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sefs
August 30th, 2008, 01:32 AM
of hacking 720K floppy disk to make them 1.4 mb floppies because you were too cheap to get the more expensive 1.4 MB

Probably due to reducing cost in production the 720K disk contain the same media as the 1.4MB disk and both could hold the same amount of information.

All you had to do was to put a second hole on the opposite side of the 720K floppy, and presto you had your home made 1.4 MB.

the 1.4MB came with the two wholes on the top, the 720K came with just the one hole used to make it read only or read/write.

LaRoza
August 30th, 2008, 01:34 AM
What is a floppy disk? Also, what kind of storage is 720K and 1.4MB?

Joeb454
August 30th, 2008, 01:35 AM
What's wrong with punch cards?

Kingsley
August 30th, 2008, 01:39 AM
I remember the good old days when I burned CDs so I could listen to my music anywhere.

jviscosi
August 30th, 2008, 01:39 AM
of hacking 720K floppy disk to make them 1.4 mb floppies because you were too cheap to get the more expensive 1.4 MB

Probably due to reducing cost in production the 720K disk contain the same media as the 1.4MB disk and both could hold the same amount of information.

All you had to do was to put a second hole on the opposite side of the 720K floppy, and presto you had your home made 1.4 MB.

the 1.4MB came with the two wholes on the top, the 720K came with just the one hole used to make it read only or read/write.

Yeah, we used a hole punch for this. Sometimes you had to punch multiple times to make the notch big enough.


What is a floppy disk? Also, what kind of storage is 720K and 1.4MB?

Well, in MY day, we didn't have any fancy-schmancy USB thumb drives with 8GB capacity. We had single-density 5 1/4" floppy disks. If we were really lucky, we had DOUBLE-DENSITY 5 1/4" floppy disks. And if we were really really lucky we had DOUBLE-SIDED double-density 5 1/4" floppy disks. And we were thankful because we didn't have to use punch cards and paper tape! And another thing! What's the deal with this whole "Internet" thing? Sending data over wires??? Or even worse, THROUGH THE AIR???? In MY day, if we wanted to move data around, we collected a big stack of single-density 5 1/4" floppy disks (or double-density ones if we were really lucky) and carried them around in boxes. And we were thankful that we HAD boxes we could carry instead of ones we had to roll around on carts! Mutter mutter mumble mumble hey you kids get off my lawn!!!!

Loaded.len
August 30th, 2008, 01:41 AM
"Internet" thing? Sending data over wires???
It's a series of TUBES! :)

yabbadabbadont
August 30th, 2008, 01:42 AM
Bah! Young whipper snapper. In my day, we mastered the hole punch in order to turn 180kb single sided 5-1/4" floppy disks into double sided 360kb ones.

(My father taught me to read punched cards in the 70's... he doomed me to this field :lol:)

Edit: little late on my reply. I had forgotten about the change from single density to double density disks...

mike1234
August 30th, 2008, 01:43 AM
My first PC (1990) had a 5.25 floppy. A real one. Drive "A". Very unreliable they were. Had a 3.5 as the "B" drive. I trhought about installing one as a novelty sometimes. :) By the way, why do they call it the good old days? My IBM 486 cost $3,000, had 4 meg ram, OS/2, 2400 bps dial up modem, and Win 3. What was good about that?

M.

Loaded.len
August 30th, 2008, 01:47 AM
After cutting my teeth on a Vic 20, I had a PC Jr. 128K of TOTAL ram (that is, until we spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade it to a whopping 640K) You had to swap 5 1/4" disks to load DOS everytime you booted it (no HDD)

When I got my first 30 megabyte HDD (which, looked like a brick) I thought I'd NEVER run out of room on it. I thought the same when I got my first gigabyte drive. Now, I've got multiple 250 GB drives and I'm planning an upgrade to multi-terabyte.

jviscosi
August 30th, 2008, 01:48 AM
It's a series of TUBES! :)

What? Talk into my ear-horn, I can hardly hear you!

jviscosi
August 30th, 2008, 01:50 AM
After cutting my teeth on a Vic 20, I had a PC Jr. 128K of TOTAL ram (that is, until we spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade it to a whopping 640K) You had to swap 5 1/4" disks to load DOS everytime you booted it (no HDD)

When I got my first 30 megabyte HDD (which, looked like a brick) I thought I'd NEVER run out of room on it. I thought the same when I got my first gigabyte drive. Now, I've got multiple 250 GB drives and I'm planning an upgrade to multi-terabyte.

