These used to be 50 cents a piece at my high school library. What a joy it was to have a tiny simple way to transport essays (and pixel art and other fun things) to and from school and amongst all the school computers.
Relatedly, I was recently digging through the attic at my family’s home and came across a 3.5" disk containing a bunch of QBASIC programs I’d written in the early ’90s. Despite sitting for decades in a non–climate-controlled attic, it loaded up just fine when I plugged it into a USB floppy drive. Honestly, looking back at code from 30+ years ago felt more like an archaeology expedition.
Also how many other kids also went around brandishing 3.5" floppies like a weird gun, "cocking them" by pulling back the shutter and letting it go with a satisfying snap?
Now I've got a pack of old floppies that are outgassing :0
I have no other explanation.
This is an almost-full box of miscellaneous floppies in one of the original cardboard trays of 30 from Office Depot.
I've got kilos more floppies in different closets but these are good ones I selected a few years ago that all passed SCANDISK.
Now this one little box is in an old ziploc bag in the office and it keeps self-inflating. At first I thought it was unusually low barometric pressure one day but I keep squeezing out the air rain or shine and it keeps on puffing back out by itself.
Something I really didn't expect.
If I did still own my own laboratory, I'd tell you what kind of gas it was by now though ;)
A couple years ago I got a bunch of recycled low density DS/DD disks here. It was a good deal; yeah I had to clean em off a bit, and I also re-labeled them with some newer labels. But a good deal nonetheless. I approve.
This is definitely not recommended but when I was a kid we also used floppy disk films to look at solar eclipses. That was far from the most dangerous thing we did in 90s in a post-Soviet country.
To this day, when I read or think about a solar eclipse, I have a visual image of floppies! My first instinct seeing this on HN was “is this because there is a solar eclipse tomorrow?”
There’s something uniquely painful about debugging your own old code. You remember the intent, but none of the decisions that led to the implementation. It really does feel like archaeology.
Looking through their website, it seems they are not recycling them in the usual sense of the word, but reusing them. That is, they reformat and resell them at a discount (66%) that of new ones. Which is fine, I guess, if they're just laying around your house, but it's not like they're making new things with the materials which is what the word recycling usually implies.
For a brief period of time, CD ROMs were already a thing, and people still had 5.25" diskettes lying around. So someone came up with the idea to put a self-burned CD into the plastic shell of a floppy disk, and I actually found that quite cool.
In twenty years time, will there be a secondary market in random USB sticks?
I have a vast quantity of random USB sticks from clearing out my father's house, keeping them just in case something needed, nothing was. Rather than take the effort to dispose of them, I am thinking of holding on to them for the retro scene of 2050.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 4.2 ms ] threadAlso how many other kids also went around brandishing 3.5" floppies like a weird gun, "cocking them" by pulling back the shutter and letting it go with a satisfying snap?
I have no other explanation.
This is an almost-full box of miscellaneous floppies in one of the original cardboard trays of 30 from Office Depot.
I've got kilos more floppies in different closets but these are good ones I selected a few years ago that all passed SCANDISK.
Now this one little box is in an old ziploc bag in the office and it keeps self-inflating. At first I thought it was unusually low barometric pressure one day but I keep squeezing out the air rain or shine and it keeps on puffing back out by itself.
Something I really didn't expect.
If I did still own my own laboratory, I'd tell you what kind of gas it was by now though ;)
What a time to be alive.
To this day, when I read or think about a solar eclipse, I have a visual image of floppies! My first instinct seeing this on HN was “is this because there is a solar eclipse tomorrow?”
Interestingly most buyers didn't care about HD, DD etc. I suspect they went into art projects.
Also: wow, this shop still has 8" floppy disks!
I have a vast quantity of random USB sticks from clearing out my father's house, keeping them just in case something needed, nothing was. Rather than take the effort to dispose of them, I am thinking of holding on to them for the retro scene of 2050.