No optical drives?

On 10/08/2020 14.53, nospam wrote:
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.

I was not talking of "ease", just availability.

the availability of the internet is what made it easy.

Again, you are being USA-centric.



And about ease... I also doubt it, it required having access to an FTP
server (in the command line).

ftp was one of several methods and did not require a command line.

HA!


gui ftp apps existed in the late 1980s and were common in the 1990s.

HA!

GUI ftp apps appeared with Windows, late in the game.


it was also possible to email an ftp server to request a file, which i
always found amusing.

Sending an email with a 1 MB attachment
would have provoked a call from the sysadmin :-D

then you had an idiot for a sysadmin.

Not at all. My mail accounts had total limit of 10 megs, for many years.


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.

I was in Canada on a college in 1990 and Internet was not even
mentioned. Not by teachers, not by the students. Not even in the data
transmission courses.

The first time I heard the word was several years later.

then you went to a ****ty college.

HA!


usenet was widely used in the 1980s, along with email, ftp and much
more.

False.


In fact, I had a friend who worked with a Mac something and used floppies.

macs could use floppies, however, by the 1990s, they were rarely used.


HA!


--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 10/08/2020 20.26, Mayayana wrote:

....

It's especially odd now with the pandemic. Theaters aren't
open. Netflix wants to rent their own TV shows instead of
movies. Amazon, Disney, Hulu and others are jumping on the
bandwagon. It's turned into a strange situation where unless
you subscribe to a half dozen monthly streaming services, you
might not be able to see a movie. For example, I heard
"Mudbound" was good, but it's a Netflix movie. Even the libraries
can't get it. So I'll probably never see it. Movies are no longer
a shared cultural event.

Indeed, it is a pain.

The weekend movie reviews
in the NYT now note how a movie can be seen. It's all gone
private, Instead of movies being available to the whole world
on release and on DVD after a couple of months, only people
who subscribe to the specific service can see the movie.

We now subscribe to Hoopla and Kanopy through our library.
The movies are free but the selection is crap. And I've watched
a few that are online for free, typically at youtube. Aside from
that I just don't watch movies anymore.

I saw the other day that Disney plans to release a new version
of "Mulan", apparently a hit movie of theirs. It's going to cost
$30 to rent it streaming! Presumably that's on top of the monthly
Disney streaming subscription. I certainly hope no one buys it,
but I'm guessing they know their audience and that the
parents will be held hostage by their kids. Disney is masterful
at exploiting children.

Certainly. Preposterous.

I have the offering from my ISP fibre, plus Amazon Prime - because it
makes sense for me the the reduced or nil delivery cost of goods of
Prime, and the video comes with it "for free". Otherwise, I would only
have what my fibre brings.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 10/08/2020 22.52, nospam wrote:
In article , Mayayana
wrote:


I saw the other day that Disney plans to release a new version
of "Mulan", apparently a hit movie of theirs. It's going to cost
$30 to rent it streaming! Presumably that's on top of the monthly
Disney streaming subscription. I certainly hope no one buys it,
but I'm guessing they know their audience and that the
parents will be held hostage by their kids.

it's a lot cheaper than buying tickets for the entire family, also
buying popcorn and snacks, plus fuel to drive to the theater and
possibly parking fees, which can easily total over $50-100, and you
might not even get good seats.

8€ tops on the theatre, perfect seats. 16 if I have company. Parking is
free. These people charge double that.


Disney is masterful
at exploiting children.

you obviously don't understand what exploiting children means.

yeah, they are exploiting the parents.


--
Cheers, Carlos.

On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 16:15:00 -0500, none
wrote:

On 08/10/2020 12:33, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 8/9/20 2:21 PM, nospam wrote:

[snip]

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

Win 95 was also available on floppies (I forget how many).

12. Bought it for myself as a birthday present around '96 to upgrade an
earlier self-purchased birthday gift-an original 60 megahertz Pentium
desktop (the one with the broken math processor which I forced Intel to
swap out rather than guarantee it'd stay broken for life-remember that
nonsense?) and on floppies was how 95 came. Believe it or not both it
and the desktop are still running-though I only use it now to play those
wonderful old card games.

