Who remembers what a floppy disk is?

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8 inch floppies had a plastic cover to make them easy to handle.
As the floppy disks got smaller they also increased the storage capacity.

I remember typing things at school and then putting them on a floppy disk to take home and work on. Life was simpler back then.

Yes, I used floppy disks on Apple IIes that my middle school had. Somewhere I still have a copy of Taipan and Oregon Trail on floppy disks. Those were computer games coded in Basic for those who do not know about them. I figured out an easy win strategy on Taipan that almost guaranteed a high score every time.

I have both an Apple II and an original Macintosh computer in my technology stash. They were giveaways from garage sales when they became obsolete. People literally gave them to me to dispose of, along will all of their attachments. Same with old video gaming systems, they all went into storage. That was way before the days of eBay. I miss those times.

I only ever saw the 3.5 inch floppy discs.

I also watched the sizes go down and data density go up, starting with 8 inch floppies. I still have quite a few 3.5 floppies (boxes of them) and a working 3.5 drive.

I saw a meme where two kids are holding a 3.5 floppy, and one of them says "Cool! Someone 3D printed the save icon!"

I remember the cassette tapes before floppy discs. Guess I m officially old

I remember using an Apple IIe at school, with 5" floppies.

I remember loading games and computer programs from cassette tapes. That was before floppy disks.

The Radio Shack TRS-80 used cassette tapes. It was released in 1977. It was hugely popular.

The Digital Equipment Corporation sold the popular PDP-11 computers.
Its OS RT-11 which supports 8 inch disks goes back to 1973.
I learned how to use assembly language using an PDP-11 computer.

I once wrote assembly code (Z80) to drive and retrieve data from archived 8" floppies, using my own circuit built on a wire-wrapped board.
The disks are about the size of a dinner plate, all for a few 100kB storage, and the drives were built like tanks -



8-inch, 5¼-inch (full height), and 3½-inch drives -

3.5 inch floppies were still in use when I arrived at University, and I rather liked them. A couple of years later, everyone started switching over to CD-RW for data storage, and those were bloody awful. Literally 1% as reliable as the trusty old floppies - they'd turn into useless junk while reading, recording or even sitting on the shelf. So I hung on to the older medium for as long as possible, even getting hold of a drive ripped from an old tower PC that I could plug into my first laptop.

I miss physical media. There was something about knowing where your files were physically. Now there's no telling, especially if its in cloud storage.

I guess that's why they haven't updated the icon. 'Saving' is such an abstract concept now, I don't know how you'd go about summing it up in an icon.

I remember them. I used to wonder why they were called floppy discs when they were square and not really floppy.

Yes, I know I'm old and worthless, and therefore I should be euthanized. Nobody cares about old people, they only care about the younglings' mental health and well being.

The origional ones that I used were very floppy! Quite easily damaged as well, but only 10p each.

Yeah. I was a late adopter. Never saw an actual floppy "floppy" disk. I only handled them (for both home and for college class on film editing) when they were already stiff blue squares with that metal plate in the middle. And only ever used the 3.5 inch. Never handled the five inch. Then came the CD ROMs (a huge improvement). Then one day I was fooling around with CD ROMs in a Kinkos copier place when this Mexican looking guy starred at me with a look of pity in his eye like I was a crippled village idiot...and he told me to get with it by getting myself a thumb drive. So I did that ...and never went back to any kinda disk. Except for music. I still burn music CDs for myself now and again.

I remember seeing floppy disks when I was little. My parents had a few of them for our original computer (which did not have Internet access).