Thursday, December 02, 2010

Techno-Notes

Having actually used terminals connected (hardwire) to a CPU, and having actually SEEN punch-card loading for programming and data entry, this desktop stuff is all rather, aaaaahh, new-ish to me.

So OK. I get a desktop, about 10-15 years ago. Has a floppy-disk receptacle.

Next desktop has a CD receptacle, and I ordered a floppy-receptacle because, after all, a bunch of data was on this here floppy-library that I'd accumulated.

Next desktop has the CD receptacle, and cute little rectangular holes for thumb-drives. I ordered a floppy-receptacle extra, even though a bunch of the data is now stored on CDs AND in the "E" drive mirror.

Today I get a call from a pal in the local school. He tells me that their computers no longer have CD drives (and I had to explain "floppy" to him, too.)

Thumb-drives only.

Here I sit with a floppy library, a CD library, an extra hard-drive--and I can't give this guy any information b/c I don't use thumb-drives and THEY don't have CD drives.

Ugh.

3 comments:

Neo-Con Tastic said...

Have you heard of file-sharing via cloud? Hundreds of sites will allow you to share files and send the links to other users publicly.

For you, I would suggest box.net. However for the future, I encourage you to move all data to a storage drive and then back up to a secondary drive. I'm sitting on about two Terabytes at home with thumb/flash drives that can hold up to 80 Gigs.

TerryN said...

Having written my first program on a keypunch I'll take the thumb drive, thank you very much Dov Moran.

GOR said...

Heh, heh – memories! Back in the early 70s I even learned how to wire boards for a punch card sorting machine! Did you ever see Bob Newhart’s gig where he’s talking on the phone with Herman Hollerith about his idea for punched cards…? It was a riot!

Yes, I can relate about storage devices and when I purchased my last desktop I specified a floppy drive as I had so much data on that medium. But thumb drives and memory sticks are foreign to me. I take a while to catch up - and back in the day I was one who went with Betamax over VHS initially…!

But I’m making progress - I got a wireless modem recently…