I bet there was at least one case of "oh shit my assignment isn't ready, maybe I can buy some extra time using the old staple through the data trick, only get to use that once maybe twice per teacher".
I had to use floppies to bring my programming assignments to university in early 2000s. They were so unreliable, I had a rule to copy every assignment on at least 3 drives.
I've asked them many times to setup an FTP, so students would not have to struggle, but they would not listen.
I remember taking my first GIS course and having to buy ZIP discs for each project around that time. That ended up being an expensive class.
Also, the lab PCs re-imaged every time they shut down, so if the PC crashed you had no way to recover the data if you hadn't written it to the zip drive, which we usually only did at the end of the day because they were slow.
We basically had a revolt to get the university to unlock the USB ports for us to use those fancy new flash drives the next year.
That's funny yet odd. I use floppy disk still to this day for my 200aml cnc plasma table. It's the easiest method to load the gcode on. The rs232 is to much of a p.i.a.
I used to have an issue when I used a USB floppy drive into my laptop. I ended up finding a pc with a dedicated floppy drive since then. I've had zero issues. Wich is also more surprising that floppy disks even work around the big ass high voltage transformer for the plasma power source. The big servo motor drives and the welders in the shop.
Less chance of dust and debris falling between the shutter and the rest of the disk. Plus, that was just naturally the top of the device when you pick it up. It's easier ergonomics to pick the floppy up from the sides and feed the top into the drive. Also the shutter did stick up a little bit, so if you placed them shutter down they can wobble and buzz in the container with slight vibrations (like say, from a computer sitting next to them). Bottom down makes it more likely that the shutter will get damaged or scoop material into the disk when moving them.
I remember downloading games from sketchy Warez sites on the school computers because they had a T1 line and I had dialup. They'd come in Floppy-sized segments; I'd go home each day with a stack of 10-15 floppies, copy the segment to my drive, delete it from the disk, and go back the next day to collect more. It would take weeks to get a whole game, and that's only if the warez site didn't disappear before I finished collecting parts. Then there was the butt clencher moment when I'd try to unpack the whole thing and see if it actually worked or not which, most of the time, it did not.
We've already got the technology to remake them as SSDs too. SATA drives are small and light enough, and eSATA is removable, possibly hot swappable. We've been able to eject optical discs with software for decades. A physically small drive inside a floppy shaped caddy wouldn't take much work, and could be much faster than flash memory based drives.
I don't know enough about nvme drives, but they could be even better again :)
I recall a Win95 installation involving on the order of 20 diskettes.
I never purchased or manually installed MicroSlop Office prior to the advent of fully administrated local area networks, so from such specific pain I was spared
I already had my first CD-ROM drive (so futuristic!) when 95 came out. But I did install Office on Win3.1 from floppies. Soon after that I switched to OpenOffice and haven't used commercial software (other than the Windows that came with the PC) ever since.
I could be wrong, but I think I bought (or rather, my parents bought) my first CD-ROM drive for installing Windows 95. I think that might have been the very first disc I put in the drive.
One bad disk or error on your part going through an 8 disk install… yeah. But we went from tape drives to 5 1/4” to 3 1/2” to the phenomenal speeds of a 32x CDRW drive. Nothing beat a CD install. I don’t even bat an eye at 30GB game update download anymore, you could fit an amazing game on 1-4 CDs and watching it install was more exciting than waiting for these massive game DLs we have today.
I think Slackware dwarfed even Office on floppy count, but it may have depended on which modules you needed.
I've had the pleasure of installing Windows 95 and Slackware from floppy and I can't say I miss that part.
I also have a box just like the one in the picture sitting in my drawer right now. With floppies. One of them has Netscape on it. I really should clean some day.
While I disagree for the most part, that's just me being super cynical because of how super shitty things are right now. Also, I feel like there was a vanishing small window of time that MS Office way the go to suite and you didn't use a CD for installation. My copy of Office 97 came on CD and Word Perfect was still very popular then.
Locks are not made for criminals, locks are made for occasionals after all, 99% of locks are very easy to break in and the 1% is a nightmare even for the owner
Just like CD cases. Here in the UK you were allowed to return CD's if wasn't opened (like most items really). They put thick shiny security stickers on them. We used to buy CD's, open the cases from the hinges, burn them to my PC then return it for a full refund.
