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The Commodore Penny Farthing Adventures

The Commodore Penny Farthing Adventures

2 comments

·February 9, 2025
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aa-jv

Love these old stories.

Back in the 80's in Southern California, I remember making weekly trips to the local "Software Bank" shops, wherein thousands of floppy disks full of shareware and other goodies was traded, record-shop style, in a kind of local swap mart. It had a very solid social aspect - often there were other kids like me, browsing the wares, flipping past endless rows of 5.4" (and later 3.5") floppy disks, looking for interesting and new software to hack around with.

I really have a lot of nostalgia for those days - it was a time when computing was young and special and quite adventurous. Of course, we are still special and adventurous, just not so young.

Recently, during a dumpster diving mission, I found myself in the posession of 3,000 brand new/unused pre-formatted 3.5" floppy disks, which I have been slowly distributing among my circles to anyone who needs them. However, the space they occupy is needed and the pace of distribution is too slow .. so I've been considering making a floppy-based 'zine, just for the fun of it.

Trouble is, what to put on the 'zine, how to craft it to make it interesting, and so on. Does anyone even have a floppy drive any more? (Rhetorical question - in my retro-computing circles, this is sort of a dumb question, since everyone is switching to GoTek ..)

So, HN, what would a modern 3.5" floppy disk-based 'zine look like, in your opinion? Would you pay $2 for it? I'm thinking PoC||GTFO in spirit, inasmuch as it'd have to be multi-platform and somewhat of a quine .. just .. what should it be about?

gxd

They could be about modern retro games and modern retro synth music (Adlib, SID, PSG audio etc) - and by that I mean games and music targeting the classic platforms but made today. A single 3.5" floppy won't fit many games, but it would fit screenshots and a dozen tunes or so.

It would be the expected text+pics+music. If you charged $2 for it people wouldn't be too interested; if you had a pretty label, simple packaging and charged $10-$15 (the price of a magazine) for it, you could have an audience.