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Comment by giu | Hacker News Reader

This question makes me feel old. And I'm in my early twenties.

One of my friends who teaches 11-16 year-olds recently had to explain to one of her classes what camera film was, and how it was used.

The movement from camera film to digital cameras was a largely unnoticed revolution which took place within the last decade.

In industry, that may be so (I seem to recall one of the Star Wars prequels being the first feature movie done entirely with digital cameras). For end-user video cameras (handicams, or whatnot), we've been storing to magnetic tape for a good bit longer though.

Being digital doesn't mean using solid state storage. Magnetic tape is probably still the most used medium for digital video cameras. For example, Betacam SX is still used.

On a recent vacation I was photographing my nieces and nephew making funny faces. After the first shots they ran up behind me, looked at the back of the camera, and said, "Can I see?" They gave me bewildered looks when I told them it was a film camera and they'd have to wait a few weeks.

Ha! I took a Hungarian class with my daughter a couple of years ago; I think she was 8, which is why she needed me to sit in with her, given it was a college class at IU. (I should explain that her mother is Hungarian, and so this was more in the way of language practice and grammar instruction, not that my daughter is a super-genius. Although, of course, she is.)

Anyway, one of the dialog exercises was to talk about hobbies, and one of the hobbies was record collections, with a picture. She had absolutely no idea what the picture was supposed to be, until I explained to her that they were like CDs. The other students in the class exploded with laughter.

For that matter it won't be long before children have no idea what a music CD is, if we're not there already.

My younger child is 11; he hasn't had much interaction with physical storage media for music.

I was in the same boat. My son found an old disposable camera in a drawer, and I couldn't find a decent way to explain it to him with out the WTF? look on his face.

One of my nieces was photographed by her grandmother with a film camera, and immediately ran to her, expecting to see the picture on the back of the camera. On learning that wasn't possible, she exclaimed "oh, it's not working".

I recently had to explain to a class of college students what a LaserDisc was. It turned out, luckily, that one of the students also knew...

My god - that's a blast from the past. I actually credit the fact I ended up studying history to the 'Doomsday disc' the produced in the UK... would love to see a copy now. Do people still have the hardware knocking around?

The student who knew grew up in a household full of 'em. Videophiles find advantages in LaserDiscs over DVD: http://www.starlaser.com/dvd-lasr.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc#Comparison_with_DVD. Jacket art and possible increased quality due to uncompressed video are cited. I didn't know LaserDisc was an analog format! LaserDisc has some of the grooviness of the 8-track, if not the deep catalog of the LP.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2097732

Friend of mine was trying to fix an ancient computer that had a 5¼" floppy drive. He thought it was a slot loading CD drive. The CD is stuck in there now.

Me too. My first thought at seeing that question was, "I am too young to feel this old."

The singularity is coming!

My thoughts exactly.

Same here and I'm not much older than you.

Worse, my current computer has an A:\ drive. I don't know why I keep a 3.5" floppy drive around, exactly, because I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years, but I do have one.

And that's nothing compared to the 8088 that's collecting dust. It has two floppy drives, a 10 MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive, a CGA card & monitor, a math coprocessor and as much RAM as it can hold.

I don't know if it still works, though. It did work roughly a decade ago, which is the last time it was actually turned on.

Pity we got rid of the Apple ][ GS back in the 90s. It might be a collector's item by now.

That's pretty high end for an 8088! Is it a PC or PC-XT?

It does sound like an XT. The first PC I used was an XT-286; the precursor to the AT. It had a massive 20 MB hard drive!

I still recall that the expensive accounting software for which my father purchased the computer required an ISA card to run it. Now that's anti-piracy!

"The first PC I used was an XT-286; the precursor to the AT." It was actually a smaller case version of the AT.

I believe it had a different cpu (6mhz vs 8mhz) and different a motherboard (16bit vs 8bit).

You are correct about the clock speed, but not the bus difference.

