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Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread

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Vince:

--- Quote from: mansaxel on June 29, 2022, 08:50:47 pm ---
--- Quote from: Vince on June 29, 2022, 08:39:02 pm ---
--- Quote ---In fact I didn’t even use floppy disks back in the 90s. Had moved to Zip disks and CDRs.

--- End quote ---

Floppies are absolutely marvelous, I much prefer them to punch cards, sorry  :-//

--- End quote ---

I think you can make a pretty good argument for punchcards having an edge to the floppy in reliability.  Mostly, I suspect, because no-one ever built punches, readers or reader/punches to a price; they were built to spec. 

Floppies, not so much.

--- End quote ---

One could make a better more reliable floppy drive, potentially. Not the floppies' fault...

No, I still maintain floppies are much better.


How large and heavy would be a 1.4MB worth of punch cards ?
I bet it doesn't fit in your shirt pocket like a floppy would  >:D

And, once you have typed this metric ton of punch cards that amount to 1.4MB... run it through the computer and then it tells you sorry you made a mistake / typo, do it all over again... you are happy.

Floppy you can just correct your mistake in seconds.

How long does it take to punch holes for this 1.4MB worth of punch cards, versus a floppy drive ?

Yes, much longer... so long it's unpractical.

Sorry, floppy wins by several orders of magnitude.  >:D

tggzzz:

--- Quote from: bd139 on June 29, 2022, 08:30:05 pm ---Yeah quite frankly fuck floppy disks. They were shit when they came out. Corruption, speed problems, reliability problems, tiny storage. Add 30 years to the problem and now you have mechanical and magnetic degradation to contend with.

--- End quote ---

And the available alternatives were 10MB hard disks the size of washing machines, or paper (tape or cards), or audio cassettes (remember CUTS at 300/1200 baud?).

Floppies were a significant advance, for those that could afford them.

Saskia:
stilllying flat, as is hubby. They denied me monoklonale antibodies as I am not in the patient group the give those to.
hubby is also still down. I don't think I'll be on my feet next week

bd139:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 29, 2022, 08:57:06 pm ---
--- Quote from: bd139 on June 29, 2022, 07:25:48 pm ---Bought some junk.
Why? Well I went through the service manual and it is absolutely packed to the brim with rather expensive analogue and TTL bits and a metric ton of standard HP parts. Absolutely no use whatsoever in this day and age as it's all for testing Bell/CCITT 4KHz channel telecoms crap which is completely obsolete so it'll be used as an organ supply for other projects.

--- End quote ---


Sounds like I might need to take care to distinguish you from Vince.

In the late 70s, the GPO (pre BT) had to work how they could guarantee sending 2Mb/s between exchanges along cables specified at audio frequencies. They could have asked the cable manufacturers, but that would have given them the excuse to drastically increase the price of the same product.

It was of course the wrong question, since the answer didn't include the newfangled optical fibres.

--- End quote ---

Yep. That’s pretty much how ADSL works now. Channelised. Amazing how we can cram 80Mbits up some mouldy copper crud.

bd139:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on June 29, 2022, 09:04:43 pm ---
--- Quote from: bd139 on June 29, 2022, 08:30:05 pm ---Yeah quite frankly fuck floppy disks. They were shit when they came out. Corruption, speed problems, reliability problems, tiny storage. Add 30 years to the problem and now you have mechanical and magnetic degradation to contend with.

--- End quote ---

And the available alternatives were 10MB hard disks the size of washing machines, or paper (tape or cards), or audio cassettes (remember CUTS at 300/1200 baud?).

Floppies were a significant advance, for those that could afford them.

--- End quote ---

Yes I remember loading tapes in via my BBC micro cassette interface. When I finally got a single 5 1/4” drive things were good. But that realistically lasted 4 years because i got a 20Mb hard disk. Every floppy interaction after that was a chore.

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