Post title at limit, but meant to be peak tactile feedback in computer storage.
The space saved from being thin made it bad for looking up and finding a specific disk within a stack, tho, as it couldn’t fit an end label
We didn’t stack them though. We kept them in those boxes with a pointless lock, and flipped through them.
The good old days. I wish I still has mine but alas many off my old flipped died in a fire.
Ah just like flipping through records at a record store.
Mine lived in the original cardboard boxes
Look at Mr Moneybags over here, playing his games without hand written labels and cracktros.
Who said that? I meant the boxes that held the original empty floppies
God that sounds nice actually, I miss it terribly
“didn’t take too much space”
Someone never installed an operating system from floppies. Win98 was 38 floppies. Heaven help you if you didn’t notice you only have 37 disks until halfway through the install.
A media format with 1.44mb per disk is not conducive to space saving even back in the day.
They’re talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.
You could build SSDs today with the exact same tactility of floppy disks but with terabytes of storage.
You better patent this.
I still occasionally use floppies and I can assure you that they do in fact occupy more space than I’d like.
That’s just 37 floppy disks of bloat. All you really need is 1.44 MB.
Here’s one with a gui lol
Those distros even have a GUI? Amiga Workbench on 720k all the way! 😁
Ok, you forgot the Kickstart boot disk loading the Kernel before. But yes, the Amiga was amazingly resource efficient.
I learned a lot about the Amiga reading Ars Technica’s history of the Amiga series. Such a shame that that computer never reached Brazil
Don’t fret. Only snobby kids whos parents bought it for them had them. Because they wanted to one-up you. And they didn’t even appreciate it. Like I did my C128D that had a built-in floppy drive.
Fuck you, Csabika.
To be fair, by 1998 something as big as win98 wasn’t supposed to be shipped in floppies. Then again, win95 was available as 27 disks
Windows 95 on CD-ROM included three music videos, presumably to show off the capabilities of the format.
I remember my copy had Buddy Holly by Weezer, and I think something called Good Times. What was the third?
Zip disks at least the 100’s had the same tactile qualities, little door to fidget and label space all while having that satisfying clicking sound each time you used them.
Not that I don’t agree but… I’d take Mini Disc over them. Really similar but smaller -but not to the point of losing tactility or nice labels- and I love the eject mechanism of some players/recorders. Amazing mix of cassette tapes (usability) and CDs (capacity, non-linearity…), kinda late to the party.
UMDs are cool too, thought not as much IMHO.
3.5 disks were my fidget spinners before the term existed. pulling back the slide and letting it snap shut kept my idle brain occupied for hours while waiting for stuff on the computer to happen.
Flashbacks of flipping around a 5¼" floppy disks that were actually floppy and manually spinning the cassette tape wheels while something is loading.
I have loaded punch cards and punch tape also. The only thing I haven’t loaded is those big open platters. I’ve used 5 1/4" floppies as late as 2017 with an old Apple Lisa and CMM.
The 3.5” disk was designed as a consumer product by Sony, whose industrial design is second to none. (Compare the 5¼ “ and 8” floppies, which were designed by IBM engineers and only intended for use by technical specialists.)
… was second to none. Looking at almost illegible black text labels on a black Sony TV enclosure.
I wish they’d make SSDs in a similar format with plug-and-play functionality.
Stick your disk in and boot from it. Remove after shutdown and take it with you.That’s called a thumb drive and you can do it as long as the computer you are using has the option to boot from USB enabled in BIOS (typically personal machines come with that enabled but machines out in the public often disable it specifically because they don’t want you booting a different OS)
But if it were an NVMe slot… That’d be juicy.
You can get near that level of performance with a small thunderbolt drive.
… you can totally do that now?
Although possible, it’s not really optimal to run an OS via USB
Never saw one of those before, that looks super neat
They were super expensive, as storage solutions went.
The labeling was a good thing, and stackability, but otherwise I prefer USB sticks. Tactile, easy to stick in or pull out. Esp. since even an old one replaces thousands of disks. 1GB==711floppies
I kind of wish that something along the lines of the old PCMCIA format had survived. Flat, stackable, big enough for easy labelling, and these days could easily fit many terabytes of flash storage.
SATA SSDs, if only there were floppy-like docks in PCs’ front panels for them. I see adding one usb-c female adapter as a part of the protective case, and adding a male one on the opposite end of the dock could’ve been the way, since modern USB ports have sufficient power and data capabilities. Adapter’s firmware could’ve signaled it’s nothing more than a big USB thumb drive, it can also be (made?) compatible with portable devices e.g. digital cameras, phones, etc to make it more useful.
I remember 2,5" hot-swap bays being a thing some years ago, surely some cases still come with them. Although for the average user that setup is pretty overkill, and pcmcia cards were smaller, kinda figures that it hasn’t gotten mass adoption.
Not all drives had buttons. There were workstations (Sun Sparcs) which had. motorized eject mechanisms.
Used 10 of these workstations to copy my freshly downloaded Slackware Linux to the stack of 60 floppies it took. (Twice, so I wrote 120 disks, as at least one of the disks would have read errors on average). Each time one of the Sparcs was done, it did spit out the disk and I’d insert a new one, labeling the old one with what was written on screen.
Ah the hours I spent downloading and installing 100-200 Megabytes of operating systems.
Labeling the disks would just be a sequence number, I’d label the disk boxes with the content.
Late 90s memories…
At home, I’d install the os by inserting each of these disks into my PC with16MBytes of RAM.
All that took about a day of work.
You kids don’t know how good you have it, we had to fetch out Xfree86 mode lines in a wooden bucket from outside in the snow, barefoot.
For similar reasons, I feel like Gameboy Advanced cartridges were the optimal size for handheld consoles. Switch cartridges are so tiny and fragile.
Growing up, my dad used to download a lot of games off BBSes for me and my brother. He would save them on 3.5 floppies and then label what game was on each one. I’ve got fond memories of flipping through his box of floppies seeing what new games he had for us to play.
- Great for storing half a photo
MicroSD cards fit these requirements too
No, but SD/MMC do. Micro SD are so small they’re awkward to carry and store.
I disagree, MicroSD is my external storage of choice. Their size makes them ideal to carry and store but you might need to rethink how you go about doing it.
I had a cool little leather wallet that held 2 3.5" disks. Felt like a pro every time i flipped it open.