I recall installing Windows95 on diskettes. They were 3.5"
stiffies that were "magically" reformatted to hold more data. I
recall a piece of shareware that allowed one to reformat and copy
the second original diskette . If you didn't you couldn't use it
to install that product on another machine.

I forget how many of those stiffies were involved with W95, but
there weren't that many. Office took about 42 or 43 stiffies.
Same deal with the second disk for Office. Also remember that
the registration number had to be evenly divisible by 7 when you
added up the digits.

nospam wrote:
In article , Mayayana
wrote:


I saw the other day that Disney plans to release a new version
of "Mulan", apparently a hit movie of theirs. It's going to cost
$30 to rent it streaming! Presumably that's on top of the monthly
Disney streaming subscription. I certainly hope no one buys it,
but I'm guessing they know their audience and that the
parents will be held hostage by their kids.

it's a lot cheaper than buying tickets for the entire family, also
buying popcorn and snacks, plus fuel to drive to the theater and
possibly parking fees, which can easily total over $50-100, and you
might not even get good seats.

And saving precious time!
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In article , lid (none) wrote:

I only use it now to play those
wonderful old card games.

I have all of those *and* Pinball happily running on Windows 10 (64-bit Pro) here!
:^)

--
Regards
John ) Remove the obvious to reply...

Mark Lloyd wrote:
Win 95 was also available on floppies (I forget how many).

Seen on /. & TheReg recently:

Boeing 747-400s still use floppy disks for loading critical navigation databases,

747-400 intro'd 1989.

wp says there are 53 pax craft operating worldwide along w/ 188 freighters.

--
Mike Easter

"Carlos E.R." wrote

| Disney is masterful
| at exploiting children.
|
| you obviously don't understand what exploiting children means.
|
| yeah, they are exploiting the parents.
|

I suppose you could look at it either way. They make
some kind of irresistible slop for the kids, then carefully
cross-brand to McDonalds and various other companies --
toys, clothes, video games, music, books....
The kids then want to go to Mcdonalds so they can get
copies of the cartoon characters as drink cups or
hamburger wrappers. I'd call it exploiting the kids. The
parents could say no, but they think Disney is great and
it keeps the kids happy.

I guess it really points to a lack of cultural archetypes.
Kids don't want to be some hsitorical hero because there
aren't any presented and there's very little shared culture.
So the shared culture is Frozen (R).

Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-08-10 4:29 p.m., Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-08-10 3:58 p.m., Ant wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-08-10 12:33 p.m., Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 8/9/20 2:21 PM, nospam wrote:

[snip]

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

Win 95 was also available on floppies (I forget how many).

[snip]


I think it was 13 if my memory still works right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IBsTvWItY0 says 29! :O


Now I am confused, some sites say 29, some sites say 13

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldne...19-10/?p=34513

Apparently they were special disks that held more than1.44 MB but that
still does not account for the discrepancy. I gotta dig more.

Rene

See system requirements here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95

Rene

It would depend on whether this was a compression technology
or not.

It messed with the floppy format, which bought part of the
reduction. But it also used .cab files, implying compression.

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

"allowed the disk to contain 1680 kB of data on
a 3.5-inch disk, instead of the standard 1440 kB"

"It also was the first software product to use CAB files"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_%28file_format%29

"The CAB file format may employ

DEFLATE
Quantum compression
LZX
NULL"

So it's a method better than NULL :-)

Paul

On Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:32:17 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

And you just need one, no matter how many computers you have.

Usually true, but there are exceptions. For example, I can conceive of a
husband traveling on a business trip with his laptop and the USB optical
drive and his wife staying home with a desktop computer and needing an
optical drive.


Buy a second (and slim) USB optical drive for only $30.

https://www.cnet.com/products/lg-gp60ns50-super-multi-dvdrw-r-dl-dvd-ram-drive-usb-2-0-external/
https://www.amazon.com/LG-Electronics-Portable-External-GP60NS50/dp/B00C2AMKR2



--
Kind regards
Ralph

Ken Blake wrote:
On 8/10/2020 10:27 AM, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 8/9/20 1:36 PM, Ralph Fox wrote:

[snip]

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.

