Nostalgia - Uses for old Floppies Anyone?

Getting in a really nostalgic mood this week, in an earlier post I asked for
Uses for old Computer Books after I had found a couple during a cleanout I am having.

Today I found a box full of the old 3.5" Floppies, about 50 of them.

I have just copied any interesting files I found onto my Laptop's hard drive,
luckily I still have a Laptop with a 3.5 Floppy drive, and deleted the files on
the floppies.

Now I have to decide what to do with them.

So far I have come up with :-

• Dump them at a recycling centre.
• Use them to play Reversi/Othello.
• Use in place of playing cards to create a tower.
• Skip them across water in place of stones.
• Donate to the Inaugural World Floppy disk Throwing competition.

maybe AOL wants them?

Use them as dominoes (not the pizza company, the other thing)

I'd go with "Use them to play Reversi/Othello." and/or "Skip them across water in place of stones."

Use them as dominoes (not the other thing, the pizza company)

No one will be able to tell the difference

I suggest frying them over medium to high heat. Stir in some veggies, add a little lemon zest. Bon Appetite

Place them in a wheelie bin and wait for some surly and smelly men to steal them early on Monday morning.

Maybe I'm just too young to understand the "old floppy" problem?

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Originally Posted by pcuser

Maybe I'm just too young to understand the "old floppy" problem?

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How old are ya?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pcuser

Maybe I'm just too young to understand the "old floppy" problem?

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Well, floppy discs hold 1.44MB, so to get the same storage amount as a standard single layer blank DVD, you would need almost 3,500 floppy discs.

Most standard digital cameras take single images larger than a floppy can hold.

However back in the day before DVDs and even before CD-R was mainstream (originally you had to buy a SCSI card because burners were not IDE and sata didn't exist) you could buy packs of like 100 floppy discs for 20 bucks, and people ended up with tons and tons of floppies that are now junk.

Couple that with the fact that AOL used to send people one per day with trial AOL software, regardless of the person already being a customer or not.

Instead of candy, you should pass them out next halloween.

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Originally Posted by kleinma

Couple that with the fact that AOL used to send people one per day with trial AOL software, regardless of the person already being a customer or not.

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I never had to buy floppies courtesy of AOL sending me 300 floppies a year. Just rip the label off, put a new label on and I was set.

i didnt even rip the old label off.. just put one on top of it or wrote on it with a sharpee marker ;)

The AOL floppy disc thing was listed as one of the top 10 tech blunders, but then again so was Windows Vista, and I never felt Vista to be deserving of that..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pcuser

Maybe I'm just too young to understand the "old floppy" problem?

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They have pills for that nowadays.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kleinma

Well, floppy discs hold 1.44MB, so to get the same storage amount as a standard single layer blank DVD, you would need almost 3,500 floppy discs.

Most standard digital cameras take single images larger than a floppy can hold.

However back in the day before DVDs and even before CD-R was mainstream (originally you had to buy a SCSI card because burners were not IDE and sata didn't exist) you could buy packs of like 100 floppy discs for 20 bucks, and people ended up with tons and tons of floppies that are now junk.

Couple that with the fact that AOL used to send people one per day with trial AOL software, regardless of the person already being a customer or not.

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I remember i needed to get a Epson Printer driver from one computer to the other. No flash drives, cds, dvds, dvd/cd burners. We had to run to Office Depot and buy a pack of 50 floppies to copy the file over...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Torc

Today I found a box full of the old 3.5" Floppies, about 50 of them.

I have just copied any interesting files I found onto my Laptop's hard drive,
luckily I still have a Laptop with a 3.5 Floppy drive, and deleted the files on
the floppies.

Now I have to decide what to do with them.

So far I have come up with :-

• Dump them at a recycling centre.
• Use them to play Reversi/Othello.
• Use in place of playing cards to create a tower.
• Skip them across water in place of stones.
• Donate to the Inaugural World Floppy disk Throwing competition.

