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Comment by Teknoman117 | Hacker News Reader

There's definitely a threshold point for knowing about them. I just turned 30, and in practice, I never used them. (But I just missed them)

About the time I got to the point in school of needing to send documents (mid-00s), flash drives had come down in price that everyone had them, and by 11th grade, even we had school emails.

The majority of my use of them was that I cut my computing/networking/programming teeth on all the 90's and early 00's computer hardware that my dad had hanging around. I had piles of floppies and no flash drive so I made do with what I had available.

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This brings back memories. I‘m 32 now and back in the day, we were trading GameBoy roms on floppies because there was nothing else we could use. Essentially we were using them like USB sticks.

The first time I learned how to do a multi-part tar archive was to split my backup across multiple floppies...

Heh, I know a guy who wrote a shell script to do multipart tar backups to floppy using a low-end disk duplicator, which was an external 3.5" standard PC drive, and a serial interface to tell it "load next disk."

Wait, could the changer swap disks automatically? That's super neat! I saw one a data tape changer once and I've always been fascinated by the mechanical aspects of computer equipment in the past.

(on a side note, I am one of my only friends who actually enjoys going to the computer history museum. I just wish I could interact with the old machines. I wish there was a "come learn a bit of cobol, fortran, or <<machine specific assembly>> and write a small program for our 1401" option available.)

Yeah, it was a single-drive duplicator, and you loaded a stack of 3.5" diskettes in. You could command it to load a diskette and eject a diskette, and I think he'd said there was an "out of diskettes" indication.

The floppy drive itself was a regular old PC drive, 34-pin interface, just mounted in a machine on a long cable vs. inside the PC case.

Bigger, fancier duplicators have multiple drives and write in parallel, but due to the cheaper configuration of this single-drive duplicator, it was possible to use it like a tape library. Mostly this was for fun, I'm sure he had tape drives on which to save his backups!

good ol' sneakernet.

I still do that from time to time. Not everyone has fast upload (compared to modern file sizes), so sometimes driving somewhere to pick up a flash drive or SSD (or mailing it) is faster than sending it over the internet...

I have symmetric gigabit, but my buddy in Fresno sure doesn't.

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