Revive the nostalgia of those sexy clicking and electro-mechanical floppy disks. Storing a whopping 1.44Mb of data (enough for a 30 second 128kbps mp3 or a couple of Jpegs), should be plenty for you to get buy and stash away a secret word document, embarrassing photo, a pic of your favorite adult movie star or your little black book of phone numbers.
Kids: forget USB flash drives and DVDs - these were the shizzle back in the day!
You can save a couple of quid on ebay and there are one or 2 for less on amazon, but this one is fulfilled by amazon - and its worth it for the nostalgia alone!
Here's the spiel:
【Old files back to life】With this external floppy disk reader, you can back up and transfer your old pictures/data to get rid of the trouble of old disk data layed around
【Ultra slim and Easy Plug-and-Play】Little deivce for you to carry. No drive needed. Plug and play,easy to use.
【USB interface and USB Powered】Compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.0.Powered directly from the USB port, no external power required.
【Compatible System and Data Capacity】Support Windows 98/SE/2000/ME/XP/VISTA/Windows 7/Windows 8/Mac and Read/Write 1.44 MB floppy disk
【Warranty】Every HusDow product includes an 45 days money-back & 18-month warranty. Please buy with confidence and don't hesitate to contact us if having any question, we'll get to you within 24 hours.
Top comments
Roger_Irrelevant
26 Oct 1622#19
Spent hours in front of this:
Godspeed
26 Oct 1617#35
Jules_HT
26 Oct 1616#15
Not a fan of this new fangled 3.5" tech, it's witchcraft. You know where you are with a 5.25" disk.
jameshothothot
26 Oct 1612#6
can anyone recommend software that will back up your hard drive to multiple floppies?
All comments (135)
Treboeth
26 Oct 162#1
Cold it`s not USB 4.0 :wink:
Magister
26 Oct 167#2
As I get older, my floppy is becoming floppier
jameshothothot
26 Oct 165#3
wow. i remember paying 65 quid for a 2nd disc drive for my amiga.
jameshothothot
26 Oct 16#4
this is double density discs though? sure 720k or 800 was standard?
shadey12
26 Oct 164#5
why
jameshothothot
26 Oct 1612#6
can anyone recommend software that will back up your hard drive to multiple floppies?
jameshothothot
26 Oct 161#7
I think monkey island 2 was the most number of floppies. 13? vague memories of installing windows 3.1 multiple times and then windows 95 upgrade on cd!
lucyferror to jameshothothot
26 Oct 162#14
Mad Dog Mccree game had more than 50 discs :smiley:
Urbangent to jameshothothot
26 Oct 16#28
Apparently Lightwave 3D came on 50 floppies...
benjai
26 Oct 164#8
Great, our son's half term project can be to install win3.1 off a dozen floppies. Good times.
gazerino
26 Oct 162#9
I loved installing Win3.1 from floppies. Loved it even more when Disk 12 error'd! :smile:
Maevoric
26 Oct 164#10
Finally some reliable technology
alg
26 Oct 162#11
I "won" a copy of OS/2 Warp which came on floppy including an office suite of some sort. Think there's about 30 something discs in the box (unused).
tubbyhubby
26 Oct 162#12
I remember Coral Draw on floppy diskoO
Rich44
26 Oct 165#13
I loved os2 Warp brilliant operating system well ahead of its time.
Installing Windows 95 from floppies was the last big multi floppy disk install I did took a very very long time.
Does anyone remember bring able to diagnose whether it was going to work based on listening to the drive in action?
Up until fairly recently used floppy disks to rebuild the tills in Lidl if you swapped a Siemens Beetle out, turn key in keyboard put floppy in one till it'd create a boot disk & put the till in master mode (like Ghost) then boot the new till & it closed itself from the existing good till.
Of course the floppy drives would always be buggered.... Lol
Ahhh good times
Jules_HT
26 Oct 1616#15
Not a fan of this new fangled 3.5" tech, it's witchcraft. You know where you are with a 5.25" disk.
melted to Jules_HT
26 Oct 161#23
:smiley:
I think my brother has still got his atari 800xl and its 5 1/4" floppy drive somewhere, a massive 130KB of storage!
Although that was big enough to fit quite a few backup copies and memory dumps of our games on one disc( Iwrote my own backup software).
It was a single sided drive controlled by a 6502 derivative processor, and connected to the atari's single serial port although you could buy a rather expensive serial hub to connect multiple devices.
Cattle
26 Oct 162#16
Fits nicely in my draw right next to my Raspberry Pi.
