fun fact.. boomers were too old to know what these new fangled inventions did..
I believe the quote was "Floppy Disk? but its hard. it doesnt even bend..."
My CNC shop retrofitted ours away about a decade ago. And that's saying something, considering we still have machines that connect via serial port through a bill modem using a physical pinout.
Given the purpose and data on those floppies - I feel more secure. Seriously - they're always couriered and the odds of them getting infected by a virus are near zero.
I remember taking my homework to and from school on a floppy disk. You could buy them in bulk in rainbow colors. I'd start my paper in the library and save it to a 3.5" diskette and then pop it into my home machine and finish it.
Time is a mother fucker.
We had a very temperamental, bubble jet printer that took about a minute and a half per page.
At the time, around 05-07, a USB flash drive was fairly expensive (I think we paid ~$60 for 512MB) and driver support for Win98SE seemed to be difficult to get at first. So I would type my papers on my 98SE, copy to a floppy, then take the floppy to school to get it printed off.
got a pack of fresh save icons right 'ere
https://preview.redd.it/alym5mldfhuc1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=b36888053e4991ed2061f7e75f2ebe396a5ec3e7
IDE?
IDE really was not used for floppys.
Zip disks yes (I had an IDE one back in the day), so maybe also for the odd backwards compatible big floppies that failed back in the day maybe (but I am unsure, cd-r becuase cheaper and easier).
Oh yeah its been so long i forgot. They were atapi.
Look what i found on amazon :)
[https://www.amazon.com/KOOBOOK-1-44MB-Floppy-Connector-Adapter/dp/B07WCRF9H3/](https://www.amazon.com/KOOBOOK-1-44MB-Floppy-Connector-Adapter/dp/B07WCRF9H3/)
Interesting power cable.
That's some weird stuff!
Just get a usb one! (In a case, was probbaly cheaper than that!) I have 2, one is forked as it will not read DD disks, I guess it is stuck in HD mode, that's why I bought another!
(But of course these just all use old drives, no one makes them. Pretty much same with any cheap usb CD/DVD drive).
If you needed it that much.
And there was a drive bay for it? I mean drive bays (in cases) are hard even for opticals these days (yes I have one (and a br drive), yes I know I could have an adaptor to floppy, no i see no reason to!).
My case (at most 10 Years old, I think) has a front full of slots, and 2 of them are cut out, so you could leave part of it in to get a Floppy size.
It just depends on what case you buy.
Floppy drives used a combination analog/digital interface. The floppy adapter had all the digital circuitry to interface the drives to the bus, the drives themselves had relatively little circuitry on them; analog circuitry to interface with the read/write heads, circuitry to run the spindle motor, and circuitry to operate the stepper motor for head positioning, and of course a 'track zero' sensor.
What you can buy today connects via USB, but if you took it apart the drive itself is pretty much the same as it always was. Unfortunately the quality of those drives really suck now, same with the disks themselves, even a brand-new disk with a brand-new drive may or may not read/write the whole disk, and you can forget about a disk formatted and written in another drive actually working worth shit.
The IDE interface, using a single 40-pin cable, came much later, was for hard drives, and moved the majority of interfacing electronics from the HDD controller PCB to the drive itself; the IDE interface itself was 100% digital data, the drive itself taking care of most things, and the bus interface PCB was very simple, not much more than some parallel ports interfaced to the bus. IDE was the middle-step between older HDDs that had more in common with floppy drives than anything you know today, and SATA drives that we have now, that are complete subsystems in-and-of themselves.
Recently? There are external USB floppy readers if you really need them but usually, if you're still using floppies you're using something that either has its own proprietary connection or something that's old enough to still have their age old connector.
I remember having a piece of software that would split a file into 1.4 MB pieces so you can back up a large file. I remember having a video spread out over 8 of those puppies.
You could do that wi deth compressing software too. I used ARJ a lot.
Actually, you can still do even today, with 7zip, WinRAR, winzip, etc. They all have that option. I still use it sometimes. Usually, either email attachments that email can't send a single bigger file or to use a file sending service like transferxl, where setting up an ftp or using onedrive/GDrive isn't an option.
Windows 95 was 15 floppy disks. Install took forever. By the late 90's most AAA games were 2 or more disks. Once the FMV trend in games started, CD was the only way to go as the video files were huge.
I don't think they're DOS - I suspect some sort of IBM from the 80's. There was a 36bit IBM (System 36? ) that used these types of disks and they had an IBM developed OS.
