Look what I found...

it looks like a good old 3½ inchdiskette to me

Best regards
Jantje

Preparing to load a sketch on my first computer

If you can find a few more, and some cable ties, you can make one of these.

I have to have one.... our local hardware place even has bags of those small cable ties in an assortment of colours, not just the common black or white. But my wife says she threw out a gazillion of those 3.5s a while back.

If you find some 8" ones you could make dustbins for under the desk....

I made some a few years back. I even found some new disks on sale that I bought for the purpose, because they were multi-colored. I made them for the kids in their school colors.

Those were the days... 8" SSSD @ 256KB iirc

You guys and your new fangled magnetic media. I had to enter my first created program ( a slot machine game written in machine language with a paper and pencil 'editior' ) via the front panel switches of the minicomputer. So get off my lawn. :smiley:

Lefty

Love the colour scheme....

I don't go back quite that far but did start Fortran on punched cards.

retrolefty:
Informa Connect - Know more, do more, be more.

That's the beast! Ours had a placard affixed with the bootloader, it couldn't have been more than 20 instructions or so. Of course the system had core memory, so if it was powered off, you could just try it on the chance that the bootloader was still there after the last person used it. I thought that a person could have some fun with that, but never quite got around to it.

JimboZA:
I have to have one....

Wowsers! I was going to offer to send a few of the discs I'm about to trash but the cheapest shipping I can find is $38.

USPS International Small Flat Rate Box is like $15 IIRC.

Ah, there we go. $17 is the lowest priced option I can find. Still a bit steep to send five used floppies. I suspect @JimboZA could offer a fiver to one of the kids and have a much faster delivery.

If it's anything like the college I work at one of said kids is presently looking for their misplaced storage medium...

(Ok, I know, they all use USB sticks these days...)

retrolefty:
You guys and your new fangled magnetic media.

Oh.. we're on that subject again.... :wink:

University: Punch card for FORTRAN. Batch process get your print output. Edit, shuffle and resubmit. Repeat.

First work: Papertape into a PDP-11 (and toggling the bootloader. But then we got a board with 20x16 Diodes in a matrix and an addressdecoder. Some diodes were cut and - tada! - we had a ROM address space with the papertape bootloader)

"Patching" was very real on the papertape. You cut some extra holes or used black tape to block some. (there were some tools/jigs so the holes were proper aligned)

But then things went ... well, modern like. 8" floppies, double the core to 16Kilobytes, even 24K. 8)

JimboZA:
.... in the street outside my house this morning.

Wth?

The gods must be crazy.

I kept some of these for my vintage systems. Was lucky that someone sent me some 5" 360K single side discs to make a copy of dos for the compacq, very first luggable ibm pc and very first compaq.

There is a panel in my work place that someone kept. It's got hundreds of jumper wires on a matrix of holes. He said it was a program someone made. That stuff IS older than punch cards.

University: Punch card for FORTRAN. Batch process get your print output. Edit, shuffle and resubmit. Repeat.

Me too (WATFOR)... you forgot the "drop on floor and accidentally stomp cards" part.

I remember running back to the computer centre between lectures to fetch print out only to find it hadn't compiled due to a silly syntax error. Then there would be no vacant card punch, then late for next lecture.

JimboZA:

University: Punch card for FORTRAN. Batch process get your print output. Edit, shuffle and resubmit. Repeat.

Me too (WATFOR)... you forgot the "drop on floor and accidentally stomp cards" part.

That's what the sequence numbers in columns 73-80 are for. You just put it in a card sorter :slight_smile:

JimboZA:
I remember running back to the computer centre between lectures to fetch print out only to find it hadn't compiled due to a silly syntax error. Then there would be no vacant card punch, then late for next lecture.

That's what an exacto knife and scotch tape are for. :slight_smile: In addition, I recall occasionally having to program in Pascal on an 027 card punch when the 029 card punches were busy, and having to multi-punch things like semicolons.

liudr:
There is a panel in my work place that someone kept. It's got hundreds of jumper wires on a matrix of holes. He said it was a program someone made. That stuff IS older than punch cards.

Not sure about the model numbers and other specifics, these were just slightly before my time but I do think I remember them being wheeled out the door. I did have an assignment for a few weeks once that involved operating a card sorter. If a jam occurred, it could create quite a mess in a hurry.