Bit pointless but voted Hot because of the sex'd up description.
coconut
26 Oct 161#17
Ordered!
Cheers OP
rossaw
26 Oct 162#18
What a time to be alive
Roger_Irrelevant
26 Oct 1622#19
Spent hours in front of this:
jameshothothot to Roger_Irrelevant
26 Oct 161#21
ha. was never sure if they defeated copy protection or not! was always a slow copy mode etc. ha........ friend comes over..brings his discs. copy.
in my spectrum days we just copied c90 tapes and had no idea what games on it!
jameshothothot to Roger_Irrelevant
26 Oct 16#22
that brings back memories. device ram! yes i think with one drive you might not have been able to get a whole disc in ram so had to swap back. recall getting extra memory stick too. wow...
118luke
26 Oct 163#20
The sign of a dying floppy disk :smile:
Treboeth
26 Oct 162#24
Forgot to vote have a 100 OP
Dragon32
26 Oct 161#25
Do they do one for the 8 inch floppies?
Treboeth to Dragon32
26 Oct 161#26
Boasting will get you nowhere, and you seem to be on the wrong thread :confused:
dheydl
26 Oct 16#27
Still have several copies of OS/2 Warp 3.0, which came on over 30 floppies. Also Windows NT 3.1, which has over 20 since the accompanying CD would only install on very few obscure SCSI CD drives and had no support for ATAPI. MS Office 4.3 was another bloater with 20+ diskettes and I have an unopened box of Office 95 Pro on diskettes, which almost certainly has even more. I hated getting to disk 19 of 20 and then hearing the grinding sound when I found the dodgy diskette that couldn't be read. A real pain in the backside.
The limitation of many cheap usb floppy drives is that they can only write to the capacity they are set up for - in this case 1.44MB. You can't usually format a floppy to 720kB in one of these - you need a proper mechanical floppy drive attached to a floppy controller for that or any other custom formats.
dheydl
26 Oct 16#29
You needed a special ISA floppy controller board to defeat copy protection back in the day. Central Point was the best known. I think it was called an Option Board or something and there were deluxe versions that could handle all sorts of floppy formats from Atari to Amiga to Apple Mac. You might still get one on eBay if you are lucky but they were always a bit pricey from what I can remember.
I used to have Rise of the Robots, that had 18 or so
m.ad
26 Oct 161#32
Disks are £11.75 for 10, so about £1.23 per MB.
Difference between iPhone 7 32GB and 128GB is £100, so 96p per MB
So Floppys are more expensive per megabyte than even Apple charge!
jameshothothot to m.ad
26 Oct 16#40
ha... except 1000 times difference in MB and GB (or is it 1,024 but most hard drives seem to be working in decimal not binary for size)
freccle
26 Oct 16#33
We had a Sony digital camera that cost us nearly a grand that took floppies. I remember the prictures as being great quality but probably now were ****
madel79
26 Oct 16#34
Hehe head added xxxxx
Godspeed
26 Oct 1617#35
peroxidase
26 Oct 162#36
It's funny how these discs (is it c or k) are still used as the save symbol on some programmes.
hitman
26 Oct 16#37
Total Recall !
sylv
26 Oct 16#38
Lotus Smartsuite, most likely. Loved it.
jameshothothot
26 Oct 16#39
oh yes. I do remember some connector for my second floppy drive.... wow... memories!
leaston
26 Oct 16#41
Just wow, me too!!! Crikey, that's a blast from the past!
simonbrowne
26 Oct 161#42
My accountant still uses these for backup.
Guess if your saving excel sheets this may be fine and he can just update them when necessary.
Maybe its just a money saving exercise? I mean he is an accountant and i think he uses 16" squarish monitors around the office.
Serialkillerz82
26 Oct 162#43
Not a good deal.
Roderz
26 Oct 16#44
Wonder if they do a USB Sinclair microdrive ? :smile:
ws007
26 Oct 16#45
wow nostalgia trip :innocent:<3
alg
26 Oct 16#46
Might have been - I'm not sure where it is, as it along with some other stuff disappeared when I moved up here from Glasgow.
tinca
26 Oct 162#47
I'm a "wrinkly" and fortunate enough to have been into home computing from the ZX80 and programming in Fortran4 at uni. Last week my neighbour asked me if I had any dvds she could watch? I had to explain to her that a DVD was so yesterday and uncool.
Now instead of being buried under cds & dvds, I'm buried under flash drives with no idea what's on them (they are cloud backup for the important files).
