 with 8MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk....

In <47331c40$1_5@news.bluewin.ch> Mark South:

[Snip...]

> And it was written on a 386 with 8MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk....


Chrissie wants to know if anything MISSION CRITICAL was involved.


--
Regards, Weird (Harold Stevens) * IMPORTANT EMAIL INFO FOLLOWS *
Pardon any bogus email addresses (wookie) in place for spambots.
Really, it's (wyrd) at airmail, dotted with net. DO NOT SPAM IT.
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On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:02:55 +0000, Harold Stevens wrote:

> In <47331c40$1_5@news.bluewin.ch> Mark South:
>
> [Snip...]
>
>> And it was written on a 386 with 8MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk....
>
>
> Chrissie wants to know if anything MISSION CRITICAL was involved.
>

Damn! Good catch. I totally forgot to mention that particular
adjectival phrase.

M.
--
Signature status: Mission Critical

Mark South wrote:
>On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:08:24 +0100, Andreas wrote:

>> Mark South wrote:
>>> On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:45:11 -0500, Broderick Crawford ilililililil wrote:
>>>
>>>> What's a floppy drive?
>>>
>>> It's what we used to save files on when our computers were still
>>> steam-driven.
>>
>> Back then I had several programs on one floppy disk, and one floppy was
>> good for a month's worth of documents. Now I get emails with attached
>> documents > 10MiB every day.

>There is a book on my shelf that I wrote in the decade before this one,
>using emacs, LaTeX, dvivga, and an ePS capable drawing program. I still
>have the entire source for the book on a floppy in my desk drawer. The
>floppy has over a MB of free space.

>And it was written on a 386 with 8MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk....

Bloatware? Can you say "bloatware?"

Everybody is guilty of it.

Once upon a time AT&T Unix (the real stuff) ran on a machine
(not Intel) with a 74 MEGAbyte hard drive. That included the
entire operating system, compilers, Troff (no TeX back then),
utilities such as vi, grep, tar, etc., etc., and not only plenty
of room for user space but a spare partition as well.

--
--- Paul J. Gans

Broderick Crawford ilililililil wrote:

> Juergen Kluth wrote:
>> Hi
>> i tried to create a grub boot disk.
>>
>> the mounting of the floppy / disk works
>> if i check this with a "mount", the drive / disk is listed with the
>> detected "vfat" filesystem followed with (rw) accessibility.
>>
>> when mounted and when creating a directory with
>> mkdir -p /media/floppy/boot/grub (/media/floppy is my mountpoint)
>> i (both times) have activity on the drive, and is signaled by the LED
>>
>> when i try to copy file to this directory it fails : nor activity on the
>> drive
>> but if i check the directory with a filemanager (or so) the copied files
>> are listed)
>>
>> if i then try to unmount the disk, it all ends up with NO activity But a
>> steady burning LED
>>
>> any hints ?
>>
>> Thanx jk
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> danke jk
>>
>>
> What's a floppy drive?

So rather than all this laughing about legacy - and I was using micros (Ohio
Scientific, Inc) when the only drives were 8 inch floppies. I still have a
system that is running a Win only package on a laptop that has ONLY floppy
as an exchange medium. No USB, LAN, CD, etc., and I have to back things up
at least weekly and can only do so with a floppy. That laptop is not
usefull for anything else, and I can't even install a decent OS on it. It
has to be done through the floppy!

And, on two different 10.3 systems with what were working floppy drives with
10.2, I have to resort to manual, root based, mounts and often get device
busy. And then I have to change the ownership of files after copying them
over. I'm tempted to eliminate all all auto-mount software (including
USB - too flaky) and write script files to manage removeable media.