I remember when CD writers first became available. The CD would have to
be written all at once, and most people didn't have big enough (700MB)
hard drives. These CD writers were often sold in a bundle with a big
hard drive.

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 you just need one, no matter how many computers you have.



Usually true, but there are exceptions. For example, I can conceive of a
husband traveling on a business trip with his laptop and the USB optical
drive and his wife staying home with a desktop computer and needing an
optical drive.

Leaving aside why any business person needs an optical reader for work,
your (rather sexist) example is an argument *against* physical media not
for it. Put your data where it's shareable and/or easily transferable.

Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Blake" wrote

| Same for movies, etc. Lots of people are streaming online these days.
|
|
| Yes. Many people used to have Netflix mail them DVDs, but Netflix
| dropped that service a couple of years ago. Streaming is now the only
| Netflix option.
|

It's been the only option offered for awhile, but they were
still serving existing DVD customers. We cancelled the DVDs
awhile back. Not because they ended it or because we
wanted streaming, but only because they cut way back
on the selection. They were also sleazy about it, pretending
that movies were not yet available when they actually had
no intention of getting them. The streaming options are
even worse, with the total number Netflix carries being
reduced each year.

It was great while it lasted. We were paying under $2 each
to see virtually any movie made.

It's especially odd now with the pandemic. Theaters aren't
open. Netflix wants to rent their own TV shows instead of
movies. Amazon, Disney, Hulu and others are jumping on the
bandwagon. It's turned into a strange situation where unless
you subscribe to a half dozen monthly streaming services, you
might not be able to see a movie. For example, I heard
"Mudbound" was good, but it's a Netflix movie. Even the libraries
can't get it. So I'll probably never see it. Movies are no longer
a shared cultural event.

The weekend movie reviews
in the NYT now note how a movie can be seen. It's all gone
private, Instead of movies being available to the whole world
on release and on DVD after a couple of months, only people
who subscribe to the specific service can see the movie.

Agree, it's horrible. Consumer choice is now about how many services you
can afford to buy.

The DVD/Blu-Ray option is still there, though.

nospam wrote:
In article , Mayayana
wrote:


I saw the other day that Disney plans to release a new version
of "Mulan", apparently a hit movie of theirs. It's going to cost
$30 to rent it streaming! Presumably that's on top of the monthly
Disney streaming subscription. I certainly hope no one buys it,
but I'm guessing they know their audience and that the
parents will be held hostage by their kids.

it's a lot cheaper than buying tickets for the entire family, also
buying popcorn and snacks, plus fuel to drive to the theater and
possibly parking fees, which can easily total over $50-100, and you
might not even get good seats.

It's cheaper because it's a continuous payment. However, you rarely get to
see what you want as the choice of films is artificially limited and
continually changing. You can watch a film one month and the next month
it's gone! Grrr

Those cinema prices are extreme.

Disney is masterful
at exploiting children.

you obviously don't understand what exploiting children means.

Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 10/08/2020 14.53, nospam wrote:
In article , Carlos E.R.


it was also possible to email an ftp server to request a file, which i
always found amusing.

Sending an email with a 1 MB attachment
would have provoked a call from the sysadmin :-D

then you had an idiot for a sysadmin.

Not at all. My mail accounts had total limit of 10 megs, for many years.


Gmail has an attachment limit of 25 MB, many SMTP servers, like postfix
default to 10MB, many other mail services and corporates limit to 1 MB.
The main reason is email is originally a text-only service protocol and
is NOT really unsuitable for data transport. Binary data must be BASE64
encoded to meet this requirement often doubling the attachment size. Not
efficient in any way effectively halving your max size limits.


--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

Rene Lamontagne wrote:
Apparently they were special disks that held more than1.44 MB but that
still does not account for the discrepancy. I gotta dig more.

There was also special formats, I think IBM developed, where they held
more data at the expense of the number of files per disk. Reduced FAT
and use for data...

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com