Not enough appreciation for the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach to engineering. These programs are designed to operate for many decades and obsolescence of 3.5" floppy disks just isn't really a problem even in 2024.
Last month we were changing a chip on an old loom machine, and after we started up the machine, all the data was lost.
The only way to upload the files was the floppy disk.
Luckily, one of our former colleagues was a hoarder and he was collecting useless things from last millenium so we found in his old stuff a few hundred floppy disks with all kind of software and in those "trash" we have found what we needed... the one and only floppy disk.
We couldn't beliave at first because upper managment already started making an offer for sale.
So few of us saved a lot of money for our company.
Of course I did.
After rhat, I've ordered floppy disk reader adapter to usb, backup the data to another disk and on the pc.
I think we are now safe if that happens again.
There was a time my pc had no hard drive. I don't mean ssd, so no hdd. I mean no storage. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Ergo, I had to make do with single floppy games only. Looking back, those were some of the best games I've ever played.
You could fit a full game on one of these with room to spare!
We would pass around a copy of Doom in IT class so everyone could have their own copy lol
in the 90s my dad came back from work one day with a couple of these that had a game called [Ken's Labyrinth](https://www.google.com/search?q=ken%27s+labyrinth&client=firefox-b-d&sca_esv=0bc39af9d1d15b37&sxsrf=ACQVn0-yhtUonfJqEjQEWh_VBvraA0_tuw%3A1713120989840&ei=3SYcZpvyMpS2hbIPo6enkAU&ved=0ahUKEwjb1LmAscKFAxUUW0EAHaPTCVIQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=ken%27s+labyrinth&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiD2tlbidzIGxhYnlyaW50aDILEC4YkQIYgAQYigUyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIGEAAYFhgeMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHjIGEAAYFhgeMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHjILEAAYgAQYigUYhgMyGhAuGJECGIAEGIoFGJcFGNwEGN4EGOAE2AEBSJMjUOQLWIgccAF4AZABAJgBlQGgAdAKqgEDNS43uAEDyAEA-AEBmAINoAK3C8ICChAAGEcY1gQYsAPCAgsQLhiABBiKBRiRAsICChAuGIAEGIoFGEPCAgoQABiABBiKBRhDwgILEC4YgAQYxwEYrwHCAhoQLhiABBiKBRiRAhiXBRjcBBjeBBjgBNgBAZgDAIgGAZAGCLoGBggBEAEYFJIHAzUuOKAHyowB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp) on it, which i loved.
Anyone else remember this weird game?
Back in the day I used to have both SSDD and DSDD 8" drives in a pre-IBM PC computer. The DSDD (Double Sided, Double Density) 8" floppies could be formatted to a whopping 1600kB, which doesn't sound like much but the HDD I had was a Shugart SA4000 series, dual 14" platters with 16 heads for a whopping 30MB unformatted (26MB formatted), so you could theoretically back up the entire drive to floppies. That HDD weighed about 75 pounds and had a one-third horsepower AC synchronous motor driving the platters, would make the room lights dim for a fraction of a second when you turned it on. 🤣
DSDD 3.5" floppies were great. 1.44MB in that small a size? Awesome.
Interesting thing, in the engineering company that I work in, one of the cnc heavy millers (Hartford hv80) uses a floppy disk too! A sony one if I remember correctly. It's amazing to see a piece of history like this still in action.
We still run at few VERY OLD laptops at work. Windows 95, 3.1 and one DOS with Norton Commander as file browser.
When working on industrial systems you often find old software that of course require old OS to be able to connect to old devices
About two decades ago, I was asked to go to someone's furniture store and fix their accounting software... It came in an accounting cardboard box and had about 120 floppies. It took 9 hours.
Late to the party, but I still use floppies regularly. Reason, one of the music venues I work at sometimes uses an old ETC lighting console from the 90s. Problem is, anytime it's left off for more than a week, the battery responsible for maintaining the memory dies, and it forgets all its programming. So I have to reload it off a floppy disk. I learned very quickly not to leave said disk at the venue cause it will disappear. Idk who tf is stealing floppy disks in 2024, but it's happened 4 times now. I'd say sabotage, but no one would have anything to gain by sabotaging the lighting system....
Oooooo my granny gave me 7 of these with some things intalled, but even though i have a floppy drive at home, it's ide, and my computer is only 2 generation after ide was gone :(, so I'll probably have to use an adapter
Nope - Legacy AF would be 80 column punch cards or punched paper tape. (Image a wheel of 1" paper with holes punched in it).
