Who remembers what a floppy disk is?

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To me there is nothing quite like booting a vintage computer and using a floppy. The machanical sounds and the active light are just a treat. Especially with the fact that a lot of the 5.25 drives are well over 30 or more years Old. You stick the disk in, close the door, access it on the computer and listen to the read write head loudly move back and fourth while the disk whirles.

It's like, it works, it's supposed to work of course, but all of the things that needed to happen, happen. And it's just a magical moment when, after 10 to 20 seconds of anticipation, a response appears on the screen.

The 3.5 disks, especially the old mac computers felt extremely responsive from the moment you pushed if in. Kur-chunk. And then this soft robotic sound of the read write head.

Idk. I feel like the old computers, while did a lot less, delivered a lot more. Yes, i know im romanticzing it, but It still feels ridiculously impressive for what it is. Does anyone else kind of get where I'm coming from?

i had many programs on floppy. i miss them. my first audio program [sound forge 1.0] was on a 5" floppy which was truly floppy.

Auntblabby do you know what system that was for? Was it dos or a different system?

windows 3.1, as i recall. this was in 1993. 30 years ago. it ran on a 486sx system, slowly but reliably.

That's cool! What were you using it for? Was it for personal use or did you do professional work on it?

initially it was for basic audio restoration of defective audio from phonograph recordings with excessive crackle/loud clicks and pops, i used it to individually remove or mute [depending on case] each offending impulsive disturbance/click/pop/crackle sound. it was a tedious job, taking caffeine-assisted all-nighters for me to do just one 3-4 minute track contaminated with hundreds of discrete clicks/pops. each operation took about one minute to complete via manual scanning and scrolling through miles of waveform. it took me weeks to do one album that way. when semi-automated declickers/decracklers came along a few years later that was a godsend. i have done occasional paying gigs with my setup as it was then and now.

Yes of course, I remember the 5.25 disks and the later 3.5s

I very much do!

I still remember the last time I used one was in 2007, and that was very late. My PC had a malfunctioning USB drive so I couldn't use USB storage sticks (or whatever they're called) to transfer data to someone, so I brought in a floppy disk for a class project I was doing with someone else. xD I can't remember her reaction.

Hard to believe that they were long out of style by 2007, and 2007 has now been like 17 years ago!

College - 1994 OMG

i do miss those days, there was a je ne sais quoi about it, the magical ritualistic whirring and clunking, then the "TA DAAA!" sound of dos/windows booting. something about that boxy CRT monitor glowing green.

When I got into PCs, 3.5 inch floppy disks were common, 5.25 inch floppy disks were pretty much phased out for personal use, and 8 inch floppy disks were all but forgotten. I had around 30 floppy disks with programs on them. I had sheets of floppy disk labels that I could run through my printer, and I'd design labels for each floppy disk. I stored the floppy disks alphabetically in a floppy disk storage box.

I too miss those days.

i had several hundred floppies in several boxes, due to space limitations and obsolescence [puters not using the things anymore] i hadda donate them to Goodwill ages ago. wish i coulda kept 'em.

I used floppy discs on a late 1980s BBC Master 128, I think they were 5.25 inch ones operating from an external drive. No longer possess the computer, the drive or the discs.

I remember using Floppy Disks for some of my elementary school assignments involving Microsoft Word which was way back in the late 90s to early 2000s. Although I didn't think too much of it back then, it is interesting now to think that my classmates and I got to use Floppy Disks at the time they were dying. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the Floppy Disks anymore, but maybe one day if I develop the interest, I'll search for the disks and get an external Floppy Disk Reader, and extract the files just to look back, and maybe even cringe at some of the stuff I wrote back then.

I remember floppy disk, I used them in high school when I took computer classes. My mom used to own a preschool, she had computers, she used floppy disk, this was the 80s, I miss that decade. When I had a desktop computer, I used floppy disk all the time in the 90s. I put pictures on there.

I'm in a very weird position where my first computer had a 3.5 inch floppy drive and we had a container with like 20 or so blank floppies by the PC (along with a stack of blank CD-RWs) but I've never actually used a floppy disk for anything.

Probably because we're talking like late 2001, early 2002 and I was 5 years old at the time and it's not like a 5 year old would have anything to do that would require me to use a floppy disk. (And don't say 'What about doing a project at home on the computer and bringing in to school?' The computers at school at the time were the original Bondi Blue iMac G3s, they didn't have floppy drives)