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As a kid back then, floppies were expensive if you were using your pocket money or hard earned side hustle stash. Floppies were used, abused and reused until that dreadful bad sector. Even after the bad sector if you knew its location. But you knew the floppy time was up. Kids today will newer know the feeling of unwrapping a fresh package of 10 floppies. The sound, the smell, the texture, the stickers, the formatting, the wast free space, ... as much as retail therapy is a thing, I think that was floppy therapy. |
I made regular use of 3.5 inch disks as portable storage up until, if you can believe it, 2000 when I mostly switched to Zip disks and, occasionally, CDRs. I never found CDRWs that useful.
Writable CD storage was always a bit of a faff to use though, whereas Zip disks behave exactly like floppies, only a lot bigger.
Fast forward to 2002 when I first got home broadband, and it just became easier to simply transfer files directly over the internet rather than toting disks around.
Not long after that cheap USB sticks started to get usefully large but, really, I’ve barely used them in 20-odd years.
It’s funny how, once floppies became too small for most practical uses - even though I’d used them exclusively for 10 years - I didn’t spend much time with anything else before jumping to just relying on the network for file sharing, syncing, and transfers.
Very occasionally I do still use them today: I’ve got an old Korg Trinity synth that uses 3.5 inch floppies for storage, and I’ve got a minty fresh box of them still hanging around in my office. I’ve also got an Amiga 1200 that uses DD as opposed to HD floppies.