@cstross When I was in university I interviewed at a place that published parts catalogues. They still had a workstation that had the giant drive platters in a plastic tub. This was early 90s.

@cstross I was recentry introduced to MP/M (I never used it back then). As far as I know, there aren't any multiuser games for it.

I have to make time to write a couple - or at least adapt one.

@cstross I'm about 10 years your junior and the first computer I learned to code on in school was a TRS-80 that had two 5.25 drives and no HDD. Missed the 8" floppies but man it's been a journey.

@cstross Was it an RM 380Z? My school had one networked to a room of BBC Model Bs.

@cstross I really enjoyed explaining 8" drives in my video about War Games https://youtu.be/p-B1clodRJ4 - it was sort of amazing how many people had never worked with them or seen them.

(My personal relationahip with that movie is my dad did in fact have an Imsai 8080 with 8" drives, but they were not "IMSAI" branded drives. He was such a poser.)

#cpm #retrocomputing #vintagecomputer

@cstross My dad's computer had 5 1/4" and a 3 1/2" drives, and we used both. I remember getting paid to transfer everything he had on 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 because he was going to get a computer that just had 3 1/2. I think my brother and I got a dime per disk. I never told him, but I'd have done it for free just to mess around with the computer.

@cstross I used 8" floppies in a minicomputer during work experience in the mid 90s!

@cstross I've heard of 3 and 5 inch(ish) floppy disks. 8? Just how floppy were they?

@cstross My office (I'm a lawyer by day) still has a box of 8" floppies containing old papers in case we ever need them again.

Now, we don't have a computer that can read an 8" floppy, or the word processing program we used back then, but by gum we've got the floppies!

@cstross aw! growing up i had an amstrad pcw with a 3-inch (not 3+1/2) drive running CP/M. happy days. locoscript 4 lyf.