(no subject)

[lethargic_man]

This is my communist hole-punch:

It's so named because one day at school somebody turned it over, saw this:

...and exclaimed "Hey, Grant: you're supporting a communist regime!"

It once went missing, and turned up again two years and three house moves later.

That's its story.

(Well, except to add that it was my Dad supporting the communist regime, not me. I did my bit supporting a communist regime by buying a Melodiya CD ("The Orchestral Works of N. Rimsky-Korsakov").)

Bonus points if anyone who hasn't been to my flat can identify the object in the top-left background in the upper picture. (The answer will be posted here on Sunday if compilerbitch hasn't no one's got it by then.)

Comments

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

The object with 2x 5-1/4 floppy drives?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Yup. Bonus points if you can identify from its shape and general appearance the writing at the lower right. (I don't imagine you'd be able to, but it's worth a little amusement on my behalf. :o))

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Not sure of exact thing but it's a computer with a big floppy and a little floppy, is it not?

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I did my bit supporting a communist regime by buying a Melodiya CD

Amateur. About a quarter of my classical record collection were Melodiya records, because it was a way of getting very good recordings cheaply.

Wikipedia alleges they're starting to re-release. Mmmh.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Nope; as pseudomonas already identified, it's a disk drive with two 5¼" disk drives. The apparent difference in size is merely perspective. (The computer that goes with them is sitting on top of my stereo, which is on top of my CD player, which is on top of the said disk drives.)

I think you're unlikely to identify it more exactly, because you didn't grow up in this country—this dates from before the computer market became as globalised as it is today.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Remind me which half of Germany you grew up in. ;^b

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Some kind of BBC then?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Closing in nicely; the computer above is a BBC Micro... but the Beeb did not come with a disk drive. Indeed, at the time my father got his, along with the above disk drive, in 1984, it was unusual to have a disk drive at all; most of my friends' computers still used tapes.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I'd say it was some variety of dual 5.25" Beeb floppy drive, but the picture is a bit too out of focus to jog my memory more accurately than that. If not, then maybe one of those weird Torch thingies, or something. Dunno.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

And the prize goes to the woman in the... in the... one of these: .

It is indeed a Torch Z80 disc pack (so old it antedates by several years the standardisation of "disk" for magnetic media and "disc" for optical):

Back in 1984 when my father got his first computer, a BBC Micro, he got it with a Torch Z80 second processor (running on the Tube). The Z80 (as you know, but other readers might not) was better known as the chip inside the Spectrum machines—the ZX81, the ZX82 and the Spectrum. When the machine switched on it booted up into MCP, an operating system related to CP/M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M), in yellow on blue on a screen 120 columns wide—a source of continual amazement to me, as the widest you could get under the native Acorn MOS was just 80 columns. My father used it for spreadsheet applications and the like. We had to hit B + BREAK to get the machine to reboot into Acorn MOS; the normal hard reset CTRL + BREAK would take it back into MCP.