The Floppy Disk

Yea,

I had many cases, all in neat little sets; labeled, categorized... even color coded! I think they got molded up being stored in a basement some time ago, just before hitting the trash can.

*a moment of silence for our obsolete collections*

I think they went the way of typewriters, carbon paper and whiteout---not to mention music cassettes.
The hard drive and the mouse are on the list now.

I started using computers in 1968 which (a) shows my age and (b) means I have used most of the now obsolete technology. I'm probably obsolete myself but we won't go there.
I can actually remember using real floppy disks, ie they were floppy (flexible). These days I travel with a collection of USB drives, sooo much easier to use, and faster.
Moving an old wardrobe recently we found an old 5 1/2 inch floppy (inch!! who uses inches anymore? Oh, sorry USA readers!:shifty:) I have kept it as a souvenir.
It did bring home one point however - as technology changes, keep transferring your photos and important data to the new media, otherwise you will be left with a whole lot of unreadable stuff. Who has a computer that reads 5 1/2" disks anymore?

I have to admit I do.

While cleaning out all the old computers, I took out cables, cords, hard drives and other things I thought I could use. This one computer I had went all the way back to 1985; I took out its 5 1/2 inch drive and put it away

While building my computer in 2007, with a Core 2 Duo,4 GB Ram , 3 500 GB HD, Builtin USB Memory Slots, a trusty 3.5 inch drive, 2 DVD Writers/Readers and a CD Rom I use just for playing CDs, I had a spare 5 1/2 slot left.

As a joke, I recovered my old 5 1/2 disk drive and put it in. And it works perfectly!
If I ever get another internal drive, I'll replace it, but for now, I can read 5 1/2 disks!

Now that is amazing! I didnt really think they would work with any modern computers. You might actually get some work recovering old data if you spread the word around that you can read these antiques.
At one stage there were bigger floppies around - I remember seeing them used in a recording studio. Not sure what the actual size was, but they were about 50% larger.

Vista still has the icon for the 5 1/2 disk even.

I could use it as a joke: I'll give you a file or picture, but I'll give it to him on a 5 1/2 floppy hahah

I have in my collection an IBM 8-inch floppy dating, I think from the '70s.

" In 1976 two of Shugart Associates's employees, Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro, were approached by An Wang of Wang Laboratories, who felt that the 8-inch format was simply too large for the desktop word processingFloppy disk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I recently found a roll of yellow punchtape that I'd used to record a short role-playing game that I'd written using BASIC when I was in high school, circa 1977.

Yikes.

I can remember using punched tape back in about 1968 - we had a particularly unpleasant lady doing the input for us; we set up a program that started up when she began to do the input - the tape came out spelling out "help i am trapped in the computer" with its little dots. My co-worker and I hid behind a desk and fell about in hysterics watching her receive this message. Does this qualify as very early geek humour?

Oh well, I was a lot younger then....

Only if you had a beehive hairdo and wore cat glasses. If you had long straight hair and wore bellbottoms it was counter-culture pranksterism.

Kids today don't appreciate the technology of the good ol' days. Remember if you were sick and your folks let you lie on the couch watching television, how if you wanted to change the channel you had to haul your sorry butt up, walk over to the set and turn a big knob? Clunk, clunk, clunk. In 1968, I think our old monster of a black and white t.v. got three channels.

No, I was definitely straight hair and bellbottoms. Even had a boyfriend in a rock band!
I remember the pre-techno days, but I must admit to loving all my gizmos like mp3 players, home wi fi and all the rest of little things with LEDs that clutter up my house. Being able to see video and listen to radio from anywhere in the world, or talk to people with similar interests (like this site) - that is something I would find hard to do without.

Oh cell phones (or mobiles as we call them here) - the hate of my life :letme-at-em:!!! Sitting in the bus listening to The Philosophers Zone on my mp3 -or trying to as some half wit is sitting next to me is bellowing into his or her phone about some complete trivial rubbish. And the Borg could do nothing compared to what I would like to inflict on these people. As for driving while talking on the phone - arghhh!!! It's actually illegal here, but you would never know seeing the number of people doing just that. I have a very ancient Nokia which only does phone calls and text, most of the time it is off or I ignore it. It does not take photos, surf the web, play music (or send adverts). Yes, off topic, but there are some hates that must be expressed!!!