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Comment by asvitkine | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, floppies were pretty easy, just had no capacity.

They were also vastly more error prone. Maybe my experience isn't representative, but floppy drives were always janky, and floppy discs failed all the time, while I can't remember a USB drive ever dying. I lost lots of files on floppies.

I've had lots of USB flash drives fail but usually in a context where they experienced a high number of writes which makes some sense.

Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of the cheap tradeshow variety.

So many floppies were damaged by magnets that almost all people still remember "magnets and floppies do not mix". That was a hard-learned lesson for many people.

Not to mention little reliability, especially in the latter years. Things got progressively worse going from 5¼" ~170K single-sided CBM-1541 to 5¼" 360K double-sided to 5¼" 1.2M to 3½" 720 to 3½" 1.44M. I never really used 8" floppies due to the lack of hardware so I can't say whether those were better or worse than their 5¼" successors but the hardware and (especially) media took a downturn in the latter years of the 3½" period.

Out of curiosity, your comment made me fire up the C64 and 1541 I keep as a conversation starter in my office. It still loads the, uh, evaluation copy of Defender of the Crown which 1988 me copied onto a 3M DS,DD floppy in February of that year, if the scrawny handwriting on the label is to be believed.

(I boot it a few times a year, mostly to show younger colleagues that whining about how terribly dated the PS4 is now that the PS5 is (somewhat) available won't get them much sympathy from someone who played games on the C64 in the mid-eighties...)

So, at least one data point for a carelessly stored floppy from a name brand still doing what it is expected to more than a third of a century later!

I remember loading some of my old floppies about 10 years ago, maybe as a bit of a nostalgia trip. I believe I'd kept my floppy drive around that long but probably hadn't actually used it in 10 years. Although I was a pretty heavy user in the mid 90s I was kind of kind of shocked how brutally slow and loud the copying operation was, and I didn't have memories of either of those aspects being great!

There is something satisfying about the mechanical chunk when they the disk snaps in though.

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