Oooh! Remember "Radar Rat Race" and "Jupiter Lander" and good games like that? None of this fancy-schmancy first-person photo-realism stuff they have now!!!!

Loaded.len
August 30th, 2008, 01:53 AM
Oooh! Remember "Radar Rat Race" and "Jupiter Lander" and good games like that? None of this fancy-schmancy first-person photo-realism stuff they have now!!!!

My favorites were Black Cauldron, and King's Quest. I also had MS Flight Simulator version 1.0

jviscosi
August 30th, 2008, 01:54 AM
My favorites were Black Cauldron, and King's Quest. I also had MS Flight Simulator version 1.0

I had Flight Simulator for my C-64. You would start it loading, then go watch television for 20 minutes or so until it was finished and you could play. (The C-64 floppy disk drive was notoriously slow.)

Loaded.len
August 30th, 2008, 01:55 AM
couldn't be any slower than the data cassettes for the Vic20

FranMichaels
August 30th, 2008, 01:59 AM
No mention of the limited color pallets? People are spoiled now, when is the last time you saw someone's computer and it didn't support at least 16.7 million colors? Last century, that's when ;)

As for all the games and such, you make it sound like you can't run them on modern boxes. I still like them, check out dosbox, scummvm, and vice specifically.

nick09
August 30th, 2008, 02:05 AM
I remember when I was on windows 98 and I had dialup. It took a half of an hour to load flash games from the Cartoon Network website.

Tzimisce
August 30th, 2008, 02:09 AM
And when 128k of RAM would be enough for anyone, -evar-?

mike1234
August 30th, 2008, 02:14 AM
No mention of the limited color pallets? People are spoiled now, when is the last time you saw someone's computer and it didn't support at least 16.7 million colors? Last century, that's when ;)

As for all the games and such, you make it sound like you can't run them on modern boxes. I still like them, check out dosbox, scummvm, and vice specifically.

For awhile I was into QBasic games. MS-Dos Qbasic. Gorilla.bas, nibbles.bas, what a dork I was.

M.

swoll1980
August 30th, 2008, 02:17 AM
remember this

LOAD "*" ,8 RUN
Or something like that

dizee
August 30th, 2008, 02:18 AM
all i remember is that 3 1/2 inch floppies were the least reliable things in the world. they would always get corrupted. of course by the time i started using computers they were more or less obsolete anyway, seeing how you couldn't even fit a single mp3 onto a 1.44 MB disk.

yabbadabbadont
August 30th, 2008, 03:48 AM
I had Flight Simulator for my C-64. You would start it loading, then go watch television for 20 minutes or so until it was finished and you could play. (The C-64 floppy disk drive was notoriously slow.)

I had a flight simulator for the TRS-80 Color Computer 2. Wasn't it fun (in the non-fun sense of the word) to have to mess with the volume level of your cassette recorder in order to get the stupid tape to load? Once I found the correct level, I used nail polish to mark it. :lol:

barbedsaber
August 30th, 2008, 04:48 AM
C'mon you old folks, its time for your nap. :)

73ckn797
August 30th, 2008, 04:59 AM
What about the Apple II? I had a 5mb (called Profile) hard drive almost as large as my current computer case and a very small monochrome monitor. Keyboard was built into the CPU assembly with 640kb memory.

DarkDancer
August 30th, 2008, 05:02 AM
I remember the first computer I ever got to play with, it was a trash-80 at the library. I would sign up for it and load Pyramid off the tape drive. Took 10 minutes. Oh, did I mention we only got 15 minutes at the computer?

I also remember notching those 5.25 inch floppies. Takes me way back. I had an Apple ][ E that I sold and bought a Laser 128 ex2. I loved that thing, I put a mac drive on it and could use 1.44mb disks, they were like hard drives they were so huge! That was back in the day before Apple stabbed me in the back (I didn't mind that much) and then twisted the knife (that however is the reason I will never own another Apple product). I may still be a little bitter.

