Who remembers what a floppy disk is?

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I never used a floppy disk. I was a child when I saw my father transferring many, many files from floppy disks to CDs and then to drives. So I grew up with computers having the floppy disk readers and I used to play with them but I never actually used them.

for some reason, inserting floppies and watching the computer sputter and flash to life made me happy back in the day.

If you can remember dial up modems you can remember floppy disks. I also remember game cartridges and the 1980s when in the future we thought Atari would be the what Apple computers are today.

I used to be paranoid about whether my data would be lost if my floppy collected dust or was scanned at the airport.

The first media storage I used was my cassette tape drive on a Commodore 64, same kind of tapes people used in the Walkman. I played Sargon II, an old chess game. It's also where I stored the very first piece of code I ever wrote which didn't disappear with my RAM after I hit the power switch.

8 in floppies were mostly used on Heath Kits at that time. 5.25 were my great technological advancement. I still remember "Load <filename> ,8,1" with some nostalgia and cheating the storage vendors by punching a small hole in the side of my floppies with a holepunch to turn single sided disks into double-sided disks which doubled the storage.

Yes, you would pull the disk out, flip it over, and put it in upside down. It was like having a second disk.

3.5 in disks were quite the advancement. Solid case made them easier to protect, much faster, better storage, more reliable, and this is what most people think of as a floppy disk these days. I was still using them to work on servers in the late 90's because they were still a convenient way to boot a machine which was having hard disk problems.

My first computer had no hard drive, but two 5-1/4 floppy drives so I could copy without switching disks. I was very happy with this feature. But there was no graphics. It could not draw a line. I played text adventure games.