Gadgets, Then & Now

An anonymous reader writes in to tell us about "A funny article about gadgets from the 70's & 80's compared to gadgets of today. Amazing that you can fit 25,000 5 1/4 diskettes on one 8GB compact flash, and phones weighed 11.5 pounds! "

Comments

Re:And yet, amazingly...

[evilviper]

Maybe because they DO come in handy every once and a while?

For what? If you've got some boot floppies you still use, grab a copy of isolinux (syslinux) and you can put all the images on a single CD, which will boot on any system made in the past 10 years.

I still keep a couple old systems (10+ years, non-bootable CD-ROMs) around, but I find it's much easier and faster to pull out the hard drives, and plug them into a modern system for OS (re)installation. Everything else just goes over the network.

Re:And yet, amazingly...

[evilviper]

where you want to load extra drivers supplied by the manufacturer just after boot time.

Home users aren't too likely to use a RAID controller, and servers are unlikely to be installed from the standard disc. Even small companies slipstream their Windows CD, and add any extra patches and drivers they want before installing it on a single machine. It's quite easy.

As for the other point - it takes less time to plug a floppy in than it does to move a drive about or burn a CDROM that pretends it is a driver floppy disk.

It takes less time to burn and boot from a CD than it does to write and boot from a floppy. Floppies are so damn slow, not to mention it'll be 100% perfect on the CD every time, and a previously used floppy will have CRC errors half the time...

Besides, I can't remember the last time I got any products with a floppy. Companies have simply switched to CDs for everything.

Moving a drive may take some time... or not. Hard drive caddies make things quite fast. My firewall/router is also trivial to move, as it's just a CF disk in a front drive bay.

the floppy disk is the one that is missed the most during setup.

You haven't given any reasons why.