Back then, the storage is was much more 'real': it was slow, made noises, degraded noticeably because of stray magnetic fields etc, complicated mechanical parts. By the hearing alone, you may spot problems.
I still have PTSD from those Zip drives. You could hear your data disappearing into nothingness as you watched powerless the drive hacking away at your cartridge.
Yep, was pretty easy to realize when you may have a bad sector on a floppy.
Even hard drives were more than loud enough you could tell when fragmentation was getting bad or the disk was starting to act suspect.
Fun thought experiment. The 128 GB SD card on my desk could store a 1-bit bitmap of 1,000,000 x 1,000,000 pixels. Imagine shrinking that down to the size of the die, and how small each (logical) cell is.
Precise, but featureless digital clocks lack "soul" which you can actually see.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/04/people-once-downloaded...
https://interestingengineering.com/science/you-could-downloa...
Haven't heard the audition, though. Well before my era.
Growing up in USSR I didn’t know anyone who would own a PC up until early 90s.
I know one programmer in his 50s. He had an access to the ZX Spectrum in his primary school, but that was by effort of his local physics teacher.
But I don’t get it then - why would they broadcast software for devices no one had?
Back in day, magazines distributed software on flexidisc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc) I remember it being very unreliable. The magazine instructed you to copy the flexidisc to a cassette tape first as you could only usually play the disc one or two times.
https://www.discogs.com/master/321455-8-Bit-Construction-Set...
I had an unsettling worry that I was being programmed when I listened to it - a bit like an alternative to the virus in Pluribus.
Wait a minute, what?? How did I not know about this.
You could even use a TV!
Shame I used to have an SCSI scanner but I already disassembled it for parts.
One can write a simple bootloader, which reads bytes printed on a paper sheet to memory then boots it. Something like: black (0), white (1) or long rectangle (1), short rectangle (0). Wonder about the storage capacity of the A4 paper.
Part of the infamous sound of a dial-up connection being established was negotiating the speed of the connection. Now I'm thinking if you'd need a negotiation of 33 1/3, 45, or 78 as an advanced feature.
It doesn't even say which type of cookies have to be accepted, I tried selecting just functional cookies, that didn't work. Funny how it's an arcane bunch of toggles in a cookie popup, on a page describing an arcane way of booting up a system.
yt-dlp https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg -o - | mpv -
Thanks for the heads up regardless, I'm sure there was others who didn't know, who learned something new! :)
Alternatively you can use the link in GP to grab the video via yt-dlp. Can even do that via tor if you want. (Weirdly at least historically youtube was friendlier to tor exit nodes than it was to a lot of mainstream VPNs. Not sure what was up with that, haven't tested it in a while.)