Another one bites the dust
Good luck finding a new computer with a floppy disk drive these days. I can remember when the floppy was the end-all, be-all of storage. My first computer was a Commodore 64, which I received as a Christmas gift in 1984. It was basically a keyboard that attached to an old television set my parents threw away. I still think it was a way to get me out of their way for awhile, since it was all set up in the basement. Yep, there I was - in the basement. With the old 1970s orange couch, a table with an old 15 inch color set attached to my C-64. On the other side of the basement was another TV hooked up to the Intellivision. Oh yeah...
Anyway, the C-64 had no permanent storage of any kind. A person would have to type in BASIC code from a program book (or experiment with it on their own) and just hope there were no typos and that the damn thing worked when you were finished. If if didn't, that usually meant hunting for a bit of mistyped code somewhere in hundreds of lines... it was quite a drag searching for it but it was quite the reward if you found it.
Here's what really sucked - as it had to no permanent storage, as soon as you turned the C-64 off... you lost everything. All of your programs were stored in 64 kilobytes(!) of RAM. And as soon as it was turned off - poof - anything you were working on was gone. You could print your code if you wanted to (I had a sweet Commodore dot-matrix printer - part of the fun was trying to print out dirty pictures using key code...) but that didn't help much if you had to re-type.
So I dealt with it until the summer of 1985 when I discovered that Commodore released a floppy disk drive for the C-64! A five-and-a-quarter inch floppy drive! For only $150! How could I resist? So I scrimped and saved and mowed about 80 lawns that summer and made my mom drive me to Montgomery Wards to purchase the floppy drive. And about 3 disks (at $3 a piece). It was sooooo cool to hook that drive up and hear the record/write head grinding on the disk, just knowing that my bits were being saved in a format that would last forever... and imagining something like the movie Tron was playing out in there. Hell yeah!
Ah, good days indeed - it was also fun learning the hard way that floppy disks did not like anything electromagnetic - from refrigerator magnets to mom's 900-watt microwave oven. Many burned out disks became floppy frisbees in 1986 and 1987.
Since then I've seen the floppy disappear and its close cousin, the Zip Disk, also bite the dust, although I do have USB-powered external drives for both, in case the inevitable disk shows up. What do I think will be the next "legacy" storage device to fade out? That's easy - the magnetic disk drive. I see more and more machines using flash-type drives, much like the newer versions of the iPod and the MacBook Air. They generate less heat, they're smaller and lighter, and there are no physical moving parts associated with it - there's no need to "park" a hard drive.
I could have picked the CD/DVD drive as the next fade out, but I think that's a no-brainer. My money is on the magnetic disk drive being the next big thing going away.
Anyway, the C-64 had no permanent storage of any kind. A person would have to type in BASIC code from a program book (or experiment with it on their own) and just hope there were no typos and that the damn thing worked when you were finished. If if didn't, that usually meant hunting for a bit of mistyped code somewhere in hundreds of lines... it was quite a drag searching for it but it was quite the reward if you found it.
Here's what really sucked - as it had to no permanent storage, as soon as you turned the C-64 off... you lost everything. All of your programs were stored in 64 kilobytes(!) of RAM. And as soon as it was turned off - poof - anything you were working on was gone. You could print your code if you wanted to (I had a sweet Commodore dot-matrix printer - part of the fun was trying to print out dirty pictures using key code...) but that didn't help much if you had to re-type.
So I dealt with it until the summer of 1985 when I discovered that Commodore released a floppy disk drive for the C-64! A five-and-a-quarter inch floppy drive! For only $150! How could I resist? So I scrimped and saved and mowed about 80 lawns that summer and made my mom drive me to Montgomery Wards to purchase the floppy drive. And about 3 disks (at $3 a piece). It was sooooo cool to hook that drive up and hear the record/write head grinding on the disk, just knowing that my bits were being saved in a format that would last forever... and imagining something like the movie Tron was playing out in there. Hell yeah!Ah, good days indeed - it was also fun learning the hard way that floppy disks did not like anything electromagnetic - from refrigerator magnets to mom's 900-watt microwave oven. Many burned out disks became floppy frisbees in 1986 and 1987.
Since then I've seen the floppy disappear and its close cousin, the Zip Disk, also bite the dust, although I do have USB-powered external drives for both, in case the inevitable disk shows up. What do I think will be the next "legacy" storage device to fade out? That's easy - the magnetic disk drive. I see more and more machines using flash-type drives, much like the newer versions of the iPod and the MacBook Air. They generate less heat, they're smaller and lighter, and there are no physical moving parts associated with it - there's no need to "park" a hard drive.
I could have picked the CD/DVD drive as the next fade out, but I think that's a no-brainer. My money is on the magnetic disk drive being the next big thing going away.
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