Why the hell are the floppies in the bin with the label-side down? Nobody used these with the shutter-side up. How're you going to read the missing label when they're upside down?
I think this is a showcase photo for the case and the flipppies look better amd more like generic floppy disk with the metal slider on the top. It clearly communicates the purpose of the item, and the keys are in to show that it locks with a key and there's 1 spare key.
Because those little metal things stick together and could ruin the disk when you accidentally snag it. This way, you could see how they are against each other and not snag them.
Spent some time imaging a bunch of floppies from my late father last summer, and I noticed that on every single 3.5" floppy box, the keys were the same. The locks had same bitting.
...also just noticed that the single 5.25" floppy box (of Commodore 64 floppies) I have at hand that even has a lock is currently unlocked. And the key is at my parents' place. ...have to check if the key is the same as the rest when I visit the next time.
Also if you took the key out, it wouldn't have started.
Actually, I guess it depended on what kind of key it was, some cases had locks for opening them, others had the locks wired into the mobo and it wouldn't start unless the key shorted the connection. Or you could open it up and hot wire the computer lol.
after paying for an upgrade to nt, some win$lop messed up date strings and the parts department freaked out and called the police to dust keyboard for prints. i ridiculed those clowns for months
Floppys were the ultimate in security because if you looked at them wrong they become corrupted.
Stop sticking them to your fridge with a magnet
Stapling 5¼" disks to reports was another whoopsie.
Or using a binder clip on 3.5" disks. Lost count how many times I saw that shit.
I always thought that was legend.
If the staple is near the corner it's perfectly fine, the disc itself is round in a square sleeve. So the corners have nothing in them
One person downvoted... "Don't you DARE put a staple through a floppy disk!" Lmao
I bet there was at least one case of "oh shit my assignment isn't ready, maybe I can buy some extra time using the old staple through the data trick, only get to use that once maybe twice per teacher".
But that's how mom shows off my rust codebase! :(
But the slide is so fun to fiddle with! Click clack click clack, why doesn't Commander Keen run anymore!?!
TBH I fidgeted with those slides a lot and don't recall fucking my shit up.
Same; amazing stim toys.
I had to use floppies to bring my programming assignments to university in early 2000s. They were so unreliable, I had a rule to copy every assignment on at least 3 drives. I've asked them many times to setup an FTP, so students would not have to struggle, but they would not listen.
I remember taking my first GIS course and having to buy ZIP discs for each project around that time. That ended up being an expensive class.
Also, the lab PCs re-imaged every time they shut down, so if the PC crashed you had no way to recover the data if you hadn't written it to the zip drive, which we usually only did at the end of the day because they were slow.
We basically had a revolt to get the university to unlock the USB ports for us to use those fancy new flash drives the next year.
That's funny yet odd. I use floppy disk still to this day for my 200aml cnc plasma table. It's the easiest method to load the gcode on. The rs232 is to much of a p.i.a. I used to have an issue when I used a USB floppy drive into my laptop. I ended up finding a pc with a dedicated floppy drive since then. I've had zero issues. Wich is also more surprising that floppy disks even work around the big ass high voltage transformer for the plasma power source. The big servo motor drives and the welders in the shop.
Bad CRC for the win!
You must have started using them at the tail end of their life when stuff got cheaper including the drives.
Back when shit made sense. OneDrive, eat your heart out
What kind of sense is there in storing your floppies with the shutter at the top?
It was the way of The Ancestors.
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me! I was there when it was written!
the seals weren't that good so storing them facing down for long periods of time made them prone to data leaks.
What? You want to stair at some indistinguishable grey rectangle instead of this cool mechanical flap?
There were supposed to be labels on them. That was half the fun if opening a new floppy. And a solid third of them would have been erased AOL disks.
Less chance of dust and debris falling between the shutter and the rest of the disk. Plus, that was just naturally the top of the device when you pick it up. It's easier ergonomics to pick the floppy up from the sides and feed the top into the drive. Also the shutter did stick up a little bit, so if you placed them shutter down they can wobble and buzz in the container with slight vibrations (like say, from a computer sitting next to them). Bottom down makes it more likely that the shutter will get damaged or scoop material into the disk when moving them.
