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Armchair General

Floppy-tastic.

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Probably all to my dad. He still buys them because he is a backwards old man. He recently complained that the floppy that he used to back up this years tax forms went bad, but thinks backing things up on more sensible and new data forms is unreliable.

He has been known to make a CD-R now and then, but will never go without his trusty floppies. Because of this he also insists to install a floppy drive in any new PC I get.

I guess it's convenient for me now because I'm such a lazy ass that when I buy old software off of Ebay, I just download the game from abandonware sites instead of taking the time to actually check and see if I could get a legit floppy rip of my game. Sometimes the abandonware files don't work and I've been saved by having a way to read off the real game floppy. I doubt most of them still work though.

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I've heard that there are plenty of machines and electronical devices in the industry which still rely on floppy disc to exchange data or to update the firmware. And as industrial devices usually stay in operation for several years or even decades the market for seemingly out-dated technology remains.

They are also still common in second and third-world countries.

I personally got rid of the floppy drive in my desktop pc about five or six years ago. USB memory devices rendered the floppy disc obsolete.

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I used to look after my precious Doom disks...I think it fitted on 3 or 5, zipped up, with the 'span volumes' flag.

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Somewhere in my closet is a box with about 12-16 of them with The Sims 1 Furniture on it... Yeah.

And a couple more with 7th grade AIM conversations.

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Somewhere in my closet is a box with about 12-16 of them with The Sims 1 Furniture on it... Yeah.

And a couple more with 7th grade AIM conversations.

I bet you would be scared to read the latter, I know I would be.

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I have a few boxes of them. Most of them are probably bad.

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I remember that when I was in school they wouldn't let you bring cds or usb drives for turning in assignments, but they would let you bring floppies. That was odd.

I used to have a bunch that I never use but for some reason they mysteriously disappear.

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I remember that when I was in school they wouldn't let you bring cds or usb drives for turning in assignments, but they would let you bring floppies. That was odd.

I used to have a bunch that I never use but for some reason they mysteriously disappear.

You know what's funny is how these things have outlived the ZIP drive. Remember those finicky pieces of junk. I was going through a graphic design degree when those became popular, about 1997. We were required to use those for everything, and people who didn't understand disk drives at all would leave them mounted and work off of them. I swear, someone was crying about losing one of those suckers at least once a week.

And today I can store the contents of 1,422 floppy disks on a Micro SD card that's the size of my littlest fingernail. Insane.

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There are really short songs that will fit in mp3 format.

I went to an all-day concert run by some small music label/collective/thing one time, and they had a couple of floppy disks by their bands available for sale, which I obviously bought, because who wouldn't buy music on a floppy disk?

If I were a musician I would definitely put out music exclusively on obsolete formats, like floppy disks and minidisks and betamax video tapes and those pre-record cylindrical things and dictaphone tapes and answerphone tapes (which might be the same thing for all I know) AND SO ON.

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I went to an all-day concert run by some small music label/collective/thing one time, and they had a couple of floppy disks by their bands available for sale, which I obviously bought, because who wouldn't buy music on a floppy disk?

If I were a musician I would definitely put out music exclusively on obsolete formats, like floppy disks and minidisks and betamax video tapes and those pre-record cylindrical things and dictaphone tapes and answerphone tapes (which might be the same thing for all I know) AND SO ON.

So were these like an album's worth of songs of music files compressed to 150kb each?

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No, they were more like singles. From what I remember, they have heavily-compressed MP3s on them, plus some odds and ends, which included stuff you like expect, like a JPEG or two, and stuff you wouldn't, like a Word document that, if I remember correctly, looked like it was someone's school project or something. Perhaps they didn't wipe the disk before putting the other stuff on, or perhaps they were being hilarious. I don't have a floppy drive in my current computer, anyway, so this is all from memory. It was only a couple of years ago, though.

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Actually I remember taking peoples lost floppies from the computer lab in high school and loading them up the word documents inside at home just because I liked reading people's badly written reports on things. Always good for a laugh.

Is that evil of me? I figured no one wanted their badly written reports.

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13. I put handles on them and sell them as spatulas. I sell thousands of them a year.

Stan Russell, Squatney, Delaware - USA

What in hell?!

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!!! I want one. I'd almost prefer it to have a sharper edge... but oh man. I love home decorating crap like this. This is now on my ever-growing list of DIY's...

Edit: I also really really like all the people who use them for decoration/art and still have files in them... There's something kind of cool about having something contained in them but used in a construction of something... If that makes sense (I'm not articulate, at all, argh).

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Edit: I also really really like all the people who use them for decoration/art and still have files in them... There's something kind of cool about having something contained in them but used in a construction of something... If that makes sense (I'm not articulate, at all, argh).

I think it makes sense, but I would feel inclined to pick apart the decoration just to look at the files inside. I think I just like snooping in people's stuff. I've been kicked off friend's computers before for that...

I would probably enjoy the floppy disk decoration or art more after I knew what was on each floppy.

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I think I just like snooping in people's stuff. I've been kicked off friend's computers before for that...

Look hard enough and you will eventually find embarrassing jpegs of your mom. :yep::getmecoat

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You know what's funny is how these things have outlived the ZIP drive. Remember those finicky pieces of junk.

Oh yeah, I remember those from school. I remember the ticking noise as well, when a disk got corrupted. :yep:

But at home we used a Iomega JAZ drive, though. I still have few of those disks lying around. They're quite bulky and heavy (much bigger than a ZIP disk), and can store 1 GB of data. That was a LOT in 1995. I liked the futuristic look of the disk back then.

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Oh gawd the click of death!! I've heard tales that if a click of death disk got put in a clean drive the defect could actually JUMP DEVICES like some kind of analog plague...

Wanna know something funny? I have an "A:" drive in my rig... I've used it once in the last decade probably but it's there. I keep transferring it from tower to tower as I upgrade over the years for some reason. I guess I just never had a reason to throw it out, and since most cases still have a bay in them sized for it, I keep filling that gap.

I imagine this will cease someday when I get a tower case that lacks the built in bay. There's not way I'd buy a frame to get the face of the damn thing to look right in a CD drive bay, that would take effort! I vaguely remember a 56k modem doing this for no apparent reason as well, making it into three different rigs over the years, but at some point I think I didn't have the free PCI slot and it finally got scrapped, so a precedent has been set, heh.

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I remember having an Iomega Ditto tape drive. It's a bit surprising that I don't have nightmares or a permanent sleep disorder of it. Why, you ask?

My father bought it to backup files from the only pc my familly had at that time (around 1996), which was located in my room. The tapes had to be formatted in order to work which took hours and was accompanied by an almost unbearable noise. And my father decided that it's a good idea if they are formatted during the night... in my room!... where I try to sleep! :fart::frusty: And the best of all was, that the formatting process was aborted at 99% due unknown reasons sometimes. :(

Ah, the memories...

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