Comment by felooboolooomba
6 hours ago
As a kid back then, floppies were expensive if you were using your pocket money or hard earned side hustle stash. Floppies were used, abused and reused until that dreadful bad sector. Even after the bad sector if you knew its location. But you knew the floppy time was up.
Kids today will newer know the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies. The sound, the smell, the texture, the stickers, the formatting, the wast free space, ... as much as retail therapy is a thing, I think that was floppy therapy.
There was a time when, for me at least, the 3.5 inch floppy seemed like the pinnacle of portable storage technology, especially as compared to the cassettes and 5.25 inch floppies I’d been used to.
I made regular use of 3.5 inch disks as portable storage up until, if you can believe it, 2000 when I mostly switched to Zip disks and, occasionally, CDRs. I never found CDRWs that useful.
Writable CD storage was always a bit of a faff to use though, whereas Zip disks behave exactly like floppies, only a lot bigger.
Fast forward to 2002 when I first got home broadband, and it just became easier to simply transfer files directly over the internet rather than toting disks around.
Not long after that cheap USB sticks started to get usefully large but, really, I’ve barely used them in 20-odd years.
It’s funny how, once floppies became too small for most practical uses - even though I’d used them exclusively for 10 years - I didn’t spend much time with anything else before jumping to just relying on the network for file sharing, syncing, and transfers.
Very occasionally I do still use them today: I’ve got an old Korg Trinity synth that uses 3.5 inch floppies for storage, and I’ve got a minty fresh box of them still hanging around in my office. I’ve also got an Amiga 1200 that uses DD as opposed to HD floppies.
The 1200 is a little weird in that it can also use HD floppies.
Whoa, wait, what? It can? I did not know that. Back in the day I had an A500, and only bought the 1200 decades later. Had no idea it would accept HD floppies. TIL. Thank you!
3 replies →
I thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc like that. But, too little too late for too much money.
But conceptually, haptically, optically...phenomenally!
I was a big MiniDisc fan. They were like digital cassette tapes. I could record from the radio, trim out the DJ, re-order the tracks, and give them titles. Looking back, it was all a bit tedious to do on the player/recorder itself, but paired with modern software and a reader for the PC, I'm sure it would be outstanding.
Yeah, it's funny they never really took off as a data storage format the way zip disks and CDs did.
To me a MiniDisc would have been far better than a Zip disk but I never encountered MiniDisc used in that context. Certainly, whereas all the machines in the computer lab during my masters had Zip drives and floppy drives, making Zip the logical choice for my home PC, I don't ever remember seeing a PC with a built-in MiniDisc drive anywhere at all - not even in computer shops.
Shame really. I'm sure they probably existed but maybe rarely enough that they'd classify as oddware? (HT to LGR for that piece of terminology.)
>Kids today will newer know the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies.
Even as an elder millennial most of the floppies I used back then were formatted aol install disks. I don't recall ever buying floppies, but maybe my father did
The jump from 1.44MB on a 3.5 floppy to a 650MB CD was astonishing.
> the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies
For us floppies just appeared in the home! I think my dad took them from the office so he could work from home.
Perhaps it's similar to the feeling of unwrapping a pack of CD-Rs