No optical drives?

On Sun, 09 Aug 2020 01:23:49 -0400, micky wrote:

Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives?

These days a CD or DVD holds only a fraction of what a cheap USB stick
can hold.

CDs and DVDs took hold when a CD or DVD could hold massively more than
the then average PC hard disk. Those days are now long gone.

If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

Get an external USB optical drive to read (or write) those optical
disks which you still have.


--
Kind regards
Ralph

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

| Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
| internet for the masses, at least over here. The floppies were mostly
| inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time), but
| there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
| used Iomega Zips.
|

I think ZIP disks were the biggest waste of money I
ever spent. They were so brief. But 100 MB seemed
giant at the time.

zips were very popular and widely used, although not that reliable.

As usual, nospam has altered his
memory to fit the demands of Lord Jobs. He's probably
embarassed that he spent $100 for a USB floppy drive.
(Or more likely $300 for 3 of them.)

as usual, you resort to insults.

you also don't understand that macs did not need floppies anywhere near
as much as windows pcs. very few people bought a usb floppy drive. just
because they existed does not mean they were hot sellers.

When I bought an eMachines PC in late 1998, Mindspring
sent me a set of floppies to install their Internet service.

their software made it easy to set up, but likely was not needed.

they also had a cd-rom version:
https://archive.org/details/MindSpri...n_Kit_Version_
3.08_Windows_Version_4.0_Mac_MindSpri

And of course I wouldn't have been downloading software
on my 56Kb modem. All of it was store-bought.

why not?

people used to download software in the 1980s from bbses and ftp sites
using far slower modems.

I even
bought PSP16 on disk just four years ago, at Staples. That
was the era when people would get angry because their friend
sent a picture of their cat in email and it tied up their computer
for 45 minutes, waiting for the download.

mistakes happened.

That eMachines was $500. A friend bought one of the first
iMacs around that time. He spent $2,700 for the iMac, printer,
USB floppy drive, etc.... and virtually no upgradeability.

the first imac was $1299, with later models dropping to $799.

either he bought an awful lot of pricy accessories, or he was sold a
lot stuff he did not need by an overzealous salesperson.

you also don't get to include a printer and whatever else he bought
when comparing prices to a bare bones emachines system.

I also remember helping a friend reinstall their Win98 system
at one point. I put back their Office 95, I think it was. Something
like 24 floppies.

windows 95 and 98 came on cd, as did office 95.

mac os came on cd since 1991.

| backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
| option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
| a ridiculous amount of time.
|
| 5 Blue ray disks. Feasible. Long ago I did backups with 89 floppies :-)
|

That's a classic case of people not understanding backup.

no, it's a classic case of not wanting to buy a second hard drive.

A 5 TB system that was backed up, say, last month, probably
doesn't have more than a couple of GB of new files. But people
don't know how to do backup, so they think they have to back
up the whole thing every time.

backed up last *month* ??

a *lot* can change in a month, especially for a business.

backups should be done at least daily.

If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk.
What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files.
I have 2 redundant, 500 GB SSDs that are nowhere near full.

most people have fare more than a partly full 500g hard drive.

In article , Ralph Fox
wrote:


Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives?

These days a CD or DVD holds only a fraction of what a cheap USB stick
can hold.

CDs and DVDs took hold when a CD or DVD could hold massively more than
the then average PC hard disk. Those days are now long gone.

yep.

If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

Get an external USB optical drive to read (or write) those optical
disks which you still have.

and then copy them to a hard drive.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:


| I distrust them because they're magnetic storage.
|
| Unless I'm lost in translation, they are not magnetic, they are flash
media.
|

Electrical? I can't say that I really understand it,
but it makes sense they could be vulnerable to
magnetic fields. I also read that SSDs can't be depended
on for more than a year or so without power. So I'm
guessing sticks are no different. That doesn't make
it a good primary backup medium.

flash drives and ssds are not vulnerable to magnetic fields or airport
x-rays for that matter.

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
happen for many more years.

yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.

Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
internet for the masses, at least over here.

i don't know about where you are

Yes you do :-)

i know where you live, but i do not know what the availability of the
internet was there 25 years ago.

but it was definitely available here
and elsewhere, but to your point, since floppies started to disappear
in the mid-90s, it's not surprising that the imac, which was released
in 1998, did not have a floppy drive.

another important difference is that macs did not need floppy disks
anywhere near as much as windows pcs.

