Wayne Parham Messages: 18787 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
I remember floppy disks. For that matter, I remember paper tape and Hollerith cards. They were really "before my time" but some businesses were still using paper tape in the beginning of my career. Not many IT organizations, to be honest, but quite a few CNC machines still used paper tape to store programs. I also remember drum drives and 9 track NRZI and PE (open reel) tape drives.
Mostly, I remember those tape drives and removable disk packs, which were in almost all IT shops in the 1980s, before PCs were anything but toys. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and started my career in the 1980s, and I loved microprocessors and single board computers but they were still toys until around 1990. That's when floppy drives became popular - in the microcomputer era. Saw 'em first on machines running the CPM operating system in the late 1970s. They were available on everything through the 1980s.