reading legacy floppy disks

[James Knott]

Howard Gibson wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Sep 2006 20:33:03 -0400 (EDT)
> phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
>> (Speaking of computer museums, I recall back in the early 80's a visiting
>> high-school student remarked that the equipment in the Ryerson CS
>> department would make a fine museum, and that they should simply change
>> the label on the lab door. This story had wide currency, and suddenly
>> there was a massive upgrade of the computer labs.)
>>
>> P.
> 
> Peter,
> 
>    I took a C programming course at Ryerson back about ten years ago.  I had to go out and find a 5-1/4" floppy drive so that I could work offline.  Perhaps the computers I saw were the replacements for the computer museum you saw.  
> 
>    I still have the 5-1/4, at least until I find another need for the drive bay.
> 

You're lucky.  When I took Fortran, BASIC and Pascal courses there, back
in the mid '80s, we couldn't even use floppies.  We used an IBM
mainframe there and the only way to get the code out, was via print out
or dial up access.

When I took C at George Brown College in 1995, we could use 3.5"
floppies.  However, in class we used Turbo C on Windows 3.1, while at
home I used Borland C on OS/2, so I had to be careful about variable
sizes.  For example an int was 16 bits in Borland C, but only 8 in
Turbo.  On occasion, my code would work fine at home, but crap out in
class because I'd overflowed a variable.

Also, when I was taking Fortran at Ryerson, I did my homework on a VAX
11/780 at work.  That also meant I had to be careful about a few things.

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