5 1/2 Inch Nostalgia

BRRRRRRR!!!!!! Click Click Click!! Clunk!! Put put put put!!! Bamf!!

Any of these sounds, sound familiar? Maybe. Do you remember what I'm talking about? Maybe this image rings a bell.


Ah yes, now you remember dear readers. The old floppy drive computer. For you readers that were too young to remember these beasts and the fun they were, this is what started the whole modern desktop era. No no hard drive, a few bytes of memory. Enough to play the Oregon Trail. Oh and you had to run everything of DOS.

Insert disk 1, disk 2, disk 3 and so on.

run.exe
help.exe

Remember your file extensions? I don't. Why do I bring this up then? Well I was clearing out a bunch of junk from the garage. Boxes of stuff I've cluttered away through years of constant gypsy movement. One of these things happens to be my old Packard Bell computer my parents bought me. Well they bought from my uncle, well, was actually given in payment for services rendered from my uncle, but that's another story.

I took out the old PC and curious critter that I am wanted to see if it still worked. I put it together, and the beast awoke from its....I'd say 18 year slumber. DOS appeared. Ah my old nemesis, how I still despise the to this day. I dug through my floppies. A few games, operating programs that to this day can't figure out what on earth they were for if anything. I plugged in my old dot matrix printer. Again for those of you young ones who don't remember, these printers had typewriter like ribbons that you installed to print. And the paper was in reams that had to fit into a track. It was a bitch getting reports to print out right, and all hell broke loose when a paper jam occurred. But it still all worked. I printed out an old report from middle school and tore off the perforated track edges, leaving beautiful fuzzy edges. Ah memories.

Next I played an old Bugs Bunny game my parents bought me. I thought it was the coolest thing ever back then. I play it now and it's like playing Atari. Fun but slow. Unfortunately this PC was just before Windows so I never had the disks to install it. But it lives. The lights turn on, it moans, it creeks, it coughs, it screams, It's Alive!! Alive!!! So many floppies clutter a couple of boxes. I really need to throw them away. I take the beasty apart, placing it back in its cardboard box tomb. I need to find a place to recycle this beast.

I find a box from my next PC when 3 1/2 hard disks came in. I don't even have a hard disk floppy drive on any PC I have anymore. Flash Drives, and portable hard drives, is what I use now. Though looking at the contents of the box carefully I discover I better find one. My last resume I did is on a hard disk. I need to convert it, updated it and place it on a flash drive, cause you just never know.