Today I cleaned out my trove of 3.5 inch diskettes — nearly 150 of them. For those of you who grew up with giant hard-drives and CD-ROM/ DVD drives, the “floppy disk” was the way computer files were saved and distributed in the olden days.  I never thought of 3.5 disks as “floppy” myself, though many people called them that. Unlike the 5.25 disks, the smaller ones had a hard-case and did not flop.  The 3.5s that I discarded were a mixture of personal data disks and commercial installation disks — including an unused, plastic-wrapped set of MS-DOS 6.2 installation disks and a used set of Windows 3.1 installation disks, about six disks in each set.

I ran magnets across the personal disks just in case they contained sensitive info.  One of them had a label “Novel 1993.”  I assume I wrote a novel that year — or more likely the first chapter of a novel. Maybe I have a paper copy somewhere.

Those 3.5 disks held between 1.44 and 2.0 MB of data.  So altogether, the 150 disks contained at most 300 MBs — which you could put on a tiny USB thumb drive with room to spare.

I still have a box of a dozen 5.25 floppies, the oldest software and files I own.  I can’t bring myself to toss them out.  One floppy contains another novel, or so the label claims.  The rest are mostly devoted to computer programming.  There is a copy of the legendary Borland Turbo Pascal, circa 1988, the finest and fastest DOS programming compiler ever sold — and for just fifty bucks a copy.  There is a disk labeled “Play Ball” that contains a baseball game I created for my father, and a couple disks with an extensive and specialized record-keeping program I wrote for his business.

Apparently, it’s still possible to hook a 5.25 drive to your computer. You can emulate DOS, too.  I know I won’t ever bother, but I will keep the box in a back corner of my closet, just in case.

Being a computer geek, I have played around with alternatives to MicroSoft Windows — free, open-source alternatives, which boils down to various flavors of Linux.  I’ve tried Red Hat, Knoppix, Ubuntu and a couple others.  I’ve installed them as dual-boots with Windows or as a stand-alone OS on an old desktop.  They’ve all worked, and the installation process has gotten progressively easier.  Linux works out-of-the-box (so to speak) with more and more hardware.  Still, none of the versions of Linux proved compelling or useful enough for me to turn to it on a daily basis as a sub for Windows.

I guess what I wanted was a less geeky Linux.  I found one.

It’s  a commercial Linux designed for brain-dead easy installation on a wide variety of Windows XP and Vista computers.  It’s also designed for fast-loading when all you really want to do is check your email and browse the web.  The product is called “Presto” and it is sold by a company called  Xandros at http://prestomypc.com/.

Xandros Presto is free to try for a week and $19.95 if you like it and want to buy a license to continue using Presto on a single computer.  I tried it on an older Dell laptop running Windows XP.  Installation was quick and painless — just like installing any  program in Windows.  I got Presto to work with my home wireless network, which I never quite managed with any other Linux. I always had to use a LAN cable, not the best for a laptop.  The Presto web site claims that some users can be browsing the web less than 20 seconds after pressing the power button.  It takes a little longer on my laptop, but seems instantaneous compared to Windows XP.   Shut down is almost immediate — maybe four seconds.

You need four GB of available space to install Presto. It’s a big download, almost 500 MB, and took over half an hour on a high speed connection (high speed on my end, but apparently not on the other — I used the CNET Downloads.com option).

The initial installation comes with FireFox 3, Skype, and Open Office.  You can easily install other applications from the Presto “Store,” which features lots of  free, open source software as well as try-before-you buy stuff.  There is a “Store” icon on the Presto desktop, but you can also browse the applications at http://presto.cnr.com/.

You can access, open and edit documents created with Windows using the OpenOffice suite on Presto.

Windows XP was/ is taking several minutes to load on this computer — about 10 minutes before I can do anything useful, despite my best efforts to speed things up.  Now it takes half-a-minute.  That’s worth $20 to me.  Of course, hardware can differ a lot on Windows machines, and it’s hard to say if a new OS will work at all without trying it first.  So you want to try Presto for free before you buy a license.

If other Linux versions prove this easy to install, use and update — this ungeeky — then Windows may be in big trouble.  Unless MS plans to sell Windows 7 for twenty bucks. What would you say the odds are of that?

(Hat-tip to Dick DeBartolo, the Giz Wiz. I learned about Presto from his daily podcast with Leo Laporte.)

I discovered something new in the world of micro-blogging yesterday. Everyone knows about Twitter and its 140 character posts.  But some open-source developers have created a platform called “Laconica” that can be installed on any server to create custom micro-blogs. They also feature a 140 character limit to posts.  The great thing about Laconica (and any similar open source systems that might come along) is that the micro-blogs will be able to communicate with each other. You can establish an identity on one micro-blog site, and use it on others.  Right now, online communities tend to be “silos” unto themselves.

At the same time, a micro-blog could have its own special focus and specialized audience.  For instance, I have joined Leo Laporte’s micro-blog on his “This Week in Technology (TWiT)” site.  He just set it up a couple days ago, using Laconica, for the community that watches his video-casts at twitlive. Laporte calls his micro-blog “the Twit Army Canteen.” The community is mostly male and all technology junkie.  All Twits, in other words.

OpenOffice has always been a decent replacement for MS-Office, especially given that OpenOffice costs so much less. Like, for example, nothing. (Yes, I do love the free software!) Development continues on OpenOffice, and a new beta has just been released. It promises to address that annoying problem of “.docx”:

OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

Here’s the complete list of features in the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta.

The beta download itself is available at http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/.