Comment by jamesbkel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesbkel | Hacker News Reader

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Back in High School I wanted to get a bit of IS experience, so I volunteered in the IS dept of a nearby hospital. Turned out, my job was to format all 10-20K of the old Windows95 installation floppies they had sitting around (this was 2000-2001).

At first I almost just left. But the guys in the IS dept were actually really nice and let me use the spare parts they had just sitting around. I ended up making a setup with 3 screens, 3 towers and each tower with 4 floppy drives. Plus an extra tower & screen to browse the internet while I would swap disks in and out of the other three.

My hidden back corner behind all the ancient, noisy tape drive towers (it was a Hospital... need to be HIPPA compliant and anal about recouds) became the cool place to hang out and I ended up learning a mountain of information from those guys/gals.

One thing about those old windows 95 floppies is that they have surprisingly better quality than other floppies. I had to use some floppies in 2001, and had massive failure rates with newly bought ones, and near-zero with rewritten Windows 95 installation disks.

Same for me. I still use floppies with some of my synths (D-20, MV-30 -- no alternative, really), and the newest floppies (post 2000) are of terrible quality, while the old floppies (up to 23 years old) work perfectly and never failed me.

Hopefully, they weren't low density floppies that they made you punch holes in and reformat as high density.

My Windows 95 installation floppies were high density floppies with a special disk format that gave them 1.6MB instead of 1.44MB.

Yea, it was called DMF, also used for Office 4.2 floppies for example.

I did this all the time when I was 13, 14 years old.

They weren't, because they were Windows 95 installation floppies.

It's weird. I was /there/ in 1995 and I have trouble even remembering Windows 95 came on floppies. I feel old.

I had a CD-ROM by then, so I don't know what the floppy installs looked like.

But you know that Windows 95 was released in 1995.

So what is your point? I used low density disks in '94, so it's not a stretch to imagine they were around in '95.

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