Products > Test Equipment
Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
mnementh:
--- Quote from: Ice-Tea on June 29, 2022, 08:52:13 am --- Free. Just pay for shipping.
--- End quote ---
So... is this a BUSTED scenario, or YAGI gone wrong? Or are you trying to mitigate JENGA reaching critical mass by applying a little BAIT THEORY to the TEA thread...? :-DD
mnem
mnementh:
--- Quote from: Vince on June 29, 2022, 11:09:25 am ---
--- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 05:25:14 am ---
--- Quote from: Vince on June 28, 2022, 08:46:55 pm ---
Plus Floppies are more convenient to carry your files with you and then go to computer, or some body else's in another office, and load your files there. Portability.
--- End quote ---
Floppies are an electromechanical part that is unreliable.
Transfering one 1.4MiB floppy worth of data over 115200 serial is going to take 102 seconds, if my maths is less broken than usual. In 1 minute 42 seconds, the "convenience" of carrying the file via sneakernet (execute copy command, unmount floppy, get to instrument, retrieve disk, move disk, insert disk, mount disk, copy files out of it) is going to be beaten. For trivial things like a file in the 10s of KiB, serial is so much faster it's silly.
Besides, RS-232 is soo archaic today (except where it isn't; I use serial console at work every week, at least) that it carries its own aura de cool with it.
--- End quote ---
I don't understand the hate for floppies, what else did you want scopes to use back then ? USB ? There was no USB.
Serial link faster ? That's irrelevant, that implies that by some magic wherever you decide / need to put your scope, somehow there will be a computer right there on the bench next to the scope, and that it will have a serial cable and the S/W to go with it... didn't work like that in real life at my school at least. There were no computers in the class room in physics, so the teacher would grab the scope (only had one, was so expensive), bring it to a particular bench in the class, put stuff on the floppy then grab the floppy back to his office, that might a few meters away, or on another floor or even another building altogether.
You need a portable media, and one that's easily usable by the desktop computers of the day. So it was either3.5" floppy or nothing. Simple.
Hell even if by some magic there WAS a computer with a serial cable available right next to the scope, then what ? You transfer your file to that PC, then what ? How do you transfer that file to your computer in your office so you can create your report / Word document with it ? You get it from the network ? There was no network back then in my school, to speak of. So used floppies to transfer files from one computer to another. And let's say that OK, there was ONE computer in the class room... class room is very large, scope might requires a 10 or 20 meter serial cable to get to the computer... you don't get silly fast speeds of R232 at that sort of distance, no you just crawl... quite possibly even much slower than a floppy drive would write the file.
So take the scope to the computer at the other side of the room ? Silly, no practical. Once you have setup your scope / experiment, it stays there until not needed anymore. But writing the file to a floppy and grabbing that and taking it to any place to any computer.. yes, that, is practical.
I don't see, back then, how you could offer the same practically in any other way. Surely all TE manufacturers thought like me that ",5" floppies were the obvious choice, and surely all the customers that paid extra to tick the " FDD " option though that too.
--- End quote ---
The main reason is we can't be arsed.
I'm probably one of the last holdouts on every major form of media evolution, and even I haven't deliberately put a floppy drive in a PC for close to 20 years. Close to a decade for optical. I have a couple USB DVD/R drives... might even still have a 1.44 USB floppy drive in one of the gazillion boxes of crap that hasn't seen light of day since I left San Damntonio after mum died... I say might have... but as that would suggest, if I do have such it has not seen light of day in over a decade. :palm:
So sure... the floppy is right there on these prehistoric scopes... but that's worthless for most people (even us weirdos in this thread) who might have one old WinXP laptop lying around you can copy files from it with. By the time you dust it off, find the power brick, wait for it to boot and finally lay hands on a USB that prehistoric machine will recognize, or find a free ethernet port and get it talking over your home network, you could literally have hand-drawn the waveform in PAINT.
Even if you have a machine in daily use that can read the floppy... it's still more assache than it's worth.
mnem
:-/O
Vince:
Yeah but that's still missing 100% my point, everything I said ?! :-//
mnementh:
The point is it's not the 1980s anymore; floppy is no longer "the convenient choice".
There are literally a dozen better ways to do it than floppy, and many of them are still compatible with these old machines. While none of the choices available on these machines are great, floppy is still the worst one possible. And in here, everybody knows about those better ways.
mnem
*puts on best Rain Man voice* "Floppy drives suck... yes, definitely... definitely suck..."
BU508A:
Convert a 1.44MByte Floppy to 256GByte:
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