At least most of the time you scribbled on these floppies what the contained - still won't go back to them tho.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane (my secretary asking if she could have one of my floppys)
Heat added
tinca
26 Oct 16#48
You mean the 16k one that you had to hold in with bluetack?
waikit83
26 Oct 16#49
Wow nice post, brings back some good memories, added heat
*cough* Lol I heard from a 'friend' that used to be a great bit of software at the time
dheydl
26 Oct 162#55
Nah. Smartsuite cost a fortune back then. What you got was IBM Works, which was the equivalent of Works for Windows except more primitive. And fugly.
118luke
26 Oct 16#56
Wow microsoft works! I'd forgotten about that old relic!
andysmoore
26 Oct 16#57
Would I be able to play carrier command with this? I've got the original floppies. Serious question.
aquapiranha
26 Oct 16#58
I have one still made by HP in the loft
alexjameshaines
26 Oct 16#59
You all laugh, but I have 30 of these floppy things to sell so someone get buying my internals!
SteveCoops
26 Oct 163#60
pkzip (v2.04g was the common one) and use the -& option to span disks.
MeneerSmith
26 Oct 16#61
Yes.
Might need a dos emulator though.
TesseractOrion
26 Oct 161#62
No, You're thinking of the Ram pack I think. Microdrives were tiny floppy-like things that nobody used. There were 2 such drives on a Sinclair QL, which was just crazy epic!
Garry53
26 Oct 161#63
I had a flashback this week when I ran the backup command on an old XP laptop and it said I would need 197 floppy disks! Nostalgia ain't what it used to be!
alg
26 Oct 161#64
Describing them as floppy things is not quite right. Iirc they were more a looping tape mechanism.
When I were a stoodent, we were taught 68k assembly language programming on Sinclair QLs which had 3.5" floppy drives on them - that was a right mix of technologies (And the QL had a 68008 processor, which was a cut down 68k iirc).
Floppy disks are still being used today, as are Zip disks. In music and aviation, for example. You would be surprised exactly where they still play a key role.
buglawton
26 Oct 161#67
Your Freudian slip is showing
jimunix
26 Oct 162#68
I dunno man, 1.44MB: that's a lot of data to lose all at once.
Magister
26 Oct 161#69
Keep taking the medication!
MR1123
26 Oct 16#70
It's more likely that your floppy disk to fail than your USB, hence innovation of new technology.
MR1123
26 Oct 16#71
Anyone else vote these deals cold? Or just me.
schui1024
27 Oct 162#72
If rebuilding a 2003 server or attempting to recover data" you have to supply raid drivers (F6) on a floppy drive A:\. I have one of these USB floppy drives and about once a year it gets used. It's a lifesaver even now.
michaeljb
27 Oct 161#73
great timing op, my tape deck is just chewing up my tapes so I think it's about time i spring for this upgrade, its along time coming tbh
just 1 question though... what's a usb?
omgpleasespamme
27 Oct 16#74
The first Monkey Island fit on 4 disks for my Atari 520ST and I thought that was a lot of disks. I was gutted when I managed to corrupt one.
elvor
27 Oct 16#75
Do you mean Corel Draw or were you just drawing corals using something else? :-p
omgpleasespamme
27 Oct 165#76
You reminded me of this picture:
willysnapper
27 Oct 162#77
Ah, just the job for a bit of extended storage, ...now where do I plug it in?
skykid3
27 Oct 161#78
Its available to download free on abandonware HERE ,save you having to install those floppies!
Hodgey
27 Oct 16#79
Heat added despite it not being Apple.
I had a box of floppy discs that I got rid of only a couple of weeks ago. It would have been nice to be reminded of what was on them.
Thanks for adding this.
Suggs84
27 Oct 162#80
Cold - gonna hold on for MiniDisc.....
speculatrix
27 Oct 161#81
pah, 5.25"? is that all? 8" floppies are what real men have!!
raptorcigs
27 Oct 16#82
Does it support 3.5mm discks?
soz pacman couldn't resist
notavalidaddress
27 Oct 16#83
IIRC Office 4.3 Professional was a 43 disk installation.
and again IIRC I used to type pkzip -exrp& a lot when younger.
ashman33
27 Oct 16#84
The only real floppy I ever used (first computer was a celeron 400mhz) was the Microsoft Windows 98 recovery disk. It got a lot of use!
lakesh8602
27 Oct 16#85
I have never had a floppy disk fail on me!
