Who remembers what a floppy disk is?

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I had the game SimCity 2000 back in the day on a floppy disk.

I had Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 for Workgroups on floppies.

Me. Had to use them for computer studies in school where we either had BBC Micros or Commodore Pets. The Commodore Pet was slightly older so only had gree writing o the screens. BBC had colour.
The discs were extremely fragile and only protected by thin card. The good thing is that they were only 10p each which is about £1 (1 dollar?) each today.
Floopy discs had gone by the mid 90's came around as they were replaced by discs with a plastic surround which were not floppy at all! Floppy disks were as floppy as polythene or thin paper is without their thin card cover. Evsn with the thin card cover we had to keep them in something as if one had a hard pencil case or a flask in ones bag and put the disk inside a page of ones book and it slid out, it was almost certain to damage even in its card!
Most people think of the solid discs that came after them and wrongly called them floppy discs where they wefe not floppy at all!
Floppy discs were used in the days before the internet and the amount one could store on them was probably less than one could store on a cassette tape. Floopy discs were preferred as unlike cassettes which took half an hour to load, floppy discs were quick! Very quick compared to what we had been used to. Cassettes!

^ MG, they're still floppy disks whether they use the 5.25" or 3.5" form factor. It's the disk inside that's floppy, as opposed to the rigid platters in a hard disk.

They were bigger then that I think. Had to look it up. 8 inch. I knew they were larger!

The 5 inch and the 3.5 inch are modern (1990's) and far more rigid than the old types as I remember being impressed with how they had made them more durable.
We use the 5 inch in my Mums computer and my brother added a 3.5 inch but we never had any of them. The larger 8 inch types were MUCH floppier. The 5" are pretty rigid in comparisson.
What do they use today?

Last edited by Mountain Goat on 25 Nov 2023, 5:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I never used floppy discs apart from demonstratively in IT class during high school. Also, my father owned a lot of them for work purposes.

The 3.5" ones are the only ones that are really rigid, the 5" ones are flexible, like a plastic envelope around the disk.

Nowadays USB thumb drives and flash cards are the main portable storage. Zip disks were a thing for awhile, but they didn't last long.

I remember what a floppy disk is. I used one in high school.

When I learnt computers in high school we had to fill in flow charts with pencil, using cards made of cardstock.

Then we got those long printed responses with perforated accordion pages.

Floppy disks were an upgrade.

I used them for most of my career.

We had a computer that used them and our windows 3.1 had it and a disc drive too. We also used these hard small floppy disc's in high school and they were used to save school work on.

As a PhD student and as a young postdoc I used to use them to carry files from A to B.

I had a scare with them a few times when I thought that I had corrupted the contents while typing things like my thesis and reports.

I have not used them for years and my stash of them are just gathering dust, most modern computers do not have a floppy disk drive and optical drives are becoming uncommon.

At university I had to use both 8 inch floppy disks and Hollerith cards!
The new Dean threw a fit when he discovered that Hollerith cards were still being used!

Yes, but the older larger ones were very floppy as had no plastic surround.

I realize why they made them tougher, but why did they make them smaller?

Any kind of electronic device or equipment being made smaller is often seen as an improvement in terms of convenience for carrying around or storing etc. - whether a real improvement or not.

I'd guess because technological advances allowed them to get the same capacity on a physically smaller disc.

My first 8 bit micro used a weird 3-inch disc format. It was amazing compared with the loading times my friends endured with their tape decks but it was really hard to find the discs to buy.

I have fond memories of installing early windows from a stack of 3.5 inch floppy discs.

It's only a matter of (not much) time before this becomes meaningless - or should it be kept as a legacy icon, always meaning "save" even though the device represented hasn't been used in years?