Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for February 15, 2021

What’s a floppy disc?!!

/SNARK/

He’s not that old. Otherwise they would be 5 1/2 inch or larger.

Back in the 70s I built a computer and the floppy drive was very expensive. Paper tape, front panel switches, teletype and a used monitor was a bundle of money. A data subscription was $30/month to down load daily commodity prices after markets closed. Wrote the assembly code for the acoustic modem. We rode stage coaches and liked it! We’ve come a long way!

(Wish I had kept it all. A museum piece.)

In the early 70’s I took a course in Fortran . We had to write the program, punch the cards, give them to the operators then come back the next day to see the results.

Well, at least he didn’t use gramophone records.

I got a floppy disc, but my doctor says that’s normal at my age.

When it comes to technology, Oldbot is all thumb drives.

Don’t throw them out. A time traveler may come back and NEED them in the future or the past. Like John Titor

https://www.coasttocoastam.com/guest/williams-oliver-5638/

Those are NEW floppies. How are they supposed to work with the 8 inch and 5-1/4" drives?

Sigh… The problem of aging… You go from hard drive to floppy disk.

I’m not behind technologically. Check out my cool avatar.

The tablets I grew up with were clay. As noted by many above, they still have older data storage without the devices to access that data. The raw data for the US Census is unavailable for the ones before 2010. Not sure how long 2010 will be readable.

I have a backup copy of Windows NT 3.1 on 22 floppy discs.

One of these is 1.44MB at the most, so what he has in his hand is … what, 200MB of data backed up at the most?

we salvaged an Apple IIe computer when our local school was throwing them out. is it worth saving???

At least they’re not 5¼ inch floppies.

Floppy disks, the new archeological discovery

Put them with the punch cards.

I remember when a floppy disk was as big as a mortarboard hat. I was in the last class at my university that punched programs onto Hollerith cards. A computer was bigger than a house trailer. You came in late at night to submit your software because undergraduates had “Z” priority. I impressed some nerds at a science fiction convention by remotely accessing my campus account via a modem which cradled the pay phone’s handset. And there was nary a female in the computer science program. Different times.

Yep, I remember the great floppy exchange when backing up my computer.

I gave a box of old 3½" floppies (with shells in multiple colors) to my son’s girlfriend about a decade ago. She decorated their coffee table by gluing a layer of them to the top.

Put them next to the file cabinet full of onion skin carbon copies.

Still remember how our engineering department manager was confounded by the (then new) 3 1/2" floppy disk – because it was stiff instead of floppy…

Yay Paper! Pbbbt electric. There’s military documents that got soaked 125 years ago frozen molded, and are still very readable. So are the volcano cooked Herculaneum scrolls (infra-red boosts 600 au human eye range for the tough ones here) Electronic only good for porting, indexing, fast retrieval. Original always best for actual data.

Going through old files the other day I stumbled across a bunch of floppies. Kids were really confused when I tried to explain.

One of my older PCs has a 3.5" floppy drive (you can also buy an external one online for about $15). On occasion, I’ve know someone who had to have files from such a disk copied to newer media, and I was at the ready!

You have to give Oldbot credit for finding all of those floppies. That’s probably half of what’s left in the world.

What’s a Floppy Disk, you ask? Just look at any Save icon…

Stationery stores used to carry mailers for floppy disks.   I used them to swap fanzines with other editors.

Now there aren’t any stationery stores.

I’ve got a large box containing several hundred of those disks in my garage.

Of course, I no longer have a Floppy Drive in my computer since they no longer put that connector on Motherboards.