I grew up in the late 90s, so by the time I ever really got to use a computer, Floppy Disks were already pretty well out of fashion. For anybody else who “grew up” in the 90s, did you actually enjoy using them? We’re they always an inconvenience or did they have some magic to them?
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Back then, it was the easiest way to transfer or store files. USB drives didn’t exist yet. Burning to a CD was more mainstream at the tail end of the '90s. Zip drives didn’t show up until mid '90s and they were still kind of rare not everyone had a zip drive. And network transfers were basically out of the question. Myself my first PC had a 33.6 modem! And I knew a bunch of people that had a 14.4 modem! There were no cloud options as that just did not exist yet.
But pretty much everything had a floppy drive. Are they were also quickly abandoned because didn’t have a lot for storage. And most floppy discs were made with very cheap materials so they broke very easily.
I was a kid in the 80s, and had a Commodore 64, with a floppy dirve. These were 5.25" (or “five and a quarter inch”) floppy discs… They were somewhat durable, you could write to both sides of the floppy, and they were (relative to tape drives) fast. Interesting note for those who werent around to experience these… the difference between a double sided disk, and a single sided disk, was a notch on the left side of the disk. You could double side a single sided disk with a hole punch.
When 3.5" disks came about, I thought they were amazing… However, I was also a broke ass kid, and didnt actually get a pc until the early 90s… By that time HDD storage was much cheaper, and cd roms were starting to make their way onto the scene. My personal preference for mass portable storage was never the CD, because I felt like the writing software was always finicky, the 10000000 types of discs were a pain to decipher, and because I loved the ease and durability of a now forgotten device… the iomega zip drive. (RIP) But the cd’s were much cheaper to produce, and iomega went the way of the dodo.
Sorry if I got off track, and danced around both sides of the timeline for the 3.5’ers. I figure you were aware of the 5.25s, and the storeage after it… please dont read that as being condescending. It just triggered old memories, and I thought I would share, and you might find it interesting! In my timeline of computing, the 3.5 was significant, but less so that the 5.25… this is because the 5.25s were something I needed to play every game, every time I wanted to play it. So I would use it everytime I played a game. Sometimes several times if the game spanned many discs… (for example, ultima 4 used two disks, and both sides of each disk. So if you entered an area it might ask you to insert the “dungeon disk, side b”, etc.) By the time I got a pc, the 3.5s were something you used to install a game to a HDD… so handling the disk was pretty much only at install.
Actually I’m pretty ignorant of floppy disks lol Like I said, I didn’t ever really use them and my dad works in engineering so they were always on the cutting edge of storage devices and he didn’t keep many floppies when CDs became more popular. It’s cool to learn about this stuff that I like JUST missed out on.
well, in the grand scheme of things, all of those modes of storage came and went relatively quickly, and the internet almost completely outmoded the need for portable tech…for more static usage, even HDDs are being replaced by SSDs… and all companies want to us to migrate even that to the cloud, to more centralize and profit from that.
well, in the grand scheme of things, all of those modes of storage came and went relatively quickly, and the internet almost completely outmoded the need for portable tech…for more static usage, even HDDs are being replaced by SSDs… and all companies want to us to migrate even that to the cloud, to more centralize and profit from that.
Oh 5.25" floppies. That takes me back to my Apple IIGS days. We even had the optional external drive so we had 2 drives.
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I had a library of 3.5 floppys, so not the giant actual floppy disks, but the tiny hard ones. They were magical. Everything about computing felt different in the 90s, because everything was more rare and special. I got my first computer in 95, and my dad made sure it was a beast. It had such a large hard drive, it could store TWO games, as well as an operating system! So, the floppies were part of the ritual. If I wanted to play a game not installed, I would delete one of the games, gather the multiple floppies that stored the other game, and go through the installation process. It built up anticipation for the game and gave you time to think. Thinking back, you had more time to think back then… all that being said, you had to treat the floppies with reverence. If you lost floppy 5 of 11, you’re program was done.
Oh! And on the other side of things, being able to work at something at home, then bring it into school on a floppy was novel, but most of the time I would just print out whatever I was working on. Printing out stuff was the expected end goal back then.
Those 3½ floppys also had that metal protector on them that made a satisfying SHHHHTICK sound when you pulled them back and released it
So much fun to fiddle with!
Yeah, having to keep so many floppies for 1 thing (like games) always seemed like such a pain. That’s the part of this post I was most interested in hearing about - if it was really as big a pain as I thought it would be lol
You kinda worked around it, at least my family did. You would keep them all together in a disk holder or something. I don’t really recall losing any like that, until the 2000s, when they weren’t in use any more.
3.5" floppies are not “hard”, they are defined by the disk inside where the 3.5" are still a flexible disk. I would buy the multi color pack made by 3M so I could have different things on different colors. OS on blue for example. Removable storage today I miss creating labels either by printing or coloring with markers, etc.
Yes, they were magical. Computers in general were magical. When they released 3.5" floppies to replace the 5.25" floppies they seemed so elegant and futuristic. I loved that you could save reports and stuff on a floppy and take it with you for use on any other computer. Of course when thumb drives came out they made floppies largely obsolete, but the thumb drives were even more magical. I paid $65 in college for a 64MB thumb drive that glowed blue when you plugged it in, and I felt like I was living in the future. That was $65 when the minimum wage was $4.25 an hour, so it was very expensive.