I don't know about that.

i do.

But I developed custom software and I needed
something to carry and deploy it, and the binaries often did not fit a
floppy. I often used rar with multidisk compression.

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

in the 80s, while that was also possible, it was usually easier to
directly call the other person and use x/y/zmodem.

where apple did screw up with the first imac was not including a cd
*burner* rather than just a cd-rom drive.

The floppies were mostly
inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time),

exactly the point.

That they were unreliable is weird, but true. Floppies made before the
90's worked for ever. Afterwards, they would fail the first time. I
needed to carry three copies to customers, or risk another trip.

that depends on the floppies. like everything, there's a range in
quality.

a lot of cds and dvds did not last particularly long, notably those
made by ritek. some burning software reported the error rate, which
gave a rough idea of how long it might last.

but
there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
used Iomega Zips.

there were several types of removable storage available, including
syquest, zip, jaz and a few others.

I remember magneto-optical media. Was too slow.

i remember those too.

backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
a ridiculous amount of time.

5 Blue ray disks. Feasible.

blu-ray will reduce the number of discs, however, it still requires
manual intervention to swap the discs, plus keeping track of which
files are on which discs for later retrieval. if anything changes, it's
another set of discs and another burn session.

Sure. Same as DVDs, it is the same thing but bigger. A good backup
software can keep catalogs - I fondly remember PCtools backup. M$ bought
it and included it in version 6 of MsDOS, I think.

it's still extra work, and a lot of physical space to keep all the
discs.

On 09/08/2020 21.21, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
happen for many more years.

yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.

Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
internet for the masses, at least over here.

i don't know about where you are

Yes you do :-)

i know where you live, but i do not know what the availability of the
internet was there 25 years ago.

Ah, ok :-D


but it was definitely available here
and elsewhere, but to your point, since floppies started to disappear
in the mid-90s, it's not surprising that the imac, which was released
in 1998, did not have a floppy drive.

another important difference is that macs did not need floppy disks
anywhere near as much as windows pcs.

I don't know about that.

i do.

But I developed custom software and I needed
something to carry and deploy it, and the binaries often did not fit a
floppy. I often used rar with multidisk compression.

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

Certainly not. Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some
of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or
institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks
like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies, because
it was expensive.


in the 80s, while that was also possible, it was usually easier to
directly call the other person and use x/y/zmodem.

With geeks. None of my clients/users had even heard of that.


where apple did screw up with the first imac was not including a cd
*burner* rather than just a cd-rom drive.

The floppies were mostly
inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time),

exactly the point.

That they were unreliable is weird, but true. Floppies made before the
90's worked for ever. Afterwards, they would fail the first time. I
needed to carry three copies to customers, or risk another trip.

that depends on the floppies. like everything, there's a range in
quality.

Everybody commented the same thing. Brand best quality floppies in the
mid 90's, failed a lot. Crap quality bought in large amounts in the mid
80's, worked without a flaw. I still have backups made in that era:
tried a decade ago and they worked.



a lot of cds and dvds did not last particularly long, notably those
made by ritek. some burning software reported the error rate, which
gave a rough idea of how long it might last.

but
there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
used Iomega Zips.

there were several types of removable storage available, including
syquest, zip, jaz and a few others.

I remember magneto-optical media. Was too slow.

i remember those too.

backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
a ridiculous amount of time.

5 Blue ray disks. Feasible.

blu-ray will reduce the number of discs, however, it still requires
manual intervention to swap the discs, plus keeping track of which
files are on which discs for later retrieval. if anything changes, it's
another set of discs and another burn session.

Sure. Same as DVDs, it is the same thing but bigger. A good backup
software can keep catalogs - I fondly remember PCtools backup. M$ bought
it and included it in version 6 of MsDOS, I think.

it's still extra work, and a lot of physical space to keep all the
discs.

Floppies used even more :-D


--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 09/08/2020 19.03, Mayayana wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote

| It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
| happen for many more years.
|
| yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
| was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
| factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
| online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.
|
| Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there was no
| internet for the masses, at least over here. The floppies were mostly
| inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time), but
| there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
| used Iomega Zips.
|

I think ZIP disks were the biggest waste of money I
ever spent. They were so brief. But 100 MB seemed
giant at the time. As usual, nospam has altered his
memory to fit the demands of Lord Jobs. He's probably
embarassed that he spent $100 for a USB floppy drive.
(Or more likely $300 for 3 of them.)

