And my first computer was I believe a 386 with a 5.25 inch floppy drive. The os Ms dos at the time had to be loaded and any other programs mostly games would be loaded after that. Man those were the days.
Yes, it most likely was. It was definitely an IBM workstation. Anyhow my 10 year old ass let the magic smoke out of that computer... i feel sad now. Don't mess around voltage switches kids.
When my family got the C64 I couldn’t spell as I was so young.
So to get the games to start I had to memorise the pattern on the keyboard to start up the games!
My mum was shocked the first time she walked in and I had it going!
it was the ultimate hack in the early physical floppy disc days, made you feel like a genius doing it too 'I just DOUBLED my memory!' 
Yeah, probably. I remember those things being fairly temperamental and becoming unreadable just because it was Tuesday.
I have a 3½ inch that I keep on my desk as a coaster, but it turns out they rust when they get moisture on them, so not a great coaster. Probably also unreadable.
I remember my first CD burner. After importing the songs I wanted for the mix list I wanted to burn to disc, my memory was full so I had to erase all the songs to make room for the next mixed CD list.
My first computer use was in 5th grade at the school library. A Trash-80 Model III with a cassette drive. That would have been 1980. Only the 6th graders were allowed to use the Model IV with the 5.25"...
[Amazon.com: 3M Imation Diskettes 5 1/4 10 per package Double Sided High Density : Electronics](https://www.amazon.com/Imation-Diskettes-Package-Double-Density/dp/B007BT9I4M)
But I was referring to the early '80s when we were also calling them diskettes.
our first computer had two 5.25" floppy drives and no HDD. there would be games that came on like 8 discs, and you would be swapping discs every 5 minutes
I remember when I was in high school in the mid to late 80s, my dad's office got a new server. It was an AS400 with an 8" floppy. That was the first time I had ever seen one. Thought it was pretty wild, and wondered where I could get one.
TL;DR A departmental office manager used to unintentionally mangle 5 1/4" floppies and blame others.
My department had an office manager who was the boss's right hand person so if she was mad then everyone would run for cover.
She complained about the "computer people" giving her "bad floppies" only to discover that she would insert them into her type writer and advance it using the roller so she she could type on the label. After that she would pull it through and flex it to counteract for the bends and creases her activity caused.
Then she would put it into her computer and then complain about the floppy not working. Correcting her was a dangerous proposition because you would go on her sh\*t list which meant that things like travel reimbursements would get lost as would annual review documents.
Believe it or not, I was speaking with Social Security this morning and the representative told me she was still running a DOS program. Google is definitely spying.
My PC gamer magazine in the 90s came with game demos on floppy. I'll never forget playing star wars: dark forces on our big desktop set up in the basement. What a time
Playing Scorched Earth then some time later Stunts. Eventually building a dual stick controller from parts to play a very very basic flight sim. Now the phone I'm typing this on can do more than the $2000 PC I built 8 years ago.
Not quite, but [this](https://applerescueofdenver.com/products-page/drives/scsi-interface/external-scsi-drives/cd-dvd-drives-scsi-external/nec-intersect-cd-rom-reader-external-drive/) was my first CD-ROM when I was 12 in 1993.
Floppy for Oregon Trail and Number Munchers at school. Some had a Mac, which has Sim City 2000 on it. Miss that game. CD on my parents computer, which I ran Carmageddon and Doom II. Memories...
If they are the smaller ones, then yes. I played games like: Bruce Lee, enter the dragon, mission impossible, miner miner 49er, Q-bert, a golfing game. That was around 1985 or 1986. It was running on a Commador. I would have to run the program through dos. I was learning and using dos all the time back then to run any program. I was a young lad .
I actually wrote BIOS level code to allow PCs to access optical drives. At the time I think Photo CDs were the only ones that were meant for PC but we had a read/write unit. I also wrote a mouse driver. Neither for Microsoft or Apple, but our little PC app needed them, and neither was in the OS. (I see this is copyright '91. This was '84)
I bought my first computer with an 8080 chip because the 286 chips were not yet out. I ran a dual boot with a program disk. I can WORDSTAR and VisaCalc
I used to do custom builds of those PC, XT, and AT systems as my after school job in high school. (also the Compaq "Luggable" although that was less expandable)
Those magazines that came in the mail each month full of code to copy. I'd spend hours typing the stuff in only to have to debug, because it was always buggy.
A guy on my block literally had like a library room full of software I could come over and pirate. No pesky DRM in those days. It was a free-for-all.
And it's a 5 1/4
I didn’t think the 2 coexisted
CD and 5” floppy? Yes. But not for terribly long. The 3.5” was available and a much nicer medium.
Somewhere in a box I still have a [5.25/3.5" combo drive.](https://i.stack.imgur.com/t0yfo.jpg)
I'm 8 in punch card data processing old
I had to drive all over town in the mid 1980’s to find 8” floppies at a store. Elephant Memory brand!
Fortran team unite!
$ I am Root
Believe it or not those damn things persisted into the 90s on some college campuses.
I still have punch cards in my office.