We also just kinda did it that way.
Service accounts and RBAC has taken you for an absolute fool!
Service accounts? You mean service principals and managed identities
For some reason I have never seen one of those where the spare key was not attached to the primary key 🤔
That's because all of the other instances had the keys get lost and the owners had to break them open and buy new diskette cases.
You mean to tell me if you lost the keys you could just break them open? I threw away countless locked cases full of diskettes.
Break them open? You mean you actually locked the dust cover?
I just threw the keys away.
Break it? You.could just push the hook from below and the whole lock rotated.
A year’s supply of save icons.
Mate, don’t give them ideas. The enshittifiers literally will implement “save tokens” into an app as soon as it occurs to them.
They already monetized it into subscription and cloud stuff.
Yeah but they can always limit that subscription to a certain number of saves
In the 90s, that would have been a single copy of photoshop.
If you've ever installed Microsoft office from floppy disks, you don't what those times back.
I remember downloading games from sketchy Warez sites on the school computers because they had a T1 line and I had dialup. They'd come in Floppy-sized segments; I'd go home each day with a stack of 10-15 floppies, copy the segment to my drive, delete it from the disk, and go back the next day to collect more. It would take weeks to get a whole game, and that's only if the warez site didn't disappear before I finished collecting parts. Then there was the butt clencher moment when I'd try to unpack the whole thing and see if it actually worked or not which, most of the time, it did not.
Those were the days.
CRC ERROR. CHECK ARCHIVE AND TRY AGAIN.
ah man I remember unzipping 50 part rar files only to find another 50 part zip files inside. All because of some IRC file size limit or something.
I bought a first gen zip drive for home because the school had one PC with one and I wanted to avoid the floppy fest lmao.
The only thing i want back from floppy disks is the form factor
We've already got the technology to remake them as SSDs too. SATA drives are small and light enough, and eSATA is removable, possibly hot swappable. We've been able to eject optical discs with software for decades. A physically small drive inside a floppy shaped caddy wouldn't take much work, and could be much faster than flash memory based drives.
I don't know enough about nvme drives, but they could be even better again :)
NVME drives are already very thin, probably you can remove the shell and put them inside a floppy one...i want a floppy SSD so bad now
I recently bought 20 floppies from diskduper and man they are fun to hold, very tactile. Much lighter than I remembered too.
Ugh, never. But installing the OS ... also ugh
Windows 3.1 was only about 10 floppies with DOS being about four. But Office was about 40.
I recall a Win95 installation involving on the order of 20 diskettes.
I never purchased or manually installed MicroSlop Office prior to the advent of fully administrated local area networks, so from such specific pain I was spared
I already had my first CD-ROM drive (so futuristic!) when 95 came out. But I did install Office on Win3.1 from floppies. Soon after that I switched to OpenOffice and haven't used commercial software (other than the Windows that came with the PC) ever since.
I could be wrong, but I think I bought (or rather, my parents bought) my first CD-ROM drive for installing Windows 95. I think that might have been the very first disc I put in the drive.
I had the CD-ROM drive running with 3.1. But they only really became mainstream after 95 came out.
One bad disk or error on your part going through an 8 disk install… yeah. But we went from tape drives to 5 1/4” to 3 1/2” to the phenomenal speeds of a 32x CDRW drive. Nothing beat a CD install. I don’t even bat an eye at 30GB game update download anymore, you could fit an amazing game on 1-4 CDs and watching it install was more exciting than waiting for these massive game DLs we have today.
I remember installing Half-life 2 off of 5 CDs, while wondering what the fuck this "Steam" shit was and why I needed it in order to play.
I think Slackware dwarfed even Office on floppy count, but it may have depended on which modules you needed.
I've had the pleasure of installing Windows 95 and Slackware from floppy and I can't say I miss that part.
I also have a box just like the one in the picture sitting in my drawer right now. With floppies. One of them has Netscape on it. I really should clean some day.
I remember getting an error on the 8th disk and crying with a bricked system
While I disagree for the most part, that's just me being super cynical because of how super shitty things are right now. Also, I feel like there was a vanishing small window of time that MS Office way the go to suite and you didn't use a CD for installation. My copy of Office 97 came on CD and Word Perfect was still very popular then.
