Floppy disk stories thread?

>2 days ago
>buy $10 thrift store computer
>no network drivers
>wont detect usb drive
>wont read cds
>resort to trusty old floppy disk
>disk wont format

>wake up
>ohshittodayisassignmenthanding.lhz
>take floppy or USB
>take random binary file
>name it "assignment.txt"
>hand it in
>finish the real assignment afterwards

>teachers are aware of this trick now
>that kid that named a furry pic "assignment.txt" and the teacher changed the extension back to jpg
when the file didn't work

>Copy very important shit on multiple disks
>Not a single one works later

>kid that named a furry pic "assignment.txt"
Who would be this stupid and actually live

I was a poorfag back around 1997. so what I'd do was download stuff from the university's T1 line, then use some utility like winzip to split the files into 1.44MB segments onto the floppies. Then I'd carry them back home and copy them on my (then 424 MB) hard drive which still had windows 3.1 and no internet or CD-ROM on it. when they upgraded to zip drives that really eased my life. it sucks when you can't get basic files (winzip, acdsee) without internet.

Attached: zip-disk.jpg (2296x2349, 1.92M)

>manet on floppy
>floppy dead
the end

>still thinking shitty fridge magnets can wreck a floppy

Well, they can - it just takes days IIRC. You're not going to wreck one by sitting it on top of a speaker for five minutes, for example.

We'll find out in a year or two when they find their way to Jow Forums and post about it on Jow Forums.

Back in the mid 90's when our school replaced Apple IIIs, we were issued our own floppy disks for our assignments because the entire school of a few hundred kids used the same ~20 machine computer lab.

I forgot a key part of that sentence. We we're issued the disks as to not save our assignments to the hard drives and fill them up.

My local library wouldn't let you use your own floppy for saving documents because of viruses, you had to buy one of theirs.

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>go to a friends' house
>think i'm smart by making a split zip of the worms armageddon main exe to fit onto two floppies
>doesn't work

>In high school.
>Hated computers.
>Get shitloads of white matches and crush heads into powder.
>Open up floppies and applied nail polish to disk inside.
>Sprinkled white powder over top.
>Put floppies back together.
>Swap all boot disks with my floppies at lunch time for another class.
>Dont stick around for shitstorm.
>Word around town was nobody used computers that afternoon.
>

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learn how to greentext

no u
>>

Why didn't it work? You can split binary files.

i copied only the main exe... not the rest of the game's files

I made shortcuts onto floppies, tested them (they worked) and then was surprised they didn't work on other machines

Or 1 if you use Tomsrootbt

i managed to avoid making that error, presumably because i started with DOS, where shortcuts... were a thing, but i wasn't aware they were a thing, so I was aware of how long things took to copy to disk and checked for available space before copying things, accidentally copying a shortcut would have immediately stood out to me as not being right

I did this back when floppy drives were everywhere, but I used a Word file of an old assignment and damaged the disk with a magnet so the file showed up but just consisted of READ ERROR.

[greentext]
Get first computer. Windows98se. Pent.III.
Back to store a week later. Windows reinstall.
Back again next week.
Dude what is wrong with you?
I like poking around with things to see if I can figure out how it works.
Next time back I ask How hard is it to reinstall windows myself?
Moment of awkward silence when guys in shop exchange sideways glances.
Not hard. Just google it.
Sweet. Head for door. One guy says wait a second.
Walks up and pulls official microsoft windows 98se setup floppy from shirt pocket. Take this brother, may it serve you well.
[/greentext]

problem with that is that the file would open in notepad, and any technically-capable person would recognize the start of a jpeg ("yöya....JFIF...") in the text

Wayne Smithson's Anarchy, from Psygnosis, had some interesting copy protection. It started off fairly easily, but a few sectors in looking with a sector editor you could see Wayne had written you little messages, daring you to go further - and the further you went into the disk, the more complex the format got; from 10 sectors to duplicate sector numbers, twin sectors, and a skewed track.

