My dad had a Prophet 2000 shortly before they were available to the public in 85, cost about $2k I think…it was the same technology but for consumers.
Recording samples was a single button push, every characteristic of any sound was infinitely mailable from reverb and attack and fade, sustain, tone, speed, looping, layering, etc. Not a professional unit like this one, lower fidelity, but affordable (by comparison) and comparable in features except the display. It also did MIDI. I have many memories of shoeboxes full of 3.5” “floppies” and way more dials than I knew how to use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet_2000

My Pops had a prophet 2000 the mid 80's. The first home digital sampling synth. It had all these options and more to apply to either the basic hum or to any sample. It had reverb, attack, sustain, decay, multiple preset wave forms, speed (of the sample), pitch and tone, and probably 1/2 dozen more I can't recall, all in a keyboard size unit, not a full pipe organ size. The samples came or could be recorded on 3 1/2" floppies, and you could store a huge number of presets to modify them as you wished at the push of one button, not a complete retuning with multiple dials. I had fun remixing James Brown and Prince, but never learned to play well.
Amazing the advancements they made in just 15 years.

He's wrong. I've seen multiple dogs on edibles, that's not what happens. They get slow, floppy, off balance, they drool uncontrollably, and have an obvious "wtf is going on here?" look on their face. Pretty much the opposite of this dog.

windows 3.x wasn't necessary and I preferred straight up MS-DOS at the time so stuck with that. Windows 95 replaced both DOS and Win 3.x so I had to use it. But still have my DOS 6.22 original floppies if I ever need to go back.

Good dog, Cujo! Also, you know that mutt drops a log the size of a baguette at least twice a day and it practically takes a snow shovel to fling it into the neighbor's yard.

I use to have a tragically retarded Cocker Spaniel (and, to note, there is no other variety of that breed) and it was like the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, only with dogshit. At least three times a day, this golden-furred, floppy ear'd mongrel would scarf down a can of Alpo, a cup of kibble and whatever food was left lying on the table -- the same table the cat always got smacked for climbing on, but the dog ... ohhh, no! It's CUTE when the dog does it! -- then make a beeline to the back lawn where it'd crap Mt. Everest. I'd have to trudge out the the back yard, shovel in hand, while the guy next door shot me the stink-eye because he was tired of fishing dog turds out of his swimming pool every day during the summer. This task is odious enough, but it's a thousand times worse when you're stoned and it's a million degrees out and you'd much rather be floating on your waterbed listening to Dark Side of the Moon in headphones while blissful AC-cooled air wafts over your twice-weekly washed body and not fighting your way through a black fog of Horseflies to reach a 1:1 scale model of Mt. Doom made entirely of a too-quickly digested overpriced slurry of meat scraps and offal that the canners couldn't fob off on Mexico.

It might not have been as bad as all that, but in my hazy recollection, it was pretty darned close.

I'm not sure why I told you all this, to be perfectly honest, but I did. So there.

The old days of buying games in boxes on Floppies, CDs and Cartridges made this so much easier.

Takes me back to the first time I had to deal with a virus infection... not on my machine, thankfully, but much every Acorn machine (and every floppy disk) in my secondary school was infected with the "ICON" virus. Didn't do any harm (besides taking up space), but it was really annoying to get rid of as it would re-infect stuff almost as quickly as you were cleaning them.

The ironic thing was that it took me months to rid of that pest and then a week later I got a computer mag with a free anti-virus on the cover disk that would disinfect a computer in minutes instead of hours....

HDD and Floppy Music: Nirvana - Smell Like Teen Spirit has been added as a related post - related requested by Mordhaus.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/HDD-and-Floppy-Music-Nirvana-Smell-Like-Teen-Spirit

Form.A sounds a lot like the Stoner virus, I'm assuming one of those was a variant of the other. Some OEM's were unknowingly sending out floppies with that virus on them with peripherals for a while which really helped them spread.

I always thought the Michelangelo virus was a pretty serious one for pre-internet days.

Post internet, the Code Red virus was especially hard to get rid of. It never touched the disk so most scanners had a hard time with it.

I suppose it is hard for any pre-internet virus to compare in terms of damage to these 5, but one that stands out in my mind:

Form (circa 1990 or so), and its variants like Form.A would infect the boot sector of your hard drive, and from there could infect any floppy disk that you used on the computer. Most PCs at the time would try to boot from a floppy disk left in the drive, which would spread the infection.

I guess that many variants didn't really do much of anything particularly bad, but I got Form.A one time and it nuked the Master Boot Record (like virus #5 in the video) of my PC. Since DOS / Windows (3.1 at the time I think) wouldn't boot, I (mistakenly) assumed that it had formatted my hard drive, and then lost all of my data by reformatting.

I remember a span of about a year where any 3.5 inch floppy disk being passed around offices or schools in my home town had a roughly 80% chance of being infected with Form.A. So that seems like a pretty impressive infection and spread rate, without advantage of being able to spread through the internet!

I think I had a lot of these on 3 1/2' floppy disks for my Prophet 2000, from way before CDs. It's mothballed in my garage, I never learned to play the synth. :-(
Where's the James Brown effects?

Anyone ever use the OS called CP\M on old Kaypro computers? My first computer job in 1985 was supporting an auto salvage yard database on those computers in Texas. CP\M was painful, you could erase the hard disk you booted from, if you weren't careful. Which I did, I spent a whole day entering inventory into the hard drive, then went to back it up by erasing a bunch of floppies first. The one time I forgot to specify A: for the floppy drive to be erased, it defaulted to the C drive. So when it said "Are you sure you want to erase this disk?" I tapped Y and it erased the boot drive, with the OS, the inventory program and all that data I had typed in all day. I took a long walk and considered a career change, I was so angry. Then went back and typed it all in again.

Off topic, but speak of the devil and he shall appear.
Apparently a trove of 200 floppy disks owned my Gene Roddenberry have turned up, and been deciphered (they were made on a proprietary OS made just for Gene, apparently) and 'there may be surprises in store on this, the 50'th anniversary of the original Star Trek' is all that's been said about it so far....
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/04/200-floppy-disks-belonging-to-star-treks-creator-have-been-recovered-and-could-offer-some-surprises/

What Is Love - Floppy Disk Version has been added as a related post - related requested by Zawash on that post.