A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
"didn't take too much space"
Someone never installed an operating system from floppies. Win98 was 38 floppies. Heaven help you if you didn't notice you only have 37 disks until halfway through the install.
A media format with 1.44mb per disk is not conducive to space saving even back in the day.
They're talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.
You could build SSDs today with the exact same tactility of floppy disks but with terabytes of storage.
To be honest, by 1998 something as big as win98 wasn't supposed to be shipped in floppies. Then again, win95 was available as 27 disks
Windows 95 on CD-ROM included three music videos, presumably to show off the capabilities of the format.
I remember my copy had Buddy Holly by Weezer, and I think something called Good Times. What was the third?
The third was the trailer to Rob Roy.
I still occasionally use floppies and I can assure you that they do in fact occupy more space than I'd like.
That's just 37 floppy disks of bloat. All you really need is 1.44 MB.
Those distros even have a GUI? Amiga Workbench on 720k all the way! 😁
And a satisfying but not too jarring "thunk" when they seat in correctly. Plus, the activity light let you know it was safe/not safe to hit the eject button.
Remember how sometimes you'd put the disk in and you could hear the floppy part spinning for a fraction of a second to line up with, I guess the motor head, before it fully clunked in? That shit was peak.
Brrr-click!
Yep lol.
And you could tell by the sound if your read/write operation was going to fail for whatever reason.
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
R-R-R-R-R-(sigh)-A
I don't even remember what (F)ail did
Yeah I was wondering the same thing. Didn't Abort just cancel trying to read that sector, while Fail would cancel the entire operation?
Nope, I looked it up. Abort would completely abort the whole thing, while Fail was supposed to return an error code to the program so that it could decide what to do next. Like Ignore but less crashy.
3.5 disks were my fidget spinners before the term existed. pulling back the slide and letting it snap shut kept my idle brain occupied for hours while waiting for stuff on the computer to happen.
Flashbacks of flipping around a 5¼" floppy disks that were actually floppy and manually spinning the cassette tape wheels while something is loading.
OP they really were. Back in the day when I was a sysadmin I would keep a bunch of tools on a floppy that I would carry around as I did user support.
It was like carrying around a toolbox to work on things.
I still do that but with a usb drive, which is way more capable especially with ventoy on it.
Growing up, my dad used to download a lot of games off BBSes for me and my brother. He would save them on 3.5 floppies and then label what game was on each one. I've got fond memories of flipping through his box of floppies seeing what new games he had for us to play.
Not all drives had buttons. There were workstations (Sun Sparcs) which had. motorized eject mechanisms.
Used 10 of these workstations to copy my freshly downloaded Slackware Linux to the stack of 60 floppies it took. (Twice, so I wrote 120 disks, as at least one of the disks would have read errors on average). Each time one of the Sparcs was done, it did spit out the disk and I'd insert a new one, labeling the old one with what was written on screen.
Ah the hours I spent downloading and installing 100-200 Megabytes of operating systems.
Labeling the disks would just be a sequence number, I'd label the disk boxes with the content.
Late 90s memories....
At home, I'd install the os by inserting each of these disks into my PC with16MBytes of RAM.
All that took about a day of work.
You kids don't know how good you have it, we had to fetch out Xfree86 mode lines in a wooden bucket from outside in the snow, barefoot.
We didn't stack them though. We kept them in those boxes with a pointless lock, and flipped through them.
The good old days. I wish I still had mine but alas my old floppy box died in a fire.
The 3.5” disk was designed as a consumer product by Sony, whose industrial design is second to none. (Compare the 5¼ “ and 8” floppies, which were designed by IBM engineers and only intended for use by technical specialists.)
I wish they'd make SSDs in a similar format with plug-and-play functionality.
Stick your disk in and boot from it. Remove after shutdown and take it with you.
That’s called a thumb drive and you can do it as long as the computer you are using has the option to boot from USB enabled in BIOS (typically personal machines come with that enabled but machines out in the public often disable it specifically because they don’t want you booting a different OS)
For similar reasons, I feel like Gameboy Advanced cartridges were the optimal size for handheld consoles. Switch cartridges are so tiny and fragile.
This and CD caddys. Nothing like spending a full minute swapping out the cd in the caddy, then getting that satisfying chunk when the mechanics kick in.
I never liked cd caddies. The push button, wait for motor to eject, then push button, wait for motor to load was dissociative.
The floppy drive was a direct mechanical link between the button and eject.
The labeling was a good thing, and stackability, but otherwise I prefer USB sticks. Tactile, easy to stick in or pull out. Esp. since even an old one replaces thousands of disks. 1GB==711floppies
I kind of wish that something along the lines of the old PCMCIA format had survived. Flat, stackable, big enough for easy labelling, and these days could easily fit many terabytes of flash storage.
SATA SSDs, if only there were floppy-like docks in PCs' front panels for them. I see adding one usb-c female adapter as a part of the protective case, and adding a male one on the opposite end of the dock could've been the way, since modern USB ports have sufficient power and data capabilities. Adapter's firmware could've signaled it's nothing more than a big USB thumb drive, it can also be (made?) compatible with portable devices e.g. digital cameras, phones, etc to make it more useful.
Zip disks at least the 100’s had the same tactile qualities, little door to fidget and label space all while having that satisfying clicking sound each time you used them.
Not that I don't agree but... I'd take Mini Disc over them. Really similar but smaller -but not to the point of losing tactility or nice labels- and I love the eject mechanism of some players/recorders. Amazing mix of cassette tapes (usability) and CDs (capacity, non-linearity...), kinda late to the party.
UMDs are cool too, thought not as much IMHO.
Incorrect. 5.25” floppies are peak tactile. Giving them a little wooble before inserting into the A: drive was the best feeling in computing.
Doesn’t compare to the satisfying click of playing with the forbidden spring loaded metal door.
They had better than that with a lever you turn into place. You got both a spring loaded click and turning a lever.
Certainly better than the 5 1/4" floppies they replaced.
But, installing big programs, like Photoshop, off a stack of 30 or 40 disks was a hassle. Imagine Photoshop fitting in 40 MB, tho.
Duke Nukem 3D Demo.
62 floppy disks.
Didn't take much space, lol I remember the huge cases people used to buy to store them all.
Still remember my friend making a copy of doom 2 for me using pkzip... I think it took about 10 disks.