"In 1986, the XT/286 (IBM 5162) with a 6 MHz Intel 80286 processor was introduced. This system actually turned out to be faster than the ATs of the time using 8 MHz 286 processors due to the fact that it had zero wait state RAM that could move data more quickly."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT

"(16bit vs 8bit)"

False.

I think it's PC-XT. I added a lot of those parts with bits I found in a Hamfest back in the 90s. It's been mothballed for ages because I have nowhere to put it so I've honestly forgotten.

I'm betting XT. It sounds identical to what my father had.

I'm in my early twenties, and this makes me feel old too. I have an 8088 too (which contains both an A and a B drive), I should fire it up again. Though mine has a Hercules graphics adaptor (everything is green!)

hums the california games chiptune

> I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years

I have one computer (a Sun workstation) with a 3.5 drive that no longer works. The fun part is I cannot tell you in what year it broke.

Mine broke when the eject failed, I used a paper clip to pull it out, but lost the paper clip. When it started smoking I had to pull the floppy's power - thankfully I had the side open to my computer so I didn't have to turn the whole thing off before I caused an actual fire.

I think this was back in the early 2000's.

Here it just silently failed. I wanted to write something to a floppy and it just couldn't.

I'm 18 and could instantly answer the question. Not sure how to feel about this.

It's a good illustration of how fast technology moves.

I started in computing with an Apple II+ (not really - my II+ was only the first to have floppies). I always wondered why those poor CP/M (and MSX) users had to put up with such nonsense as drive letters ;-)

IIRC on the Apple the floppies were normally S6D1 and S6D2 (if you had two), unless you installed your floppy controller card in a slot other than Slot 6, which was the norm.

That would be DOS 3.x. You could specify a file under (Apple's) DOS with "long_filename,S6,D1". File names could have up to 33 chars and had type information (one byte) so as not to rely on naming conventions.

Long file names were under Apple ProDOS Apple DOS was still 8.3 (I think).

No. Apple DOS filenames were limited to 30 chars. ProDOS was limited at 15 chars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS

My 33 figure was wrong (either me or Wikipedia). Maybe the directory entry had 33 bytes (30 for the file name, 1 for type, and two for track and sector)

I started out with an Amiga before moving to the PC. The Amiga (while still dealing with device-roots) at least had a more flexible system.

fd0: was floppy 1. If you had an additional drive, that would be fd1: etc. The best part was that you could also access devices by file-system label, so if you needed to make sure you were accessing not only a floppy, but the device labelled "WorkbenchExtras" you would simply do WorkbenchExtras:

Needless to say, this made multi-disk tasks & scripting rather pleasant, easy and cut out lots of boilerplate and checking.

It was a nice system and I kinda miss it.

Edit: df0: was floppy 1. dh0: was first harddrive, etc. Not that in changes much.

Don't forget the ASSIGN utility which created new device roots from one (or more!) existing folders, or with deferrment i.e. when assigning Fonts: to df0:Fonts, the OS remembers the disk referred to, and will ask you for that specific disk if you remove it and subsequently access Fonts:. It made working with floppies a lot more pleasant.

SUBST on Windows is similar, but with 1/10th of the power and just single drive letters.

I miss the Amiga too, but it simply never kept up the pace.

I think it was overcome by PCs when they started offering VGA graphics. The Amiga architecture was much more "intimate" with video generation than PCs and, thus, were not so easy upgrade as newer hardware became available.

Oh I do remember, and I was notorious for ASSIGNing things to my RAM: drive for performance-reasons once I got a 10MB memory upgrade to my Amiga 1200.

I just thought it might be slightly out of scope for the discussion at large, so I decided not to include it ;)

I have to agree with you. Only now I got to play with an Amiga (a 500 became part of my collection) and it's really very sophisticated for the time it was released.

Just to imagine most today's PCs deal with cruft that dates back to the CP/M days is... disgusting.

Apple's ProDOS also had something like that - the volumes were named and you accessed files with /VOLUMENAME/FILE.DAT paths.

I'm not yet done high school , and it makes me feel old too.

An accelerating rate of innovation will do that to you.

Me too :\

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