When I bought an eMachines PC in late 1998, Mindspring
sent me a set of floppies to install their Internet service.
And of course I wouldn't have been downloading software
on my 56Kb modem. All of it was store-bought. I even
bought PSP16 on disk just four years ago, at Staples. That
was the era when people would get angry because their friend
sent a picture of their cat in email and it tied up their computer
for 45 minutes, waiting for the download.

I remember that :-D

The other incumbent often using the company internet connection, so no
problem for them. They could not understand why I was angry at them.


That eMachines was $500. A friend bought one of the first
iMacs around that time. He spent $2,700 for the iMac, printer,
USB floppy drive, etc.... and virtually no upgradeability.

I also remember helping a friend reinstall their Win98 system
at one point. I put back their Office 95, I think it was. Something
like 24 floppies.

:-D


|
|
| backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a viable
| option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would take
| a ridiculous amount of time.
|
| 5 Blue ray disks. Feasible. Long ago I did backups with 89 floppies :-)
|

That's a classic case of people not understanding backup.
A 5 TB system that was backed up, say, last month, probably
doesn't have more than a couple of GB of new files. But people
don't know how to do backup, so they think they have to back
up the whole thing every time.

Well, at some point I had to backup the entire thing. My hard disk was
32 MB, could not fit everything I needed. So I stored them in different
large backups, and switched big apps. Of course I used incremental and
differential backups as well.

If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk.
What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files.

I do.

I have 2 redundant, 500 GB SSDs that are nowhere near full.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

Optical drives and discs are rarely used these days.


micky wrote:
Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

I"ve been looking at microcenter.com. They have the advantage of
having a store in Baltimore that charges the same price as their
webstore,

--
Life's so loco! ..!.. *isms, sins, hates, (d)evil, illnesses (e.g., COVID-19/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2), deaths (RIP), interruptions, stresses, heat waves, fires, out(r)ages, dramas, unlucky #4, 2020, greeds, bugs (e.g., crashes & female mosquitoes), etc.
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org /
/ /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail.
| |o o| |
\ _ /
( )

Mark Lloyd wrote:
knuttle wrote:

[snip]

Unfortunately they are removing the space for any drive on the new
laptops.* Most new laptops the have solid state drives and no optical
drive.** It looks like the average solid state drive is about 256GB
with some 128GB and 500GB.

My newest laptop (from 2019) has a 256GB NVMe and NO mechanical drives
of any kind.

Mine was the same way. Not only that, but it doesn't have an ethernet
port, is wireless only. Since I've had a few problems with the wireless
disconnecting for no apparent reason, I bought a USB hub with a built in
ethernet "card":

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0178HOTOU/

The first one I got had problems, but I contacted the manufacturers and
they sent me a replacement that works. I have yet to have the CAT5
cabled connection disconnect spontaneously.

I also bought a USB DVD burner:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071LGWVSL/

that so far works perfectly, and an external 2tb hard drive:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CRG94G3/

and carrying pouch:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00F5CKWBA/

I carry all this stuff along with my laptop and a full-size, wired mouse
(I detest touchpads) in a briefcase. However, since the laptop has W10
on it and I detest that version of Windows, the whole mess mostly just
sits in storage.

--
John C.

On 09/08/2020 18.51, Mayayana wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote

| I distrust them because they're magnetic storage.
|
| Unless I'm lost in translation, they are not magnetic, they are flash
media.
|

Electrical? I can't say that I really understand it,
but it makes sense they could be vulnerable to
magnetic fields.

To electrical fields, specially if alternating, yes. To magnetic fields, no.

I also read that SSDs can't be depended
on for more than a year or so without power. So I'm
guessing sticks are no different. That doesn't make
it a good primary backup medium.

