Recycle – Floppydisks
floppydisk.com
floppydisk.com
Also how many other kids also went around brandishing 3.5" floppies like a weird gun, "cocking them" by pulling back the shutter and letting it go with a satisfying snap?
My favorite part is when I start cursing loudly "what hipster doofus wrote this pile of steaming horse crap?" as my eyes bleed Ark of the Covenant style from unblinkingly debugging poorly documented code in a company with a huge codebase only to realize a few seconds later that it’s mine from several years back, when I first started. The old “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
The oldest publicly released code of mine is SLIPShuttle, which provided pushbutton connecting to the internet on an Amiga (the cmdline interface was terrible). Written in AREXX https://aminet.net/comm/tcp/SLIPShuttle.lha
The second oldest was ringconnectd, which allows you to "ring knock" your (POTS connected) modem to make it connect to the internet and mail you your IP address. It was VERY handy while I was in college, and apparently it took off in Africa a few years later as their internet connectivity grew. https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/network/daemons/rin...
ringconnectd never answered a call, but rather listened for a ring pattern that you could specify. So what I'd typically do is go to a payphone, dial my line at home, let it ring twice, hang up, get my money back, dial again letting it ring twice again, hang up, get my money back again, then go to the computer lab to wait. My system at home was configured to connect after the ring pattern [ring, ring, delay, ring, ring]. It would then wait 30s, connect to its ISP, and email me its current IP address.
I did it this way because I was already using the terminal for pretty much everything, and we didn't get dedicated machines on campus. So it was better to just hold my work on my Linux machine at home and connect to it from the lab.
To this day, when I read or think about a solar eclipse, I have a visual image of floppies! My first instinct seeing this on HN was “is this because there is a solar eclipse tomorrow?”
I have no other explanation.
This is an almost-full box of miscellaneous floppies in one of the original cardboard trays of 30 from Office Depot.
I've got kilos more floppies in different closets but these are good ones I selected a few years ago that all passed SCANDISK.
Now this one little box is in an old ziploc bag in the office and it keeps self-inflating. At first I thought it was unusually low barometric pressure one day but I keep squeezing out the air rain or shine and it keeps on puffing back out by itself.
Something I really didn't expect.
If I did still own my own laboratory, I'd tell you what kind of gas it was by now though ;)
The possibility of mold growth may also be considered.
The bag is old and imperfect, and I don't think it is completely airtight either. Not as much from permeability of the polymer but phyical wear & tear too.
I smelled the exhaust when I deflated it the last few times and it is very faint but industrial. Doesn't smell like mold but organisms could still be hidden somewhere breaking down plastic or additives. Which may or may not consume oxygen.
Osmosis I have been considering too, if fairly high molecular weight breakdown products are gradually emerging into the gas phase, with the bag way more permeable to atmospheric gases, maybe the atmosphere is forcing its way in and builds slightly higher partial pressure than ambient as a molar dilutive effort.
This is a good time to put the floppies in a brand new bag and see what happens, the experiments never end ;)
No irreplaceable game floppies and probably nothing worth saving at all, but it was only about 10mb total on all the disks combined, might as well save it on a HDD when the web wastes more of my megabytes than that in five minutes now.
So the files were just backed up the regular way before testing a couple dozen disks for future use, and bagging them to keep out the dust.
I tried to pick clean ones but actually probably kept in a bit of vintage dust when you think about it :)
What a time to be alive.
I'd guess they use .mod files - instruments and tracks, rather than digitized audio.
https://supercassetteband.bandcamp.com/merch/ouroboros-flopp...
Also: wow, this shop still has 8" floppy disks!
Interestingly most buyers didn't care about HD, DD etc. I suspect they went into art projects.
I have a vast quantity of random USB sticks from clearing out my father's house, keeping them just in case something needed, nothing was. Rather than take the effort to dispose of them, I am thinking of holding on to them for the retro scene of 2050.
From a vintage computing perspective, possibly. The only question is whether they will work. Oddly, I have found USB sticks to be less reliable than floppy disks. (Odd because I would think that semi-conductor memory would last longer than a ferrous coating glued to a plastic substrate that is dragged along both the read/write head and the shell and is known to be susceptible to mould.)
Other uses, I just don't know. Floppy disks have a well defined appearance that means they are iconic. (Sometimes literally so!) USB sticks vary so much in size and appearance that it will be difficult to earn the iconic status. Floppies also have more to work with when it comes down to arts projects.
I've bought many floppy disks from these guys and I can say that they are 100% legit.
Also, destroying old technology is no way to progress into the future.