Ripperoo
27 Oct 16#86
There you go again, gettting your inches and centimetres mixed up again.:laughing:
pcardoso73
27 Oct 16#87
Wow !! Thanks for that image, I couldn't remember that anymore :-D . I used the "copy" command on MS-DOS all the time and compressed archives to arj. When X-Copy appeared, the floppy was checked for errors :-).
I have even used 5 1/4'' single and double sided floppies :-D. The 3 1/2'' were super expensive by that time.
GrahamFairham
27 Oct 16#88
Monkey island , Corel Draw, X copy on an Amiga, DD disks. Nostalgia, have some heat.
GrahamFairham
27 Oct 16#89
I remember when I upgraded my RAM on my Amiga and I could copy a disk in its entirety. I felt so superior
sempai106
27 Oct 16#90
must be a Floppy Bird :smiley:
fazzy-bhoy
27 Oct 16#91
still got university projects and essays on floppy disc somewhere.
ajavaid92
27 Oct 16#92
This is the future. The future of the past? Or maybe the past of the future?
tomhood98
27 Oct 16#93
9.83p/MB... but still 10x too expensive based on how much storage costs nowadays
brilloboy
27 Oct 16#94
Just me who comes here for the deals then...
DonkeyKonk
27 Oct 16#95
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Twenty years ago it was all spangles and chopper bikes, now it's mini discs and floppy discs.
dmm1000
27 Oct 16#96
the humour just about saves it from being a complete waste of webspace ... as cold as a floppy could possibly be this time of year :wink:
acj7745
27 Oct 16#97
Does anyone remember the way software was sold on floppies? In a cereal sized cardboard box and with a war and peace style printed user manual.
leeparsons
27 Oct 16#98
I love it. Old skool is to cool.But i guess better off left in the past. Only the new kids on the block might be interested in this
poundshopper
27 Oct 162#99
RIGHT. Scitex OS came on 72 floppies and i had to install it onto an IBM server, it should have taken about 2 hours. On the IBM the power button was directly above the floppy eject and half way through i pressed the wrong button. I had to spend the next hour with my finger holding in the power button to complete the install and shut down safely. I have suffered from RSI in that finger ever since. The next week I bought a 2X cd rom for £600 and never looked back (until now)
technobot
27 Oct 16#100
Can't wait to get my floppy stuck in this! :smile:
imransaeed
27 Oct 16#101
hot (for whatever unknown reason!)
Sqsq
27 Oct 16#102
disk = square (sk sounds like sq = square = shapes of floppy, hard drives, flash pens...)
disc = round (c looks like o = round = shapes of CD, DVD, BRD, disc brakes...)
But really no consensus on the difference between disc and disk and the two are often used interchangeably.
I was known as 'the nibbler' in 1990, on account of me using cheap cover discs to copy games off mates (with the wad of paper jammed into the write protect hole of course). Nibble mode was the only slow method that worked.
handsomejackuk
27 Oct 161#105
Remember buying loads of 720k disks from PC wise in merthyr they used to produce magazine disks too if I remember I used to drill a hole in the disk to make it 1.44mb
FocusST
27 Oct 161#106
Happy Days, I ran a business at school buying 3.5 blank disks in bulk (via mail order!) and then selling them in 5's and 10's to the pupils!! :smile:
fishmaster
27 Oct 16#107
They are used in factory machines and other machines where the expense of changing the equipment to avoid a floppy drive wouldn't be worth it. Floppy drives are used in antiquated equipment and definitely not for mission critical data.
RichieCJ
27 Oct 161#108
Actually I think 720K disks were classed as Double Density (original 5.25" ones were 360K) and 1.44MB ones were High Density :smile:
___Josh____
27 Oct 16#109
I hate floppies you always have to thumb them in
RichieCJ
27 Oct 16#110
Ha! I had an Amstrad 286 which just read everything as 1.44mb disks anyway...worked fine unless you put them in any other computer and then it would fail :smile:
horatiog
27 Oct 16#111
Ah no, even 5.25 magnetic media is too high tech - card readers are the real biz!
soap_box
27 Oct 161#112
Great stuff thanks. Anyone good a good deal on disks themselves? I want to back up my 2TB hard drive so I'll need roughly 694,445 of them. Ta
nascent
27 Oct 162#113
C is optiCal (dvd/dvd/bd)
k is non-optical (flashdrive/hdd/ssd/ramdisk)
horatiog
27 Oct 16#114
I was told this was a UK/US thing? (UK=disk, US=disc) ?
mRActivate8
27 Oct 16#115
ahhh.. for my nostalgia i would need 3.5 inch floppies drives :stuck_out_tongue:
dheydl
27 Oct 16#116
Dunno. Clearly some industries are totally strapped for cash.