73ckn797
August 30th, 2008, 05:14 AM
The Apple II E was the one I was referring to. It was my first computer given to me. It would not load anything and I messed with it until I was able to load several programs. My fascination with figuring that behemoth out started me on computers. I went out and bought the Laser 286 with Geoworks on it and something called AOL that cost $35 a month if you did not go into areas that were an extra charge. 1mb of additional memory costs $100 and seemed to fly with that much memory. HA, 33 megahertz speed!

My desire to figure things out made me crash the thing more times than I can remember. I learned a lot getting it running again.

Northsider
August 30th, 2008, 05:19 AM
My favorites were...King's Quest.
Ohh man! I loved all of those Sierra games...Police Quest was my favorite.

Anyway, to answer the thread title, yes I rember those days. People today are so spolied with computers and the internet :-p

FuturePilot
August 30th, 2008, 06:00 AM
It's a series of TUBES! :)

All I know is that it's not a big truck. :)

joninkrakow
August 30th, 2008, 08:23 AM
In MY day, if we wanted to move data around, we collected a big stack of single-density 5 1/4" floppy disks (or double-density ones if we were really lucky) and carried them around in boxes. And we were thankful that we HAD boxes we could carry instead of ones we had to roll around on carts! Mutter mutter mumble mumble hey you kids get off my lawn!!!!

LOL! However, you forgot the "uphill both ways" part!

I remember my younger brother's first computer--a Vic-20 that I harware hacked our mom's cassette recorder into his first tape drive. I must admit, that the need to write your own programs in Basic was quite daunting to me in those days, and I never thought myself meant for computers. ;-) However, my harware hacking days were begun without my realizing it. Later, my bro bought himself a Sanyo MBC 555, with 2 (count 'em--2) double-sided, double-density floppy drives and an amber monitor! Several years later, I bought that computer from him, and it was my first computer. It ran DOS 3.1, and came with WordStar, CalcStar, DataStar and Microsoft Multiplan (spreadsheet). I mastered WordStar, using it to create multi-column newsletters and multi-page/multi-column folded booklets (properly imposed!) with multiple fonts (built into my 24 pin Epson LQ dot matrix printer). Heady days, those. ;-)

I later bought a 286 with, I think, EGA color, and next a little laptop which I traded for a Mac Classic, which began my Mac years. All that before 1993. I never lost my love of the command line, however--just not the Windows one. I think that this is part of the appeal of Linux to me.

-Jon

beercz
August 30th, 2008, 10:30 AM
I used to use a slide rule!

I have even used an abacus!

quanumphaze
August 30th, 2008, 01:02 PM
I used to use a slide rule!

I have even used an abacus!

Hey you can run Quake 1 on that

caljohnsmith
August 30th, 2008, 02:16 PM
I think my brother and I started on what is maybe one of the first personal computers ever made: a Commodore Pet. I don't remember the specs, but it probably only had 4K or 8K of RAM, and it took at least 10 minutes to load even just a few kilobytes off the tape drive.

After that we graduated to an Atari 800. Talk about games galore! Does anybody remember what a "happy" drive is? :D That was the de facto "1337" standard for piracy back then. And no, we didn't have one, but we had a friend that had one. ;) It blows my mind that anything even worked with only 32K RAM, which is what I think our Atari 800 had.

Ethyrdude
August 30th, 2008, 02:35 PM
I still have a working Timex Sinclair 1600, needs a converter to use with the TV but this was the first computer I tore apart to repair. There was a loose cap under the keyboard and if you nailed a key too hard it would reset, bye non saved data. I still have the manual somewhere too, but the optional tape recorder wasn't worth the cardboard box it came in.

I ended up chucking the recorder about six months after I bought it and bought a better tape recorder, any cassette tapes I recorded programs on became useless after around five or six reads, this machine would literally stretch the tape and I got sick and tired of buying box after box of cassettes, much more expensive than 50 blank DVDs now.

I learned how to program in BASIC on this puppy, you could also "Poke" and "Peek" but I never did figure that out. This was our family's first computer and was more of a novelty item than anything really useful.

KiranOtter
August 30th, 2008, 02:47 PM
Gee, no one had a TRS-80 with 8" floppies? I also had a Olivetti that used magnetic cards (about the size of a punch card).

uilyam
August 30th, 2008, 03:30 PM
Yeah. The good ol' days... My first "computer" as a kid... A Brainiac, the kit cost $18.75 and include a reprint of Shannon and Weaver on the Boolan algebra of switching circuits, as I recall. Then I grew up and did my military service, where I actually got to work on a real computer that wasn't built of pegboard, nuts and bolts connected by wires to a battery holder and a row of flashlight bulbs. Anyone here ever work with a Buick machine that was used in the SAGE system?

Then university... at night I did my own programming, figuring how to reduce the code to fit into the 4K RAM on the lab machine. That was when the physics and astronomy dept had the new Wang calculators... four terminals with nixie tube displays connected to the big box. I got a touchtone phone at home so I could communicate with the ARU on the university mainframe, get batch job status, etc. Sometimes at the lab I would call Dave Mills to come over and help debug the RAMP program we were running. RAMP: A PDP-8 MULTIPROGRAMMING SYSTEM FOR REAL-TIME DEVICE CONTROL (http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/6639/4/bac9435.0001.001.txt)

Yeah... To reboot: first toggle in the UZERO program to clear the RAM of trash. Then toogle in the BOOTSTRAP loader. Then read a relocating loader from paper tape. Then load the operating system paper tape. Then you could communicate through the 10 cps teletype I/O device and actually do something. All the same, we could connect to the network. It was smaller then and was called arpanet.

I considered the 96-column cards a real improvement over the old 80-column cards. More data in less space. Much more useful as a turn-around document. I was initially opposed to introducing the 8-inch floppies when they first appeared.

Much, much later... Not only DD/DS 5-1/4, but also hard-sectored. We had higher data capacity on the hard-sectored floppies. The basic price on a desktop micro that I sold and supported in 1980 was $5700. It had 64K RAM, two floppy drives with 630K each. You could choose your operating system: CP/M or Micropolis. I pushed CP/M because it was manufacturer independent. But the Micropolis Disk Extended BASIC did have some nice features.

On the other hand, much of what we see today was imagined in those good ol' days. I showed a movie copy of Douglas Engelbart's 1968 demonstration to my students in 1969 to encourage thinking about what was to come. If you have the capacity (and the time), then you can see it now: Doug Engelbart: The Demo (75 min video) (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097) More information is at http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/index-inside.html (http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/index-inside.html).

Of course, the really good ol' days were before my time... When Vannevar Bush invented the idea of the "memex (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush/4)" or when H. G. Wells thought about a "permanent world encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain)"... But I was around when Manfred Kochen was trying to continue this line, working on the concept of a "Growing Encyclopedia System"...

Rhubarb
August 30th, 2008, 03:31 PM
Just last week I assembled parts from 2nd hand computers for my mum.
AMD2000+ 768MB RAM, runs Ubuntu 8.04 fine.
For the past 5 years I've had no floppy drives in the house, but I decided for novelty's sake to put a 3.5" and a 5.25" floppy drive in there.
They still work fine, Ubuntu can read them, and if need be dosbox runs them just fine :D

Rhubarb
August 30th, 2008, 03:32 PM
Double post, please ignore.

init1
August 30th, 2008, 04:00 PM
couldn't be any slower than the data cassettes for the Vic20
Yeah, I've got one of those. It's a very impractical way storing data.

Kernel Sanders
August 30th, 2008, 04:08 PM
What? Talk into my ear-horn, I can hardly hear you!

STOP CLOGGING MAH TUBES! :lolflag:

tiggsy
August 30th, 2008, 07:11 PM
I remember 1.2mb floppies on the Sirius when the IBM was still struggling with 160kb - remember that? single sided floppies, before the size went up to HDDS with a massive 360k per disk?

We had a dualboot machine (the Vulcan) that would read and write both the Sirius multi-speed disks and the stoop IBM ones... Ah happy days

damis648
August 30th, 2008, 07:24 PM
Unfortunately, I am not old enough to remember the "good ole' days" :'(. But wow, I do remember the days of using 1.44 megabyte floppies. Always hated them. Then I bought a 256MB flash drive ($50!!!)... and that was only like 6 years ago or something like that. Now I can go to the store and get 8GB for the same price. Times change quickly.

jviscosi
September 2nd, 2008, 10:12 PM
couldn't be any slower than the data cassettes for the Vic20

LOL, true. I once tried to copy one of those in my father's dual-deck tape player, figuring that since it was just audio that should work. The copy loaded partway, but wouldn't finish. Thus ended my early career pirating copies of "Temple of Apshai".

Tindytim
September 2nd, 2008, 10:18 PM
How many of you can say you've handled an 8" floppy?

PurposeOfReason
September 2nd, 2008, 10:36 PM
While I'm only 18, I remember some of these days. I started with computers at 5. All I remember was it was a macintosh (what it this 'apple'?). All the games and stuff flopies let me do. Best game (not that old though) was prince of persia.

Funny enough, we just cleaned our garage and found two boxes of flopies. :)

Tindytim
September 2nd, 2008, 10:41 PM
Yeah I recently ran out and bough a floppy drive and some disks for some SATA drivers to install XP.

jviscosi
September 2nd, 2008, 10:54 PM
How many of you can say you've handled an 8" floppy?

Handled, yes; used, no. I had one from the old IBM System/36 where I used to work, which I stuck on the bulletin board in my cube as part of my "museum of data storage" display.

mellowd
September 2nd, 2008, 10:55 PM
I remember 720k floppies. I remember the first time I heard an adlib 8bit mono sound card, I was in heaven

steveneddy
September 2nd, 2008, 10:57 PM
what a dork I was.



was?

mips
September 3rd, 2008, 01:59 AM
If you did not own an Amiga you missed out on a lot!

mellowd
September 3rd, 2008, 02:20 AM
If you did not own an Amiga you missed out on a lot!

I didn't have one. I loved my spectrum though

mips
September 3rd, 2008, 02:29 AM
I didn't have one. I loved my spectrum though

How did you miss the Amiga as it was a good few years after the ZX Spectrum?

mellowd
September 3rd, 2008, 02:36 AM
How did you miss the Amiga as it was a good few years after the ZX Spectrum?

I spent many many years with my spectrum. I then went straight to PC, never actually touched an amiga

kspringer
September 3rd, 2008, 02:59 AM
I used 8" floppies on a dedicated word processor when I was in the military, oh so long ago.
Can't even remember what it was called!

But my favorite was playing Zork I on the Commodore 64.

"...Raise septre, ring bell..."


Better than any video game -- then or now.

k

jviscosi
September 5th, 2008, 04:31 PM
I used 8" floppies on a dedicated word processor when I was in the military, oh so long ago.
Can't even remember what it was called!

But my favorite was playing Zork I on the Commodore 64.

"...Raise septre, ring bell..."


Better than any video game -- then or now.

k

Say Odysseus

Perfect Storm
September 5th, 2008, 04:38 PM
This was my good ol' day

http://www.imageviper.com/displayimage/56700/0/C64_startup_animiert.gif

with cassette and a little screwdriver to adjust it. Programming in its basic language when I was a kid.

10 rem *** test ***
12 clear
100 print "hello world"
110 goto 100

Later on I moved to Simons Basic w00t!! It was easier to make graphic with it.

fiddledd
September 5th, 2008, 05:04 PM
This was my good ol' day

http://www.imageviper.com/displayimage/56700/0/C64_startup_animiert.gif

with cassette and a little screwdriver to adjust it. Programming in its basic language when I was a kid.

10 rem *** test ***
12 clear
100 print "hello world"
110 goto 100

Later on I moved to Simons Basic w00t!! It was easier to make graphic with it.

I still have a C64, C16, 2 Amiga 500s, and 1 Amiga 600. Last time I checked (10 years ago?) they all work. Oh, I coded 6502 machine code, even got a game accepted for a Cover Disc.:) I have a feeling I've posted this elsewhere, hopefully it wasn't in this thread.

beercz
September 5th, 2008, 05:11 PM
How many of you can say you've handled an 8" floppy?
I have :-)

(8" floppy disk that is - just to be clear)

Zyphrexi
September 5th, 2008, 05:15 PM
pah! floppies? ha I used the abacus. you kids nowadays with your machines and corn.

pp.
September 5th, 2008, 05:32 PM
How many of you can say you've handled an 8" floppy?

