The changes were rapid. I remember the Kaypro salesman saying, Kaypro is developing so fast, that by the time the manual is printed, it's already out of date!"

Chill, it's a joke.

"Old enough to consider your mom as jail-bait!" -Mahdood 😜

I think it's only a few, but their heads are so big that it seems like a lot. 😜

The PET computer used cassette tapes. It seemed like a cool idea, until you need to fast-forward the tape to get to your program. 🤣

Anyone that's creating something useful for others needs to learn how to accept criticism, and use it to improve their output. Rejecting all criticism is a sign of an unhealthy ego.

These are 5.25" floppy disks. Before that were 7", and I think there were larger ones before that. Single-sided disks were cheaper than double-sided. You could tell them apart by a notch in the side, where the drive would lock it into place. Double sided disks had a notch on the left and right, so it could be flipped over and inserted properly. Single-sided disks just had a notch on one side.

The funny thing is, if you cut a second notch into a single-sided disk, it magically bacame a double-sided disk! 😀

This is the kind I started with, and yes, you could fold them. They were pretty much ruined if you did. I remember some people putting creased ones in a book, in hopes of it spinning properly again.

In the same way that authors are better off having someone else proof-read/edit their works, nearly every dev is the worst person to QA their code.

In the commercial world, a large part of being a QA engineer is the psychology of informing a dev that their code isn't perfect.

In the non-commercial world, many devs prefer to ignore any (or all) criticisms, aside from the program crashing, or complete failure of some basic functionality. Even then, I've seen where devs say they don't care about the user. I'm baffled why those devs publish to begin with.

Even the devs that do care about making a polished product, they often can't put themselves in the position of ignorance and lofty expectations that many users will have. In fact, most people are not good about putting themselves in someone else's shoes. A vast majority of people cannot overcome their own bias.

It really takes someone with a good imagination to create proper tests, outside of the rote panel of test cases. The best replacement to that is "the actual user", but when devs ignore a message that translates to "more work, and not really fun work", they'll tend to turn a blind eye.

The floppy that confused normies, since it wasn't floppy. Some normies thought those were "hard disks".

Now I know what to do next April 1st.

Necrophilia, eh?