It wasn't that long ago I had to buy some floppies for a web design course I was doing. That was 2004/2005. Still have a box of blank ones I refuse to get rid of because I'm convinced "they'll come in handy for something"! :innocent: I do still have an old Samsung laptop that has a floppy drive so don't need to buy this, but it's made for a great read! Except for the boys who think **** "jokes" are funny. :smirk:
Really, the proper word for male genitalia is starred out but all the jokes are OK? HUKD's posting rules seem backwards.
veedubjai
27 Oct 16#118
I'll await till the USB 3.0 model comes out.:smiley:
omgpleasespamme
27 Oct 161#119
Back when they did it properly. It was complete when sold and wasn't subject to a million bug fixes as soon as the disk was put in the drive. Proper documentation was nice to have too as the user base (now called fan base in a lot of cases) couldn't be relied upon to make their own.
davening
27 Oct 161#120
Right! Buying some, then off to flog them on ebay...
melted
27 Oct 162#121
Most of the software boxes I had weren't particularly large, maybe a inch thick.
However, I remember my brother buying a little Basic cartridge for his Atari 400, and the box it came in was simply massive. It must have been 8" plus thick, and a fair bit larger than the box the computer came in, I thought they were handing him the wrong thing when he asked for it at the counter.
It did come with a modest thickness A4 manual and ring binder, but the vast bulk of the box was two massive blocks of foam rubber with a small rectangle cut out in the centre to accommodate the fag packet sized cartridge.
He reused the box to keep his Atari 400 in, because it was big enough to hold the computer pus all the gear associated with it, including the cassette deck, power supplies, etc.
kester76
27 Oct 16#122
they were little tape loop cartridges. Good article on Reddit about the rise and fall of them.
acj7745
27 Oct 16#123
The documentation was very much appreciated. I miss that. I think you've got overly romantic about the software though. Beta testing would have been on 30 people and when there were the inevitable bugs, there was nothing you could do about it!
lordminty
27 Oct 16#124
Pfft. 8 inch floppies are the real deal. 8 inch and very floppy!
kidrock123
27 Oct 16#125
A whopping 1.44mb i hear you say? :laughing:
lordminty
27 Oct 16#126
Nah, that might what it's morphed into but back in Ye Olde Days (tm) of mainframes it was simply that Americam IBM called their huge spinning lumps of rust disks, and British ICL called them discs.
IBM invented the 8 inch 'floppy diskette' so it was shortened to a floppy disk.
lordminty
27 Oct 161#127
If you want to be creative you could use 5 of them and create a 5MB RAID 5 array... LOL
balexandrov
28 Oct 16#128
Who said floppotron?
spirogiro
28 Oct 16#129
I have an IBM 2.88Mb FDD unit for my Thinkpad 760 still - never used it as the 760 can accommodate USB via its PCMCIA ports... I do though have many extended formaters for my Atari ST - most of my ST FDs are 800K.
Tomjaz
28 Oct 16#130
I have still Windows 3.11 on 10 Floppy disks :smiley:
DonkeyKonk
28 Oct 16#131
Just tried it with my iPhone, didn't work, but made a nice wrap cover.
seedmonger
29 Oct 16#132
This floppy gives me a hard drive. :confused:
Gort1951
31 Oct 16#133
Cheap. Cost me 200.00 for my disk-drive + interface for my Amstrad 464C. The difference between tape and disk drive was amazing and random access. (These were 3" disks not 3.5").
Could load Fruity Frank in seconds.
Gort1951
31 Oct 16#134
C++ came on 22 disks which I used on my Intel 386DX (Built in Maths co-processor).
It came in a hugh box with plenty of ref. manuals for each library and c++ core.
![Fresh Breakfast Meat Box (Using code) @ Campbells Meat [Haggis / Lorne Sausage / Bacon / Black Pudding & More]](/images/topics/208684_1.jpg)
![[Xbox One] Q. u. b. e: Director's Cut on Deals with Gold](/images/topics/208716_1.jpg)
Opening post
Kids: forget USB flash drives and DVDs - these were the shizzle back in the day!
You can save a couple of quid on ebay and there are one or 2 for less on amazon, but this one is fulfilled by amazon - and its worth it for the nostalgia alone!
Here's the spiel:
【Old files back to life】With this external floppy disk reader, you can back up and transfer your old pictures/data to get rid of the trouble of old disk data layed around
【Ultra slim and Easy Plug-and-Play】Little deivce for you to carry. No drive needed. Plug and play,easy to use.