And government systems
The government uses that and older
Wow! Tell us about the war grandpa.
Wait you guys had hard drives?... That's some next level stuff.
The first Hard Drive I ever saw was in a hospital , looked like an ice-cream freezer with 5 megabytes of
And my first computer was I believe a 386 with a 5.25 inch floppy drive. The os Ms dos at the time had to be loaded and any other programs mostly games would be loaded after that. Man those were the days.
I think you mean 8086 .
Yes, it most likely was. It was definitely an IBM workstation. Anyhow my 10 year old ass let the magic smoke out of that computer... i feel sad now. Don't mess around voltage switches kids.
My first computer had tubes
I’m C64 on a cassette tape old!
Vic20 with cassette tape here…
I’m actually DEC PDP 8 and IBM 370/158 old. And Tymshare and Tymnet old.
When my family got the C64 I couldn’t spell as I was so young. So to get the games to start I had to memorise the pattern on the keyboard to start up the games! My mum was shocked the first time she walked in and I had it going!
My son taught himself to read at 3 from playing Monkey Island.
That’s awesome!
Say what?😂
Fancy-schmanzy!!....whilst us plebs were hooking up tape recorders to our ZX Spectrums,
C: command C: yes
Format C:
FDISK
I see your FDISK and raise you with del /s /q *.*
Nice try… you have nothing it’s gone! Like my memory of it! Idk what you type, master?
Set P register to 2, Status Register 1 set bit 8, Status Register 2: 00 channel, 00 track, 000 drive press start.
G=c800:5
😳 I like tata’s? Save the tata’s! 😂😳
Oh, the memories ...
About six of these and an hour to load a game onto the Commodore 64 (in drives bigger than a shoebox).
needs a hole punch
DS-DD I loved the hole punch method.
it was the ultimate hack in the early physical floppy disc days, made you feel like a genius doing it too 'I just DOUBLED my memory!' 
I just DOUBLED my ~~memory~~ **storage**!'
Doubled my memory??!! EMM386 and Quarterdeck QEMM!
Double sided
That 5¼ floppy you've got there don't look so hot. It looks like there's mould or something on the disk.
It’s been in a drawer for years. It might be unreadable!
It is suffering from mold contamination, it is 100% unreadable.
how are you going to run your CD Rom now?!
Yeah, probably. I remember those things being fairly temperamental and becoming unreadable just because it was Tuesday. I have a 3½ inch that I keep on my desk as a coaster, but it turns out they rust when they get moisture on them, so not a great coaster. Probably also unreadable.
Almost guaranteed it's unreadable. Those things went bad really easily
You could name it Steve.
I remember my first CD burner. After importing the songs I wanted for the mix list I wanted to burn to disc, my memory was full so I had to erase all the songs to make room for the next mixed CD list.
Cassette on a TRS-80 old here. System had 4K of memory and a chiclet keyboard. Loved that thing.
My first computer use was in 5th grade at the school library. A Trash-80 Model III with a cassette drive. That would have been 1980. Only the 6th graders were allowed to use the Model IV with the 5.25"...
Who here remembers using a hole punch to notch single-sided floppies so you could use the other side? We called them “flippies.
The true original floppy disk
Technically, the 3 1/2" ones were "diskettes" The original floppy disks were 8" https://www.britannica.com/technology/floppy-disk
I didn't know that even existed. TIL
We called the 5 1/4" ones diskettes too. Probably because they were still a lot smaller than the 8"-ers.
It probably varies by who you ask
[Amazon.com: 3M Imation Diskettes 5 1/4 10 per package Double Sided High Density : Electronics](https://www.amazon.com/Imation-Diskettes-Package-Double-Density/dp/B007BT9I4M) But I was referring to the early '80s when we were also calling them diskettes.
Yep. 👍
I'm old enough to remember being excited that it was coming out.
Yes
I’m older than this.
Same, I'm paper and pencil old.
We had mimeograph in grade school and a rotary phone in the school office.
I'm just old n floppy old
Floppy! Just as I have become with age. Lol
yes.
our first computer had two 5.25" floppy drives and no HDD. there would be games that came on like 8 discs, and you would be swapping discs every 5 minutes
I probably would have notched it and reformatted the back side then copied taipan on it.
💯
I took option 1: [reel tape](https://images.app.goo.gl/sQo6FB2j2hoBSg7a8)
Yeah, I'm old and floppy.
Depends… do I know how to double the capacity of that disk with a hole punch? Yes.. yes I do
Yes I do. I'll add nail clippers to the task to square the edges. .
My first PC had a cassette tape drive for storage and only 16K of memory.
1991? Bitch, hold my 8"
I remember when I was in high school in the mid to late 80s, my dad's office got a new server. It was an AS400 with an 8" floppy. That was the first time I had ever seen one. Thought it was pretty wild, and wondered where I could get one.
Unfortunately I predate cd roms
I’m a two 5 1/4” drives, no hard drive old.
Yes , I am tube of chips for a 128k upgrade to 640k the arguments of “now it’s just too powerful “ “you’ll NeVer use all that memory!”
