You lucky bastard, I remember watching the scrambled porn channels and trying to move the dial on the cable box ever so slightly so it would become unscrambled for that three or four seconds.

Mediocre fapping material from the 80's = Victoria Secret Ads

The idea that the software is useless without the original hardware is asinine beyond belief, thanks to the magic of emulators. I bet there are tons of people out there who don't own any five-and-a-quarter floppies yet somehow have miraculously played an old C64 game. I've got (completely legal) Amiga emulators on several devices, yet don't have the big beige doorstop itself anymore. And going further back, I've done remakes of TI-99/4A games and actually stripped data from cartridge images of the games, all without ever touching original media.

The "permanence" of physical media is just as laughable. In a crisis situation I would rather copy an already virtualised file than try to duplicate a copy-locked CD. And as I said earlier, I have redundancy on my files, which would be far harder to achieve with physical media. One good fire or sinkhole and all your CDs are gone, yet I can keep two external harddrive in separate places and not lose anything if one is ruined.

Frankly the whole "physical versus digital" debate smacks of paleolithic thinking, the idea that the tangible is better than the abstract - "rock good, spirit evil". Maybe you feel cheated when you buy something but can't hold it. I can imagine it's a real quandry for you then to go to a movie or buy a ride on a rollercoaster, since you walk away with exactly zero more tangible possessions than you started with.

Wait until the 1Q2014 and the 1TB will be coming out.
I have a digital copy of 7. It will at least work for a week without their activation servers. Just to be safe, maybe I need to create and ISO of my 98 CD before it goes bad. They'll have Windows 98 drivers for my Holodeck, won't they.

You do know that there is nothing in the law that prevents you to acquire and use an emulator? Well, at least not yet anyway. It`s just the games that are the murky ones; in order to legally own the digital copy, you need to have the original disk/cartridge.

I`m guessing it is the younger generation that has no problem with the concept of handling abstract "things". It`s usually an age thingy. But hey, not long ago I spoke to an elderly woman that had taken over all the financial/practical things in her house. She almost scared me when she talked about files, folders et al. Mental visualization is something many sorely lacks.

It is going to be interesting to see what solution they present to us as the final "new age computer", that will revolutionize how much faster we can work for lesser amounts of time :p

Exactly but personally if taken care of physical media would last generations imo, I mean Angry Video Game Nerd has a treasure trove of media history preserved.

Well, I take really good care of my discs but it still feels like half my old TV DVD sets have episodes that don't play right. I'd take digital any day.

Yes, I know. I only emphasise the legal aspect of the Amiga emulators because the OS files needed to run them (Kickstart and Workbench) are still commercially restricted, so you need to purchase those. Many other emulators, such as the TI-99/4A and C64 ones, have no such limitations.

You are a collector, some people just want to play the games.

Btw., if anybody out there still has some clutter-fostering, paleolithic boxed games/records they still hadn't incinerated, my shelves would gladly spare You the trouble! ;)