No, sticks last longer than that. Still, they can not be depended on
very much.


| Unfortunately, they are ridiculously small. I have a BlueRay writer,
| which allows up to 100 GB. They are not cheap, but some are archival
| quality.
|

I guess that depends on what you need. My periodic
backup of email, program data, business files, etc, is
well under the 4+ GB I can put on a DVD. I also use
CDs, mostly for boot media. For example, I use BootIt
for booting/partitioning/disk imaging. That's very compact.
It used to fit on a floppy. It still might. It certainly fits
on a CD. USB stick? Maybe. But that introduces
complications. Not all machines can boot from USB.

Not periodical backups, no. But for backups of photos, yes.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

Chris wrote:
micky wrote:
Is tit my imagination or are they these days selling a lot of PC's
without DVD drives? If you say No, I'll look harder or look somewhere
else.

You're correct. Since software stopped being distributed on optical media
(5-10 years ago), there's been little need/demand.

Same for movies, etc. Lots of people are streaming online these days.
--
Life's so loco! ..!.. *isms, sins, hates, (d)evil, illnesses (e.g., COVID-19/2019-nCoV/SARS-CoV-2), deaths (RIP), interruptions, stresses, heat waves, fires, out(r)ages, dramas, unlucky #4, 2020, greeds, bugs (e.g., crashes & female mosquitoes), etc.
Note: A fixed width font (Courier, Monospace, etc.) is required to see this signature correctly.
/\___/\ Ant(Dude) @ http://aqfl.net & http://antfarm.home.dhs.org /
/ /\ /\ \ http://antfarm.ma.cx. Please nuke ANT if replying by e-mail.
| |o o| |
\ _ /
( )

On 2020-08-09 3:39 p.m., Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/08/2020 21.21, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:

Â*Â*Â*Â* It was never about floppies being out of date. That didn't
happen for many more years.

yes it was. floppy sales had been dropping well before the first imac
was released, to where one of the only two remaining floppy disk
factories closed earlier that year. software distribution was mostly
online and transferring files between machines was done via ethernet.

Huh, when the floppies started disappearing (say, mid 90's) there
was no
internet for the masses, at least over here.

i don't know about where you are

Yes you do :-)

i know where you live, but i do not know what the availability of the
internet was there 25 years ago.

Ah, ok :-D


but it was definitely available here
and elsewhere, but to your point, since floppies started to disappear
in the mid-90s, it's not surprising that the imac, which was released
in 1998, did not have a floppy drive.

another important difference is that macs did not need floppy disks
anywhere near as much as windows pcs.

I don't know about that.

i do.

But I developed custom software and I needed
something to carry and deploy it, and the binaries often did not fit a
floppy. I often used rar with multidisk compression.

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

Certainly not. Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some
of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or
institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks
like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies, because
it was expensive.


in the 80s, while that was also possible, it was usually easier to
directly call the other person and use x/y/zmodem.

With geeks. None of my clients/users had even heard of that.


where apple did screw up with the first imac was not including a cd
*burner* rather than just a cd-rom drive.

The floppies were mostly
inadequate (too small, and very unreliable at that point in time),

exactly the point.

That they were unreliable is weird, but true. Floppies made before the
90's worked for ever. Afterwards, they would fail the first time. I
needed to carry three copies to customers, or risk another trip.

that depends on the floppies. like everything, there's a range in
quality.

Everybody commented the same thing. Brand best quality floppies in the
mid 90's, failed a lot. Crap quality bought in large amounts in the mid
80's, worked without a flaw. I still have backups made in that era:
tried a decade ago and they worked.



a lot of cds and dvds did not last particularly long, notably those
made by ritek. some burning software reported the error rate, which
gave a rough idea of how long it might last.

but
there was no popular replacement (USB sticks were not invented yet). I
used Iomega Zips.

there were several types of removable storage available, including
syquest, zip, jaz and a few others.

I remember magneto-optical media. Was too slow.

i remember those too.

backing up a multi-terabyte hard drive to optical discs is not a
viable
option. even a 500 gig drive, which is now considered tiny, would
take
a ridiculous amount of time.

5 Blue ray disks. Feasible.

blu-ray will reduce the number of discs, however, it still requires
manual intervention to swap the discs, plus keeping track of which
files are on which discs for later retrieval. if anything changes, it's
another set of discs and another burn session.

Sure. Same as DVDs, it is the same thing but bigger. A good backup
software can keep catalogs - I fondly remember PCtools backup. M$ bought
it and included it in version 6 of MsDOS, I think.

it's still extra work, and a lot of physical space to keep all the
discs.

