Anyone else remember being able to double your disk space with a hole punch?

[Uhtrinity]

Originally posted by: Triumph
What? You could do that? I need to go back in time and tell that to my 8 year old self. I mean, ther was no internet around in those days to tell you everything you needed to know.

Man, those were the days, when computers were exciting and new and every advance in technology really felt like you were getting somewhere and doing something new. Now, I've pretty much lost interest - a 3 year old bare bones machine can still run most of today's apps just fine which gives me no incentive to upgrade. When my friends 66mhz Pentium could run the Quake demo and my 33 mhz could not, that's when I was interested in upgrading.

There might not have been an internet (that most could afford), but we had BBS's with forums and Usenet threads if your BBS host subscribed to them.

Kind of on topic for this thread:

This summer I picked up an older system in pristine condition -

Circa 1987 Packard Bell 8088
512k Ram
42 MB Seagate Hard Drive
5.25" Floppy
original 16 color monitor

I am using it as an instructional aide for my computer lab class and the computer club. Currently running the original DOS ver 3.1, but will most likely load a newer version of freedos.

 

[McCarthy]

I used a soldering iron to melt a hole. The excess plastic would pop right off and leave a nice little hole.

Good times

 

[Evadman]

/me looks at his collection of 40 track single sided 5.25" disks for his osborne

 

[Whisper]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog

Originally posted by: SoulAssassin
Ahhhh....I remember when Doublespace came out with DOS 6.0 too. That was fun until it crashed.

The best thing about DOS 6 was the boot menu! No more boot disks for games!
Although I did have a pretty nice config before it, with all my drivers loaded I had 604k free. I had to use a different mouse driver, can't even remember where I got that one from.

Ahh yes, the good ol' days of autoexec.bat and config.sys

I'm pretty sure every game they made back then was programmed to require exactly 16k more than you had available, every time.

 

[IronWing]

Maybe I'm recalling this wrong but it seems to me that the hole punch was to make a SS disk into a DS disk and that you had to turn the disk over to use the other side so you basically ended up with two SS disks for the price of one. The trick was that the media inside the disk was always double sided, just the folder was different.

 

[IronWing]

Originally posted by: Whisper

Originally posted by: nakedfrog

Originally posted by: SoulAssassin
Ahhhh....I remember when Doublespace came out with DOS 6.0 too. That was fun until it crashed.

The best thing about DOS 6 was the boot menu! No more boot disks for games!
Although I did have a pretty nice config before it, with all my drivers loaded I had 604k free. I had to use a different mouse driver, can't even remember where I got that one from.

Ahh yes, the good ol' days of autoexec.bat and config.sys

I'm pretty sure every game they made back then was programmed to require exactly 16k more than you had available, every time.

I kind of miss windows.ini. If Win 3.x wasn't working right one could always drop to DOS and fix most problems. Of course the problem was always with ATM so it was easy to spot. Now users are not to worry their pretty little heads about what is going on with their PCs.

 

[Syringer]

Oh yes, I remember when freeing up conventional memory was so much more important than extended memory.

A "mem" check on the command prompt says I have all 655360 bytes available, w00t.

 

[Syringer]

DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

 

[Uhtrinity]

Originally posted by: ironwing
Maybe I'm recalling this wrong but it seems to me that the hole punch was to make a SS disk into a DS disk and that you had to turn the disk over to use the other side so you basically ended up with two SS disks for the price of one. The trick was that the media inside the disk was always double sided, just the folder was different.

That was true for the 5.25" disks, however punching the 720kb 3.5" made them high density 1.44MB disks. The 3.5" disks of course could not be flipped over.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Syringer
DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

QEMM > memmaker.

Error! Insufficient memory!

"What do you mean insufficient memory? I have eightfuckinmegs!"

:laugh:

Quote from a Falcon 3.0 user, circa 1992.

 

[Shadowknight]

Originally posted by: cherrytwist
You guys realize that was stealing, right? Riiiiiiight?

Don't Copy That Floppy! Incidentally, they made a referencec to DCTF in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. There were books you could read to increase your computer skills if they were below a certain level. If your research skill wasn't high enough, you couldn't learn from the books and the description would says something like ""This book says "Don't Copy That Floppy", but you can't possible be reading that right."

 

[FoBoT]

oh yeah, make them double sided with the hole punch

good time, good times

 

[dennilfloss]

I remember being able to double my park bench space with a single punch.

 

[Sphexi]

I also remember getting our first modem, and not being able to do much with it since nobody else really had one yet. Eventually a friend's older brother setup a dial-in BBS on his private phone line his parents got him (nobody ever called to talk to him apparantly), and he had some games and stuff on there. I used it once or twice, then figured out his admin password, and uploaded some photos of muscle-building guys I found on Prodigy in one of his shared folders. A bunch of his friends logged on and found them and thought he was gay.

Oh, and one summer a friend and I spent something like 5 hours a day playing the original Warcraft over 2400bps modems, not realizing that back in those days our parents didn't have unlimited local calling. Hilarity and large phone bills ensued.

 

[jfall]

Hah, yeah I remember doing that. Boy, I sure don't miss the days of using diskettes

 

[Deeko]

Ohh double space.

When I was a wee lad (less than 10 years old) we had an old IBM PS/1. My dad ran doublespace on it. In order to play DOS games, things had to be installed on the "real" drive for some reason that I don't remember (probably I didn't know how to make it run doublespace, or maybe doublespace used up too much memory). I was curious what this seemingly useless 150MB file was. I deleted it. Hilarity ensued.