Shirt.Woot

Would have been better if the fonts used were popular in 1971 to really make it look authentic.

ThunderThighs wrote:ALL SIZES ARE ON AA BLANKS. THIS IS CONFIRMED.

Too bad, this is the second great shirt I have to pass up on then.

dreamaster wrote:Too bad, this is the second great shirt I have to pass up on then.

But it's made on an American Apparel blank...

I thought that you didn't like the Anvil ones.

?


Edited to add: Unless it was the switch in itself and not the individual shirts that was what bothered you... then your post totally made sense and I retract this comment. I was just a bit confused.

wvutkep1002 wrote:Enclosure is the case for the circular diskette, which was plastic. Paper sleeve is for storage, not an "enclosure "

I have one sitting on my desk that is most definitely not in a plastic enclosure. It's basically cardboard... You are correct though it does have a paper sleeve.

techgeek24 wrote:I have one sitting on my desk that is most definitely not in a plastic enclosure. It's basically cardboard... You are correct though it does have a paper sleeve.

Post a pic!! I would like to see it!

redacted

This is probably against the majority but I'm sad it isn't on the Anvil blanks. I really wanted to try a women's size

chellemonkey wrote:Post a pic!! I would like to see it!

For those who want a reference...
8" and a 5.25"(5-1/4 inch) and a 3.5" (3-1/2 inch)

ThunderThighs wrote:ALL SIZES ARE ON AA BLANKS. THIS IS CONFIRMED.

Will probably buy one then. Though it may be my last purchase from shirt.woot! unless they go back to American made shirt blanks.

Does this play Blu Rays?

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 applaud you sir. You have just convinced me to buy.

Is it sad I still have an 8" drive I kept for fun... :D There's no school like old school!!

ellenbhawk wrote:Those of us who are old enough to have used floppy disks should probably not be wearing a t-shirt with the word FLOPPY on it.

Are you kidding? They have pills for that now man!

mistamoose wrote:Brilliant. On the fence about getting this one, but it is brilliant.

yep, exact same here.

beats the hades out of the paper tape that was the storage for the first computer I used. If you have ever had to use punch cards, this was a major improvement.

Q

From a designer standpoint, I like the colors and vintage look but there's way too much text and the fonts are overused. The art looks like clipart you download for free from Microsoft. But maybe that adds to the charm?

xxchange wrote:Did they have Arial font in 1971?

It appears to be Helvetica. Note that the terminals of the 'S' character are perfectly horizontal, while in Arial the upper terminal would be slightly tilted. Helvetica was introduced in 1957, and the floppy was introduced while Helvetica was on the ascendancy in advertising for its bold, legible character. You're right, though, in noting that Arial was first made available in 1982.

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.

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!)

I did walk through the snow uphill both ways in the '70s - I lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where the shortest route to my high school was through a wooded hill [developed my senior year] - up from my house and then down into the high school. AND I learned to program the first time [and the second time] on punch cards I'm a 59-er [Late Baby Boomer].

I worked on an old IBM mainframe computer in 1987. It was powered up rarely, to test and maintain one program. Most of the time, it wasn't even turned on. The mainframe was just old, some of the peripherals were truly ancient. In particular, there was this one huge metal box. This box was from the era, when IBM made all of their cabinets so they just barely fit into the smallest common freight elevator.

This box was a disk controller. It was connected to the mainframe via the "channel interface". The disk drives it controlled were the washing machine sized thingies with the cake platter disks. They were newer than the controller, so they were on the order of 80Mbytes.

The controller had a stupid little processor of its own, so it could manage the conversations between the disk drives and the mainframe channel interface. This stupid little processor needed to load its software from somewhere.

The hard disk controller booted from the read only floppy disk drive, hidden in the cabinet. Once the controller finished booting, it turned off the floppy disk drive. It wouldn't access it again until the next boot. It had no need to write stuff to the floppy, because once it was up and running, it could save data to the big disk drives.

We had some spare parts. The data cables were about an inch in diameter. We had some that were the maximum safe length for one person to install. That is to say, the cables were 60 pounds each. If it was any longer, and therefore any heavier, OSHA rules required two people to lift it. The computer was in a machine room with raised floors. The huge cables ran under the floor between the cabinets.

The controller cabinet was mostly empty, but it looked impressive from the outside. When you bought hardware from IBM in the early 1970s, you got your money's worth (edit: or at least it looked that way. The thing cost more than a nice car).

It looked like cardboard to me. This wasn't one of those modern floppies like we had in 1975, that was used for saving and transporting data, this was just used for booting the peripherals. Something that happened once every few months, or less.

---
[Edit: Since this is now a quality post, I thought I should fix up the low quality grammar.]

