Did you use Floppy Disk/Diskettes?

[KleinesSinchen]

Floppy disks are fun and I'm sad they disappeared instead of being improved. Both ZIP drives and LS-120 (most interesting since backwards compatible), even ED floppy disk (2.88MB) never saw wide distribution.

I've recently started using standard 3.5" HD floppies again for my newly obtained Mavica MVC-FD91.

A fun thing is trying to squeeze as much data on a given floppy disk as possible. Together with ED floppies this puts an end to the never ending joke "not even a single song fits on a floppy disk" with some stupid picture of a stack of diskettes saying "1/5", "2/5"…

A HD capable 5.25" drive can format 360KB DD disks with 80 tracks to 720KB or even further. The DOS program 2M can get about ≈2 million bytes on a 3.5" HD disk.

Floppotron on YouTube is worth listening!

 

[Bladexdsl]

didn't get a pc (486) till the late 90's so never really used them much since i had a cd rom. i did have the disc storage box with the flippable racks to organize them better though

 

[hippy dave]

The first computer we got was an Amiga 500 that used 3.5" 720k floppies for everything.

Not to be anal (he says, being anal), but Amiga floppies were 880K. They were the same kind that were 720 on PC, but the Amiga format fit more on.

I never did, but it was possible to get an HD drive for your Amiga to get 1760K on an HD disk, and eventually there were even the extra-HD drives/disks that fit 3.5MB.

 

[RedColoredStars]

These are the ones I used, that predated the mini ones pictured in the OP. You could literally cut a notch on the opposite edge to make them double sided.

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Back in my day, I and others would use floppy disk drives to save homework assignments, game roms, and so on, it was like the USB sticks of that era and really handy, too. I doubt anyone still uses since it had such little storage (1.44 megabytes), unless they'd do it for nostalgia.

I still have a bunch of them lying around because what else am I gonna do with it, throw it away? Maybe someday I'll load them up and see what I archived on them as that could be cool.

And if you're too young to know what a floppy disk is...

Who knew that we'd now have tiny memory cards that can hold 1TB+, people in the 90's and early 2000's wouldn't believe that!

I used to carry a stack of 10-20 floppies with me to school in floppy cases nearly every day. I would download game demos, mods, maps and roms at school and use WinZip to split them across multiple floppies, because I only had dialup at home and I was rarely allowed to use it.
Eventually, I discovered Kazaa, but those downloads were often tens of MBs or more, my stack of floppies were no match for them. Eventually, I got a 128 MB USB flash drive, and ditched floppies, never looking back.

 

[Hanafuda]

Used floppies, cassette tapes, and even loaded some programs with punch cards when I first started messing around with puters.

 

[The Catboy]

I was using floppies in Middle school UωU

 

[M7L7NK7]

My first experience with emulation was someone bringing a poorly translated copy of pokemon gold and no$gmb to school on floppy disk before it released outside of Japan and everyone copying it

 

[SylverReZ]

My first experience with emulation was someone bringing a poorly translated copy of pokemon gold and no$gmb to school on floppy disk before it released outside of Japan and everyone copying it

aka the 'Telefang' version

 

[emigre]

I used floppy disks. Do not miss them in the slightest.

See the same opinion attributed to VHS and cassettes. Fuck that shit.

 

[SylverReZ]

See the same opinion attributed to VHS and cassettes. Fuck that shit.

Cassettes are not bad as you might think. As long as you use a good-quality deck then it will sound amazing. Most people back then could not afford one, and many resorted to cheaper players which sounded terrible.

 

[hippy dave]

User error

 

[RHOPKINS13]

Well would you look at that, somebody 3D-printed the Save icon...

 

[SylverReZ]

User error
View attachment 430856

Fridge magnets do not de-magnetize floppy disks. Stronger magnets, such a neodymium, does damage the surface.

 

[subcon959]

I miss those days.. I still use floppies in my Amiga and ST even though one has WHDLoad and the other a Gotek.

I also listen to my mix tapes from the early 90s and they all sound great still to this day.

 

[Robert Newbie]

I remember games coming on the 8-inch floppy discs. I used the 3.5-inch ones for my projects. I worked on multiple websites in the 90's and 2000's, and 1.44 MB of space was not a lot to work with. At least HTML files were small back then.

Later on, I remember GBA flashcarts advertising tons of space, but the unit was Megabits (Mb), not Megabytes (MB). The size difference is significant.

 

[Fien]

I used them for a long time.

The first PC we had was a Pentium III with 20GB HDD around '98-'99 which didn't had a CD burner in the beginning. At some point my dad did the first reinstall and a couple of 1,44MB floppy disks was the only medium to store the data I wanted to keep before he formatted the HDD. And one floppy even became unreadable because it had writing errors leading to a blue screen which can be continued. Me and my dad at that moment didn't know what it was and just instructed me to hit the spacebar to continue...

The last time I used a floppy was past year. Running a DOS-based program for programming a bus destination sign.

I also have 2 or 3 PC's which still have a LS-120 drive, some used spare drives and about 30 discs still in foil.

Windows 10 and modern Linux still supports internal 1,44MB and LS-120 drives.

 

[subcon959]

Windows 10 and modern Linux still supports internal 1,44MB and LS-120 drives.

It's funny how even in 2024 when floppies are a distant memory, Windows is still the C: drive. You'd think it would've been promoted to A: by now.

 

[tech3475]

It's funny how even in 2024 when floppies are a distant memory, Windows is still the C: drive. You'd think it would've been promoted to A: by now.

Probably concerns over compatibility, such as some ancient hard coded software which only accepts A: and B: for FDDs or C: as the system drive. Remember that they supposedly skipped "Windows 9" because of old software.

Even if 99% of users don't need it, I'd expect some company to still be using some ancient hardware/software which requires it.

Well either that or somewhere in the corner of Redmond, one guy exists whose sole purpose is to prevent the format tool going beyond 32GB for FAT32 and the C: drive being defaulted to A:.

 

[zxr750j]

Installing Windows "Chicago" (what was going to be Windows 95) from a stack of what felt like 100 floppy discs, hoping none of them would fail...