Jim's Cafe Friday, Sept. 19, 2025

[Gonz]

88 TB is a huge amount of real estate!

I remember when 250 MB was HUGE and we sold and installed 250 MB hard drives for $250.

Would you like to describe your hardware/software setup to someone who goes all the way back to DOS?

I bought a drive for my Switch. It was about the size of my thumbnail. A little smaller and less than 1.5 times as thick. It was a tiny little thing, It held a terabyte, I was amazed.

I knew that’s how memory was measured now, in terabytes, but I thought a drive that held that much would be considerably bigger.

I have a 4tb external drive for my Xbox and It’s roughly the size of an old mass market paperback (a short one). Same width and thickness, a bit shorter. It’s small, I can easily put it in my pocket and forget about it, but it’s not so tiny that I run a genuine risk of never seeing it again if I drop it.

I’d brag about being able to use MSDOS, but I couldn’t. I just had lots of post-its stuck to the monitor with commands written on them. The introduction of Windows and the first Macs were the first time I had any idea what I was doing.

 

[Gonz]

Oops, double posted.

 

[FFurry]

Do you collect stationery?
Do you have a collection of anything interesting?

Indeed! That's been a passion of mine since early childhood. I thought I was unique (and not necessarily in a good way) 😂

I wouldn't even know where to start... but I continue to collect mechanical pencils. Everyone knows HB, but have you ever seen a 10H or a 12B? Not just the pencils, but those leads can be supremely difficult to find! 😂

Pens are a rather massive area. I've focused on all-metal pens, such as Cross, Parker and even some Paper Mate, as well as the various "astronaut" pens that take pressurized cartridges (search for bullet pens 👍).

That's just the tip of the iceberg. It would take too long to list everything else! 😂

 

[Angie]

I say bring back DOS, loved that 640K High MEM test that spun up, but I also want to bring back cubits as a unit of measure, yes, I am that odd. LOL You are probably like me and also got to used TRS-BASIC and Commodore-BASIC and CP/M so.

I did use a trash 80 and all the word processing machines I started out on ran CP/M.

Seriously though those word processing machines while HUGE and clunky (expensive for the time, too) did a great job handling correspondence, proposals, briefs, and such.

Later, I went self employed and we built and sold PCs from a garage. The first 2 GB drive we sold for $2,000 and it required a Netware tech to help install it. We thought we were very fancy for the time. lol

Those were the days!

 

[Angie]

I bought a drive for my Switch. It was about the size of my thumbnail. A little smaller and less than 1.5 times as thick. It was a tiny little thing, It held a terabyte, I was amazed.

I knew that’s how memory was measured now, in terabytes, but I thought a drive that held that much would be considerably bigger.

I have a 4tb external drive for my Xbox and It’s roughly the size of an old mass market paperback (a short one). Same width and thickness, a bit shorter. It’s small, I can easily put it in my pocket and forget about it, but it’s not so tiny that I run a genuine risk of never seeing it again if I drop it.

I’d brag about being able to use MSDOS, but I couldn’t. I just had lots of post-its stuck to the monitor with commands written on them. The introduction of Windows and the first Macs were the first time I had any idea what I was doing.

I had this HUGE book called The MSDOS Bible, read it cover to cover and actually found it really useful.

These days I am as far away from the operating system as my MacBook Air can get me. lol

 

[full]

Got a collection of pharmaceuticals 😁. Prior to that was tobbaco and ciggies.

 

[Gonz]

Speaking of collections, 2 isn’t really one so I didn’t think of it, but I’ve started buying carved wooden canes. Guess I’ve just started a collection.

I’ve got the first two, and the third on the way.


I’ve also got my eyes on one with a crow, one with a siren, and one with a harpy.

Whenever one goes on sale, I pick it up. They’re too expensive for what are really just wooden sticks, but are a lot more reasonable around half price.

 

[Auri]

Speaking of collections, 2 isn’t really one so I didn’t think of it, but I’ve started buying carved wooden canes. Guess I’ve just started a collection.

I’ve got the first two, and the third on the way.

View attachment 73465 View attachment 73466 View attachment 73467
I’ve also got my eyes on one with a crow, one with a siren, and one with a harpy.

Whenever one goes on sale, I pick it up. They’re too expensive for what are really just wooden sticks, but are a lot more reasonable around half price.

Wow, these are exactly my style if I ever need a cane! I love them!

I don't know their price, but I think of a cane like another accessory that you carry with you, so it's fair to own ones that you really like the look of.

 

[Gonz]

Wow, these are exactly my style if I ever need a cane! I love them!

I don't know their price, but I think of a cane like another accessory that you carry with you, so it's fair to own ones that you really like the look of.

Well, I guess part of it is that any extra expense is a big one for someone on disability.

That’s what I thought. The simple aluminum one I started with would still get the job done but, as much as I dislike needing one, I may as well get something (or several things) I like if I’m going to have to carry it around literally all the time.

Plus there’s something depressing about the things around me having a “medical” aesthetic. I like to get away from that.

 

[LumberJack]

thx for tagging me @Angie !
I do not intentionally collect stationery. Nonetheless I do have more notebooks than I can keep track of, because I have a tendency to keep losing them, and buy a new one, then I lose that one and find an old one. Apparently that is common among ADHDers. I'm striving to be a "normie" but everything I do that causes friction in my personal relationships seems to turn out to be trait of ADHD. It's getting harder to convince myself or anyone who's known me for over 40 minutes. This is likely due to much greater public awareness of neuro-spicieness today compared to when I was in school and just getting in trouble for everything that made perfect sense to me, but turned out to not be so understandable among authority figures.

I do have a collection of a bunch of different items in a certain genre. I am going to tiptoe around what it actually is for fear of offending someone, or at least bearing their disapproval. Most people have at least one of these items, but I do collect them. They are nice to look at, but nonetheless because of their nature they are rarely displayed in polite company.