4 ms·

I was at a tech event and I realized the 20-something I was chatting with didn't know what a floppy disk was. I had to explain it to him and he only got it whe

by dotBen 4y ago

I was at a tech event and I realized the 20-something I was chatting with didn't know what a floppy disk was. I had to explain it to him and he only got it when I finally showed him images on Google and he sort of got the concept. He was a software engineer and he had literally never heard of floppy disks! I'm 41 and I felt so old...

bombcar 4y ago
I used to explain what they are by starting with "imagine a hard drive where the platters were removable" and now people ask "what's a hard drive?"
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  It's like that post on the PC gaming subreddit where someone was unironically asking about what interface was on a pictured hard drive ... it was IDE.
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Most people now never saw the innards of their computers (or phones) and also, everything is always "on", so there's less distinction between RAM and disk.
Teknoman117 4y ago
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.
- randomluck040 4y ago
  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.
  - inconceivable 4y ago
    good ol' sneakernet.
    - Teknoman117 4y ago
      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.
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    The first time I learned how to do a multi-part tar archive was to split my backup across multiple floppies...
    - systems_glitch 4y ago
      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."
      - Teknoman117 4y ago
        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.)
sn_master 4y ago
I once posted on reddit/TIL something about CD-Roms and the thread got deleted because CD-R was an unknown term or something...
WillAdams 4y ago
When my daughter did a poster charting storage capacity of computer media, I got out a variety of things so that she could draw at scale the media (from memory, 5.25" floppy, 3.5" floppy, Zip disk, Compact Flash, and SD Card). I gave her a 5.25" floppy to take in and show as part of her presentation -- her _teacher_ asked if she could keep it since she had never seen one.

by dotBen 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

I used to explain what they are by starting with "imagine a hard drive where the platters were removable" and now people ask "what's a hard drive?"

Teknoman117 4y ago
It's like that post on the PC gaming subreddit where someone was unironically asking about what interface was on a pictured hard drive ... it was IDE.
actionfromafar 4y ago
Most people now never saw the innards of their computers (or phones) and also, everything is always "on", so there's less distinction between RAM and disk.

Teknoman117 4y ago

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.

randomluck040 4y ago
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.
- inconceivable 4y ago
  good ol' sneakernet.
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    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.
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  The first time I learned how to do a multi-part tar archive was to split my backup across multiple floppies...
  - systems_glitch 4y ago
    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."
    - Teknoman117 4y ago
      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.)

sn_master 4y ago

I once posted on reddit/TIL something about CD-Roms and the thread got deleted because CD-R was an unknown term or something...

WillAdams 4y ago

When my daughter did a poster charting storage capacity of computer media, I got out a variety of things so that she could draw at scale the media (from memory, 5.25" floppy, 3.5" floppy, Zip disk, Compact Flash, and SD Card). I gave her a 5.25" floppy to take in and show as part of her presentation -- her _teacher_ asked if she could keep it since she had never seen one.