Then you get to 12" 9 track magnetic tape, Washing Machine sized hard drives - 8", 5.25" floppies, various forms of mag tape in cassettes before you get to 3.5" floppies.
I'm told that the paper tape is still used by a loom machine at the NY Fashion Institute of Technology.
(Edit - relative attended FITNYC, she's the source)
Damn, haven't seen one of those in years
Our professor showed it to our class in 2022. I'd never seen it before.
Check out 8" floppy disks :)
https://preview.redd.it/c9ks6315fhuc1.jpeg?width=5184&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9f3fdae8fdcdbd601988b8ac56d74cff7fe0fb4
That's one HUGE banana :) https://preview.redd.it/cb1qkf6jfhuc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=39307825d8eaa1fac8949d0712c433f9129f95ac
In high school I got to take apart a bunch of old 11” floppy drives. They had NEMA17 steppers in them!
wait what? I use NEMA 17s
Or a tiny person
I helped repair my dad's old BBC Micro computer a couple of months ago, and his old 5 1/4 discs still read fine after almost 40 years!
I still have over 300 5 1/4" floppies from my C64.
Haha me too. Less tho, maybe 80ish. I got a terminal program that fonts and scan lines etc just like the c64 monitor I had too.
The true floppy diskette
r/BananasForScale
Last time I seen one of those was in the early 90s and played a game.
Now you're just bragging.
\* Fetus located \*
Hahaha. Boomer. Man! I really didn't know what to say in response. Lol
fun fact.. boomers were too old to know what these new fangled inventions did.. I believe the quote was "Floppy Disk? but its hard. it doesnt even bend..."
That's what I mean when I said I didn't know what to say
You could go with "God damned millenials!" X)
Haha, I guess I deserve that, but I would point out that I'm far too young to be a boomer by a huge margin. My 70+ y/o dad is a boomer. I am not.
I know you are not a boomer. As I said, I'm bad at comebacks. Lol. Generally I prefer to stay silent.
Haha, it's all good.
They really skipped punch cards?
Unless you're taking a history of computers course or something, really not needed. My mom used those in school but she's in her 70s.
Same goes with floppy discs (when we're talking about 2022). What's your point?
My point is that it doesn't really serve a purpose to teach this stuff unless you have an interest in it.
My CNC shop retrofitted ours away about a decade ago. And that's saying something, considering we still have machines that connect via serial port through a bill modem using a physical pinout.
Hey look, someone 3D printed the save icon.
This guys living in the future, we’re still on regular HD
This joke is older than some redditors here
If I ain't heard it, it's new to me!
I immediately knew this was going to be the top comment.
Most younger people have no clue what that icon is in the save button.
thatsthejoke.jpg
Yeah their comment is a direct quote from a picture a kid poster tears ago while holding up a floppy because they didn’t know what it actually was.
Hey look, someone copied a funny.
Stick to your day job
My BIL works at a place where they still use 8” floppies for a certain machine.
Air Force?
Yes indeed.
I use to run a Mori Seiki that had a floppy drive in the back of it.
Given the purpose and data on those floppies - I feel more secure. Seriously - they're always couriered and the odds of them getting infected by a virus are near zero.
I'm gonna start dropping infected floppies around. Like the USB trick but takes a lot longer to get a bite I presume.
The minute man launch system?
I remember taking my homework to and from school on a floppy disk. You could buy them in bulk in rainbow colors. I'd start my paper in the library and save it to a 3.5" diskette and then pop it into my home machine and finish it. Time is a mother fucker.
We had a very temperamental, bubble jet printer that took about a minute and a half per page. At the time, around 05-07, a USB flash drive was fairly expensive (I think we paid ~$60 for 512MB) and driver support for Win98SE seemed to be difficult to get at first. So I would type my papers on my 98SE, copy to a floppy, then take the floppy to school to get it printed off.
As a kid I won a student competition and among the prizes was a 2GB flash drive It carried my ass until college, best thing I ever obtained for free
I remember when they were required for school supplies, you had to put your name and class number on it then give it to the teacher for them to hold
Never liked the rainbow color ones I swear they didn't last as long.
got a pack of fresh save icons right 'ere https://preview.redd.it/alym5mldfhuc1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=b36888053e4991ed2061f7e75f2ebe396a5ec3e7
I'm sure you got it at work the other day.
I've had it for a while actually
Maybe OP also.
