Floppys were the ultimate in security because if you looked at them wrong they become corrupted.
Stop sticking them to your fridge with a magnet
Stapling 5¼" disks to reports was another whoopsie.
Or using a binder clip on 3.5" disks. Lost count how many times I saw that shit.
I always thought that was legend.
But that’s how mom shows off my rust codebase! :(
But the slide is so fun to fiddle with! Click clack click clack, why doesn’t Commander Keen run anymore!?!
TBH I fidgeted with those slides a lot and don’t recall fucking my shit up.
Same; amazing stim toys.
I had to use floppies to bring my programming assignments to university in early 2000s. They were so unreliable, I had a rule to copy every assignment on at least 3 drives. I’ve asked them many times to setup an FTP, so students would not have to struggle, but they would not listen.
That’s funny yet odd. I use floppy disk still to this day for my 200aml cnc plasma table. It’s the easiest method to load the gcode on. The rs232 is to much of a p.i.a. I used to have an issue when I used a USB floppy drive into my laptop. I ended up finding a pc with a dedicated floppy drive since then. I’ve had zero issues. Wich is also more surprising that floppy disks even work around the big ass high voltage transformer for the plasma power source. The big servo motor drives and the welders in the shop.
I remember taking my first GIS course and having to buy ZIP discs for each project around that time. That ended up being an expensive class.
Also, the lab PCs re-imaged every time they shut down, so if the PC crashed you had no way to recover the data if you hadn’t written it to the zip drive, which we usually only did at the end of the day because they were slow.
We basically had a revolt to get the university to unlock the USB ports for us to use those fancy new flash drives the next year.
Bad CRC for the win!
You must have started using them at the tail end of their life when stuff got cheaper including the drives.
Back when shit made sense. OneDrive, eat your heart out
What kind of sense is there in storing your floppies with the shutter at the top?
It was the way of The Ancestors.
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me! I was there when it was written!
the seals weren’t that good so storing them facing down for long periods of time made them prone to data leaks.
What? You want to stair at some indistinguishable grey rectangle instead of this cool mechanical flap?
There were supposed to be labels on them. That was half the fun if opening a new floppy. And a solid third of them would have been erased AOL disks.
Less chance of dust and debris falling between the shutter and the rest of the disk. Plus, that was just naturally the top of the device when you pick it up. It’s easier ergonomics to pick the floppy up from the sides and feed the top into the drive. Also the shutter did stick up a little bit, so if you placed them shutter down they can wobble and buzz in the container with slight vibrations (like say, from a computer sitting next to them). Bottom down makes it more likely that the shutter will get damaged or scoop material into the disk when moving them.
We also just kinda did it that way.
Service accounts and RBAC has taken you for an absolute fool!
Service accounts? You mean service principals and managed identities
For some reason I have never seen one of those where the spare key was not attached to the primary key 🤔
A year’s supply of save icons.
Mate, don’t give them ideas. The enshittifiers literally will implement “save tokens” into an app as soon as it occurs to them.
They already monetized it into subscription and cloud stuff.
Yeah but they can always limit that subscription to a certain number of saves
In the 90s, that would have been a single copy of photoshop.
If you’ve ever installed Microsoft office from floppy disks, you don’t what those times back.
I remember downloading games from sketchy Warez sites on the school computers because they had a T1 line and I had dialup. They’d come in Floppy-sized segments; I’d go home each day with a stack of 10-15 floppies, copy the segment to my drive, delete it from the disk, and go back the next day to collect more. It would take weeks to get a whole game, and that’s only if the warez site didn’t disappear before I finished collecting parts. Then there was the butt clencher moment when I’d try to unpack the whole thing and see if it actually worked or not which, most of the time, it did not.
Those were the days.
CRC ERROR. CHECK ARCHIVE AND TRY AGAIN.
ah man I remember unzipping 50 part rar files only to find another 50 part zip files inside. All because of some IRC file size limit or something.
The only thing i want back from floppy disks is the form factor
I recently bought 20 floppies from diskduper and man they are fun to hold, very tactile. Much lighter than I remembered too.
