Yes, this is a retro article, but with a modern twist.

The Commodore 64 is to date the best-selling computer of all time and hasn’t been topped. An all too common item to be seen next to the C64 was the 1541 floppy disk drive. This actually was in fact more than just a disk drive. It was a computer because it did contain a microprocessor (this one, in fact).

Everybody knows what USB is. Everything connects to it. Keyboards, mice, printers, digital cameras, network devices (wired or wireless), lights, humping dogs, you name it..

However the one thing that has never existed is a 5¼-inch USB floppy drive. Oh sure, you can get the 3½-inch USB version easily, but no 5¼ is to be found; it doesn’t exist.

Being that there are mountains of old C64 software out there that people are looking to archive, a USB solution was needed for the old 1541 5¼-inch drive. And wouldn’t you know it, someone built one.

The xum1541 is an actual home-brew solution for the Commodore 1541 that will allow it to interface to a PC via USB.

Here it is in action:

This, dear friends, is true computer hacking. If it doesn’t exist, build it. Hopefully this will be made into a for-sale product later on as I’m sure there are many C64 owners who would love to be able to back up their piles and piles of disks with a simple adapter like the xum.

Hey, if they could make an Apple II Ethernet Module, anything is possible, right?

Think the floppy disk is dead technology?

OpenOffice 3… floppy disk!

Google Docs.. floppy disk again!

Windows Live Writer… FLOPPY DISK!

ThinkFree.. ACK! FLOPPY DISK AGAIN!

You cannot escape the floppy..

I think it’s about time to.. oh, I dunno.. change the save icon to something besides a 3.5-inch floppy diskette.

In a few short months it’s going to be 2009, and a ton of stuff has changed in the world of computing over the past almost-ten years. Some of the modern advancements have proven to be a notable improvement while others still produce the same crapola they did nearly ten years ago.

In this installment we’ll be taking a look at fixed disk drives (which you know as the hard disk drive or just hard drive).

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In 1999 a “really big” hard drive (in reference to how much data capacity it could hold) was 20GB. An HDD of that size was prohibitively expensive and most people didn’t have anything that large. Remember, this was a few years before Microsoft Windows XP came into existence so most people used a 1GB and 2GB drive for a variety of reasons.

The first reason was volume limitations.

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