Why are we talking about the circumference when you can't be any more than one diameter away from any other point on Earth? It's not as if the poll is actually asking you to drill the tunnel, it just wants its length.

Depends how often it takes to count as really using it ... but my DEC RL01 (14" 5 megabyte cartridge drive) still works whenever I spin it up. Those things are built like tanks!

OK then they're not eligible to register either -- so it does seem like a needless extra step. And I'm a little uncomfortable at how easy things get when you ARE registered -- where I live (western Mass.) they don't even ask for ID when I vote. It'd be OK with me if it were a little harder to get in the door, but once you can prove you have a right to be there it doesn't matter whether you remembered to get your name added to a list ahead of time.

2K cache memory for the PDP-11/34a -- it made a *huge* difference!

Aw c'mon, you could totally fit a TCP/IP stack in 48 KB. Pretty much nothing else, but as you say, there's your security for ya!

Seriously! Great for development and no one bothers writing DOS viruses any more.

>UEFI is an overdesigned solution to a non-problem.

Well it does solve the problem of 30 years of backwards compatibility. Thank god that's over! I really *hate* the fact that I can pull out any floppy, CD, or USB drive from when I was 1/3 my current age and expect it to boot up beautifully on my latest PC. I mean it's not as if backwards compatibility is the only reason x86 stuff rules the Earth ... there have got to be lots of other things everyone loves about it!

Seriously, I don't get it either. Slow booting is caused by slow BIOSes, not by the fact that the BIOS model is inherently slow -- it isn't! Many popular BIOSes have ridiculously long POSTs but that's their fault. Once that's over, loading the boot image from disk takes a few hundred milliseconds (max) even in real mode with INT 13h. Switching from real mode to protected mode takes a few dozen microseconds, using boilerplate code that we all debugged back when the 386 came out. Why complain about that now? They've increased the BIOS disk size limit a bazillion times and there's nothing stopping them from doing it again (last time around they finally generalized it so all you have to do is increase the packet size that can be accepted by the same EDD calls).

Exactly! The really amazing part is sending a manned vehicle some place insane. We (humans, I mean) were really good at that back in the 1960s -- an impressive number of crazy stunts worked on the first try.

Building something with motors and a decent oxygen supply would also be very cool, but the truly awesome part is withstanding the pressure and it's already been done, *fifty-one years* ago. So why should Branson get so much credit for something which, so far, is just a painting anyway?

Why are we pretending this hasn't already been done? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste

Once I made up a batch of little circuit cards that adapt the 8" drive bus to work with 3.5" controllers, and put up a dinky little web page advertising them at a price that would just about get me my money back (with nothing for my time) if I ever managed to sell all ten. Now it's twelve years later and I sold eight of them in January alone!!! Usually it's more like one a month but it absolutely blows my mind how many other retro-geeks like me are in the world.

Admittedly the users are mostly/entirely people like me who want to take snapshots of all their old disks for use under emulation, so that might not fit the definition of "using" them (since they'll stop once they have read everything).

It's kind of funny that CDs aren't considered antiques, even though they came out in 1982 so they're not that much younger than 8" floppies. I guess no one ever really thought they were too big (physically) or expensive so the upgrade path was just to increase the capacity at the same form factor and maintain backward compatibility (so it's convenient to keep using them even now, for things that fit). It was very odd that the first direction floppies went was to the 5.25" mini-floppies, which were slower and had much less capacity, instead of upgrading 8" drives to store 8 MB per disk or something amazing like that.

Anyway I'd love to know where the original poster thinks you can buy brand new 8" floppy drives. My Googling just turns up mislabeled NOS 5.25" stuff, and a blank media vendor whose page is copyrighted 14 years ago.