floppy disks . i rember the kind that you drop into a huge round slot and twist . people still use them

[jmowreader]

13. I remember going to the Living Computer Museum in Seattle the year before the pandemic hit

This was basically Paul Allen's personal collection of computers...and that guy had some serious iron in his collection.

Anyway, I'm in the mainframe room they had there looking at the IBM version of the CDC pack drive that holds the disc pack in your photo just searching all over the damned thing and the docent came up...

"Do you have any questions?"
"Yeah. Where's the head switch on this unit?"
"Why would there be a head switch?"
"Because if you can't turn the head motor off you can't purge the disc before you start using it, and that's pretty important."
"How in the hell did you know that? When did you become a mainframe sysop?"
"1989, in the Army."

So we spent a very pleasant hour talking about real computers. He'd spent his career working with IBM 360s and 370s; I was mostly a Unisys guy but we had pretty much everything - when the government had a mainframe they didn't know what to do with they'd dump it on a field station so we had all this weird crap that was old enough to vote...and we were using it in production.