Shirt.Woot

Wait a second, cardboard? I just verified, that thing had a plastic covering. Also very few people would actually remember the 8" floppy disk. The 5.25" floppy was much more common.

xxchange wrote:Did they have Arial font in 1971?

Unsure who "they" is referring to here, but Helvetica was present at the time.

Just wanted to say thanks for the quick and helpful replies. In for one.

infornography wrote:Wait a second, cardboard? I just verified, that thing had a plastic covering. Also very few people would actually remember the 8" floppy disk. The 5.25" floppy was much more common.

Yeah, cardboard is off, because fibers+Motion= static. and static is BAD.
But the original 8" were read only.

Love it...as someone who went from a tape drive to the big floppy drive upgrade, I can't wait to parade this geek shirt around - IN FOR TWO!!

I'd buy it but "read only" sorry

Was bored so I did the math and..

a 1TB hard drive is equal to about 13,421,772 of those floppy diskettes.

Thats over 13 million.

Whoaaaaa dude!

Man, this just makes me wish I could pop in this:



But I would probably just keep seeing this:

I'm happy to see this shirt won. I was hoping to buy it.

And in the same neighborhood as patrickspens. Utah is represented well here at shirt.woot.

Hope Woot shirt is still around in 2041 to snag a "Introducing the USB flash drive" shirt (41 years after its intro too).

infornography wrote:Wait a second, cardboard? I just verified, that thing had a plastic covering. Also very few people would actually remember the 8" floppy disk. The 5.25" floppy was much more common.

The cardboard is the part you would slip it in to to protect from dust. Even the 5 1/4 had these.

This info on the shirt is right. They were also read only. But later they sold a punch to turn them into read write. It was black and you put the floppy in it and pushed down.

Some were in cardboard holders or jackets. Funny thing they could warp fast.

I still have a few around here someplace.

BabyBear wrote:Hope Woot shirt is still around in 2041 to snag a "Introducing the USB flash drive" shirt (41 years after its intro too).

Perhaps it would look something like this?

sylgern398 wrote:Too bad the shirt gets the technology wrong.

Floppys like that weren't read only and the enclosures weren't cardboard, they were more like Tyvek.

Wrong. The first 23FD models we 80KB read only. I will assume the cardboard they are referring to is the sleeve the disk was put in while not in use. It's been a while since I've actually seen one..

So all you people thinking "Read only?!? That's not right." need to check your history.

I would be interested in this if the colors didn't look like vomit

This shirt makes me happy. In for one.

mjonatzke wrote:I would be interested in this if the colors didn't look like vomit

Guess you didn't live in the 70's much. :'P

infornography wrote:Wait a second, cardboard? I just verified, that thing had a plastic covering. Also very few people would actually remember the 8" floppy disk. The 5.25" floppy was much more common.

Oh dear, now you're making me feel reallly old. I remember writing my first programs in Basic: writing them in pencil in a spiral notebook first and then TYPING THEM IN BY HAND on my friend's TRS-80 each time we turned the machine on. (it was a choose-your-own-adventure story and it took about 45 minutes to type in). When she got a CASSETTE TAPE storage option, we felt like we were amazing.

Yeah, I know - we also walked to school in the snow uphill both ways..... *sigh* I teach school and my current 7th graders didn't know life before flash drives. I remember when my Zip drive DOUBLED the memory on my Powerbook. Ok, I'll stop now and give the thread back to you whippersnappers.

tl;dr: this was my vote in the derby, I'm thrilled to see it print, and I'm in for 1 today (and probably another next week!)

bounty42 wrote:They were initially read-only. took a while to develop the write notch.

Oh! and then they'd break, but you could "fix" it by scotch-taping over the notch.... Good times....

It makes me feel old when I remember that I turned in essays in a floppy disk while in college (and saved programs that ran in Pascal when in high school).

mnuahs wrote:Wrong. The first 23FD models we 80KB read only. I will assume the cardboard they are referring to is the sleeve the disk was put in while not in use. It's been a while since I've actually seen one..

So all you people thinking "Read only?!? That's not right." need to check your history.

'Sleeve' would have been the best choice of word, then. 'Enclosure' appears to imply that the casing of the disk itself was cardboard, which was not the case.

Pun unintended.

I find it hard to imagine myself not buying one of these, but it will have to be later because I've done my shirt quota for the month.

mypinktoes wrote:Oh dear, now you're making me feel reallly old. I remember writing my first programs in Basic: writing them in pencil in a spiral notebook first and then TYPING THEM IN BY HAND on my friend's TRS-80 each time we turned the machine on. (it was a choose-your-own-adventure story and it took about 45 minutes to type in). When she got a CASSETTE TAPE storage option, we felt like we were amazing.

