Gregory's ServerIf modern games came on 360k floppy disks, Diablo IV would be about 220,000 disks, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 close to 900,000.
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  @thomasfuchs I looked up the size of the stack of punch cards needed for some common things. The cards themselves are quite thick, so the volume needed for a rather small amount of data is more than you might think. A standard container fits a few MB if I remember correctly? Or maybe GB?  @loke @thomasfuchs Punch card containers hold 2000 cards, a card holds effectively 80 bytes or 80 * 12 bits of raw data. That's 160kB per punch card box of effective data. A punch card takes about 10% of the space (volumetric wise) of a 360k floppy disk though, making it about 450x less information dense. Storing MS Flight Sim on punch cards would therefore take about 20-30 regular sized houses. @dascandy42 @thomasfuchs Except for the fact that the volume of a "regular house" depends highly on where you live, it does sound legit. Thanks for the calculation. @loke @thomasfuchs It's why I used the range. I assumed a house would be between 400 and 600 cubic meters, corresponding to ~100-150 square meters or 1100-1650 square feet. And yes, that's wrong for some regions, but I think average-ish.   @thomasfuchs That's about how inconvenient downloading them is. Handling that many floppies might even be preferable. 🤦 Games are so dead to me because of this shit.  @thomasfuchs and errr what's the best transfer rate achievable by these floppies ? 😂 @thomasfuchs Flight Sim: So that's about a 3.5 x 3.5 meter room stacked to the ceiling - 12 by 12 foot stacked 8 foot high for the Americans. @thomasfuchs old enough that I once received a customer database backup on 200+ 5.25" to 'fix'  Never used the large floppies but remembering how infuriatingly slow the 1.44-MB ones were, it would take months to install, even if you don't count the time you'll spend swapping disks. |
@thomasfuchs Please enter Disk 2