Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrayr | Hacker News Reader

CD-R: there's a word I hadn't heard for a long time. It's amazing how technology marches forward and you only notice it when you look back.

View on HN

There’s a chance it’s also on a Zip disk somewhere in my basement!

Oh wow, Zip disks! I entirely forgot those existed. Which is now bringing back memories of just how many different disk drives those late 90s computers would have. The desktops in my middle school would have floppy, zip, sometimes another floppy, and an optical/cd drive. Towers are now almost flat in front, with even optical CD/DVD drives disappearing in many corners, but back in the day there were disk bays everywhere.

I can still feel the satisfying click as a floppy was seated home and hear the buzz as the drive spun up. There was something wonderfully concrete about those storage media. You just don't get the same satisfaction at all from plugging in a USB stick. And the hours spent pulling back the metal cover and letting it go while bored in class...

Although I do think they stuck around a little longer than many remember. I was still using 3.5s to bring papers to home and back around 1998-2000.

I'll add MO discs. They were supposedly more durable, longer-lasting, and (at one point) GB than CD's and DVD's. I discovered them playing Resident Evil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

I also had a drive for 100MB, Zip disks. Only ever owned one since I couldn't justify the expense. Hardly anyone else had them. What's point of a tech for moving data if you can't use it to share the data with friends and local businesses? ;)

Anyone for Jaz drives? Oh man, I remember my mom having 100MB Zip drives and 1GB Jaz drives for a while in the 90s. Always wanted an excuse to play around with them but didn't have much useful data to put on them at that point.

I had an internal 2GB Jaz SCSI unit in my April of 1999 dual-PIII-450 “God Box” I was given for my 18th birthday.

Oh man no kidding! Dual P3s... those things were absolute beasts at the time. What video card did you have? I remember the ol 266 celeron to 400 overclock that became popular around then. Researching that was what got me originally into overclocking.

While on the (off-) topic of magneto-optical drives, do you remember how every cyberpunk film of the 1990s seemed to feature (MO) MiniDiscs as ‘future’ storage? I remember them appearing in some form or another in Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix (amongst others). Lawnmower Man featured CD drives in external caddies, a type of drive system that virtually disappeared with the advent of ‘2x” CD-ROM drives starting sometime in 1992 or 1993.

My first USB ‘thumbrive’ was a 16MB IBM-branded unit I received as an amazing gift in December 2001, when the world was still in shock over the 9/11 attacks.

God, the memories...

It didn't hurt that MO drives were big and colourful, which translates well to the screen :)

And now even hard drives and their associated bays are disappearing (good riddance) as flash storage becomes increasingly prevalent in the form of SSD M.2 slots. Most functionality that was on expansion cards is now either redundant (sound cards, disk controllers) or integrated somehow onto the motherboard/chipset/processor (networking, integrated graphics, video in/out capabilities built into USB and HDMI ports)...

Very true. And to be clear, I much prefer the advent of solid-state based storage; I will be truly happy to never again have a HDD show up DOA. Or to hear an ominous crunch while working on something, and then realize the drive's just decided now is a good time to go bye-bye. I completely welcome the loss of moving parts.

But like I said, there was just something to the experience of working with diskettes. It felt more analog somehow.

I wonder if there was any such nostalgia for the days of tape/cassette storage.

> Or to hear an ominous crunch while working on something, and then realize the drive's just decided now is a good time to go bye-bye. I completely welcome the loss of moving parts.

"Why I'm usually unnerved when modern SSDs die on us"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18653728

You don't need moving parts for the drive to go bye-bye without warning.

Somewhere, in some box, I may yet have a disc with my first BASIC programs from high school.

On floppy disc.

On eight inch floppy disc. (DEC PDP 11/04)

I didn't keep the mark sense cards. I think.

Vic 20’s crappy cassette tapes are probably why I became a network admin instead of a programmer: 9 times out of 10 the cassettes never actaully saved my hours long programming sessions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com