"Only 8 inches!" XD

Many years ago when my dad closed his computer business, I found a stash of 8 inch floppies in their own plastic storage case while helping him clear out. This was back when CDs were starting to take off. I thought they looked like 5 inch floppies on steroids.

And now we're using micro SDs XD

This shirt is brilliant. Will definitely be in for 3. I have so many nerds in my life!

I would say more like 1981....

Love the design but why Olive green? Why can a design be put onto the color choice of the purchaser?

Forgot to mention... In 1979, I went to college. The University had an RJE station that loaded its firmware from a deck of punched cards. Or rather, it would have loaded the software that way, if they still used it. When I saw it, it was a pile of junk in the basement.

Booting off of an 8 inch read only floppy, is a vast improvement over booting off of a stack of punched cards that was six inches tall.

nocorvair wrote:For those who want a reference...
8" and a 5.25"(5-1/4 inch) and a 3.5" (3-1/2 inch)

Nice photo. Dang. Makes me wish I'd kept some punch cards. Remember real confetti? If someone posts a photo w/a punch card and the 3 floppy sizes, we might throw you a ticker-tape parade!

History question for youngsters: what's the difference between confetti and ticker-tape?

Congrats Firefrogh!!!

Nicely done, reminds me of playing Bird vs Dr. J one on one on my first Apple

It's funny, because it's true.

rbaehr wrote:I would say more like 1981....

Nah. By '81 the 5.25" disks were around, and the 3.5" weren't that far off.

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.

Agreed. that is the deal breaker for me.

ellenbhawk wrote:Those of us who are old enough to have used floppy disks should probably not be wearing a t-shirt with the word FLOPPY on it.

I'm only 22. I used floppy disks in middle school. I'M NOT FLOPPY.

My thoughts exactly!

TronGMZ wrote:Agreed. that is the deal breaker for me.

Read the rest of the posts. The shirt is 100% correct for the original 1971 8" floppies. These were only used in mainframes, predating the PC by quite a few years.

I don't understand what size to get- they said all woman's shirt sizes changed a few days ago- but the sizing chart is the old one. Is this shirt on the new size or old one? Frustrated

phonedog365 wrote:Understood but stating "Read-only" and "Storage" in the same clause is an oxymoron, isn't it?

Unless it's supposed to be clever. Hmm.

Nope. The data is still stored, you just can't add to it. If you buy a blu-ray of a movie, the movie is still "stored" on the disc, but you can't add your clever mashup of My Little Pony and Thundercats.

amnewsboy wrote: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)

"Impossible Mission" was so awesome! And I'm in the same boat, no idea what happened to my 64 or 1541. I think my dad sold them while I was away at college. My fave game was "Paradroid"--there's a PC port, but I couldn't get it to work right.

Ahh not read/write if they have the notch taken out ;-) have to put tape over that to make read/write ;-)

rogue8402 wrote:But it's made on an American Apparel blank...

I thought that you didn't like the Anvil ones.

?


Edited to add: Unless it was the switch in itself and not the individual shirts that was what bothered you... then your post totally made sense and I retract this comment. I was just a bit confused.

Ooops - Should have had my coffee before I posted - in for one!

I get the joke, but the "designer" really messed it up by his clumsy mix of 1950s style clipart, Helvetica (or is that Arial?), the distressed-look filter, and Brush Script.

Coulda been good if he'd adopted a style appropriate to the floppy's time, but FAIL.

nocorvair wrote:LOL.... Quote of the day.

As an "old timer"... I remember the first PCs...having TWO floppy drives was an upgrade and a big deal. You could read your program AND write your data! Floppies being one sided. the notching punch to make them writable. the foil tape/tab to make them read only. making single sided disks "dual sided" by cutting out the backside... ah, the days. For those who quote audio cassettes... those came later in the commodore/amiga/TRaSh-80 days.
It is with fond memories and great frustration that I recall the punchcards of yore... I bid them farewell back with COBOL and FORTRAN and Assembler...

COBOL is still used in the banking industry. The Copybook is a beast.

basfiji wrote:How did this get voted and picked with errors in the text. Really cardboard. Man just fix the text please so I can buy one, I cannot go around with such a lie on my chest.

However the concept and design is awesome, so I might just buy one and write over it.

Let's all take a field trip to The National Museum of Computing.

"In a maze of rooms and corridors, visitors make a journey through the history of electronics, from slide rules via early calculators, analogue modems and large cardboard-encased ‘floppy’ disks, through supercomputers and mainframes half the size of the room, to the development of business PCs, Palms and early laptops."


http://p-thomas.suite101.com/the-national-museum-of-computing-a253826#ixzz1nKimAFTF