Oh yeah, I had a Kaypro IV that had two 5.25 floppy drives (and no hard drive). It’s amazing what I could do with so little computing-power… but I’m really happy to not be quite that limited in storage, user-interface or computing power. Thank you very much.
This posted resulted in the following conversations:
Paul: “It was a simpler time… but we were happier…” lol
Me: Paul, I have fond memories, but I don’t want to “live there”… ????????
Paul: That’s how nostalgia works lol. Same for me. Joe Bustillos I do think the restriction of storage (and the SLOW recovery of date) made work more focused overall. I catch myself making the “save everything, clean it up later” habit now… only I don’t have the discipline/habit to close that loop the way I should because it’s so convenient compared to before.
Me: Yeah, I’ve definitely gotten spoiled with the “save everything/fix later” practice. I have GBs of stuff from my last few years teaching that I have yet to either archive or trash… I remember when my sister retired from teaching and was torn with all the physical “supplies” and materials that she wanted to “save” and I thought that was nuts. “Save” for what, you’re not going back to teaching, I thought. But here I am less willing to trash all the stuff that I saved that I’ll never use for any future work… It’s a bad but necessary habit when one doesn’t have time to get everything done. Ugh. Back in the day, we just didn’t have the space to save “unnecessary” stuff. [sigh]
Rami: wonders if a giant emp pulse will wipe all our digitally stored stuff; and a good amount of hardware out too
Me: Rami, I’ve always wondered about how much damage an EMP would create. In the movies the blast goes off and all electronics are permanently destroyed forever. Only EMP that I’m aware of was connected to the atom bombs dropped in Japan and “electronics” from that era were very different from current technologies. My initial guess is that it depends on the strength of the EMP and would be a “local” event within the blast radius and that it would wipe out CPUs and circuits that were running and unshielded. I don’t know if it would have any effect on my magnetic hard drives or SSDs if they were powered down. And the effect may damage working circuits but might not have any effect on equipment what was shut down and not connected to power or any network when the blast happened. And an EMP, as far as I know, is not a permanent state, where electronics or electricity will no longer functions, just equipment damaged by the event would no longer work. But back-ups and nonvolatile memory/chips should be fine after the event. Sorry, if your hope is that one EMP would force us back to being dependent on physical printed media. It’s good to have “backups” on multiple media, electronic and physical (if possible) and multiple places, but I don’t buy the one EMP ends civilization permanently scenario. ????????
Tags: daily random shit, floppy disks, kaypro, personal tech history, tech nostalgia
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