Thanks for sharing... I remember doing that too.

This one is a pass for me because I've never seen an 8" floppy and I'm not interested in correcting colleagues about the Read-Only specification. I'm guessing that 8" floppys were largely used for mainframes.

My Dad bought us a Commodore PET in the late 70's, which used cassette tapes. We had programming books that required us to type in the BASIC programs to run games, etc. It wasn't until High School in the early 80's that I got to play with a Commodore CBM with color screens and external 5 1/4" disk drives. We would go to the computer lab after school to hang out and play arcade games.

It's the black 5 1/4" floppy disks with white paper sleeves for which I would feel nostalgic. Of course, later they came out with different colored casings, usually for games.

bluejester wrote:Man, this just makes me wish I could pop in this:



But I would probably just keep seeing this:

still have my floppy of this and my commodore 64 to play it on!! love zork!!

Today's shirt is awesome! Remember when you had to load one of these bad boys that had DOS on it before playing games?

I loved Carmen SD!!! *flashback to childhood glee*

I feeling like popping "Impossible Mission" by EPYX into my C64's 1541 Floppy Drive.

Except that I don't have the game anymore. Or a 1541 Floppy Drive anymore. Or a Commodore 64.

(sigh)

troydogtvtv wrote:This info on the shirt is right. They were also read only. But later they sold a punch to turn them into read write. It was black and you put the floppy in it and pushed down.

Some were in cardboard holders or jackets. Funny thing they could warp fast.

I still have a few around here someplace.

I had to throw my 3"1/2 and 5"1/4 floppies a few years ago, but I did my school programming practice on one of these. It was in LOGO :__D

FWIW, I'd cut the write notch with an exacto knife, and do the analogue thing on 3"1/2 DD floppies to turn them into HD, too. In my experience, the 5"1/4 floppies came in paper-ish envelopes, not cardboard, but close enough.

I love this shirt to pieces, but I don't want to buy another AA shirt until I am clear with the sizing. Which will mean an additional 3$ for woot when I buy it at the reckoning, so no loss for them :D

Will the next shirt feature a PET computer?

xxchange wrote:Did they have Arial font in 1971?

Maybe. The Arial in common use today is a TrueType font (cf PostScript fonts - remember those?). TrueType fonts didn't exist back in '71. There were other fonts besides Times New Roman. I don't know if some version of Arial was among them, but I wouldn't be surprised.

8" floppies, followed by 5-1/4" floppies, followed by 3-1/2" floppies.

More and more guys with smaller and smaller floppies. Any wonder why Viagra and its ilk became popular?

I'm not sure if I'm nerd enough for this shirt.

Great idea, but really a half-ass execution. I'll wait for version 1.1. But those 8" disks were murder when flung as a Frisbee.

bluejester wrote:Man, this just makes me wish I could pop in this:



But I would probably just keep seeing this:

Related:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nigRT2KmCE

alanhwoot wrote:Obligatory nitpicking nerd comment:

Floppies are read/write, not read-only.

Thank you, that is correct (kinda the whole point of the OG removable media)! I ordered the shirt anyway, despite that technical nitpick.

I joined the computer age with the Commodore with the tape recorder. The only 8" floppy I saw was in the movie "War Games". So, I am on the fence on this one but I like the design.

um... chicken / egg OR pot / kettle ... take your pick
dont we have to write on it in order to read from it?

I've actually used 8" floppies (on IBM mainframes/minicomputers) and the media itself has always been writable from the very beginning, regardless of Wikipedia's possible confusion. The misunderstanding stems from the early DRIVES that were sold to the public being read-only.

Obviously the data had to get onto the disks somehow, and they are magnetic media so they certainly couldn't have been pressed like records or CDs. They were written by very expensive write-capable floppy disk drives that were not available to the public initially.

In any case, read-only would have never been used as a selling point as it has no advantage whatsoever. I could perhaps imagine "Read-write drives coming soon!" or similar though.

That combined with the "cardboard" thing makes this one a pass. It'll just be worn by wannabe geeks who like to pretend they know what they're talking about, but more often don't.

hazbean wrote:Then you could educate them. The initial floppy disks were read-only.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Sizes.2C_performance_and_capacity

I am not buying that the 5 1/4 drives were ever read only. This reference in wikipedia is about cutting notches on SINGLE sided floppies to make the reverse side writeable. I used to use an old cassette drive before floppies were available and 5 1/4 drives pretty early and never heard of or could imagine the use of a readonly drive at that time. Does anyone have a better reference than this?

If not I have to pass on the shirt which is a bummer because otherwise it is so awesome! Remove that line and I'd already have ordered a couple.