Technology

It's the guts of 3.5" floppies, like these, they usually stored 720kB, then 1.44MB, but the latest versions (double sided) were 2.88MB.

The larger one at the bottom is from a 5 1/4" (orange in this picture, the big daddy in the picture is 8", first type I used, with COBOL)

... and now you kids know where the "save" button icon came from.

They were not meant to be removed from their protective envelopes, they're probably damaged now.

Interesting they look like three and a half inch floppies out of their sleeves

Nobody ever asks why it's the C:\

Pour one out for A:\ and B:\

My heart aches for those floppies’ demise.

That looks like a floppy disk with the protective casing removed...

Yeah, as others have said, floppies without cases.

Just to be clear, floppy cases were never meant to be removed. They were glued together in such a way that it wasn't possible to take the case off without breaking the case. And these disks can't be read without the cases. Basically, the cases were considered part of the disk (just like the plastic casing of a an audio cassette or VHS is integral to the functioning of the medium.) I have to imagine whoever took these out of their cases had a misunderstanding about how computers on the order of thinking a CD-ROM tray is a drink holder or trying to print a document by laying the monitor face-down on the bed of a copy machine.

If you wanted to read the 3.5" disks, you might be able to do so if you can procure a proper floppy drive and some sacrificial floppy disks. It'd probably take some finesse and careful gluing skills.

But that all assumes that these disks haven't lost their data already. Floppies tend to just plain old degrade over time. So the data very is very likely heavily corrupted.

I have heard of really specialized hardware to read data off of degraded disks, but that's probably "you have to know a guy/gal" level of specialization. If you really wanted to go that route, I think you'd probably want to know if what you have there is "valuable" (basically not already available on Archive.org and also interesting like unreleased source code or something.) But if you thought you had something like that and wanted to pursue it, you could @ Jason Scott (@textfiles@mastodon.archive.org) on Mastodon. If anybody has a lead on how to read those, it's him.

Hope this is just a Boomer hating shit post. Pretty sure it is.

As everyone else said, they’re floppy disks with the plastic case removed.

Since you found them in a church, could they have belonged to a church bell system? I’ve seen other church bell systems in the past where the songs came on weird mediums.

This is just a random guess, I don’t know why anyone would remove the casing.

Well, I feel old.

3.5” floppy discs which have been removed from their plastic shells.

12 megabytes of RAM, 500 megabyte hard drive, built-in spreadhseet capabilities and a modem that transmits it over 28,000 bps

Wow this makes me feel old

Looks like floppy disks without the shell. How big are they?

Looks like the physical storage medium of a 3 1/2 inch diskette. Which is usually called a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk, except with this one it's a bit of a misnomer, since this iteration has a rigid case, unlike the older 8 inch and 5 1/4 inch versions. Or should have, it appears to be removed in OP's case.

the disk that lies inside a floppy disk (a 5.25 floppy disk judging by the size)

Yeah, floppy without the case was my immediate guess too. Not sure why they would have been stored this way though. It's a bit weird.

Thanks, everyone. I thought that's what they were, but thought there was maybe something I didn't know. I think we'll probably just trash them.

old floppy disks of different sizes. the bottom looks like 5 1/4" the ones on top with the metal centers are all 3 1/2". Both standards needed sleeves to be read. Many of these are likely trash now but that wouldn't stop me from trying to load them.