1996

[dank69]

Seeing that fat stack of optical drives reminds me of saving up for a lightscribe capable DVD-R/W lol.

I had one of those in a gaming laptop I bought, lol

 

[Red Squirrel]

I remember thinking lightscribe was a really cool idea, but more I looked at it, it just seemed impractical. It required you to flip the cd and put it back in, and was also rather slow. Not to mention the discs were much more expensive. I feel this is a tech that could have been refined and done better but never really took off. There was also cd label systems you could buy to automate labeling them, so that was probably the better bet if you needed that sort of thing.

 

[AdamK47]

Built my first PC from the ground-up in early '96. Don't remember ever wanting an Iomega drive. Still remember the specs. 166MHz Pentium, 24MB EDO memory, 1.6GB Western Digital HD, 6X TEAC CD-ROM, Sound Blaster AWE32, and a 3D Baster PCI (Rendition Verite V1000). Later bought a Diamond Monster 3D (3Dfx VooDoo 4MB) to add to it.

 

[ultimatebob]

Built my first PC from the ground-up in early '96. Don't remember ever wanting an Iomega drive. Still remember the specs. 166MHz Pentium, 24MB EDO memory, 1.6GB Western Digital HD, 6X TEAC CD-ROM, Sound Blaster AWE32, and a 3D Baster PCI (Rendition Verite V1000). Later bought a Diamond Monster 3D (3Dfx VooDoo 4MB) to add to it.

My college campus was into Iomega Zip drives hardcore. Every PC and Mac on campus had to have one, mostly because people were working on projects that were too big to fit on a floppy and we didn't really have home directories for everyone on the network yet. At least, not in a way that students knew how to access them.

Remember, this was the late 1990's. USB thumb drives haven't been invented yet

 

[sdifox]

My college campus was into Iomega Zip drives hardcore. Every PC and Mac on campus had to have one, mostly because people were working on projects that were too big to fit on a floppy and we didn't really have home directories for everyone on the network yet. At least, not in a way that students knew how to access them.

Remember, this was the late 1990's. USB thumb drives haven't been invented yet

Huh? We had Sun Sparcstation IPCs in early 90s. And yes we had network storage for our network accounts.

 

[ultimatebob]

Huh? We had Sun Sparcstation IPCs in early 90s. And yes we had network storage for our network accounts.

We had an IBM UNIX server with FTP access where people could share files, but most people outside of the CS department or campus IT department didn't know how to use it.

We also had Novell Netware for networking at the time. Eww. It was enough trouble just to keep some basic network shares working for software installation. Individual home directories for each student wasn't going to fly back then.

 

[Torn Mind]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_in_video_games

Ah, the beginnings of Pokemon, quietly in Japan.

(And Tomb Raider and Resident Evil for fans of those franchises)

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had something WAAAAY cooler, a SCSI Magneto-Optical drive, the disks were like extra-thick floppys.

 

[sdifox]

We had an IBM UNIX server with FTP access where people could share files, but most people outside of the CS department or campus IT department didn't know how to use it.

We also had Novell Netware for networking at the time. Eww. It was enough trouble just to keep some basic network shares working for software installation. Individual home directories for each student wasn't going to fly back then.

We were doing lan party playing Descent. Netrek cost me dearly xd

 

[IronWing]

Next thread: 1976

 

[Fir]

I tried one but wound up using Syquest SyJet drives which held 1.5GB per cart and were smaller. They proved to be quite unreliable. Unlike zip media, these actually have flying heads and there's no way to keep the insides as clean as they need to be and failure rate was unacceptable. The fact that both used fast SCSI interface was a bonus. But fly fast, crash hard. Good thing backups were on DLT!

 

[purbeast0]

I remember really wanting the Zip drive for the Dreamcast for some reason. I even asked at an Electronics Boutique (or maybe it was Software Etc), but the worker like couldn't even understand what I was saying, like I was speaking a totally foreign language that made no sense to them.

Probably because the zip drive for Dreamcast was never released...

 

[lxskllr]

I had a lightscribe drive. I guess I bought it when I built a pc. Price probably wasn't bad, but I can't remember. The only disc I ever labeled was the sample disc it came with. I never bought any others.

 

[Stiff Clamp]

I never got into storage media like that. I just didn't back up.