(The protection was actually just a slightly more unusual Rob Northen, using a weak sector and rereading it to see if you got a different result. The rest was all decoys and checksums.)

boss still used them for storing .txt files in 2016. then i explained to him that a usb drive that's just 4 gb is 4,000 of them and there is no need to wait for it to read/write/buffer the way a floppy disk does. he's still afraid of filling it up with 200 ish line .txt files... lol.

There's not a lot else to say.

Attached: download.jpg (300x168, 8K)

>inb4 some shitty boomer meme

You didn't need magnets. All you need to do is rewrite a 1.44MB disk three times to get errors.

Grats, you save a thumbnail.

They bring back memories of walking across the campus in winter, taking a floppy to the classroom lab. I'd copy over the experiment template, work for a while on campus, and finish up sometime, somewhere, later. The drawing of the equipment set-up were pretty spare, but they still took up a lot of storage, and you couldn't keep a whole semester's worth of labs on 1 disk. I could pick up a copy of Computer Shopper, and see solutions like a Kanguru removable/portable hard drive, but that was waaaay beyond anything I could afford or put together. And I was like, "Man, I wish someday technology would get better, you know?"

And then it did! I finally had funds to upgrade from my 386 tower (with turbo button!), and I saw that Gateway was selling a laptop that had a floppy drive that accepted the LS-120 disk! Clearly, this was the ultimate solution! This capacity would easily hold all my labs for a semester. What a great technology to finally have. "The LS-120 is going to be around forever, I'll never have to worry again!" Yes, I actually said that.

In just a couple of years, the Zip Drive took over the market, and the LS-120 sank into the stygian dephs of technological irrelevance. You couldn't even find their disks anymore. I sadly moved over to Zip, but I barely used it. By then, I was off campus, and online, with access to labs and classwork, so there wasn't a pressing need for the sneaker-net.

But I always kept using my little 3.5's. I'd save stuff to my hard drive mostly, but I always backed up my text files and writtens stories to my floppies and store them in my clear-plastic lidded floppy case. I still have the caddy, I still have those floppies with some text files (The Jargon File, Gopher Manifesto, Ed, man! !man ed ...), and I even have an unopened, still-in-shrinkwrap box of Sony 3.5 floppies. I still use an external floppy drive to read some files and disks every now and again, because, you know, happy nostalgia.

>be in early 90s
>buy 3.5" floppy disks in batches of 100
>spend evenings doing pic related with whatever came through the door in jiffy bags that day

also: trackloaders

Attached: xcopy.jpg (1280x720, 167K)

Wow, someone 3D printed a save icon?

xP

same lol. also downloaded thumbnails of images to set as my desktop wallpaper on pc my cousin gave away to me.

>>spend evenings doing pic related with whatever came through the door in jiffy bags that day
aka yiff animations

Did you get the faggy rainbow disks? Those always seemed to fail a lot quicker than the plain old black ones.

Who is this General Failure and what is he doing reading my disk??

>1996ish
>friend copies me 22 floppies with Warcraft 2
>rar archive - so disks filled to the last byte
>spend an hour copying them
>21st disk has a bad sector
>ask a friend for the 21st disk
>he already deleted the game, because his 340MB hard drive was getting full

lol

>autoexec.bat
>echo Y | format c:

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I installed slackware with just two in '96. Quickly discovered
a) had no unix skills and all I had installed was a cli
b) my modem was just a software modem that needed win95 for the actual drivers

Fixing (b) was easy. Learning unix took a few months.

i was going to say "why didn't he use recovery records", since this is exactly the kind of thing they're useful for
but then i wasn't sure when exactly winrar got support for recovery records...
for anyone curious, it was with version 2.0, in september 1996, so your friend in 1996 might not have had that option

Considering this was 22 years ago... I believe the version was 1.43.

Woth ARJ archives this was not a problem, usually, because the bad sector could be recovered and moved somewhere else on the disk. ARJ never filled the disk exactly to the full capacity.

RAR however was better since solid archives were smaller, thus one or two floppies were saved.

Good times. I miss them.

download 3 jpg files of porn.

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