I found this old software on a medium I don’t recognize at my church. Does anyone know if this has value to anybody?
this
Removed by mod
Well, I feel old.
3.5” floppy discs which have been removed from their plastic shells.
Interesting they look like three and a half inch floppies out of their sleeves
That’s definitely what it is, but why was it removed from the plastic housing? It would never last long without the protection, and even if it was being bulk-written to, you wouldn’t do it outside the housing.
Very strange.
I would rip em up as a kid all the time.
Someone probably had no idea what they were doing. Like, at all.
The more interesting thing to me is the oddly old timey brand
That brand was a software maker back in the Apple II days.
From Beagle Bros - Wikipedia:
Beagle Bros was an American software company that specialized in creating personal computing products. Their primary focus was on the Apple II family of computers. Although they ceased business in 1991, owner Mark Simonsen permitted the Beagle Bros name and logo to be included on the 30th anniversary reboot of I. O. Silver, released on December 12, 2014 by former Beagle programmer Randy Brandt.
Found via reverse image search:
12 megabytes of RAM, 500 megabyte hard drive, built-in spreadhseet capabilities and a modem that transmits it over 28,000 bps
deleted by creator
Games and stuff
Yeah, floppy without the case was my immediate guess too. Not sure why they would have been stored this way though. It’s a bit weird.
might be a floppy disk, but without the case
Looks like floppy disks without the shell. How big are they?
Beagle Bros was a software company that developed useful quirky software for the Apple ][ computer. They had a schtick that all of their manuals and promotional materials were styled like flyers from “old West” salesmen. They were actually pretty funny if you were in on the joke.
old floppy disks of different sizes. the bottom looks like 5 1/4" the ones on top with the metal centers are all 3 1/2". Both standards needed sleeves to be read. Many of these are likely trash now but that wouldn’t stop me from trying to load them.
Both standards needed sleeves to be read.
For 3.5", yes. 5.25" disks could be removed from their protective enclosures, inserted into a drive, and used as normal. At least until the exposed medium was damaged by fingerprints or other debris. Not something you would normally do though. Source: Did it myself a few times mostly out of curiosity.
This. When my favourite floppies started to have a worn sleeve (especially 3.5", where that metal protective covers started to bend out a bit, threatening to jam in the drive), I usually transplanted the disk itself over to a new sleeve.
Thanks, everyone. I thought that’s what they were, but thought there was maybe something I didn’t know. I think we’ll probably just trash them.
Yeah, I’d be surprised if you could pull data off them, but data recovery pros never cease to amaze me
It’s the guts of 3.5" floppies, like these, they usually stored 720kB, then 1.44MB, but the latest versions (double sided) were 2.88MB.
The larger one at the bottom is from a 5 1/4" (orange in this picture, the big daddy in the picture is 8", first type I used, with COBOL)
… and now you kids know where the “save” button icon came from.
They were not meant to be removed from their protective envelopes, they’re probably damaged now.
If you play them backwards a satanic message is heard before the media bursts into flames.
This reminds me of when I got a new PC when I was younger and I was shocked… “WHAT?! THEY COME WITH 128MB RAM NOW!!! AND THEY HAVE A DVD TRAY??? No more floppy disks!!!”
Fuck, those were nice times (except for dial-up internet).
I remember having a CD burner, dvd burner, floppy drive, and Zip drive for those rare occasions.
I still have a working zip drive.
I still have a bunch of zip disks that I want to examine. Think they’re still good?
Zip drives!
I remember backing up all my documents on a zip drive and feeling like we reached peak storage.
Last month I bought two 6TB drives into my house because of all my photos/videos.
Felt like we could store the whole world on 100mb zip disks
The part that’s wild to me is I have an SD card in a computer in my pocket that cost $10 or so and is basically disposable but it’s larger than the hard drive in my first computer from 25 years ago
You can get a 128GB pendrive for like 15€…
That’s crazy.
I remember upgrading my Macintosh computer from 512kB to A FULL MEGABYTE! Wow, what a difference, suddenly I could run two programs at once - even three small ones.
Ah, the eighties… Those were the days.
I got all excited when the cost of hard drives got down to $10/MB.
There’s nothing quite like passing around copies of games that are eight-diskettes large and finding out that disk #8 is unreadable after a 30min install. Good times.
I have the original floppy set for MS Office 4.3 for Windows 3.11.
Fourty-three 3.5" disks.
Hahaha, mfw the last few disks is the same face the morning after a spicy burrito.
Don’t forget the cassettes before that. (Sinclair 1000 / ZX-81)
Having worked in a datacenter somewhat recently, I can assure you that cassettes are still in use. Now, they manage to fit tens of TB in a 4"x4" square.
Oregon Trail, on cassette, on a RadioShack TRS-80 in the school library.
Gaming heaven.
Started with the 8" bastards on a dedicated word processor (with a 12" CRT, green phospher glow, and typwriter style printer built right into the top of the unit!) that my dad had for medical filekeeping at his office.
It’s been amazing watching storage tech from those to zip drives, and now, floppies of any kind are dying.
My daughter found a 3.5" floppy in a drawer a couple of years ago (she was 20) and went “What is this? It looks just like a ‘Save’ button!” :)
I hope you smacked her for that lol.
My parents first computer was 3 feet tall and cost $30,000. I liked to play frogger on it lmao.
First game I ever played was on those 8” floppies. It was a turtle game where you would type in DOS commands and make it move. I can’t remember the command prompts but it was fun enter like forward 1000 and it would blast across the screen.
I learned this and BASIC at around the same time.
That’s it! Ha ha wow haven’t seen that since elementary school.
Logo wasn’t a game but a programming language.
As far as I can remember, it was both, as it was an educational tool developed to teach children the basics of programming while playing it as a game.
Good old turtle. You could also program loops, so you could make fancy shapes like circles.
That sounds like Logo
I remember that! As others have posted, Logo.
Logo ? Anyway there was a this “programming langue” with a turtle and it had like 6 commands : move forward/backwards, turn left/right, pen up/down :-D
God damn I’m old.
Hear, hear.
As in, wha? Did you say something? taps cane on the floor
Come in!
Your belt onions are looking spiffy today
Which was the style at the time…
the disk that lies inside a floppy disk (a 5.25 floppy disk judging by the size)
Buffalo bill works there
Nobody ever asks why it’s the C:\
Pour one out for A:\ and B:\
Originally, personal computers only had a floppy disk drive, which got letter A, and later models could have two floppy drives, so A and B. When hard disk drives appeared they got assigned to letter C (and typically D for a secondary HDD). E then became customary for optical drives (CD-ROM, DVD-ROM etc.)
Me, an average Linux enjoyer: “What’s a drive letter?”
sda, sdb
hda, hdb
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/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0
older.fli
/dev/disk/by-uuid/*
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new.avif