Vocal Voices

A Japanese minister has gone to war on floppy discs, fax machines and pagers. He plans to ban them and other retro stuff from all government usage. Good luck with that!

I don't quite go back to ticker tape or magnetic reel-to-reel, but I did have an Atari, a ZX and a Commodore so I remember using cassette tapes as storage. Then came 5¼ and 3½ floppies, then CDs, full form and mini, then various memory cards, then USB sticks and now the cloud.

I have a drawer full of all those storage solutions and they still work! Well, not a cloud (apart from the dust) or r-to-r or ticker....but all the rest.

My guess is that they will go the same as vinyl for music. Someone will always want to use them to do things 'the old way'. I might be one. My Canon digital camera uses SD cards for storage. At the time I bought it it was up there with the best compacts with 10Mp. 8x optical zoom, video, sound and all sorts of bells and whistles - filters and things - built in. I still prefer it to any phone cameras I have ever used.

Dinosaur! Moi?

When I first started in IT we trainee programmers had to fill in coding sheets.
A bit like graph paper, filled in in pencil. If you made a mistake you got the rubber out. Other wise your sheets were sent down to the "punch girls" who would punch your code into cards to be fed into a card reader, which would compile your program. Talk about a faff.
We also used to have "test decks" of punched cards which contained known data that you could test your program against.
The dark ages of computing! (late 70's).

I have a box of 3.5 floppy drives with software on them I wrote many years ago. I used to have a usb floppy but that appears to have vanished. I'll need to get a new one to transfer the floppy files onto then make sure it is duplicated and backed up. Not even worth putting on a dvd as my use of these drives is also falling off and they will eventually go.

France is FAX mad. It is slowly dying away but every time I worked here they were demanding that we interfaced with FAX systems. Usually I pointed them at a web service for this. Certainly it is what I use whenever someone insists I send them a FAX.

Pagers are interesting things. They work where mobiles do not. My ex son in law bought one for when my daughter was Pregnant. Did the job perfectly. He then started hiring out the pager to all the other RAF lads who were waiting for the call. It all depends on what you want to use them for.

If you go to a flight and wait by the gate, you will hear the DMP printer kicking off to print out the passenger list. It is multi part paper which allows a copy to be kept. Something which lasers simply don't do in the same way. Then again they should be using digital and tablets, multiple, plus a screen at the desk. I believe one of the multi part lists goes to the pilot for their paperwork but planes are technology dinosaurs.

There are tons of end of life systems used all over the place. I have a box full of DAT tapes which I can't get a working drive for. Which is irritating because some of the data I've lost. The data on them is valid but the technology is dead.

cromwell wrote:When I first started in IT we trainee programmers had to fill in coding sheets.
A bit like graph paper, filled in in pencil. If you made a mistake you got the rubber out. Other wise your sheets were sent down to the "punch girls" who would punch your code into cards to be fed into a card reader, which would compile your program. Talk about a faff.
We also used to have "test decks" of punched cards which contained known data that you could test your program against.
The dark ages of computing! (late 70's).

Yes the 486sx25 with 4mb ram and 200mb hard drive, running DOS, was a luxury when I started coding. Then again I joined the Army and was 10 years out of college before I started in IT in the early 90's.

I missed in the other reply. In our attic we have a C64 with boxes of games, two joysticks an external 5.25 floppy and a printer.... It might be worth real money some day but it's well used.