70
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
Forty years ago, a 7MB file would be unheard of, at least in contexts where floppies would be the only available means of transferring it. (Tapes were commonly used for large transfers on minis and ...
- 127k
49
votes
Accepted
Why were optical drives not used as secondary storage instead of magnetic drives?
For the simple reason that until relatively recently, it was very difficult to make a rewritable optical medium, but it was easy to make a rewritable magnetic medium. Magnetic tape as a recording ...
- 16.9k
42
votes
Accepted
How can I store a machine language program to disk on a C64?
I have looked all around online, but I cannot find on how to do this.
Well, you won't, as the C64's BASIC2 does not provide such function or a monitor. The old PETs had TIM in ROM, while BASIC 3.5 ...
- 232k
42
votes
Accepted
Could today's flash memory be used instead of RAM in 1980s 8 bit machines?
No, Yes, But No, But Maybe, Also There's Better Stuff
It's memory, but not as straightforward as it seems, so let's try to go along the posibilities:
No
Conventional FLASH is a block device. Like a ...
- 232k
41
votes
Accepted
What is the massive CD drive used in the movie "Licence to Kill"?
As far as I remember, this wasn't a CD, but (supposed to be) a Laserdisc, and he was using a Philips player (the movie contained several Philips machines). Laserdiscs were available in different sizes ...
- 232k
40
votes
Accepted
What is the (standardized) weight of a 3.5 inch floppy disk?
The short answer / TLDR: One 3.5-inch floppy disk weighs between 15 - 25 grams. The average (mean) weight of one 3.5-inch floppy disk is 18 grams, the median is 17 gram. Of that weight 75% is ...
- 1,672
39
votes
Accepted
When did 5.25″ floppies exceed the capacity of 8″?
In practice, 5.25" drives equalled or exceeded the capacity of 8"
drives when 5.25" floppy drives started using HD media.
The Evolution of 5.25" Drive Systems
There are only two ...
- 27.2k
31
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
40 years ago - 1978 - there was no home/hobbyist/small office computing to speak of. Maybe a few hundred people altogether. So you must be talking about commercial/industrial computing.
For large ...
- 6,354
30
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
As well as splitting across multiple floppy disks, there were several cabled communication options available ranging from your basic serial cables and sending data over via X/Y/ZMODEM or Kermit, but ...
- 12.4k
30
votes
Accepted
Digitally stored data world total history?
A TiB is not a lot. I would think that amount was already hit with punch cards way before the first digital computers were used. Wikipedia notes:
"By 1937... IBM had 32 presses at work in ...
- 232k
27
votes
Why were optical drives not used as secondary storage instead of magnetic drives?
Write speed and endurance.
Optical drive technology has been much slower to write to than magnetic Hard Disk Drives (HDDs).
The erasable optical technologies that made it to mass market were much ...
- 4,631
27
votes
Did something like floppy disk jukeboxes for home computers exist in the 70s or 80s? Would that have been a feasible concept?
There was a product, called I think "Juke Box 5" designed for the Macintosh, which had a hopper on the top that could hold a IIRC about 20 floppies, and was designed to be placed in front of ...
- 38k
24
votes
Accepted
How does a floppy drive identify the first and last sectors and tracks?
The track identification part is quite simple. Floppy formats are standardized so that there are specifications what is the distance between tracks (e.g. 96 tracks per inch) and what is the position ...
- 35.7k
23
votes
Accepted
Was photographic film ever used for digital data storage?
Yes, the IBM 1360 used it. The wikipedia page suggests that it could store 0.5 terabits (64 GiB) of information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360
Fascinating design.
- 5,327
22
votes
When did wear leveling in flash storage come up?
It's a long-standing and well understood design principle.
The very first EEPROM I designed into a system in about 1989 had wear levelling implemented in the software. It was a simple conclusion that ...
- 4,631
21
votes
Accepted
Did something like floppy disk jukeboxes for home computers exist in the 70s or 80s? Would that have been a feasible concept?
Many home computers in the 1970s and 1980s had two floppy disk drives
Home computers had any number of drives from zero to 6 or 8, all depending on budget. Even rather restricted systems like a C64 ...
- 232k
20
votes
Was photographic film ever used for digital data storage?
It IS used in at least two places even today:
QR codes. There is the possibility of the print media carrying it having been prepared involving photographic methods.
Digital sound in movie theaters, ...
- 5,782
19
votes
Why Kansas City Standard (KCS/CUTS) differs from Bell 103/202/212 modem protocol?
They are different because they are meant for different use cases so they both work well for what they are meant for. One is suitable for real time data transmission between two distant equipment over ...
- 35.7k
19
votes
What was the typical amount of disk storage for a mainframe installation in the 1980s?
Marburg University in Germany has put the complete configuration of their IBM 4381 as of Dec 31, 1987 online. They list five "magnetic disk units" (Magnetplatten-Einheiten) of 2.52 GB each, ...
- 10.3k
18
votes
Accepted
Zip drive eject "tool"
The problem is almost certainly the quality of the dollar store paperclip. If you buy a box of paperclips from a stationary store, you are more likely to get paperclips made from thicker and stronger ...
- 2,736
17
votes
What is the massive CD drive used in the movie "Licence to Kill"?
That is a Philips VP415 LV-ROM player.
- 35.7k
17
votes
Did the Commodore datasette interface provide greater reliability?
The Datassette has a digital interface, and since it is not meant to process audio signals at all, it allows directly writing sharp digital magnetic transitions to the tape, using a single monophonic ...
- 35.7k
17
votes
Accepted
Why didn't the CD come with a caddy by default?
When the CD first released back in the early 80's (or is it late 70's?)
First shown 1981 in Berlin, introduced worldwide 1982.
why did Sony and Philips even allow the disk itself to be "naked&...
- 232k
17
votes
Digitally stored data world total history?
While there is an answer already, I'll put things into a historical perspective with a few data points.
The first time humanity had ~1 TB of stored data was most likely around 250-200 BCE. The Library ...
- 1,271
16
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
Do have a 7 MiB file, you would need a HD at least that size. In reality even a manyfold thereof, as usually one won't have a HD with just one file.
Now, in the real early times, lets say 70s, home ...
- 232k
16
votes
Dealing with oversized files decades ago? Data transfer in the age of floppy disks
Your timescales are out. Floppies might have just existed 40 years ago, but your average office worker never saw one. More to the point, office workers didn't pass machine-readable data around the ...
- 889
16
votes
When did wear leveling in flash storage come up?
It was certainly a known practice in 1993 when I designed a filesystem for EdenOs that had an optional wear-levelling layer for flash-based storage (battery-backed RAM on PCMCIA was the favourite ...
- 1,385
14
votes
Zip drive eject "tool"
A very thin Allen key. I've got a .05" one in my toolkit which was originally there for aligning Shugart floppy discs and by now is used almost entirely for misbehaving DVD drives etc.
I'd ...
- 2,578
14
votes
Could today's flash memory be used instead of RAM in 1980s 8 bit machines?
No, because the game expects to access the memory as RAM, where any address can be arbitrarily read and written to replace current contents.
Or rather, no, unless many obstacles are solved, when it ...
- 35.7k
13
votes
Accepted
Magnetic tapes as a random access medium?
DECtape was used that way; it was wide (0.750 inch?) magnetic tape, on very small reels, so it
didn't take forever to find a sector. PDP-8 and PDP-11 systems from Digital Equipment were the likely ...
- 2,180
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible