This is the old drive space indicator that was used in old versions of Windows. Such an image is so retro looking it is hard to believe that we use to use something like this. The days of using 1.44 Megabyte floppy disks and Iomega Zip drives are long gone. Now we have 16 Gigabyte USB drives and 3 Terabyte hard disk drives. Still; I remember using the Internet before Google, Facebook and Youtube; when you would watch a video in a window that was probably 176*144 pixels in size and was grainy as hell. And you thought that was the bees knees. back when websites looked like this: http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm. Those where the days indeed. And when Napster was used for downloading pirated music and you could have any song you wanted just by searching for it and downloading it from the Napster site. Installing Windows from about 30 floppy disks and having to insert one disk after another thirty times. That would drive you to distraction. Windows Vista would fit on 1721 floppy disks; imagine installing that with a slow and error prone floppy disk drive. It would be better to use an Iomega Zip drive; that could fit 250 Megabytes. Here is a photograph of a huge stack of Windows installation floppies. Would you enjoy installing this? Of course since this is a Linux website; I should not be going on about Windows, but this is a nostalgia posting and I need to get the Windows stuff out of the way before getting into Linux.
Now the old Linux desktops were copies of the Windows interface especially the Gnome 1.0 desktop that had the taskbar at the bottom of the screen and icons on the desktop like Windows `95. But it had better software than the Microsoft operating system. The fact that Linux is more secure than Windows due to the open source nature of the software is a major bonus. The gnome 1.0 desktop interface was a very good desktop to get things done with. Nowadays with the focus on touch interfaces the whole desktop paradigm has gone to the dogs. But at least some people like the Xfce developers still care about the desktop traditionalists that wish to use a fast and sleek desktop that will operate in the traditional way. The KDE 1.0 and 2.2 desktops were also the same as the Windows desktop. The modern KDE 4.9 desktop can be setup to look just like KDE 3.4; but I am not sure if there are themes available these days to emulate the look and feel of KDE 2.2. That would be one theme that I would be happy to install. Another nostalgic thing that you do not see anymore is the Pentium II slot 1 cartridge that allows you to plug in a replacement CPU without having to deal with heat sink grease and clamping down the CPU with a lot of force like you have to do with a modern Intel i3 CPU. But this is the price of progress I guess.
Having to push down on the CPU clamping lever with so much force and hearing the crunching sound is nerve wracking to say the least. That is one of the things that you have to deal with when you are putting together a computer. Still, it offers more power than this old 8086 CPU from 1978 would. Such a CPU can run games like Wolfenstein 3D, and you can use it to perform word processing duties. But using the Internet on such a slow machine would not be much fun. An old Amiga computer can run Doom though, and it runs pretty well too. Here is Amiga Doom running on an A1000 Pal Computer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmTTEtYiPVQ. The Amiga computer system was built from the ground up as a multimedia system. This video shows the capabilities of the Amiga computer when it is used for multimedia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_quFubu9XM.