Comments on: Funeral for a (Floppy) Friend

By: Ben Waranowitz

Ben Waranowitz — Mon, 17 May 2010 02:40:58 +0000

I actually AM older than dirt!

By: Ben Waranowitz

Ben Waranowitz — Mon, 17 May 2010 02:39:07 +0000

Heck, you guys make me feel OLD! I worked on IBM systems that had 1MB 8 inch floppies. And mainframe systems that used 1/2 inch tapes on banks of tape drives. We even had huge tubes in the power supplies for the saturable reactors for regulation.

By: tulle

tulle — Sat, 01 May 2010 13:21:56 +0000

First: My dads IBM PS2 with windows 3.11 on it. I don’t remember using any floppys, but tetris was loads of fun for a five year old kid.
Last: My current custom-built PC. Last time I used was when I found a laptop with a 486 in it and wanted to see if it could run 3.11. One OS contained in only 8.64 megs? Marvelous!

By: krishna

krishna — Sat, 01 May 2010 11:24:13 +0000

I liked the old version I had up, but I liked the new version I came up with even better. :) BTW, congrats on the new job! Enjoy the new laptop!

By: Adrian Chrysanthou

Adrian Chrysanthou — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:38:27 +0000

Commodore 64 was my first with any type of floppy. And my last was a Compaq Presario 5000(2001), and a ECS Desknote i – Buddie 4 (2002) with an external floppy drive.

By: coius

coius — Sat, 01 May 2010 07:47:04 +0000

I coulda sworn I saw another comic up there, that was like “Newer” than this… What happened? Didn’t like the outcome? I thought it was pretty cool :P

btw, victory laptops ftw, especially when scoring a new job (which I am about to do soon)

By: Axonite

Axonite — Sat, 01 May 2010 03:05:42 +0000

First computer with a floppy – C64 with a 5.25″ floppy, and later I had the 3.5″ drive for it too.

Last one with a floppy – a spare parts PC that’s currently in the attic. I had a program for it that could read the Commodore 3.5″ disks.

By: oldmachead

oldmachead — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 21:56:09 +0000

Mac Plus! After using 5-1/4″ floppies on an Osborne (I still have one in my garage) and a PC, it was a thrill to handle the little 3.5″ floppies. I still have MS-Word v.1 and MS-Excel v.1 – on floppies. Probably still have Mac OS6 and 7 somewhere – all on floppies!! ;-)

By: Theala Sildorian

Theala Sildorian — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:19:07 +0000

Ah, the floppy.

I had a 5 1/4″ with my Apple IIe, and felt lucky to have it; a friend had a tape drive with his C64, and it took FOREVER to load anything. Had the Apple until about 12 years ago, but hadn’t used it in years. Had 3.5 floppies with all my PC’s, and the PCs I use at work still have 3.5 drives in them. Some of my colleagues still use floppies for data, and I actually had a student who insisted on handing in his work on 3.5 floppys instead of using email (he didn’t have internet at home to email it to me) as recently at 4 years ago.

I’ve got a ton of floppy’s from my PC days, with loads of data I haven’t had time to convert to CD. I have a USB floppy drive for my Mac that works just fine, but I won’t mourn the demise of the format.

By: Kevin Rubin

Kevin Rubin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:55:00 +0000

I got my first floppy disks to use with my junior high’s TRS-80′s. The Radio Shack brand ones were thick and heavy and about $5 each. Once I bought my first computer, an Apple //e, I switched to buying Maxell floppies in boxes of 10, and Elephant ones, and my father got a deal on 100 Wabash, which went bad faster than the others…

I don’t think I got a 3.5″ disk drive until the mid-90′s. Before that all my college friends and I just kept the covers off our computers so we could easily add and remove drives to carry to each other’s computers for temporary usage…

In storage in the U.S. I’ve got a collection of them, including a 2.88MB 3.5″ drive and a box of 10 extra-high density disks to go with it (though I’ve never actually used it).

Here in India I haven’t used a floppy since I gave my PC away to a former colleague (he was a poor kid and didn’t expect to earn enough money to buy his own computer for a couple of years, and thrilled to get my unused, obsolete machine). Even then it was kind of pointless, I don’t think any disk I’ve used in India has lasted more than a couple of uses before being unreadable. Must be the dirt and dust (I suspect there’s lots of metallic particles in the dust).