Relatedly, I was recently digging through the attic at my family’s home and came across a 3.5" disk containing a bunch of QBASIC programs I’d written in the early ’90s. Despite sitting for decades in a non–climate-controlled attic, it loaded up just fine when I plugged it into a USB floppy drive. Honestly, looking back at code from 30+ years ago felt more like an archaeology expedition.

Also how many other kids also went around brandishing 3.5" floppies like a weird gun, "cocking them" by pulling back the shutter and letting it go with a satisfying snap?

A while ago I learned that very early versions of 3.5" floppies didn't have the auto shutter mechanism and you had to open and close the shutter manually. (I think that was probably just used on some Japanese Sony machines.)

Looking back over any code older than 12 months is always like archaeology, at least if it is my poorly documented tech-debt ridden nonsense.

haha true.

My favorite part is when I start cursing loudly "what hipster doofus wrote this pile of steaming horse crap?" as my eyes bleed Ark of the Covenant style from unblinkingly debugging poorly documented code in a company with a huge codebase only to realize a few seconds later that it’s mine from several years back, when I first started. The old “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

I definitely remember doing that as a kid, and I remember bending the thin metal off some broken ones. Whatever brand I was using allowed that metal to work a bit like a spring, you could launch it by compressing it. (Sorta like the frogs you find in Christmas bonbons.)

Definitely can still feel the spring sensation.

If you loosen the metal cover just right you can make it go absolutely sailing across a computer lab (or any room, I bet).

These used to be 50 cents a piece at my high school library. What a joy it was to have a tiny simple way to transport essays (and pixel art and other fun things) to and from school and amongst all the school computers.

Yes! But beware the one computer in the second row that wrecks your disk, learned one by one, the hard way.

Now I've got a pack of old floppies that are outgassing :0

I have no other explanation.

This is an almost-full box of miscellaneous floppies in one of the original cardboard trays of 30 from Office Depot.

I've got kilos more floppies in different closets but these are good ones I selected a few years ago that all passed SCANDISK.

Now this one little box is in an old ziploc bag in the office and it keeps self-inflating. At first I thought it was unusually low barometric pressure one day but I keep squeezing out the air rain or shine and it keeps on puffing back out by itself.

Something I really didn't expect.

If I did still own my own laboratory, I'd tell you what kind of gas it was by now though ;)

For old equipment, there are very good alternative methods =3

https://github.com/keirf/flashfloppy