</floppies>

Today marks the end of the floppy disk from my life. Over the years, I’ve accumulated a ton of them, and as time has gone by, my hardware’s support for them has vanished. Every time I moved, they tagged along, possibly too important to throw away; certainly too trivial to examine.

Cleaning house a few weeks ago, I realized I could do better without them, and better be done with them soon—my office computer (a Dell Optiplex GX240 with a Dell 1905FP monitor), can still read them, but my office laptop (a Toshiba Portege M200 Tablet PC), office Mac (a 15 inch PowerBook G4) and home computer (an Apple PowerMac G5) cannot. I really don’t want to face the day when I can’t toss them out because I can’t determine what’s on them.

CD’s, email, the Internet, USB drives and my iPod have replaced the floppy in my life.

Over the last several weeks, searching through drawers, closets, under my bed and in the basement, I gathered them up into a nice tall pile. Then, a little bit at a time, day by day, I stuck them in the Dell, examined their contents, copied what was worth it and tossed what wasn’t. What a pain in the rear that was. Well, I’m now happy to say that I don’t have them any more. I also no longer have the one Jaz disk that carried a lot of data from my life in the midwest that was completely inaccessible to me, never having owned a Jaz drive. Luckily, there’s a lab at work where I was able to salvage the contents of that.

The 3.5-inch double density (DD) disk was introduced in 1984 and stored 720KB, and its high density (HD) cousin followed in 1987, storing 1.44MB. They were much more durable (and oddly, far less floppy) than their 5.25- and 8-inch ancestors, and though I have fond memories of doubling their capacity with a paper punch with Tim and Andy back in West Bend, it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen or used them.

Oh, and on a similar thread, I’ve never owned an 8-track, and I don’t own any record albums any more. In fact, I don’t remember if I ever did own an album. Music and me really didn’t get personal until the cassette tape era, and I’ve only held onto a few of those—Limited Warranty and Something Fierce. I’ve successfully converted these tapes into iTunes, but I still hold onto them for sentimental reasons.

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I still have quite few floppies here. I have backed up (in the long process) most of the content worth keeping and have copied some of the stuff that seems somewhat useless but may have some historic interest to CD. The problem with disposing of the disettes en mass is one of retention of older software. While much is no longer useful or relevant, I cannot find the inclination to garbage it outright and so while I have imaged all the diskettes and archived the images to CD, I have also retained a small number of diskettes of various formats (which I still have drives for) as a kind of archival backup system. I spent $10 on eBay a year ago and bought a QIC-80 tape drive so I could retreive material off some old 120MB backup tapes that are now also part of the “museum” here.

Who knows, one day they (along with the LP’s, 45’s, 78s, 16’s, metal music box disks, 8-tracks, cassettes and yes CD’s and DVD’s) will make an archaeologists career. Though I don’t expect the paper program tapes, punch cards or piano rolls will survive that long. GRIN

» by WD Milner on Nov 30, 2005 at 05:20 PM | #

This post is closed to new comments. Thanks to everyone who commented.

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