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If your refrigerator door tends to stay open you could put a floppy or two under the front legs so it tilts back more.

I can remember installing Windows 95 from the 13 floppy disks it came on.. and I think those actually held more data than 1.44MB

I thought it was crazy at the time, considering my Windows 3.11 installation was 3x5.25" floppies.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kleinma

I can remember installing Windows 95 from the 13 floppy disks it came on.. and I think those actually held more data than 1.44MB

I thought it was crazy at the time, considering my Windows 3.11 installation was 3x5.25" floppies.

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Early version of MS Office on floppies ... not for the faint heated or "Twilight" fans for that matter.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kleinma

I can remember installing Windows 95 from the 13 floppy disks it came on.. and I think those actually held more data than 1.44MB

I thought it was crazy at the time, considering my Windows 3.11 installation was 3x5.25" floppies.

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I remember those 13 win95 floppies, what a pain in the *ss. I eventually took all 13 of them, copied all the files to the same folder then burnt it all to a cd.

My win 3.11 came on 3x3.5" floppies, I'm surprised yours would have taken 6x5.25" floppies.

Obviously, you were using the Home Basic Edition

pfft, I can't be doin' with new fangled floppies. Tape drives, that's where it's at.

zip drives were all the rage for a little while, and of course the elusive "jazz" drive.... those tapes could hold a whole gig... man thats a lot of storage!!!

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Originally Posted by EntityX

If your refrigerator door tends to stay open you could put a floppy or two under the front legs so it tilts back more.

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I'm currently using a pair of 486 chips to shim a desk. That's ten to fifteen thousand dollars worth of shims in early 90s dollars.

I had a 486 (66mhz with turbo on!) and I don't recall paying ten to fifteen thousand dollars for it

Two of them, not one. The price for the original 486/33 was somewhere around $5-8, though that was back in the 80's when every new chip was covered in the trade journals as being too powerful for any home user to need, and only suitable for high-end workstations and servers. They eventually quit saying that sometime in the mid-90's, but only after being wrong about every chip from the 286 through the early Pentiums.

If you say so... but I don't remember things being nearly that much money...

The 486 didn't even come out until 1989, and the penitum in 1993, so there wasn't even a long life for the 486 line.

Of course the early pentium (i think they started at 60Hmz?) had all kinds of problems with floating point math, and I remember we used to sell them at CompUSA (my first job) as keychains. At least intel found something to do with all those bad chips.. ;)

I remember reading the price in a magazine in Damascus, VA during the late summer of 1989. I believe it was a copy of BYTE magazine. That might be specific enough to look it up.

The reason I remember that was that I was sitting out a two day rainstorm in a hostel while hiking the AT. Unfortunately, "hiking the AT" is now a euphamism for having an affair, but back then, hiking meant hiking.

I've a stack of 5.25" floppies somewhere .... along with an original IBM PC 8086 system... last I tried it, still worked... been a while though... had a whopping 640K memory (because no one would need more than that, right?) ... When we turn that baby on (that's when the power switch was a SWITCH - the big orange kind that went "THUNK", not this push button stuff from today), the lights in the house would dim for a moment... then SoCalEd would throw some switches and restore power....

-tg

I will see your stack of 5.25" floppies and raise you some 8" floppies, along with a cassette tape recorded, which we used here before moving to floppies...

The first product my company sold was written in basic on this thing...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair_1500

While I've got a Timex Sinclair 1000..... I never successfully used it... I am impressed it was ever used to build something, let alone sellable.

-tg

Eventually the product was migrated to qbasic in DOS and compiled to exe, but yeah, we are talking when no one had computers yet. People would actually buy the software, computer, monitor, and tape cassette player all from us just to run this program.

It was a very niche market and the company got in very early (obviously since they had to sell people computers just to run the software) so it did very well.

I had the fun task of migrating QBASIC code over to VB.NET. And some people thing they have it bad upgrading "legacy" VB6 code.. ;)

If you pull back the little metal bit and insert some cheese they make a reasonably servicable mousetrap.