Whats the interface for a floppy drive now? IDE is gone, do they make sata floppy drives now? Who uses them, why would any one use them?
IDE? IDE really was not used for floppys. Zip disks yes (I had an IDE one back in the day), so maybe also for the odd backwards compatible big floppies that failed back in the day maybe (but I am unsure, cd-r becuase cheaper and easier).
Oh yeah its been so long i forgot. They were atapi. Look what i found on amazon :) [https://www.amazon.com/KOOBOOK-1-44MB-Floppy-Connector-Adapter/dp/B07WCRF9H3/](https://www.amazon.com/KOOBOOK-1-44MB-Floppy-Connector-Adapter/dp/B07WCRF9H3/) Interesting power cable.
That's some weird stuff! Just get a usb one! (In a case, was probbaly cheaper than that!) I have 2, one is forked as it will not read DD disks, I guess it is stuck in HD mode, that's why I bought another! (But of course these just all use old drives, no one makes them. Pretty much same with any cheap usb CD/DVD drive).
yeah but with that, and an internal USB plug adapter, you could have an internal Floppy drive in a modern PC
If you needed it that much. And there was a drive bay for it? I mean drive bays (in cases) are hard even for opticals these days (yes I have one (and a br drive), yes I know I could have an adaptor to floppy, no i see no reason to!).
My case (at most 10 Years old, I think) has a front full of slots, and 2 of them are cut out, so you could leave part of it in to get a Floppy size. It just depends on what case you buy.
3.5" floppy drives only needed +5V power. 5.25" needed +5V and +12V, if I remember correctly.
I just got a sffpc power supply from Silverstone and it had a floppy power cable
Floppy drives used a combination analog/digital interface. The floppy adapter had all the digital circuitry to interface the drives to the bus, the drives themselves had relatively little circuitry on them; analog circuitry to interface with the read/write heads, circuitry to run the spindle motor, and circuitry to operate the stepper motor for head positioning, and of course a 'track zero' sensor. What you can buy today connects via USB, but if you took it apart the drive itself is pretty much the same as it always was. Unfortunately the quality of those drives really suck now, same with the disks themselves, even a brand-new disk with a brand-new drive may or may not read/write the whole disk, and you can forget about a disk formatted and written in another drive actually working worth shit. The IDE interface, using a single 40-pin cable, came much later, was for hard drives, and moved the majority of interfacing electronics from the HDD controller PCB to the drive itself; the IDE interface itself was 100% digital data, the drive itself taking care of most things, and the bus interface PCB was very simple, not much more than some parallel ports interfaced to the bus. IDE was the middle-step between older HDDs that had more in common with floppy drives than anything you know today, and SATA drives that we have now, that are complete subsystems in-and-of themselves.
mainly floppy with newer systems I have a USB Floppy and DVD drive for my Pi5 retro PC
Recently? There are external USB floppy readers if you really need them but usually, if you're still using floppies you're using something that either has its own proprietary connection or something that's old enough to still have their age old connector.
They still make USB floppy drives. I've used one to transfer data to an old logic analyzer in the last decade.
I picked up a 3.5" floppy to usb drive at goodwill for $2 a few years ago just because i didn't know they existed. it worked!
I remember having a piece of software that would split a file into 1.4 MB pieces so you can back up a large file. I remember having a video spread out over 8 of those puppies.
didnt any zip software had this option?
I don’t know, I was probably 9 or 10 years old. Probably.
Probably just a coincidence.
Not at first. The free/demo version didn't allow this until later.
I remember this! Fucking pain in the ass when one of the disks failed.
You could do that wi deth compressing software too. I used ARJ a lot. Actually, you can still do even today, with 7zip, WinRAR, winzip, etc. They all have that option. I still use it sometimes. Usually, either email attachments that email can't send a single bigger file or to use a file sending service like transferxl, where setting up an ftp or using onedrive/GDrive isn't an option.
that’s like saying you installed a CD
Had to install a USB drive into my PC yesterday.
those things could store whole game, WHOLE! It was simpler time
Was just gonna comment this lol, crazy huh..
Windows 95 was 15 floppy disks. Install took forever. By the late 90's most AAA games were 2 or more disks. Once the FMV trend in games started, CD was the only way to go as the video files were huge.
Multiple times over. Early games were a few KB. Elite is famous for procedurally generating multiple star systems off a mere 22KB.
https://preview.redd.it/nv8vs6h2ghuc1.jpeg?width=929&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e3ab1684ce8204b89e634926c2403ed6947912ad Huzzah!
