My nephew asked what a floppy disk was last weekend

I was pulling out some old family photos from a box in my closet and my 10 year old nephew saw a 3.5 inch floppy disk I had saved. He thought it was a 3D printed save icon from a video game. I popped it into an old USB drive reader I still keep around and showed him it actually held a couple of old school reports from 1998. He just stared at it and asked how 1.44MB could fit anything. It made me wonder how many of you still have a working floppy drive or some other dead format kicking around?

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2 Comments

blairsanchez1mo ago

Oh man, that's a wild one. Here's something nobody's mentioned yet - those old floppies were actually way more fragile than people remember. I had a stack of them in the 90s and if you so much as looked at them wrong the magnetic layer would get corrupted. I lost a whole folder of high school essays because I left a disk on top of my desk speaker. The magnet in that thing wiped it clean. So the real miracle isn't that 1.44MB could hold anything, it's that yours still worked at all.

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angelab621mo ago

My brother kept all his floppy disks in a shoebox under his bed. One summer the basement flooded. Water got in the box. No labels left. Every single disk looked the same. He tried to read them one by one and it was just random gibberish from different games. Never knew if he lost anything important.

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