lizziec | Olivetti PC-1, nostalgia and floppy disks

Once upon a time (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away) there was a family with a "new" computer. To start it needed a floppy disk in its drive (built in to the keyboard) and when it did start it presented its operator with a numeric menu from which you chose options 1-*. When it started it said Hello Phillip, How is your lovely little family today? and the computer was much loved, for it came with First Choice (on a floppy - nothing on this computer ran without a floppy) to make documents on and a dot matrix printer to print the documents out. It came with a disc with games on - Tic-Tac-Toe, Chess and Frogger.

It was great.

It was an Olivetti PC1 with one floppy drive (like the one featured here). It was very light, much lighter than my PC now (Aragorn - as of last night the owner of two 250g disks [raid1] and a new PSU) because this is all there was to it.

With its (tiny) black and white screen it looked much like this:

The reason I'm talking about all this is because today I finally got round to checking on some old floppy disks that I found when ben and I were spring cleaning last week. Much of the results are very noisy and not terribly fruitful. Alas, most of these disks and the data on them are unsalvigable it would seem.

One of the disks was very old. It was called "Getting Started".

I took screenshots of what I found on them. The dates show just how old they are:

...Wow. I am of the firm believe that most of the WPK files are ones I created. Especially ones with titles like "THE_CAT" and "THE_DOG".

Of course, now I'm drowning in a wave of nostalgia.

And spending the rest of my day making models of the Starship Enterprise out of dead floppies.