CDs turned out to be terrible for long term storage, because the actual bits are pits in the very thin aluminum layer that's bonded to one side of the transparent polycarbonate disk. The back side of that aluminum often had nothing but a painted label to protect it.
DVD otoh, seems much more durable. The storage layer is sandwiched between two decent thicknesses of poly. But who knows, only time will tell.
I am continually amazed at the number of my nerdy colleagues who have never even heard of Pratchett, particularly when it's someone who's into D&D or otherwise enthusiastic about Tolken-esque works.
Imagine the dry humor of Hitchiker's Guide crossed with a generally Middle Earth setting, but with a good bit of contemporary (well, 90s/00-ish) cultural references mixed in, and multiply by the fact there are literally dozens of Discworld books, and it's incredible that finding another Pratchett fan is so rare.
Look closely, you'll notice there's no network interface. The only vulnerability in a system like that is physical access by malicious individuals.
About the worst mal-ware it can have is a boot sector that installs a "terminate, stay resident" (TSR) that copies itself onto any floppy that gets inserted.
Except for "the hive". Remember the hive? Sort of an alternate registry, in addition to the actual registry. Granted, it was pretty invisible, until it got corrupted.
I had a win2k machine that was my daily (at home) that was fine until idk about 2006, at which point something happened (muons?) and it would go into some kind of panic state just after bringing up the desktop. Hive corruption. I tried on and off for a couple of years to repair it, no luck. It wasn't just about the files on the HD, it was easy enough to transplant the drive and read/write anything, it was that I really liked the way I had the environment configured. Sure, it was all kind of moot, but it became a kind of personal windmill to resurrect this old thing. In the end, I booted an XP CD in it, and selected 'upgrade', and voila, it was Duncan Idaho, back from the dead.
You know, that's possible, I wouldn't be surprised. This was 20 years ago. I only recall a sense that the w2k system seemed more complicated than XP in that area.
Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything.
But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted.
From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.
Indeed, we still pay homage to the era with terms such as the stack, pushing and popping, and all kinds of things .. i remember we had fun inserting random infinite loops in other students cards on occasion until we all realized we could just have marked “finished” stacks with an X across the spine, and also to ease sorting, and so on .. i would mark certain sub-routines with different color markers on the spine too, just to see a budget for how much computing time i expected to be billed for, and so on and on .. lots of valuable hands on came from the card-based computing, its a lost art ..
I remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in various professors offices since the mid 70s, being taken to get read into some disk in the mainframe.
And for such simple processors and systems no less! No descriptor tables to deal with, no memory management to configure. These days it takes a little processor inside the main processor, just to get things started. Those were golden times.
Indeed, even if I don't do anything else with my HF rig, usually I'll check good old CHU. Can't always make out the verbal parts, but those tones usually cut through. Been setting my clocks by CHU for literally decades. Going to miss that.
DVD otoh, seems much more durable. The storage layer is sandwiched between two decent thicknesses of poly. But who knows, only time will tell.
reply