I have a troubleshooting boot disk from back in the day in a ringbinder pocket folder thing. I keep on thinking of getting rid of them but Im kinda nostalgic about it and don’t. does not take up all that much space. also tracking software.

Used? Just using one now, but as a coaster.

What an interesting juxtaposition on my home screen.

About a year or 2 ago. Remember when you stick a brand new floppy into the drive and tries to boot and it says something like, “Non-system disk. Please remove and press any key”? We’ll that’s actually a program coded on the floppy (which was preformatted by the manufacturer) and each manufactuer coded it a little different. I was ripping the image off different brands to compare their code.

Not exactly a floppy, but close: more than 20 years ago a very dear person gave me an Iomega Zip drive and a couple of disks. Game changer. My hard drive was 40 MB, so for the first time my backup was bigger than my computer. Same speed, too, so not much of a sacrifice.

Later came the tiny Clik! disks: great as a music player, and perfect for carrying data around when 100 MB was a HUGE amount of memory. Through all my university years the Zip was my go-to. I just learned to pray every time I heard a click that wasn’t the brand name. :D

Back in 2017 I found a bunch in our garage. I bought a cheap USB floppy drive off Amazon and went through them. It was real nostalgic hearing that noise and seeing the A: drive show up on the explorer sidebar. I archived them all on what is now my NAS.

Prior to that, probably the early 2000s. My parents bought a computer in 2004. It was the last one I can remember coming with an internal floppy drive.

The save icon in so many programs are still floppy disks. So technically, I still use floppy disks pretty much daily. 😆

Around 2013, when I was just 13, on the computer at my grandparents place. I had to actually ask around and spend effort to find floppys since by then they were already obsolete, but my grandparents PC only had a floppy drive available. I used it to attempt to write an OS (I know I know, daunting task but I didnt know how much I didnt know). I got as far as writing the bootloader and got it to load and print Hello World, but no further.

The event production world is simultaneously very advanced and antiquated at the same time. I used a floppy disc earlier this year because some lighting consoles still use them. We then used said lighting console to control a projection mapped surface with motion tracking.

A few weeks ago, as coasters.

Not my use, but this in the news today: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-out-floppy-disks-air-traffic-control-by-2028-2026-11-05/

About a month ago. Found a copy of railroad tycoon on a 5 1/4" in an abandoned building and wanted to see if it still worked.

It did not

2003

I would have used a USB drive; I owned one back then. But I needed something that would work with the school’s computers. This was back when most mice and keyboards were still PS/2 and most printers were parallel, so USB wasn’t on every computer yet. At least, not at the school I went to.

I don’t remember for sure, but I’d guess late 90s at the latest, for smaller files where it wouldn’t make sense to burn a CD-R and uploading it somewhere (especially since I didn’t have a CD-RW until later) and downloading it wasn’t a viable option.

With most data transfer to friends being via BBS or later IRC DCC over the Internet, and software becoming available on CDROM, and Zip drives for backup, and CD-R and CD-RW becoming available for larger files, the use cases for floppies were already becoming limited by mid-90s.