View from the Potting Shed

Do you remember what these are called? Ah, the good old days when you had to install operating systems from floppy disk. For MS-DOS 6.2 it took 3 disks, Windows 3.1 used 6, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 occupied 8 plus one for mouse drivers, while — can you believe? — Windows 95 was shipped on 24 floppies!

And PC magazines were sold with 3.5″ disks sellotaped to the front covers. This was the AA’s A to B UK Route Planner application that was shipped with the September 1997 issue of PC Pro. Not only was it a great application (it showed no maps, it just described where you should go!) but I loved the fact that it said “Requires Microsoft Windows” on the label. A warning to all those late-90s die-hard DOS fans that maybe it was time to upgrade after all! (I moved from my job in London in 1997, where one of the offices was still running a Novell Netware DOS network … ah, what fond memories of the complexities of WordPerfect 5 for DOS!)

Anyhow, as part of my PC restoration process, this evening I sorted out my collection of 3.5″ floppy disks. I discovered that (astonishingly) I have 208 of them, including 5 DSDD 135TPI disks for the Apple Mac SE (which were state of the art when I was at university!).

Most of the disks have now been backed up to hard disk (once again!) and again onto CD-ROM. I must only have transferred about 100 of the disks to CD as it took up only 146MB. That’s not even 1/4 of the space available on a CD-R, and it’s about 1/32 of a DVD! How things have changed.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2005 at 10:47 pm and is filed under Computer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.