apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

What's funny is I was cleaning out my office the other day and I found a little stack of floppy disks with materials from my college classes on them. At first I thought it would be fun to pop them in and see what was on there, and then I realized that I don't have a machine - or know anyone who does - that reads floppy disks. I was stunned about that for a minute, it doesn't seem that long ago that the floppy disk was the best way to store information on!

Hey, I know that car! I even know the owner of that car.

I have a couple of programs that I bought long ago on floppy. They are of limited appeal (biology stuff) and very narrow application. I use them about once a year: I never have bothered to transfer them to CD. I suppose I'll be sorry one of these days. I also have the original edition of Word Perfect, from which I do not want to part ( for some obscure reason I'm not even aware of).

Maryja, I don't know the owner, but I see that car around my 'hood a lot.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Starship-Enterprise-Out-of-a-Floppy-Disk

Okay, raise your hand if you remember being proud of having two floppy drives, one for old-school 5" disks and one for exciting new 3.5" disks, which came in cute colors and were easier to carry around.

My nostalgia for the days when large graphic files never quite fit on a disk and installing a program required swapping 8 disks... is amazingly limited.

but those large disks were so gorgeous.

i did an art project in high school with the large disks. took out the inside (magnetic circles) and made a series of pie charts (i.e. empty, 1/8th, 1/4th, etc until whole) mounted on clear plexiglass. i'm really sad i lost it!

I wound up reformatting the hard drive of a laptop *before* my mother told me that the CD-ROM didn't work.

Had to go out to the drugstore and buy some so that I could do a floppy install. It took *forever*, and isn't something I wish to do again. Moral of the story? When someone gives you an old computer, ASK what doesn't work first. I assumed "there's nothing wrong with it, I just don't use it anymore" signified that it was okay to just wipe it clean.

I still have a bunch of floppies lying down with MP3 files that I downloaded way back in the day (one to a disk, of course) - and there are some random old documents out there in a box somewhere.

It seems I am at home in the Mesozoic Era.

I need to quickly get files between two laptops. It's much easier to save my file on a floppy and then insert it in the next laptop. No hunting for the USB port, usually in the back of laptops, and waiting for the okay to safely remove hardware. I am surrounded by Apple people who just look quizzically at my floppy disks

If anyone has an old W98 or W2000 laptop they would like to declutter, I will give it a good home. My email is laurenwoods AT dslextreme DOT com.

5" disks aren't large...large would be 8" floppies. ANyone else remember those?

The technology was so primitive then that the drives had to be specially calibrated to ensure that a disk written with one drive would be readable by another drive (I calibrated a few of them myself back in the day).

We take all that for granted now, I doubt anyone even thinks of it. Back in the early days of the 8" floppy, you had to be a business to afford one, let alone two.

Most hobbyists (there were no PCs then) were using cassette tapes. And if you were smart, you never rewound a tape all the way to the end (or the tape would stretch and you'd lose data).

8" floppies! I was trying to remember the size of the floppies as big as dinner plates, but I only used them once, on a long-ago temp job that I can't otherwise remember.

Remember 14" removable hard drive cartridges? They held a whopping 5 MB.

Scroll about halfway down this page. I'm sure there's other better examples but this was all I could find right now. I miss working with Data General machines. I could make batch files consisting of one or two lines of shell commands that I can't come anywhere close to in Linux.

http://wps.com/NOVA4/pitchas.html

The best thing was the hard drives were not hermetically sealed, so you had to have a near clean-room atmosphere.

Which was one of the reasons I started getting interested in computers because back in 1978 the only way to have a guaranteed smoke free (and air-conditioned) work environment in the tech industry was to work with computers.

I use 3.5" floppies at work because there are many older pieces of equipment (e.g. oscilloscopes) that don't have any other method of data transfer.

Boomer, the removable hard drives don't look all that familiar (probably because we were strongly discouraged from opening the big boxes in the high school computer labs, as I recall the concept), but my heart skips a beat for 1/2" mag tape. It was the mark of an Uber-Geek to be granted one's own mag tape, ostensibly for storing one's coursework (in Fortran 77, naturellement), but more realistically for sharing copies of whatever space ship game was current at the time.

Ever play the ASCII version of Star Trek? ;->

Maybe once -- my crowd was more D&D than Trekker, so we played the text version of Adventure. I was lousy at it.

Helloinsomnia, it's because I'm stalking you. :-)

No, actually, my boyfriend lives on the Hill, so I flit about your hood trying to find a %&$ing parking place.

to the other commenters: there are 8" floppies on the inside ceiling of the car. they are pretty hard to obtain these days, but I managed to get about 10-20 of them.

lara7, driver of "disk drive"