• tenchiken@anarchist.nexus
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    5 hours ago

    Fun fact! The Laser in the burner didn’t actually burn from thermal effects, and instead caused a chemical reaction using specific wavelengths of light to activate a substrate called pthalocyanine.

    This is part of why you could burn “faster”, although typically you had a higher quality burn at slower speeds as the change from one color to another via the chemical effects was more complete. This allowed weaker reading lenses to better perceive the new colors easier, and greatly increased compatibility.

    I am very, very old.

    • nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      “Floppy disks” were 8 inches a side in my youth and went in the minicomputer

      Then along came Newfangled desktop PCs with their 5.25" floppies

      Tom Bombadil remembers first acorn and first rain drop

      • DivineDev@piefed.social
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        4 hours ago

        I used those big floppy disks with some ancient hardware for running physics experiments during university in like 2015-ish, and I’m sure that exact floppy is still in use today. It’s not even a small and underfunded university or anything.

    • curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 hours ago

      As the owner of a CD burner so old there was no speed to note, and later upgraded to a 4x burner…

      I’m also quite old it seems.

      Edited to add: I bought it at a computer show. The kind that you showed up to in person and paid like $5 to get into. I also bought a used laser 128.