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.
