It was a simpler time
(midwest.social)
pelespirit
People TwitterCheckmate hackers.
Safe and secure. Just like our digital lives today!
In the 90s, that would have been a single copy of photoshop.
For some reason I have never seen one of those where the spare key was not attached to the primary key 🤔
That's because all of the other instances had the keys get lost and the owners had to break them open and buy new diskette cases.
You mean to tell me if you lost the keys you could just break them open? I threw away countless locked cases full of diskettes.
Break them open? You mean you actually locked the dust cover?
I just threw the keys away.
Display of wealth, 90s style
And you could open it with a spoon.
What kind of psychopath stored their floppies upside down like this?
UpperEndian format, clearly.
The same people who wrote the data backwards.
In the 1990s in the US we put our SSNs on our checks.
And as my first college ID. And on at least one of my licenses, I think...
Floppys were the ultimate in security because if you looked at them wrong they become corrupted.
But the slide is so fun to fiddle with! Click clack click clack, why doesn't Commander Keen run anymore!?!
TBH I fidgeted with those slides a lot and don't recall fucking my shit up.
Same; amazing stim toys.
Stop sticking them to your fridge with a magnet
Stapling 5¼" disks to reports was another whoopsie.
If the staple is near the corner it's perfectly fine, the disc itself is round in a square sleeve. So the corners have nothing in them
Or using a binder clip on 3.5" disks. Lost count how many times I saw that shit.
I always thought that was legend.
But that's how mom shows off my rust codebase! :(
Back when shit made sense. OneDrive, eat your heart out
What kind of sense is there in storing your floppies with the shutter at the top?
It was the way of The Ancestors.
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me! I was there when it was written!
Service accounts and RBAC has taken you for an absolute fool!
Service accounts? You mean service principals and managed identities
At the same time these were in vogue, you also could require a key to start the PC itself.
Fine, I'll do it:
Why the hell are the floppies in the bin with the label-side down? Nobody used these with the shutter-side up. How're you going to read the missing label when they're upside down?
I think this is a showcase photo for the case and the flipppies look better amd more like generic floppy disk with the metal slider on the top. It clearly communicates the purpose of the item, and the keys are in to show that it locks with a key and there's 1 spare key.
Because those little metal things stick together and could ruin the disk when you accidentally snag it. This way, you could see how they are against each other and not snag them.
And just have to pull all of them out to get the right one, right?
You'd browse through them like a rolodex. The disks can tilt forward in the box to make that easier.
That really depended on how full it was, yeah?
Color code to narrow it down
Just checking.... color code on the labels? The labels that are on the bottom?
Good question, could just be slop.
A year’s supply of save icons.
Mate, don’t give them ideas. The enshittifiers literally will implement “save tokens” into an app as soon as it occurs to them.
They already monetized it into subscription and cloud stuff.
Yeah but they can always limit that subscription to a certain number of saves
Its funny cause you could pinch the back and lift the lid off of its hinges
Not on the better ones you couldn't, but you could trivially pick with with paper clips.
Like bike locks. Very easy to circumvent, but just enough of a hurdle to deter most casual crimes of opportunity.
Locks are not made for criminals, locks are made for occasionals after all, 99% of locks are very easy to break in and the 1% is a nightmare even for the owner
If you've ever installed Microsoft office from floppy disks, you don't what those times back.
I remember downloading games from sketchy Warez sites on the school computers because they had a T1 line and I had dialup. They'd come in Floppy-sized segments; I'd go home each day with a stack of 10-15 floppies, copy the segment to my drive, delete it from the disk, and go back the next day to collect more. It would take weeks to get a whole game, and that's only if the warez site didn't disappear before I finished collecting parts. Then there was the butt clencher moment when I'd try to unpack the whole thing and see if it actually worked or not which, most of the time, it did not.
Those were the days.
ah man I remember unzipping 50 part rar files only to find another 50 part zip files inside. All because of some IRC file size limit or something.
CRC ERROR. CHECK ARCHIVE AND TRY AGAIN.
I bought a first gen zip drive for home because the school had one PC with one and I wanted to avoid the floppy fest lmao.
The only thing i want back from floppy disks is the form factor
We've already got the technology to remake them as SSDs too. SATA drives are small and light enough, and eSATA is removable, possibly hot swappable. We've been able to eject optical discs with software for decades. A physically small drive inside a floppy shaped caddy wouldn't take much work, and could be much faster than flash memory based drives.
I don't know enough about nvme drives, but they could be even better again :)
I recently bought 20 floppies from diskduper and man they are fun to hold, very tactile. Much lighter than I remembered too.
While I disagree for the most part, that's just me being super cynical because of how super shitty things are right now. Also, I feel like there was a vanishing small window of time that MS Office way the go to suite and you didn't use a CD for installation. My copy of Office 97 came on CD and Word Perfect was still very popular then.
I think Slackware dwarfed even Office on floppy count, but it may have depended on which modules you needed.
I've had the pleasure of installing Windows 95 and Slackware from floppy and I can't say I miss that part.
I also have a box just like the one in the picture sitting in my drawer right now. With floppies. One of them has Netscape on it. I really should clean some day.
Ugh, never. But installing the OS ... also ugh
Windows 3.1 was only about 10 floppies with DOS being about four. But Office was about 40.
I recall a Win95 installation involving on the order of 20 diskettes.
I never purchased or manually installed MicroSlop Office prior to the advent of fully administrated local area networks, so from such specific pain I was spared
I already had my first CD-ROM drive (so futuristic!) when 95 came out. But I did install Office on Win3.1 from floppies. Soon after that I switched to OpenOffice and haven't used commercial software (other than the Windows that came with the PC) ever since.
I could be wrong, but I think I bought (or rather, my parents bought) my first CD-ROM drive for installing Windows 95. I think that might have been the very first disc I put in the drive.
I had the CD-ROM drive running with 3.1. But they only really became mainstream after 95 came out.
I remember getting an error on the 8th disk and crying with a bricked system
One bad disk or error on your part going through an 8 disk install… yeah. But we went from tape drives to 5 1/4” to 3 1/2” to the phenomenal speeds of a 32x CDRW drive. Nothing beat a CD install. I don’t even bat an eye at 30GB game update download anymore, you could fit an amazing game on 1-4 CDs and watching it install was more exciting than waiting for these massive game DLs we have today.
One really strong magnetic and all info will be lost.
I swear we had this exact box by our home PC. The key was never removed from the lock.
We definitely had this one too, Commander Keen was almost always at the front because of me.
I have one upstairs. In bed now, and not taking a photo of it. I might do it tomorrow, if I remember. Good night.
When I was in high school we could buy floppy disks from the vending machine
That's so cool
