History Lesson: How Dad Used To Save Files

Giles Turnbull ()

Big thanks to raneko on Flickr for creating this delightful video reminder of what life used to be like.

Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks.

They were awful, awful things.

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This video shows you why. And also demonstrates quite nicely why, on his return to Apple after the years of exile at NeXT, Steve Jobs ditched floppy drives as soon as he possibly could. The rest is history, and in some cases, rodent cages.

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About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in Cult of Mac, News, Quickies |

  • Charli

    don’t laugh. I still have one. it’s a fish tank (perfect size for a betta)

  • Jamie

    I love my old 512KE. I turn it on whenever I have the chance. My beloved SE/30 departed years ago, giving into the random-bars error. I asked my parents to get me another for Christmas once, but according to them a girl shouldn’t be playing with computers.

  • Colin

    Waddyamean “my dad”? I used one them Macs – and and IBM 8086-based PC before that! We’re not all young geeks!!!!!!

  • Rodrigo

    God bless the hard drive! LOL!
    Anyway, despite the saving and operating process, I still want to have one of these. Seriously, the Macintosh Classic is a state of the art product. And I think it’s really beautiful, even for today’s standards.

  • Gene

    Pfffff. Before that, we used to save everything to AUDIO CASSETTES using a Radio Shack cassette recorder. Disks. WhatEVER.

  • Gary

    Back in the old days, we used to call this flippy/floppy action “Making toast”.

  • http://blog.argentinaslovenia.com/ Carlitos

    I agree with Gene.

    The Spectrum’s SAVE command was so unreliable (or more precisely, the tape was), that we also had the VERIFY command, to check whether the BASIC program you copied from a magazine the whole weekend was properly saved to tape.

    These days, sometimes I stop to think about how ubiquitous Cmd-S is. You just, well, SAVE! And that’s that.

    Back in 1986, it was a very different story.

  • http://odonoghue.net Mike O’Donoghue

    And those were the snappy small sized ones! We used two 5″ disk units under the monitor (black with green text) with the Mac 2e back in the 1980s.