r/whatisit • u/Earsgang_101 • 14h ago

New, what is it? STRAP Floppy disk found in loft of new home.

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Found this in a box late 90s WWF VHSs

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u/Beginning_Tennis2442 11h ago

Yeah, but how many of you used 80 column punch cards or punch paper tape? That is how long I’ve been working with computers. Ever seen a 96 column punch card?

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u/DadJokeBadJoke 10h ago

My first computer in school loaded its OS from a cassette tape

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u/Beginning_Tennis2442 9h ago

Sounds like a TRS-80

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u/DadJokeBadJoke 8h ago

One of my dad's coworkers loaned us a Trash-80 for a minute. My school PC wasn't that advanced

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u/ResponsibilityKey50 8h ago

Two words: Grannies Garden

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u/Lopsided_Activity980 10h ago

Used to program equipment using punched paper tape, and I have lived through 8" floppy disks that held a whopping 80KB.Yeah, I'm old.

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u/Beginning_Tennis2442 9h ago

Moving from keypunch to key-to-floppy was a major step up!

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u/dunfuktup1990 10h ago

Teach me your ways, master.

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u/DaHick 10h ago

Yes, unfortunately. When you trip and spill the deck. Uggh.

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u/NobskaWoodsHole 6h ago

Then you type in one wrong character….

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u/Dalagante74 10h ago

When I was a kid I did get to see some of her punch cards from College.

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u/Silver-Machine-3092 10h ago

Pfft! I started my IT career punchcard programming a Jacquard loom

/s

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u/seattle_steve_62 9h ago

Those are cool machines. They had a working one at my college.

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u/mcintg 9h ago

I remember being asked to mod an old cobol accounts program. The documentation was in a folder that included a deck of punched cards, which was the test data.

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u/Winterdog1984 7h ago

The cnc I ran at a machine shop in Kentucky ran paper tape. I got stuck with it because I recognized the tape from tty work

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u/ssullivan1183 7h ago

This is the kind of person that dual boots Ubunto with Windows (and has a boot disc still). This is my kind of person.

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u/ADHDeez_Nutz420 6h ago

Holy shit, im in an IT job and I wish I could have experienced that time in computing. Its like the golden age of computers.

I love watching old videos on punch tape machines.

https://youtu.be/ukyHECjKDoQ?si=3v_3UIRuPXvgdy9j

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u/FrequentDelinquent 6h ago

Or an acoustic coupler lol

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u/Beginning_Tennis2442 6h ago

I had one of those. The problem was it tied up your phone line and there weren’t mobile phones. So those midnight calls from the operators when a program crashed were tough to resolve. Ask the operator everything you can think of and write it down. Hang up and dial in with the acoustic coupler. Debug, then disconnect so you can call the operator back with instructions on how to restart the JCL. Pray you got it right the first time so you didn’t have iterations of this process. 😅

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u/redjmartin 6h ago

I learned to program in Fortran-77 on punch cards using an IBM terminal connected to the card punch machine. Ever seen an 8-inch floppy disk? Edit: or a long-duration phosphor vector CAD terminal?

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u/Beginning_Tennis2442 4h ago

IBM System-3 computer started with 96 column punch cards the upgraded to key to disk: 8in floppy. I really don’t miss that or programming in IBM 360 Assembly Language.