Ugh, never. But installing the OS … also ugh
Windows 3.1 was only about 10 floppies with DOS being about four. But Office was about 40.
I recall a Win95 installation involving on the order of 20 diskettes.
I never purchased or manually installed MicroSlop Office prior to the advent of fully administrated local area networks, so from such specific pain I was spared
I already had my first CD-ROM drive (so futuristic!) when 95 came out. But I did install Office on Win3.1 from floppies. Soon after that I switched to OpenOffice and haven’t used commercial software (other than the Windows that came with the PC) ever since.
I could be wrong, but I think I bought (or rather, my parents bought) my first CD-ROM drive for installing Windows 95. I think that might have been the very first disc I put in the drive.
I had the CD-ROM drive running with 3.1. But they only really became mainstream after 95 came out.
One bad disk or error on your part going through an 8 disk install… yeah. But we went from tape drives to 5 1/4” to 3 1/2” to the phenomenal speeds of a 32x CDRW drive. Nothing beat a CD install. I don’t even bat an eye at 30GB game update download anymore, you could fit an amazing game on 1-4 CDs and watching it install was more exciting than waiting for these massive game DLs we have today.
I remember installing Half-life 2 off of 5 CDs, while wondering what the fuck this “Steam” shit was and why I needed it in order to play.
I remember getting an error on the 8th disk and crying with a bricked system
I think Slackware dwarfed even Office on floppy count, but it may have depended on which modules you needed.
I’ve had the pleasure of installing Windows 95 and Slackware from floppy and I can’t say I miss that part.
I also have a box just like the one in the picture sitting in my drawer right now. With floppies. One of them has Netscape on it. I really should clean some day.
Its funny cause you could pinch the back and lift the lid off of its hinges
Like bike locks. Very easy to circumvent, but just enough of a hurdle to deter most casual crimes of opportunity.
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Locks are to stop honest people.
Locks are not made for criminals, locks are made for occasionals after all, 99% of locks are very easy to break in and the 1% is a nightmare even for the owner
Most padlocks can be opened by hitting them a few times.
Just like CD cases. Here in the UK you were allowed to return CD’s if wasn’t opened (like most items really). They put thick shiny security stickers on them. We used to buy CD’s, open the cases from the hinges, burn them to my PC then return it for a full refund.
In the 1990s in the US we put our SSNs on our checks.
And as my first college ID. And on at least one of my licenses, I think…
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Why lock them in a case when you could just slide the plastic square to lock the disc? Security was built right in
Sometimes it’s about not wanting it stolen physically.
But then again this whole box is small enough to just carry off so I dunno.
Who else can smell this picture?
At the same time these were in vogue, you also could require a key to start the PC itself.
Still more secure than Flock’s shit.
Also I had one of those… The plastic… The color…
Fine, I’ll do it:
Why the hell are the floppies in the bin with the label-side down? Nobody used these with the shutter-side up. How’re you going to read the missing label when they’re upside down?
I think this is a showcase photo for the case and the flipppies look better amd more like generic floppy disk with the metal slider on the top. It clearly communicates the purpose of the item, and the keys are in to show that it locks with a key and there’s 1 spare key.
Dafuq you on about this is the correct orientation.
Edit: After doing some research I may be outvoted. Huh.
Because those little metal things stick together and could ruin the disk when you accidentally snag it. This way, you could see how they are against each other and not snag them.
And just have to pull all of them out to get the right one, right?
You’d browse through them like a rolodex. The disks can tilt forward in the box to make that easier.
That really depended on how full it was, yeah?
As long as you don’t go over the max, it works.
Color code to narrow it down
Just checking… color code on the labels? The labels that are on the bottom?
I remember my dad getting a pack of colored floppies and (~)11-year-old me being estatic at the cool colors.
What kind of psychopath stored their floppies upside down like this?
UpperEndian format, clearly.
The same people who wrote the data backwards.
When I was in high school we could buy floppy disks from the vending machine
That’s so cool