【USB interface and USB Powered】Compatible with USB 2.0 and USB 1.0.Powered directly from the USB port, no external power required.
【Compatible System and Data Capacity】Support Windows 98/SE/2000/ME/XP/VISTA/Windows 7/Windows 8/Mac and Read/Write 1.44 MB floppy disk
【Warranty】Every HusDow product includes an 45 days money-back & 18-month warranty. Please buy with confidence and don't hesitate to contact us if having any question, we'll get to you within 24 hours.
Top comments
All comments (135)
Installing Windows 95 from floppies was the last big multi floppy disk install I did took a very very long time.
Does anyone remember bring able to diagnose whether it was going to work based on listening to the drive in action?
Up until fairly recently used floppy disks to rebuild the tills in Lidl if you swapped a Siemens Beetle out, turn key in keyboard put floppy in one till it'd create a boot disk & put the till in master mode (like Ghost) then boot the new till & it closed itself from the existing good till.
Of course the floppy drives would always be buggered.... Lol
Ahhh good times
I think my brother has still got his atari 800xl and its 5 1/4" floppy drive somewhere, a massive 130KB of storage!
Although that was big enough to fit quite a few backup copies and memory dumps of our games on one disc( Iwrote my own backup software).
It was a single sided drive controlled by a 6502 derivative processor, and connected to the atari's single serial port although you could buy a rather expensive serial hub to connect multiple devices.
Bit pointless but voted Hot because of the sex'd up description.
Cheers OP
in my spectrum days we just copied c90 tapes and had no idea what games on it!
The limitation of many cheap usb floppy drives is that they can only write to the capacity they are set up for - in this case 1.44MB. You can't usually format a floppy to 720kB in one of these - you need a proper mechanical floppy drive attached to a floppy controller for that or any other custom formats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI
Difference between iPhone 7 32GB and 128GB is £100, so 96p per MB
So Floppys are more expensive per megabyte than even Apple charge!
Guess if your saving excel sheets this may be fine and he can just update them when necessary.
Maybe its just a money saving exercise? I mean he is an accountant and i think he uses 16" squarish monitors around the office.
:smile:
Now instead of being buried under cds & dvds, I'm buried under flash drives with no idea what's on them (they are cloud backup for the important files).
At least most of the time you scribbled on these floppies what the contained - still won't go back to them tho.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane (my secretary asking if she could have one of my floppys)
Heat added
Might need a dos emulator though.
When I were a stoodent, we were taught 68k assembly language programming on Sinclair QLs which had 3.5" floppy drives on them - that was a right mix of technologies (And the QL had a 68008 processor, which was a cut down 68k iirc).
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/261864882009
just 1 question though... what's a usb?
I had a box of floppy discs that I got rid of only a couple of weeks ago. It would have been nice to be reminded of what was on them.
Thanks for adding this.
soz pacman couldn't resist
and again IIRC I used to type pkzip -exrp& a lot when younger.
I have even used 5 1/4'' single and double sided floppies :-D. The 3 1/2'' were super expensive by that time.
Twenty years ago it was all spangles and chopper bikes, now it's mini discs and floppy discs.
disc = round (c looks like o = round = shapes of CD, DVD, BRD, disc brakes...)
But really no consensus on the difference between disc and disk and the two are often used interchangeably.
Star Wars - Imperial March on Eight Floppy Drives
And my favourite:
The Floppotron: Game of Thrones
k is non-optical (flashdrive/hdd/ssd/ramdisk)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/36385839
Really, the proper word for male genitalia is starred out but all the jokes are OK? HUKD's posting rules seem backwards.
However, I remember my brother buying a little Basic cartridge for his Atari 400, and the box it came in was simply massive. It must have been 8" plus thick, and a fair bit larger than the box the computer came in, I thought they were handing him the wrong thing when he asked for it at the counter.
It did come with a modest thickness A4 manual and ring binder, but the vast bulk of the box was two massive blocks of foam rubber with a small rectangle cut out in the centre to accommodate the fag packet sized cartridge.
He reused the box to keep his Atari 400 in, because it was big enough to hold the computer pus all the gear associated with it, including the cassette deck, power supplies, etc.
IBM invented the 8 inch 'floppy diskette' so it was shortened to a floppy disk.
Could load Fruity Frank in seconds.
It came in a hugh box with plenty of ref. manuals for each library and c++ core.
It was a pain but you only installed it once.