'96 was the year I got a pre-built Pentium 100Mhz system with 1.2 gig of storage (a Quantum Fireball hard drive), 16MB RAM. $2048.
It was delivered right after New Year's - so, basically 1995 tech.
That summer a knowledgeable friend got a network driver installed for me, and I got my personal machine on the internet for the first time. I'd been using lab computers to go online for a year or two.

 

[darkswordsman17]

eh? why would a Zip drive work on a Dreamcast?

Because they developed one?

Dreamcast Zip Drive - Sega Retro

segaretro.org

The history of the Zip Drive Dreamcast, a cancelled accessory | SEGA Dreamcast Info

The Zip Drive Dreamcast was designed for the last Sega console. It was never commercialized. The marketing department of Sega Japan didn't see the need for a Zip Drive and didn't see a big use for it. IOMEGA, an American company, was in charge of designing this device. The goal was to...

en.sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com

what would be the point?

Who said there needed to be one?

If I remember, there was talk of it allowing more in depth systems for games like Shenmue. I was a teenager, and it looked to me like basically the 64DD (which I also was hyped about, and similarly disappointed) but for the Dreamcast. I want to say there was maybe talk of using it to store the smaller arcade like games (Swirls? There were some others; but it kinda made it seem like what became Xbox Live Arcade years before) and older games (so updated ports of games, things like the updated Ridger Racer 60fps that was shipped with R4 and others), maybe even something like Bleemcast where it wouldn't have required the optical disk swapping while possibly allowing more powerful version of Bleemcast or better compatibility. I think there was even talk of using it for online related stuff (Dreamcast was the first computing device I regularly accessed the normal internet on at home).

I never gave a shit about piracy on the Dreamcast so that had nothing to do with it.

 

[sdifox]

I still have two Dreamcast in the basement. And the maracas and fishing rod. Never got the NIC. I got it during the fire sale. The DC Zip drive never got made.

 

[Dr. Detroit]

Computer lab at University had Zip drives. Used to download music and bring it home to the PC for listening as everyone was still on dial up for home use!

 

[Dr. Detroit]

I still have two Dreamcast in the basement. And the maracas and fishing rod.

Samba de Amigo!

 

[SaltyNuts]

LOL shortylikens, awesome thread. I SO wanted to get one of those when they came out. I always thought they looked so cool. Not the spec, just their physical appearance. And the fact that they could hold so much data... AMAZING.

Alas, I was still a broke college kid at that time, I suffered with the 3 and 1/2s, or whatever they were. And I guess CDs were a thing by then as well...

 

[purbeast0]

Best thing about 1996 for me was 100% this.

 

[nakedfrog]

We had an IBM UNIX server with FTP access where people could share files, but most people outside of the CS department or campus IT department didn't know how to use it.

We also had Novell Netware for networking at the time. Eww. It was enough trouble just to keep some basic network shares working for software installation. Individual home directories for each student wasn't going to fly back then.

We had Novell Netware running at my high school, I ended up getting to administer a secondary server my senior year since I did most of the rest of the IT stuff for the school too. We had home directories for students I did learn to hate token ring, since our network was half that and half ethernet, and one PC could bring down the entire token ring network...

 

[JM Aggie08]

We had Novell Netware running at my high school, I ended up getting to administer a secondary server my senior year since I did most of the rest of the IT stuff for the school too. We had home directories for students I did learn to hate token ring, since our network was half that and half ethernet, and one PC could bring down the entire token ring network...

Holy shit, I forgot about Novell. All of our school systems had it. Librarian left her admin password on a sticky note -- fool!

Ah..memories. I used to bring in Armegatron Advanced on a flash drive and play it with my buddies

 

[Red Squirrel]

I remember Novell, as a student, and a little bit as help desk. We had access to do basic things like reset passwords etc. It was a decent system for it's time though, but once AD became more of a thing it kind of lost it's purpose. Also, remember Groupwise? That was basically their version of Outlook/exchange.

And since we're going down memory lane, remember Corel suite? That used to be huge in schools too.

I can still remember putting in my Novell username and password, logging in to the Pentium 1 computer, then opening Word Perfect to do my assignment, and hope it does not crash. Back then software was so unreliable lol. It was driven into us to save often. To this day I still hit CTRL+S passively as I'm working on anything.

 

[Stiff Clamp]

yep, Novell Netware at my college lab in 1996

I was writing down URLs on paper . . . lol . . . and using the lab printer to print out B&W photos of Kate Moss to hang on the wall

 

[IronWing]

I remember when IP tunneling came to Novell and we were liberated.