Anybody need some 3.5" floppies???

msdos622wasfun · 09 Dec 2010

I say we petition the hardware vendors to bring back the 8" floppy! Who knows, maybe they can find a way to squeeze just as much as a Blu-ray disc on there! :)

3.5", 5.25", 8" floppies, record albums, 8-track tapes, rotary phones, VHS, cassettes ... it has all come and, if not completely gone, slowly fading away.

I know that some people still use them when they have to boot to a bare minimum or do BIOS updates ... seems like that's one of the main reasons that they still hang around to a small extent.

I do so love the colors of these floppies, heh ... red, green, blue, yellow ... it really brightens things up. But that suggestion about donating them is a good idea ... I might have to consider that.

So is Apple to credit for weaning us off them? As far as I understand, it was the original iMac that said goodbye to the 3.5" disk.

Luckystar · 09 Dec 2010

I actually have two brand new boxes, 20 in each, and an open box, bout the same amount.

But got fed up with the floppy drive looking so ugly and i just use a USB stick for everything, even a BIOS update. So just chucked the drive in the box under the bed and got a card reader instead.

Though, they were handy for the time and at least the disk inside was covered so almost better than a CD/DVD disk in some cases.

Lucky

LiquidSnak · 09 Dec 2010

I was always partial to the green and yellow floppy disks.

There is tons of cool stuff you can make with them, your imagination is the limit:

Gallery - 10 things to do with floppy disks : Shiny Shiny

Joan Archer · 09 Dec 2010

I've got a load of them here but my machine doesn't have a drive, my XP machine does but they're never used.

strollin · 09 Dec 2010

Fantail said:

We have an old phone system at work ( getting replaced next year ) that runs off a 386 and OS/2. ...

Hey Fantail - Is that old phone system an Edify system by chance?

msdos622wasfun · 09 Dec 2010

LiquidSnak said:

There is tons of cool stuff you can make with them, your imagination is the limit:

Gallery - 10 things to do with floppy disks : Shiny Shiny

Some of those ideas were really cool! :)

WindowsStar · 09 Dec 2010

Fantail said:

We have an old phone system at work ( getting replaced next year ) that runs off a 386 and OS/2. What system back then didn't have a floppy? Hey, who else remembers a breif stint of drives that could read the 3.5's but also took super-disks that were 1.2 gigs if memory servs?

Don't I wish 1.2gigs if that had been the case they would have really taken off. They were 120meg. We bought a bunch of machines with them so that when we had to boot our Virus Cleaning Disk we had enough space. At one point we were using 3 1.44meg disks, so the 120meg was nice. We only bought them for about 8 months because then CD-Rom prices really dropped.

Nickmix · 10 Dec 2010

They are needed when updating the BIOS. The safest way IMO.

Fantail · 10 Dec 2010

strollin said:

Fantail said:

We have an old phone system at work ( getting replaced next year ) that runs off a 386 and OS/2. ...

Hey Fantail - Is that old phone system an Edify system by chance?

No I believe its Nortel.

Borg 386 · 10 Dec 2010

I seem to remember a few years ago one of my wife's friends asked me "What's the difference between a floppy disk and a hard disk". I told her "Why don't you come over when my wife's at work and I'll show you".

That's when the fight with my wife started....no sense of humor.......