We didn't stack them though. We kept them in those boxes with a pointless lock, and flipped through them.
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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The good old days. I wish I still had mine but alas my old floppy box died in a fire.
Ah just like flipping through records at a record store.
Mine lived in the original cardboard boxes
Look at Mr Moneybags over here, playing his games without hand written labels and cracktros.
Who said that? I meant the boxes that held the original empty floppies
God that sounds nice actually, I miss it terribly
"didn't take too much space"
Someone never installed an operating system from floppies. Win98 was 38 floppies. Heaven help you if you didn't notice you only have 37 disks until halfway through the install.
A media format with 1.44mb per disk is not conducive to space saving even back in the day.
They're talking about the tactility of the format, not the actual data limits on it.
You could build SSDs today with the exact same tactility of floppy disks but with terabytes of storage.
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To be honest, by 1998 something as big as win98 wasn't supposed to be shipped in floppies. Then again, win95 was available as 27 disks
Windows 95 on CD-ROM included three music videos, presumably to show off the capabilities of the format.
I remember my copy had Buddy Holly by Weezer, and I think something called Good Times. What was the third?
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I still occasionally use floppies and I can assure you that they do in fact occupy more space than I'd like.
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I wish they'd make SSDs in a similar format with plug-and-play functionality.
Stick your disk in and boot from it. Remove after shutdown and take it with you.
That’s called a thumb drive and you can do it as long as the computer you are using has the option to boot from USB enabled in BIOS (typically personal machines come with that enabled but machines out in the public often disable it specifically because they don’t want you booting a different OS)
But if it were an NVMe slot... That'd be juicy.
You can get near that level of performance with a small thunderbolt drive.
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Never saw one of those before, that looks super neat
They were super expensive, as storage solutions went.
Zip disks at least the 100’s had the same tactile qualities, little door to fidget and label space all while having that satisfying clicking sound each time you used them.
3.5 disks were my fidget spinners before the term existed. pulling back the slide and letting it snap shut kept my idle brain occupied for hours while waiting for stuff on the computer to happen.
Flashbacks of flipping around a 5¼" floppy disks that were actually floppy and manually spinning the cassette tape wheels while something is loading.
I have loaded punch cards and punch tape also. The only thing I haven't loaded is those big open platters. I've used 5 1/4" floppies as late as 2017 with an old Apple Lisa and CMM.
Not that I don't agree but... I'd take Mini Disc over them. Really similar but smaller -but not to the point of losing tactility or nice labels- and I love the eject mechanism of some players/recorders. Amazing mix of cassette tapes (usability) and CDs (capacity, non-linearity...), kinda late to the party.
UMDs are cool too, thought not as much IMHO.
And a satisfying but not too jarring "thunk" when they seat in correctly. Plus, the activity light let you know it was safe/not safe to hit the eject button.
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The 3.5” disk was designed as a consumer product by Sony, whose industrial design is second to none. (Compare the 5¼ “ and 8” floppies, which were designed by IBM engineers and only intended for use by technical specialists.)
... was second to none. Looking at almost illegible black text labels on a black Sony TV enclosure.
It's easy to read as long as you have 20/20 vision and are under 25 years old.😂🤓
I had a cool little leather wallet that held 2 3.5" disks. Felt like a pro every time i flipped it open.
Not all drives had buttons. There were workstations (Sun Sparcs) which had. motorized eject mechanisms.
Used 10 of these workstations to copy my freshly downloaded Slackware Linux to the stack of 60 floppies it took. (Twice, so I wrote 120 disks, as at least one of the disks would have read errors on average). Each time one of the Sparcs was done, it did spit out the disk and I'd insert a new one, labeling the old one with what was written on screen.
Ah the hours I spent downloading and installing 100-200 Megabytes of operating systems.
Labeling the disks would just be a sequence number, I'd label the disk boxes with the content.
Late 90s memories....
At home, I'd install the os by inserting each of these disks into my PC with16MBytes of RAM.
All that took about a day of work.
You kids don't know how good you have it, we had to fetch out Xfree86 mode lines in a wooden bucket from outside in the snow, barefoot.
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Growing up, my dad used to download a lot of games off BBSes for me and my brother. He would save them on 3.5 floppies and then label what game was on each one. I've got fond memories of flipping through his box of floppies seeing what new games he had for us to play.
OP they really were. Back in the day when I was a sysadmin I would keep a bunch of tools on a floppy that I would carry around as I did user support.
It was like carrying around a toolbox to work on things.
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Still remember my friend making a copy of doom 2 for me using pkzip... I think it took about 10 disks.
pkzip
Phil Katz, what a sad story
Interesting story with a sad and premature end. I'd not heard of the guy before today.
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3.5" were peak tactile feedback
I hear you
5 1/4"'s smell better.
For similar reasons, I feel like Gameboy Advanced cartridges were the optimal size for handheld consoles. Switch cartridges are so tiny and fragile.
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And then the button jams 😞
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