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....

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?

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.

Excellent Dag. Love me some good old noisy floppy disk noises!
I had a 128 mac my parents bought me for Xmas in 84. I ended up trading it to my brother for his Apple 2 (bought for him when it first came out in the 70's) because he had tons of games for it, and I had little on the mac.
I also learned programming on Apple 2's in 7th grade...an elective summer school class. Does that earn me double nerd points?

I did tape scratching in the 90s a lot, with modified reel to reel machine. The technique i used is harder, doesn't differ from vinyl scratching a lot (except in mine, i didn't cut the audio with fader but lifting the tape head from tape. THe end result surprised me, didn't expect it to work as at that point, had no knowledge of anyone ever using that (now i of course know that i was actually late..) It is a lot like vinyl, you still need to keep manually rotating the reels, working with the tape motor, needing to hit hits precisely without actually seeing where they are (easier with reel but there's a lot of tape in that reel and manually rotating against the motor and motion, makes the tape tighten so you can't use marks on the reels either...) Plus few handy effect like taking both reels and just turning them opposite directions, making the tape sits still but stretching, making all kinds of nice screeching sounds as the vibrations from the reel and the tape are heard, not the audio material on tape...)

Next i'm thinking of refitting old 5,4" floppy disk with analog tape head and maybe drawing the recordings on to to it, attaching the tape head to the end of my index finger.. Then i could get even closer to vinyl as there is something interesting on rotating sound sources.. Mainly it is the recording part that makes tape scratching interesting, taking a scratch sample, scratching it, resampling it again, using signal generators, designing harmonics etc.. Maybe that's next for me, using one hand to record and the other to play back.

I don't think Oregon Trail game was on 8.5" floppy disks. 5.25" yes.

Why does he have 3.5" floppy disks on his desk?

Your video, "Still Alive" played by four floppy disk drives, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I'll give you a hint... IBM is based in the U.S. but Philips isn't.
>> ^Phreezdryd:

>> ^ant:
>> ^Phreezdryd:
>> ^ant:
>> ^Phreezdryd:
I certainly don't miss installing programs from a pile of floppy disks.

Or discs.

Not a fan of "disks"?

Are there such things as compact disks (CDs), digital video disks (DVDs), etc.?

Not sure why, but all the magnetic storage media, floppy or hard, have been called "disks", while optical media got "discs". The basic physical difference I see is that magnetic disks are usually encased in something rectangular. There's probably a historical fun fact on this somewhere.

>> ^ant:

>> ^Phreezdryd:
>> ^ant:
>> ^Phreezdryd:
I certainly don't miss installing programs from a pile of floppy disks.

Or discs.

Not a fan of "disks"?

Are there such things as compact disks (CDs), digital video disks (DVDs), etc.?

Not sure why, but all the magnetic storage media, floppy or hard, have been called "disks", while optical media got "discs". The basic physical difference I see is that magnetic disks are usually encased in something rectangular. There's probably a historical fun fact on this somewhere.

>> ^Phreezdryd:

>> ^ant:
>> ^Phreezdryd:
I certainly don't miss installing programs from a pile of floppy disks.

Or discs.

Not a fan of "disks"?


Are there such things as compact disks (CDs), digital video disks (DVDs), etc.?

>> ^ant:

>> ^Phreezdryd:
I certainly don't miss installing programs from a pile of floppy disks.

Or discs.

Not a fan of "disks"?