For me, it must have been 20 years ago in 2005. I got Kingston’s 512MB flash drive for a Christmas present and oh my how great it felt to hold so much of memory in my pocket. After that it was clear to me that there is no use for floppies to me anymore.
About a year or 2 ago. Remember when you stick a brand new floppy into the drive and tries to boot and it says something like, “Non-system disk. Please remove and press any key”? We’ll that’s actually a program coded on the floppy (which was preformatted by the manufacturer) and each manufactuer coded it a little different. I was ripping the image off different brands to compare their code.
The event production world is simultaneously very advanced and antiquated at the same time. I used a floppy disc earlier this year because some lighting consoles still use them. We then used said lighting console to control a projection mapped surface with motion tracking.
Not exactly a floppy, but close: more than 20 years ago a very dear person gave me an Iomega Zip drive and a couple of disks. Game changer. My hard drive was 40 MB, so for the first time my backup was bigger than my computer. Same speed, too, so not much of a sacrifice.
Later came the tiny Clik! disks: great as a music player, and perfect for carrying data around when 100 MB was a HUGE amount of memory. Through all my university years the Zip was my go-to. I just learned to pray every time I heard a click that wasn’t the brand name. :D
Last week to store recovery codes from 2fa
I mean it might be security by obscurity and some added work to ensure no data loss. I mean pretty darn secure. The intersection between those that wants to access those codes also have immediate access to a floppy drive as well. Must be extremely tiny Cause my guess is they have at most a couple of hour before you notice.
Used? Just using one now, but as a coaster.
This week, because I’m wiping old data for someone who wants to get rid of computer equipment.
Around 2013, when I was just 13, on the computer at my grandparents place. I had to actually ask around and spend effort to find floppys since by then they were already obsolete, but my grandparents PC only had a floppy drive available. I used it to attempt to write an OS (I know I know, daunting task but I didnt know how much I didnt know). I got as far as writing the bootloader and got it to load and print Hello World, but no further.
Not my use, but this in the news today: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-out-floppy-disks-air-traffic-control-by-2028-2026-11-05/
A few weeks ago, as coasters.
What an interesting juxtaposition on my home screen.
Spring 2012.
This survey ship I worked on needed updated navigational data from us in the instrumentation room from time to time. It was an old ship with an old auto pilot system, and the simplest way was to copy over the data and sneakernet it up to the bridge.
about a year ago, had to boot to DOS on my old WinME machine
A few months ago. Was repairing a FANUC robotic arm, and found an incredibly dusty box. At the bottom of it was a few disks marks as “robot”
Had to find a reader, and only one of them was still readable.
late 2000s to save something while in computer lab, before thumbdrives took off.
