don’t copy that floppy

Do I miss software stores? Kind of!

A floppy disk. Kids, ask your parents! I graduated from 5.25″ floppies to DVDs over the years.

In the weird old days when you wanted software for your computer (because software for a portable phone was not a thing yet), you had to go to a physical store, buy a box with a disc in it, take it home, install the software, then hope (especially if it was a game) that the copy protection didn’t screw things up. If you didn’t want to insert the disc every time you ran a game like some kind of savage, you’d have to go to some skeevy-looking website and grab a no-CD fix.

Sometimes the no-CD fix worked flawlessly, sometimes it required the tech equivalent of arcane magic to work, sometimes it did nothing (or put malware on your PC).

I don’t look back fondly on any of the stuff I just described…except for the actual experience of looking for new software/games in stores. Back in the timeframe I’m describing, roughly the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, I would learn about new games through magazines like Computer Gaming World or PC Gamer. Or sometimes I would learn about them by actually finding the new games sitting on the shelves of a software store. It seems absolutely quaint now that this was how you could discover a game, but it’s true!

Some random memories:

  • Convincing a store clerk to sell me the Not For Sale version of the Commodore 64 game The Castles of Dr. Creep, circa 1984. A friend and I played it co-op in the store and I had to have it. I can’t recall what store I bought it from, other than somewhere just outside of Victoria.
  • Going to the Eaton’s store in Duncan and buying some generically-packaged versions of old Infocom games for cheap, back around 1985 (think Zork and a few others). To this day, I have no idea if these were legit copies. They were about $20 each, which was very cheap back then.
  • Buying OS/2 4.0 on floppy disk at Egghead Software. I don’t remember how many disks it came on, but more than a few! It was also surprisingly cheap, around $50 or $60 because IBM was trying to undercut Windows upgrade pricing. I never made much headway with it, and IBM abandoned OS/2 not too long after.
  • I want to say I bought my Windows 95 upgrade (on CD ROM!) at Computer City, where I worked during the launch of Windows 95 (at the Coquitlam store), but I’m not 100% sure. It seems like the logical place to have picked it up, and I know I grabbed it right away. I worked at Computer City for six weeks before quitting. The chain collapsed and vanished the following year.
  • Going to Super Software in Richmond and splurging one day by buying two games at the same time, each costing $50. I picked up Populous and SimCity, both for my Amiga 500. Probably the best 1-2 gaming purchase I ever made on physical media. Super software was also relatively gigantic and catered to every major platform back in the day: Apple II, IBM, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit (and probably others I’m leaving out). It seems nutty how many different systems existed back then. There’s actually a 1989 commercial for Super Software on YouTube.
  • Buying the last copy of Age of Empires II (1999) at a Future Shop location on the day of release. It came in a gigantic box and had a relatively thick manual.
  • A few years later, I bought Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002), one of the first games to come in a mini box, with little to no documentation. Steam was only two years from launching and the end of physical media was nigh, though you’d be able to buy games on disc for some years after.

The floppy disk comes back to haunt me

Somewhere in a box I have a bunch of old floppy disks that date back to the early to mid-90s, in formats for Amiga, PC and the Atari ST. I even have a box of old Commodore 64 floppies that date back to the mid-80s–more than 30 years ago now.

I doubt many or possibly even any of these would work now. For the Amiga and Atari ST disks I have no convenient way to find out, as I last owned the hardware for each…back in the early to mid-90s. And the current PC I have, already about four years old, is like the two I had before–no floppy drive. I suppose I could get a USB floppy drive if I really wanted to test the disks, but I’m not that curious.

Basically what I’m saying is the floppy is long dead and I don’t miss it.

But today it came back to haunt me in a way I could never have predicted.

I was taking an online course for Windows 10 and the labs involve using virtual machines through your web browser. In the final lab of the final day of the course, at Step 39 of 47, I suddenly hit a block. And it was shaped like a floppy disk.

Step 39 required me to copy some files to a floppy disk on VM #1 and then put the floppy in VM #2 and run the files from there. I thought it a bit odd to do this because really, no one uses floppies any more. Why not copy the files to a network share and move them that way? Or simulate a USB flash drive? I’m guessing a floppy disk was easiest with the VM setup. Or maybe someone just wanted to be all old school up in the hizzy. No biggie, it’s not like I needed to write a batch file to make it work or anything.

But after copying the files to the floppy and then “ejecting” it by clicking the appropriate icon, I found after “inserting” it into the second VM that it was not showing the proper files. As it turned out, both VMs refused to “eject” the floppy disk, even after restarts. The instructor dubbed it weird, copied the needed files over the network and kindly dumped them on the desktop of VM #2. I completed the lab a few minutes later. But for about 15 minutes I was suddenly reliving every bad experience I’ve had with floppy disks–and I’ve had a few. Press the eject button and you hear the disk try to eject, but it doesn’t. Instinctively start looking for a paperclip you can straighten out and stick into the little hole to force the eject mechanism. Wonder how much–if anything–would be readable once you got the disk out. Contemplate having to go to the computer store to buy another 10-pack of disks. Forget the whole thing and play an Infocom game instead because they’re on the fancy new hard disk you have in your PC and you never have to worry about ejecting it.

Then contemplate how long it will take to get an Invisiclues hint book mailed to you because you’re stuck. Again.

(This was before the internet. It was a dark and scary time, though perhaps less dark and scary than having the internet, come to think of it.)

Anyway, the instructor summed it up best by calling it weird. It truly was. This is not how I like my computer nostalgia.

On the plus side, I’m pretty sure I won’t need to handle a floppy disk–real or virtual–again any time soon.