I wrote a driver for an 8" floppy drive for my Apple ][.

stat30fbliss
September 5th, 2008, 07:40 PM
Hells Yea. I remember turnign in Homework on a 8" floppy! :)

nowin4me
September 5th, 2008, 07:49 PM
Hells Yea. I remember turnign in Homework on a 8" floppy! :)

What did the teacher say?
DARN I wish I was back at school so I could give my teacher an 8" floppy disc.

:lolflag:

Tindytim
September 5th, 2008, 08:01 PM
I wrote a driver for an 8" floppy drive for my Apple ][.
Yeah well, I had to walk a mile each way just to load a single punchcard for my drivers into the machine.....in the snow.....with both legs in a cast and a broken arms.......and it was uphill both ways.

Didi I mention I'm 18?

dizee
September 5th, 2008, 11:49 PM
http://www.imageviper.com/displayimage/56700/0/C64_startup_animiert.gif
if it wasn't for Vice City I wouldn't even know what that screen is :lolflag:

though i wasn't that far ahead. back in primary school instead of xbox vs ps3 it was SNES vs Mega Drive. ;) (mega drive FTW of course)

tom66
September 5th, 2008, 11:53 PM
In 'dem days you used to have a 286, 'n then BAM it blew... pheewwwwheee dat smoke was NAAAAsty.

(Yep, I had a 286 blow up... last ever message was '120K OK...' or something, then the floppy drive started to try and read, then smoke, then black screen.)

red_Marvin
September 6th, 2008, 12:43 AM
When I was in school (ie around 1997) I remember each of us in the class being assigned a floppy, although a 1.44Mb 3.15" one, to store our school work on.

Sometimes I wish that I was "there" when "computer" didn't automatically imply x86.

fballem
September 6th, 2008, 02:38 AM
The good old days ...

I was living in Winnipeg. A friend of mine had access to an IBM PC with a single floppy drive. She got me hooked on computers by letting me play Zork (one of the first text-based RPG games).

When I had $7,200 together, I bought one - it had 256k RAM, two 360K floppy drives, monochrome (green screen) monitor, a dot matrix printer, EasyWriter 1.1, and DOS 1.1. That computer lasted me for four years until I was able to get an IBM PS/2 with a 286 processor, 20 Meg Hard Drive and a 3.5 inch floppy drive. Oh, and it had a colour monitor.

I learned to program - originally with Turbo Pascal, later with Turbo C (USD 99 each, if I recall correctly). I even got to the point where I could write and use Assembler subroutines for key capture and screen display (it was a LOT faster).

I guess I'm old - but that's okay. My wife fried her laptop (coffee in keyboard), so I gave her mine and got bits and pieces. The Laptop has a 17-inch screen, 2 Gigs of RAM, 256Meg Video, and two 120 Meg Hard Drives. Current computer has 4 Gig RAM, 500 GIG Hard Drive, an Nvidia 8600GT (with 512 meg video RAM), a 22-inch LG LCD monitor and Ubuntu. The bits and pieces cost me $850 + tax.

The dot matrix printer has been replaced over the years with a daisy wheel (needed the quality), an old HP LaserJet, an IBM Lexmark Color printer (if I remember, about $3,000 seven years ago) and now an HP cp1518ni colour laserjet that prints much better than the Lexmark (and only cost $350.

I ran into my friend from Winnipeg a year-or-so ago. She still has the original PC that I played Zork on!

In a few years, I may show this to the kids (11 and 9) so that they can laugh as they use their voice activated computers that fits into the palm of their hand and projects images onto a coffee table.

caljohnsmith
September 6th, 2008, 03:03 AM
Current computer has 4 Gig RAM, 500 GIG Floppy, an Nvidia 8600GT...
Wow, do they really make 500 GB floppy drives these days? :biggrin:

Perfect Storm
September 6th, 2008, 04:10 AM
Wow, do they really make 500 GB floppy drives these days? :biggrin:

I want one...

pp.
September 6th, 2008, 08:07 AM
I want one...

Not if they haven't improved the transfer rate as well.

fballem
September 6th, 2008, 09:03 AM
Wow, do they really make 500 GB floppy drives these days? :biggrin:

:lolflag: Had an old guy moment - obviously 500GB Hard Drive. I've edited the post - thanks for the catch.