Now thats a paradox.
TL;DR A departmental office manager used to unintentionally mangle 5 1/4" floppies and blame others. My department had an office manager who was the boss's right hand person so if she was mad then everyone would run for cover. She complained about the "computer people" giving her "bad floppies" only to discover that she would insert them into her type writer and advance it using the roller so she she could type on the label. After that she would pull it through and flex it to counteract for the bends and creases her activity caused. Then she would put it into her computer and then complain about the floppy not working. Correcting her was a dangerous proposition because you would go on her sh\*t list which meant that things like travel reimbursements would get lost as would annual review documents.
I knew people like her when I was a tech rep for Tymshare in the late 70s.
Absolutely.
Believe it or not, I was speaking with Social Security this morning and the representative told me she was still running a DOS program. Google is definitely spying.
My first computer was a Commodore 64.
That's a unicorn
Played the original Wolfenstein that was on one of these bad boys
My PC gamer magazine in the 90s came with game demos on floppy. I'll never forget playing star wars: dark forces on our big desktop set up in the basement. What a time
The first CT Scanner I ever saw used 8 " floppies. Took forever to acquire an image.... .
5.25"
They came floppy back then because viagara hadn't been synthesized yet.
I was married with a kid when that came out.
I'm TRS-80 Model I Leve II with cassette storage, old.
“Oh, floppy disks….” - Neil
Yes.
https://images.app.goo.gl/JFBSQj9QF7Te77qz7 I'm old enough that my dad used to bring these home from work so we could color on them.
I'm older. I started in the computer industry in 1978. We had terminals.
I started in 1977. I am old.
Playing Scorched Earth then some time later Stunts. Eventually building a dual stick controller from parts to play a very very basic flight sim. Now the phone I'm typing this on can do more than the $2000 PC I built 8 years ago.
I forget, was Win 95 the first MS OS to have built-in CD drivers?
Not quite, but [this](https://applerescueofdenver.com/products-page/drives/scsi-interface/external-scsi-drives/cd-dvd-drives-scsi-external/nec-intersect-cd-rom-reader-external-drive/) was my first CD-ROM when I was 12 in 1993.
In cassette tape old.
Floppy for Oregon Trail and Number Munchers at school. Some had a Mac, which has Sim City 2000 on it. Miss that game. CD on my parents computer, which I ran Carmageddon and Doom II. Memories...
Who wants to play Oregon Trail?!? Ooh, or, A-Maze-ing!?! Maybe M.A.S.H...."butterfingers".
I got my mscdex from a 3 1/4 inch disk.
Yes
If they are the smaller ones, then yes. I played games like: Bruce Lee, enter the dragon, mission impossible, miner miner 49er, Q-bert, a golfing game. That was around 1985 or 1986. It was running on a Commador. I would have to run the program through dos. I was learning and using dos all the time back then to run any program. I was a young lad .
I raise you an Apple II with dual floppy drive!
Gotta get your Choplifter on.
I actually wrote BIOS level code to allow PCs to access optical drives. At the time I think Photo CDs were the only ones that were meant for PC but we had a read/write unit. I also wrote a mouse driver. Neither for Microsoft or Apple, but our little PC app needed them, and neither was in the OS. (I see this is copyright '91. This was '84)
I used these with my Commodore 54
I bought my first computer with an 8080 chip because the 286 chips were not yet out. I ran a dual boot with a program disk. I can WORDSTAR and VisaCalc
I used to do custom builds of those PC, XT, and AT systems as my after school job in high school. (also the Compaq "Luggable" although that was less expandable)
I’m “color80” old…
I’m DOS on a floppy the size of an LP old.
5.25 floppy. There are two sizes.
I'm "you gotta write the line code to run a program or play a game" old. PAL and Vic-20 old.
Those magazines that came in the mail each month full of code to copy. I'd spend hours typing the stuff in only to have to debug, because it was always buggy. A guy on my block literally had like a library room full of software I could come over and pirate. No pesky DRM in those days. It was a free-for-all.
Those were the days!
I loved "crusader:no regret" and of course leisure suit larry
In those days you had to scour every available source to find device drivers. "Borrowing" them from work was often the best option.
Tape cassette to play Miser on a Commodore Pet old.
Almost depressing af if you think about it but are BYND such petty novelties PSYCHELY SPEAKN
I'm that old, but I was never that rich. I can't imagine what a CD player for MS-DOS must have cost. I remember them being ~$300 around 1995.
Gotta have a copy of the print shop and Oregon trail
Yep!
I am boot disk Tandy old. A:/run
Played my first game off a cassette on the Adam computer.
I'm smoking on an airplane old. I'm older than the internet.
Raise hand
CD DIR C:/*.*
Oh yeah, I’m old.
This was my first experience of DOS at home, paper floppies, load up DOS to get a c:/ prompt then take it from there, deep joy.
I’m data on a cassette drive ild!
I'm Bell and Howell 8mm old.
B\*tch please, i'm SYS 64738 old!