• zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      55 minutes ago

      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.

      • nexguy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        16 minutes ago

        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.

  • SouthFresh@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    2 hours ago

    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?

  • brap@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 hours ago

    Floppys were the ultimate in security because if you looked at them wrong they become corrupted.

    • zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      50 minutes ago

      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.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      3 hours ago

      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.

      • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 hours ago

        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 :)

      • errer@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 hour ago

        I recently bought 20 floppies from diskduper and man they are fun to hold, very tactile. Much lighter than I remembered too.

    • folekaule@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      2 hours ago

      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.

        • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          3 hours ago

          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

          • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            2 hours ago

            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.

            • grue@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 hour ago

              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.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      2 hours ago

      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.

  • hesh@quokk.au
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 hours ago

    I swear we had this exact box by our home PC. The key was never removed from the lock.

    • jackal@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 hour ago

      We definitely had this one too, Commander Keen was almost always at the front because of me.

    • P1nkman@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 hour ago

      I have one upstairs. In bed now, and not taking a photo of it. I might do it tomorrow, if I remember. Good night.

    • starik@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      3 hours ago

      Like bike locks. Very easy to circumvent, but just enough of a hurdle to deter most casual crimes of opportunity.

    • Axolotl@feddit.it
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      3 hours ago

      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