Its funny cause you could pinch the back and lift the lid off of its hinges
Like bike locks. Very easy to circumvent, but just enough of a hurdle to deter most casual crimes of opportunity.
There are good/better bike locks though.
An angle grinder doesn't care. Just throw on a high visibility vest and carry a clipboard and no one will question you.
Exactly, once in my city they robbed an house but no one even noticed because they were dressed as workers from a moving company
Locks are to stop honest people.
Locks are not made for criminals, locks are made for occasionals after all, 99% of locks are very easy to break in and the 1% is a nightmare even for the owner
Most padlocks can be opened by hitting them a few times.
Just like CD cases. Here in the UK you were allowed to return CD's if wasn't opened (like most items really). They put thick shiny security stickers on them. We used to buy CD's, open the cases from the hinges, burn them to my PC then return it for a full refund.
Not on the better ones you couldn't, but you could trivially pick with with paper clips.
In the 1990s in the US we put our SSNs on our checks.
And as my first college ID. And on at least one of my licenses, I think...
Why lock them in a case when you could just slide the plastic square to lock the disc? Security was built right in
Sometimes it's about not wanting it stolen physically.
But then again this whole box is small enough to just carry off so I dunno.
At the same time these were in vogue, you also could require a key to start the PC itself.
Fine, I'll do it:
Why the hell are the floppies in the bin with the label-side down? Nobody used these with the shutter-side up. How're you going to read the missing label when they're upside down?
I think this is a showcase photo for the case and the flipppies look better amd more like generic floppy disk with the metal slider on the top. It clearly communicates the purpose of the item, and the keys are in to show that it locks with a key and there's 1 spare key.
Because those little metal things stick together and could ruin the disk when you accidentally snag it. This way, you could see how they are against each other and not snag them.
And just have to pull all of them out to get the right one, right?
You'd browse through them like a rolodex. The disks can tilt forward in the box to make that easier.
That really depended on how full it was, yeah?
As long as you don't go over the max, it works.
Color code to narrow it down
Just checking.... color code on the labels? The labels that are on the bottom?
I remember my dad getting a pack of colored floppies and (~)11-year-old me being estatic at the cool colors.
Dafuq you on about this is the correct orientation.
Edit: After doing some research I may be outvoted. Huh.
Good question, could just be slop.
Who else can smell this picture?
Still more secure than Flock's shit.
Also I had one of those... The plastic... The color...
When I was in high school we could buy floppy disks from the vending machine
That's so cool
What kind of psychopath stored their floppies upside down like this?
UpperEndian format, clearly.
The same people who wrote the data backwards.
Spent some time imaging a bunch of floppies from my late father last summer, and I noticed that on every single 3.5" floppy box, the keys were the same. The locks had same bitting.
...also just noticed that the single 5.25" floppy box (of Commodore 64 floppies) I have at hand that even has a lock is currently unlocked. And the key is at my parents' place. ...have to check if the key is the same as the rest when I visit the next time.
As a kid I figured out most of those tubular key locks that were used to disable the keyboard/power/HDD all used the same key too.
I was able to unlock those with a letter opener.
hackerman.jpg
I have one still from my childhood and I never had a key. The lid flexes enough to bypass the lock.
Display of wealth, 90s style
gotta leave the key in the tower too so i could pretend to start it and drive it as a kid using my dads computer.
Also if you took the key out, it wouldn't have started.
Actually, I guess it depended on what kind of key it was, some cases had locks for opening them, others had the locks wired into the mobo and it wouldn't start unless the key shorted the connection. Or you could open it up and hot wire the computer lol.
Checkmate hackers.
And you could open it with a spoon.
Safe and secure. Just like our digital lives today!
I swear we had this exact box by our home PC. The key was never removed from the lock.
We definitely had this one too, Commander Keen was almost always at the front because of me.
I have one upstairs. In bed now, and not taking a photo of it. I might do it tomorrow, if I remember. Good night.
I lied. I have two!
One really strong magnetic and all info will be lost.
after paying for an upgrade to nt, some win$lop messed up date strings and the parts department freaked out and called the police to dust keyboard for prints. i ridiculed those clowns for months
Well, to be fair, that's a hell of an air gap. And those things were very safe, not even the Lockpicking Lawyer can open those.
Why... why... why are the disks upside down?