Floppy Disks, Big and Small

[Starry Windy]

Well, let's talk about some blast from the past, shall we?

Back then, when I get my computer for the first time, the most well-known storage were floppy disks. Floppy disks are well known because it's pretty portable in its time, can store some small data like documents and pictures, and also because of this:



It's said that long time ago, floppy disk was massive and thin, and it's started from 8 inch floppy disks, to 5¼ inch, and finally, to the one that is well known nowadays (or perhaps yesteryear), 3½ inch floppy disk. They're so special that time that Windows reserved two drive letters of A and B for floppy disk drives. Even though floppy disks once become the main hub if you want to install older operating systems like Windows back in the day, this storage started to wane once USB Flash Drive and other removable storage like SD card started to be developed, and floppy disk has dissolved to history.

What do you think about floppy disks? Do you missed using it for quite long? How's your experience when you use it back then, or are you still using it even now? Discuss! :)

 

[Judge Mandolore Shepard]

I recall floppy disks were still a thing back when I was in elementary school. Course that was back in the late 90s.

 

[Guest123_x1]

^I also remember using floppy disks regularly when I was in elementary school, particularly on the Apple IIe systems that were in widespread use at the time. In fact, after I got my first IBM PC-compatible computer at home, I used floppies on a regular basis, and continued to do so with several of the computers I later got, all the way until the latter part of last decade, when I began burning CD-RW and DVD-RW discs more and more, which in turn was largely supplanted by using USB flash drives and portable hard drives.

One thing I don't miss about floppies, though, is putting in a particular disk, only to find out that a file that I'm trying to open can't be read, because the disk developed bad sectors. I've also often gone through the "Invalid media or Track 0 bad - disk unusable" error when formatting floppies.

Given the underlying technology behind floppy disks and drives hadn't changed much if at all since the early 1980s when the 8 inch and 5¼ inch sizes were commonplace (and the earliest IBM PC hardware ran an 8088 processor, not to mention there were many competing microcomputer designs, all mutually incompatible with one another (think VHS vs. Betamax if you don't get what I mean), with various processor architectures such as the Z80, 6800, 8080/8085, among others, the vast majority of them being 8-bit), it's not surprising that the medium died out when it did.

 

[Tsutarja]

I used a floppy disk in 2008!

Of course they were as useful back then as flash drives are today.

 

[Bay]

I remember I would save my stories and other documents in floppy disks. I even still used them until like third year of university (like 2008/2009) and when usb drives were more affordable. My dad long ago worked in a factory that ships floppy disks and he kept several of them at home lol.

 

[Lucario]

I've never really used floppy disks, but I have a drive in my pc for them just in case.

 

[Mimikyu]

I used to use floppy disks back during my first 3 years of elementary (aka early 2000s). Fun times, I used to keep my data in a couple of them.

Kids these days won't know how big our portable storage items were ahaha.

 

[miragespot]

Fun Fact: the "save" button in Microsoft Word is still (and has been as long as I can recall) a floppy disk, possibly upside down.

I used floppy disks through middle school (2003-2004). As a young kid I used them to play on my dad's ancient Apple from the 80s, and later I used them to take my work to school to print it on a school computer, since the family printer was always broken.

 

[Cordeline]

I have never used floppy disks myself, but I know my brothers used them and then flash drives started to appear shortly after I was born. I have seen them and I know how they work, but I never used them myself. I'm surprised a photo taken with my phone doesn't fit on one... Unless you split the photo to fit in 5 of them ^-^;

 

[Cersei Lannister]

I remember the 5~ inch ones and the 3~ inch ones (of course on the latter). Pretty funny things, especially the big ones because they were literally floppy.

 

[Sylphiel]

I can't take a picture of this because I dunno where my camera is, but I found something interesting when finally cleaning out my nightstand: a case full of floppy disks. Full of 5.25" floppy disks! They're all my dad's old disks of various programs - I think one was Lotus 1-2-3. Why a case of his old disks was in my drawers I'm not sure, but there they were.

But those are the only ones I have left on me as of now. I haven't used a floppy disk since the early 2000s or so, when I took a computer class that had us use 3.5" floppies on which to save our work. Then I got computers that didn't have a floppy drive, so no more using floppies for me...

Kind of sad, actually. Especially when I found an old diskette of mine some point after that I'm sure had my old stories and such on it. I just didn't have any way of accessing it anymore.

 

[Maki-Nishikino]

its honestly been years since i last used a floppy drive and really dont miss them i do how ever have a p4 slim dell i got from a neighbor that didnt want the computer anymore i test booted it i cant remember if it was before or after i replaced a bad cap on the motherboard it had a 3 1/2 under the laptop style dvd drive

 

[Starry Windy]

Hmm, speaking of which, I haven't used Floppy Disks for years nowadays after finding out that Floppy Disks are not quite enough for saving some software as big as 10 MB. But still, it was nostalgic when I used it to save some data like documents for schoolwork.