Floppies used even more :-D



After switching from Apple to PC in 1995 my first one was a Dell
Dimension and it came with an HP Colorado T1000 Travan Tape Drive, I
remember it used the second connector on the floppy cable, Also the tape
cartridges were very expensive, I don't remember what size but I paid
$25.00 to $35.00 cdn each for them, Made by Imation if memory serves me
right

Rene

"Carlos E.R." wrote

| If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk.
| What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files.
|
| I do.

Ah. Nunca limpia su casa, no?

In article , Carlos E.R.
wrote:


But I developed custom software and I needed
something to carry and deploy it, and the binaries often did not fit a
floppy. I often used rar with multidisk compression.

in the 90s, it was easy to send software via the internet.

Certainly not.

it was very easy and everyone i knew did it.

Nobody here had internet, not even e geek like me. Some
of us had Fidonet, some Compuserve, and some in Universities or
institutions had Internet. Most did not even have a modem. With geeks
like me, I did direct modem to modem transfera - on emergencies, because
it was expensive.

maybe where you were, but internet access was widely available in the
usa in the early 90s, from a variety of providers.

software could also be sent via compuserve and similar services, but
normally only within the same service.

some of the earliest and largest isps include:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL
The WELL was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985,
and the name (an acronym for Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is
partially a reference to some of Brand's earlier projects, including
the Whole Earth Catalog. ... The WELL began as a dial-up bulletin
board system (BBS) influenced by EIES, became one of the original
dial-up ISPs in the early 1990s when commercial traffic was first
allowed, and changed into its current form as the Internet and web
technology evolved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(Internet_service_provider)
The World is an Internet service provider originally headquartered
in Brookline, Massachusetts. It was the first commercial ISP in the
world that provided a direct connection to the internet, with its
first customer logging on in November 1989.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netcom_(United_States)
In 1996 the company called itself the world's largest ISP, with some
500,000 subscribers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panix_(ISP)
Panix is the third-oldest ISP in the world after NetCom and the
World. Originally running on A/UX on an Apple Macintosh IIfx, Panix
has gone through a number of transitions as the Internet has grown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindSpring
When it acquired Netcom in February 1999, its subscriber base
surpassed 1 million. It announced its first high-speed cable service
to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1999 and DSL services to eight
cities the following November. In September MindSpring launched its
first national advertising campaign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EarthLink
EarthLink was co-founded in March 1994 by Sky Dayton, investor Reed
Slatkin and Kevin M. O'Donnell. Dayton, then only age 23, reportedly
was inspired to start the dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) in
Pasadena, CA after spending an entire week trying to configure his
own computer for Internet access. Dayton¹s experience convinced him
that there was a market for a simple, user-friendly ISP.
....
By 1995, EarthLink offered dial-up service in 98 cities, and was
one of the first U.S. ISPs to offer unlimited Internet access for a
flat rate.
....
In 1998, EarthLink entered partnerships with Sprint, Apple, CompUSA,
and other companies that helped it reach 1 million members by the end
of the year.
....
On February 4, 2000, the company, then based in Pasadena, California,
merged with Atlanta-founded MindSpring, making it the second-largest
ISP in the U.S., after AOL. Later that year, the company launched
EarthLink Biz DSL service. EarthLink also acquired OneMain.com, a
large, rural ISP, and Rural Connections in 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL
AOL was one of the early pioneers of the Internet in the mid-1990s,
and the most recognized brand on the web in the United States. It
originally provided a dial-up service to millions of Americans, as
well as providing a web portal, e-mail, instant messaging and later a
web browser following its purchase of Netscape. In 2001, at the
height of its popularity, it purchased the media conglomerate Time
Warner in the largest merger in U.S. history. AOL rapidly declined
thereafter, partly due to the decline of dial-up and rise of
broadband. AOL was eventually spun off from Time Warner in 2009,
with Tim Armstrong appointed the new CEO. Under his leadership, the
company invested in media brands and advertising technologies.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:


| If I wanted to back up 5 TB then of course I'd use a hard disk.
| What else? But I don't even have anywhere near 5 TB of files.
|
| I do.

Ah. Nunca limpia su casa, no?

he likely has a lot of large files, such as music, photos and
particularly movies, which adds up *very* quickly.