5 ms·
I'd go as far as to say that 3.5" floppy's were much more widespread than for instance usb sticks are today and in numbers that has no comparable to this age(th
by Seanambers 6y ago
I'd go as far as to say that 3.5" floppy's were much more widespread than for instance usb sticks are today and in numbers that has no comparable to this age(thankfully). The world basically ran on it until windows 95 came on a CDROM (also distributed on 13 floppys) and with it the multimedia age as they called it, but still it took a good decade before it was mostly CD/DVD's..
- kace91 6y agoI grew up in the CD era but I still had to use floppy disks for things like school assignments, because disks were far worse for that - burned once, disk lost. Rewritable disks were more expensive, failed like crazy and took a lot of time to burn anyway. I remember that time as particularly annoying. It was a God send to see usb sticks become mainstream, and since everyone had mp3 players on them it meant that you were always carrying a USB stick with you (except for the poor souls that had ipods, who couldn't treat the storage as a folder for random files and had to use iTunes instead ).
- johnzim 6y agoYou definitely could do that to my recollection, I remember doing so to ferry files around. Here's an apple support doc showing how: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544
- silly-silly 6y agoThis was not a viable option pre 6th gen.
- LukeShu 6y agoIt was if you ran ipodlinux instead of the stock OS!
- silly-silly 6y agoI had forgotten about this, thanks for the reminder :)
- uncle_dickie 6y agoFrom firsthand experience? I think my 2003 iPod w/ Dock Connector can still boot to Disk Mode.
- leemailll 6y agoBelieve it or not, my win95 copy came with both 3.5 floppy disks and a cd. my computer that time had a cdrom but I tried to install it with floppy disks, and failed miserably around the thirties or something. At that time there was a joke why MS named it win95 not something else.
- bluedino 6y agoAre you sure you aren’t thinking about Office? The last version came on 55 floppies https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archive/cc767941(v=technet.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archiv...
- acomjean 6y agoCan confirm the OS did as well (win 95). It was a hard install on my notebook which lacked a cd drive. So many floppies.
- lozf 6y agoSame here, floppies and failures! I ended up taking the notebook (a Dell Latitude with 810MB of hard disk) to a friends where we managed to install from a network mounted CD via the parallel port IIRC.
- simonblack 6y agoI bought a version of Novell Unixware back in the early 1990s that had even more floppies, 63 of 'em, IIRC. I tried to short-circuit that long-winded installation by putting the last 50 or so on to a QIC tape-cassette. Most of the time that worked, sometimes it didn't.
- silly-silly 6y agoIt definitely came packaged this way in Australia. I can confirm OP's story.
- treeman79 6y agohttps://www.ebay.com/itm/1995-Microsoft-Windows-Upgrade-for-Users-of-Windows-/393019333321?_trksid=p2349624.m46890.l49292 https://www.ebay.com/itm/1995-Microsoft-Windows-Upgrade-for-... I have not so great memories of constantly reinstalling windows via floppy. Swapping disks getS old quick
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoWhile the average computer user may have had, say, 40 floppy disks, and today's users have maybe two USB sticks on average, the sheer number of users has probably risen enough to overcome that difference.