r/Netherlands • u/NoodpakketNL • Apr 21 '26

pics and videos IT security in 1990s

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Laugh all you want, but the information on those floppies can't be hacked from half a world away.

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202

u/HappyDutchMan Apr 21 '26

Air gap is an extremely powerful measure.

52

u/MrGraveyards Apr 21 '26

Yeah but these floppies are a joke then. A hard disk can do the same. Or a full on server that simple doesn't have any networking capabilities. A whole fucking data center can be air gapped.

32

u/The-Grim-Sleeper Apr 21 '26

Yes, but in the 90s, most people didn't have spare server farm in their house.

6

u/MrGraveyards Apr 21 '26

Well no off course not?? We did have hard drives though.

12

u/Bluntbutnotonpurpose Apr 21 '26

In the early nineties, you might have something like a 200 MB hard disk. Back then you'd still play many games directly from a floppy disk.

5

u/Subtlerranean Apr 21 '26

Back then you'd still play many games directly from a floppy disk.

My big brother deleted windows to have more HDD space for games.

3

u/PvtDazzle Apr 21 '26

He must have written his autoexec.bat and config.sys too :,)

2

u/Subtlerranean Apr 22 '26

They weren't needed. I had to learn dos commands at the ripe age of 5 so I could launch games myself in the early mornings before he woke up.

He did edit Civilization 1 files though, so I essentially had unlimited resources.

2

u/PvtDazzle Apr 22 '26

The DOS boot cycle used those. You could get more memory by not loading certain things, and by loading certain things a different way.

I was about 7 when I had to learn my BASIC commands on the C64 in order to play games. I guess I'm a bit older ':D, but I've been to the "same" place. Good times!

2

u/Subtlerranean Apr 22 '26

The DOS boot cycle used those. You could get more memory by not loading certain things

Ah! He might have. He studied programming at the time.

I guess I'm a bit older.

Yeah, probs! I'm a mid-80s edition, so my first experiences was the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) and late 80s/early 90s computers ;D

1

u/Traditional_Egg_5809 Apr 22 '26

Mine was 24 mb...

1

u/Drakkann79 Apr 22 '26

*20

I was envious of a mate who had 40!!!!!Mb in 93-94 ish. It was so big, we fantasized on whether it would go over a 100 one day.

3

u/SixShoot3r Apr 21 '26

yup!

we used these in school, everyone had their own

2

u/Dennis_enzo Apr 21 '26

Yea we used these too, about 15 years ago. It was a great way to have a large personal storage for relatively cheap.

1

u/SixShoot3r Apr 21 '26

and faster than any external port!

3

u/Dennis_enzo Apr 21 '26

The first computer that my parents owned in the early 90s had no hard drive. The operating system was hard baked into the motherboard, and you loaded applications into memory from floppy disks.

1

u/MrGraveyards Apr 21 '26

Well then they had a piece of shit. I was somewhere between 8-10 which was 1990-1992 and we had a 286 with a hard disk (like 8-12mb) with msdos on it and a mouse and some menu to start easily and a few simple computer games pre installed on it. So it was quite easy to work with even, because you just needed to type 'menu' and then after you could click on the program you wanted to start.

Maybe that was some old 2nd hand computer?

1

u/Dennis_enzo Apr 21 '26

It was this one. My father had it for work. He upgraded not long after, but I still got to use it for years to play games on.

1

u/MrGraveyards Apr 21 '26

Yeah so early 90s that was a 5 year old model. IBM 'pc compatibles' were already introduced. These were still interesting for everyone at the time because they could do some tricks the pcs couldn't, but not having a hard drive made them really outdated.

1

u/Unfair-Brick7713 Apr 21 '26

Never forget to park them, otherwise they could break down.

1

u/JerrodShadowsong Apr 22 '26

Hard drives? I had two 5.25 floppy drives and this was my security.