Today I made some pretty sweet flyers for our Hackers party.
Previously, previously, previously.
Flyers
Tags: computers, dnalounge, firstperson, photography, retrocomputing, sf
Location: 37° 46' 14.36" N, 122° 24' 47.99" W
17 Responses:
Jamie the club owner has a posse. 3.5" 1.44M
Some of us still use those for backups.
Please explain.
We run a community voicemail service on an old Norstar NAM (which apparently is still on the market?!):
http://www.convergencecti.com/drupal/norstarnam
Under the hood it is an IBM Pentium 1 running OS/2. It backs up mailbox structure and recorded names (but not messages themselves) for hundreds and hundreds of accounts onto six floppy disks.
Eventually we will replace this beast with an Asterisk system, but it still works, so...
You had me at OS/2....
I imagine the only file on the disk would be "root slash period workspace slash period garbage period."
Is there a demo on each disk? I can't be alone in assuming there's something more than this cute eventually-a-coaster.
K3n.
I'm sure it's appropriately seditious. The only way to know is to pop it in your computer and see!
Yeah, if it isn't pre-loaded with the finest copy of Nimda that money can buy, I'm disappointed.
If there were, I can't imagine Jamie didn't have a rant about how stupid it was that a high percentage of the disks have bad sectors, and that formatting them was slow, and how hard it was to find USB floppy drives that still worked. Do they even have drivers on the newest version of popular OSes?
They're mass storage devices. USB mass storage is the product of a standards committee, specifically the type of committee that rather than make a decision which would be unpopular with any member simply staples together all the competing alternatives and says "Pick from any of these". The sub-class bits for the Mass Storage class in USB are used to pick from SCSI, UFI, RBC, some crazy protocol for QIC tape drives (!) ATAPI and some others. So a driver can look at those bits and treat the device accordingly.
Most USB mass storage picks SCSI, and then you're just in the usual desolate hell sphere of SCSI, but at least you didn't injure yourself trying to fit a ridiculous terminator block to a row of daisy chained devices.
But USB floppies (mostly) pick the UFI option, a "Universal Floppy Interface" that's so "universal" it barely warrants mention in any documentation. I could call this ridiculous, but how is SCSI any less ridiculous really?
Anyway, on a half-decent OS somebody in the late 1990s will have sighed, opened the ring binder full of unrelated specifications that is "USB mass storage" and implemented everything that looked even vaguely useful. That driver makes your USB stick work, so it's still included with the OS. And as a side effect, a USB floppy drive, if you can find one, should still work.
I was almost tempted to go find one and try it, and then I came to my senses. Probably Jamie had the same experience.
Willing to do pretty much anything to obtain one of these.
Except, you know, make your own?
I'll skateboard while hanging off the side of a limo, but yeah, making my own is going too far.
I am flying from the east coast for this party, and convinced three SF locals to go. It had better not suck.
Mostly I just want to drink and yell HACK THE PLANET at the appropriate time, so it's not a high bar.
I call those "weekdays".
I'm quite certain each disk has Boza.A on it.