Remember
this? I still remember my computer teacher in 1st grade plugging in the only SuperDisk drive in the school into her PC and XP telling her it was a regular floppy. The discontent when she couldn't get more than 5 students work on there was hilarious...
The idea of a floppy went away in favor of CDs and DVDs for speed and reliability. The optical standards are all created equal but you can get faster drives in the computers for existing disks. If the engineers wanted to make floppies faster they would have had to redesign the drive and the disks, where as with CDs you stick it in what ever speed reader and it goes whatever speed it is capable of.
USB isn't going anywhere for a long time. But within 20 years I believe we will see the decline of USB drives and external storage and go fully cloud for many. Unfortunately, that means we will have a big problem using our PowerPC Macs then...
The move to 'cloud computing' is a GIANT step backwards and has been the goal of the industry since at least the mid 90s when internet went mainstream. I will ALWAYS want my own computer with it's own software and it's own disks space. Cloud computing is just a return to dumb terminals with graphics and all of these free storage services will turn into rental services and all of the free software will be rental. I am totally against the idea of a move back to the cloud. Luckily, I don't think Linux will be going away anytime soon and so we will still get to keep our client end machines and not be forced to use dumb terminals.
As for floppy disks, speed could easily be improved. In fact, without interlacing, just the higher density would speed it up. The problem with Iomega and so on was that they weren't open standards and the media was very expensive. I still maintain that CDs are far less reliable than a floppy. One tiny scratch in a cd renders it useless. I was talking about an open standard with modern speed and density. The fact that floppies aren't sealed and created in clean rooms will always limit their capacity, but I do think getting a 1GB floppy at regular old floppy disk prices is technically feasible, but probably wouldn't be backward compatible. It's just a matter of miniaturizing the head and the magnetic particles suspended in the layer on top of the Mylar. The world has probably moved on and my hoping for a new floppy standard is well, unlikely to say the least.
Wouldn't rebooting necessarily delete virtual memory files?
Today's hardware IS without question of lower quality than older hardware, especially hard disks. I have some really old hard drives that work fine (we're talking 10MB MFM hard drives) and nearly every drive I own that is older than 10 years old doesn't work. Compare early keyboards with the junk we get with our computers today. We went from nice heavy switch style keyboards (which were ALWAYS part of a review of a PC back then, not feature or looks, but quality of the switches) to membrane based Keyboards that you are lucky if it survives a year or 2 and are hard on the fingers. I use old IBM branded keyboards on my computers (except for my macs because they don't have PS2 connectors). The cases are much, much thinner and cheaper and so are the power supplies. Getting a good power supply today is very difficult and they have pretty high failure rates compared to the old ones. CD/DVD drives are probably not that much different because they so new and were really only a standard in a computer after the great drop in quality in the middle to late 90s as home computers went mainstream. I got my first computer in 1981 and the drop in quality of manufacture has been very evident. There was also a period of several years where millions of badly designed capacitors plagued computers and were known to blow out in the late 90s early 2000s. In fact, the only real quality improvement is VLSI being used to lower the chip count on a given board, thus lowering the number of parts that could fail. The downsides are that they aren't serviceable and are made much more cheaply than the older boards, even the VLSI chips. Modern boards use narrower etched circuitry and thinner layers of etched copper and are more prone to failure. The MTBF ratings of nearly every piece of hardware in a modern computer is less than the MTBF rates of, say, 1990.
I do agree that the hardware race is no longer as important, especially after the release of XP and the long time between it and vista. This allowed speed of hardware to catch up to the software. Most computers made after 2005, assuming they have enough ram are perfectly usable today for just about everything a typical home user would do. Cad, video editing, gaming and other intense software being the exception.
AOL sucked (I actually used it when it was called Q-link and was geared towards the 8 bit systems). I did like AOL for dos as it came with geos, and under-appreciated competitor to windows. GEOS could actually run fairly well on a 5150, especially if you had 640k. I did use AOL for a while when I was still using telix to connect to local BBS's to access files and arpnet (or arcnet) and internet on some BBSs for email and news groups. But once a local ISP became available, the whole BBS scene collapsed.
I've always been a command line junkie. It's so much more straight forward, at least the way my mind works. Long file names has had an effect on that for managing files, but luckily XP still displays short file names with /x and it's easy to figure out the "short name" anyway.
For those would like to check out gem, geos, cp/m etc, I'd really recommend PCE (there's a 5150 emulator with (PC speaker) sound and VGA and an 80186 processor and IIRC. 4MB EMS and custom dos drivers to load dos high and use the UMA for TSRs) and comes in all kinds of configurations from dos 5 to CPM and gem as well as an early compact Mac emulator (I think it's an SE that's being emulated) and I am pretty sure there are both OSX and PC versions of both. You can also use dosbox to mount a PCE floppy image file and get software onto the virtual hard disk by floppy image. Just use the dosbox "imgmount -t floppy" command. otherwise, it's hard to get files from the 'world' into the emulated machine. But you can download dos games or whatever and then use dosbox to mount the built in floppy img file to transfer files to the 'inside' of the 5150 emulated pc
I had both a Commodore SX-64 and a Compaq Luggable (with a 9" green cga compatible screen, an 8086 which I replaced with an nec v20, 640k ram, 10MB MFM hard disk and a 360k 5.25" disk drive). There is a reason they called that thing "luggable", damn it was heavy. Of course, it was built like a tank.
Chris
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You are totally right about Flash being a pig. I personally despise it but it is the world we live in today...
Which eMac is this? The earlier ones only had a B grade AirPort Card, and if the Verizon router only broadcasts N (which the iPhones and iPads can see and use), it would be invisible to the eMac. Try setting it to mixed mode and seeing if that helps...
The problem with floppies is that they are slow! They are also damaged easily by dust and debris which seemingly is always in the floppy drives of old PCs. Plus there is a lot of plastic used to make one and they probably should be recycled. Ever install Windows 95 off of floppies? You would know just how long an install would take. Another downfault is that they can't be used as frisbees like CDs and DVDs when you are done with them.
The airport card came out of a 450mhz G4, it didn't come with the eMac. The eMac I have is the one that was strictly for schools (cd-rom 700mhz version) that I got on a closeout from smalldog Otherwise, these weren't available to the public to the best of my knowledge. I'll give that a try, but where do you go to turn on mixed mode?