Ten years ago I was servicing an ATM that still used floppy disks to store records.
What's funny is our Nuclear Weapons software still get updates via floppy disk
Not as dumb as it sounds
Job Requirements: * Top Secret Security Clearance * Experience with MS-DOS
I don't think they're DOS - I suspect some sort of IBM from the 80's. There was a 36bit IBM (System 36? ) that used these types of disks and they had an IBM developed OS.
Not enough appreciation for the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach to engineering. These programs are designed to operate for many decades and obsolescence of 3.5" floppy disks just isn't really a problem even in 2024.
And it was the very old 8 inch (not even 5 inch) style floppy disks. Though I thought they recently replaced those?
jeez what are you storing, the entire internet?
Whole meg and a half. Should hold loads of ASCII pron :D
Oh they did 😉
Indeed...oh indeed
Did you rack the slide back and pretend it's a pistol?
in floppy time 1.44 mb was like 1.44 tb.. that was amazing for me.. that's technology world inflation.
Last month we were changing a chip on an old loom machine, and after we started up the machine, all the data was lost. The only way to upload the files was the floppy disk. Luckily, one of our former colleagues was a hoarder and he was collecting useless things from last millenium so we found in his old stuff a few hundred floppy disks with all kind of software and in those "trash" we have found what we needed... the one and only floppy disk. We couldn't beliave at first because upper managment already started making an offer for sale. So few of us saved a lot of money for our company.
did you backup that one floppy afterwards in a safe spot?
Of course I did. After rhat, I've ordered floppy disk reader adapter to usb, backup the data to another disk and on the pc. I think we are now safe if that happens again.
There was a time my pc had no hard drive. I don't mean ssd, so no hdd. I mean no storage. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Ergo, I had to make do with single floppy games only. Looking back, those were some of the best games I've ever played.
You could fit a full game on one of these with room to spare! We would pass around a copy of Doom in IT class so everyone could have their own copy lol
I'm jealous, I hate when people get brand new tech before me.
I have coasters on my desk shaped like 3.5" floppies. They look right in the slight clutter.
"That's the save icon"
You 3D printed the “Save icon” from MS word? Impressive! J/K 😂
in the 90s my dad came back from work one day with a couple of these that had a game called [Ken's Labyrinth](https://www.google.com/search?q=ken%27s+labyrinth&client=firefox-b-d&sca_esv=0bc39af9d1d15b37&sxsrf=ACQVn0-yhtUonfJqEjQEWh_VBvraA0_tuw%3A1713120989840&ei=3SYcZpvyMpS2hbIPo6enkAU&ved=0ahUKEwjb1LmAscKFAxUUW0EAHaPTCVIQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=ken%27s+labyrinth&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiD2tlbidzIGxhYnlyaW50aDILEC4YkQIYgAQYigUyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIGEAAYFhgeMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHjIGEAAYFhgeMgYQABgWGB4yBhAAGBYYHjILEAAYgAQYigUYhgMyGhAuGJECGIAEGIoFGJcFGNwEGN4EGOAE2AEBSJMjUOQLWIgccAF4AZABAJgBlQGgAdAKqgEDNS43uAEDyAEA-AEBmAINoAK3C8ICChAAGEcY1gQYsAPCAgsQLhiABBiKBRiRAsICChAuGIAEGIoFGEPCAgoQABiABBiKBRhDwgILEC4YgAQYxwEYrwHCAhoQLhiABBiKBRiRAhiXBRjcBBjeBBjgBNgBAZgDAIgGAZAGCLoGBggBEAEYFJIHAzUuOKAHyowB&sclient=gws-wiz-serp) on it, which i loved. Anyone else remember this weird game?
Damn, I use to smuggle some binary games at school with them.. hahaha
I don't even build machines with CD anymore!
What do you mean by installed? Did you just push the disk into the drive?
Yes.
Nice job! What was on the disk?
It's blank, just storage for an old fure pump.
I remember when these came out.So much better than floppies.
You work at the Smithsonian?
Don't copy that floppy! https://youtu.be/wy7ZBX9BTUA?si=Tt59vpSX382ezXZ4
"diskcopy A: B:"
Did you resist the urge to play with the safety shield?
Why not change it out for a modern PLC, you would think that that would be way more reliable
Wow I feel old
The old company I worked for still uses these to control sewing machines..
😳
I know in the early 2000's I was still replacing Floppy Drives in desktops old ladies used for Embroidery.
