July 13, 2011

Floppy disks - you're too late
posted by polychrome 13 years ago
  • NNOOOOOooooooo..oo....000.....0....... I've a couple of boxes of 5.25s and some 3.5s scattered around, patiently waiting resurrection. And my last computer with a floppy drive installed (3.5) curled its toes a few months ago. Reality arrives with an ugly face...
  • 5.25? Bah. My first exposure to the floppy disk was in an office where the main accounting functions were done with an IBM System 34 "Mini" (the size of two refrigerators) that used 8 inch floppies. Now those were floppy! It took most of a box of 10 to back up everything on the computer before we shut it down every night. And I remember the first time I saw a hard-shelled 3.5 incher with the little sliding door. I thought "freaky!"
  • Back in my day real geeks had rigid disks. In my case it was a pair of 7935s the size of commercial washing machines and just about as noisy, hooked up to an HP3000.
  • Oh man, I've seen the 8 inch ones. Never a machine that could take them though. I have a zip disk around here somewhere that I used to run email off of.
  • Tapes man. Big tapes.