For me, it must have been 20 years ago in 2005. I got Kingston’s 512MB flash drive for a Christmas present and oh my how great it felt to hold so much of memory in my pocket. After that it was clear to me that there is no use for floppies to me anymore.
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About a year or 2 ago. Remember when you stick a brand new floppy into the drive and tries to boot and it says something like, “Non-system disk. Please remove and press any key”? We’ll that’s actually a program coded on the floppy (which was preformatted by the manufacturer) and each manufactuer coded it a little different. I was ripping the image off different brands to compare their code.
Not exactly a floppy, but close: more than 20 years ago a very dear person gave me an Iomega Zip drive and a couple of disks. Game changer. My hard drive was 40 MB, so for the first time my backup was bigger than my computer. Same speed, too, so not much of a sacrifice.
Later came the tiny Clik! disks: great as a music player, and perfect for carrying data around when 100 MB was a HUGE amount of memory. Through all my university years the Zip was my go-to. I just learned to pray every time I heard a click that wasn’t the brand name. :D
The event production world is simultaneously very advanced and antiquated at the same time. I used a floppy disc earlier this year because some lighting consoles still use them. We then used said lighting console to control a projection mapped surface with motion tracking.
Last week to store recovery codes from 2fa
I mean it might be security by obscurity and some added work to ensure no data loss. I mean pretty darn secure. The intersection between those that wants to access those codes also have immediate access to a floppy drive as well. Must be extremely tiny Cause my guess is they have at most a couple of hour before you notice.
This week, because I’m wiping old data for someone who wants to get rid of computer equipment.
Not my use, but this in the news today: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-out-floppy-disks-air-traffic-control-by-2028-2026-11-05/
A few months ago. Was repairing a FANUC robotic arm, and found an incredibly dusty box. At the bottom of it was a few disks marks as “robot”
Had to find a reader, and only one of them was still readable.
Around 2013, when I was just 13, on the computer at my grandparents place. I had to actually ask around and spend effort to find floppys since by then they were already obsolete, but my grandparents PC only had a floppy drive available. I used it to attempt to write an OS (I know I know, daunting task but I didnt know how much I didnt know). I got as far as writing the bootloader and got it to load and print Hello World, but no further.
A few weeks ago, as coasters.
What an interesting juxtaposition on my home screen.
Used? Just using one now, but as a coaster.
Fifteen years ago? Maybe a little more? I had old games on them I liked to play. Them no floppy drives. Then no cd drives even. Makes me sad.
Between my dad and I, we’d accumulated several hundred floppies with software, pictures, data, whatever stuff we’d accumulated over the years. I embarked on a big project somewhere around 1998 or so to copy all the contents of the floppies onto my hard drive and sort through it all, and… I just… petered out after a while.
Whatever it seemed like worth saving just really wasn’t.
I discovered that’s largely true of my Downloads folder. Every so often I go move all the contents to an archive folder, and anything that was in the archive folder gets deleted. I always think “I should keep this around in case I need it!” and whenever I do need it (like a new computer or reinstalling the OS or whatever), I just go grab what I need or install using choco or winget or of course apt for Linux or whatever… Docs/pics/vids I keep elsewhere, of course, but all that download stuff just adds up to wasted drive space. heh
Last year. Restoring an old Compaq notebookike one I had as a child. I bought it out of the back of a van at Vintage Computer Fest Midwest.