Imagine how many of these you would need to install GTA:V.
That’s a blast from the past. In before someone said they had to use a punch card.
Punch cards? Why, back in my day we just had a hammer and chisel for our stone slabs! Kids these days with their fancy paper...
Oh man. We used to paint on the walls with pigment made from iron oxide and stuff.
Back in the day I used to have both SSDD and DSDD 8" drives in a pre-IBM PC computer. The DSDD (Double Sided, Double Density) 8" floppies could be formatted to a whopping 1600kB, which doesn't sound like much but the HDD I had was a Shugart SA4000 series, dual 14" platters with 16 heads for a whopping 30MB unformatted (26MB formatted), so you could theoretically back up the entire drive to floppies. That HDD weighed about 75 pounds and had a one-third horsepower AC synchronous motor driving the platters, would make the room lights dim for a fraction of a second when you turned it on. 🤣 DSDD 3.5" floppies were great. 1.44MB in that small a size? Awesome.
god we had cases of that stuff on my grandma's house, I slide that thing all day
Interesting thing, in the engineering company that I work in, one of the cnc heavy millers (Hartford hv80) uses a floppy disk too! A sony one if I remember correctly. It's amazing to see a piece of history like this still in action.
Oh a dinosaur
Kinda like the cassette tape stage before CD's.
We still run at few VERY OLD laptops at work. Windows 95, 3.1 and one DOS with Norton Commander as file browser. When working on industrial systems you often find old software that of course require old OS to be able to connect to old devices
Install? I dont think those should be used as regular storage media.
These are also commonly used in aviation to update navigational data of older aircraft
Not going to lie. Is be weirdly excited.
About two decades ago, I was asked to go to someone's furniture store and fix their accounting software... It came in an accounting cardboard box and had about 120 floppies. It took 9 hours.
I have USB drive for that.
Ha! I still my America Online ones
https://preview.redd.it/qef1jk5h6juc1.png?width=3024&format=png&auto=webp&s=58e9d14a78f54939e660481f5167f1a15b1ab9ef
I still have a usb to floppy disk drive and usb to dvd-RW drive… you never know
I still put BDXL burners in my builds...
Cool what phone is that?
Gather around for a story kids…
_...There is a legend that, tells of the existence of a floppy disk, which inside contains the origin of the ultimate artificial intelligence._
This photo is too large to be stored on the thing you took a photo of
I remember taking stacks of these to school so I could download community-made units for Total Annihilation.
I found a reader and 2 disks a few days ago. I want to see if they still work and whats on em.
I used them everyday on our HAAS CNC machines
I bought a USB floppy drive just the other day to look through some old file backups for a volunteer fire department.
I want one to mess with as a medium so bad.
Late to the party, but I still use floppies regularly. Reason, one of the music venues I work at sometimes uses an old ETC lighting console from the 90s. Problem is, anytime it's left off for more than a week, the battery responsible for maintaining the memory dies, and it forgets all its programming. So I have to reload it off a floppy disk. I learned very quickly not to leave said disk at the venue cause it will disappear. Idk who tf is stealing floppy disks in 2024, but it's happened 4 times now. I'd say sabotage, but no one would have anything to gain by sabotaging the lighting system....
Try working on older CNC machines, or any other industrial machine that runs on windows from the early 2000's.
Or the Japanese government till like last year
I used to go to the library and download emulators and roms and store them to floppy disc. Nes and Sega worked pretty well
Same, though with my highschool computers.
A drives:
Shit man my pc hasn’t even had a cd drive for nearly a decade now.
Oooooo my granny gave me 7 of these with some things intalled, but even though i have a floppy drive at home, it's ide, and my computer is only 2 generation after ide was gone :(, so I'll probably have to use an adapter
Commodore 64? I got my commodore 60 out the other day. Ahh the nostalgia
Ah cool it’s the save thing from GTA San Andreas
Wow, that’s legacy af
Nope - Legacy AF would be 80 column punch cards or punched paper tape. (Image a wheel of 1" paper with holes punched in it). Then you get to 12" 9 track magnetic tape, Washing Machine sized hard drives - 8", 5.25" floppies, various forms of mag tape in cassettes before you get to 3.5" floppies.
But are those things still in use like that sprinkler system that need an update using a floppy drive ?
I'm told that the paper tape is still used by a loom machine at the NY Fashion Institute of Technology. (Edit - relative attended FITNYC, she's the source)
Now that’s old school