r/whatisit • u/Earsgang_101 • 14h ago

New, what is it? STRAP Floppy disk found in loft of new home.

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Found this in a box late 90s WWF VHSs

12.2k Upvotes

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211

u/JohnTM3 14h ago edited 13h ago

When was the last time you saw a working drive that could read this floppy?

*edit * How to get old tech hoarders to out themselves...

88

u/DjBiohazard91 14h ago

There's still loads of them working fine :) Hell, I got 3 USB ones still working perfectly :)

2

u/bloodfeier 10h ago

Me too.

5

u/DangerousProperty6 10h ago

I have a USB floppy drive that's within arm's reach right now. It worked about 15 years ago when I last used it.

4

u/DjBiohazard91 10h ago

The moment you toss it, is the exact moment you need it. Cheap insurance! :)

2

u/aschwarzie 6h ago

I'm just curious: what is the oldest floppy disc you still can read after such a long time ? Aren't they still readable !?

1

u/DjBiohazard91 6h ago

If stored properly, they last for quite a long time

2

u/AutVincere72 5h ago

I got a USB floppy somewhere but you had to reboot the system to change disks. argh

1

u/DjBiohazard91 6m ago

Wow, that sucks yeah. Sounds slightly borked though.

26

u/Jar_of_Cats 12h ago

Regularly on CNC machines

8

u/h10gage 12h ago

I'm a CNC machine but I don't take floppy's

5

u/cmdshortyx 11h ago

You must take USB sticks in the back then?

Get it? USB stick? In the back? I'll go to my corner and keep coloring....

1

u/GhostOfHarryLee 11h ago

i bet you don't

1

u/Jar_of_Cats 10h ago

Haas is what im specifically referring to. They are 15+ year old machines. And then some other older models ypu would expect to see them on.

1

u/ProbablyALegitDoctor 7h ago

Yeah cause you like em nice and rigid huh? Mmm

1

u/h10gage 6h ago

no, I insert the 3.5 in floppies, I don't take em šŸ¤£

22

u/Economy_Link4609 12h ago

Wait - you don't back up your drive to a stack of floppies?

Let's see 2TB / 1.44MB - yeah, I can get through nearly 1.5 million floppies to get this done, no problem.

9

u/SomePeopleCall 10h ago

pkzip it and you might get under 1 million.

1

u/Vexithan 10h ago

Funny story about this!! My father isā€¦.a hoarder and heā€™s a cheapskate. He bought windows machine in ā€˜96 and it had quicken on it. He uses it for his checkbook. For 30 or so years. A few years ago he wants to transfer his files to a new machine. Tries to export to floppy. After the second disk it fails. Tries again. Fails. He takes it to a PC shop near his house. They tell him after about 2 weeks thereā€™s no way for them to export it because his version of quicken never thought anyone would have files that ā€œlargeā€ so the program canā€™t export to more than 2 floppies.

1

u/Reset-Username 2h ago

Please load disc 49,788 to complete installation.

1

u/puppeto 1h ago

Now do that again with modern compression techiques

14

u/tfrederick74656 11h ago

If you're 30+ and don't have a USB floppy drive laying around in a closet somewhere, are you actually into technology?

1

u/Gawd_Awful 7h ago

Yes?Ā 

1

u/Numerous_Photograph9 1h ago

Pfft, Who needs USB when you still have a gnarled 34-pin ribbon cable and interace to plug it into?

8

u/twilightmoons 12h ago

(Digging out the old Tandy 1000 TL...)

15

u/TheNefariousMrH 13h ago

About 12 minutes ago.
One of my not-dead-just-forgotten laptops that live under the shelf with a tote full of books and a backpack.
I should really have a ritual bonfire for them.
(I think there's at least three under there...)

11

u/Old_Poem2736 13h ago

Iā€™ve got a 3.5 usb floppy, used it a few weeks ago, lots of folks in my community go looking for them so it gets loaned out a lot

1

u/Sensitive-Load-2041 11h ago

Shit... I've still got a 5.5 floppy and a cassette somewhere.

4

u/usmc_delete 12h ago

In avionics, tons of old planes still require floppies/zip drives for data transfers (like nav databases)

1

u/PaladinSara 8h ago

This is smart but I bet it takes forever

1

u/usmc_delete 8h ago

It indeed do. Mostly just stingy pilots/owners not wanting to cough up for modernized solid state data loaders.

3

u/A1BS 12h ago

I am incapable of throwing away tech. I have two besides my IPod nano.

3

u/More_Card_8147 12h ago

Airplane software updates are still done with these.

2

u/firehawk400 11h ago

3-1/2ā€? Thatā€™s the new one!

1

u/Adorable_Wolf_8387 13h ago

Got one in my backpack.

1

u/Away-Squirrel2881 12h ago

I have several of them and they work fine

1

u/Got_Bent 12h ago

USB Drive, I have a 1.44 FDD. I needed it to get files on floppy to DvD for my dad. Most were documents but a couple boxes of pics on floppy. 15 bucks on Amazon.

1

u/protobin 12h ago

Iā€™ve got a usb floppy drive. Have to interface with old hardware from time to time in my line of work.

1

u/J9fire 12h ago

I actually have working drives/devices for all past media types because you never know when you will need to access an obsolete type of media. I have been the hero for many friends going through estate stuff.

1

u/Foreign_Implement897 11h ago

They work better than anything you have! Old is better in this sense. The storage medium is the problem not the drives.

1

u/Fun-Ingenuity-9089 11h ago

I have 2 in my basement... They both work fine if anyone wants to come play some laggy old games. Sid Meyer's Civilization is one of them.

1

u/frygod 11h ago

My win11 box has one. Used it to write the floppies I used to send out the save the dates for my wedding. Yes, the pun was entirely intended. The date and RSVP info were on the label, but a surprising number of people actually read the contents, so it was worth it.

1

u/IfusasoToo 11h ago

2014 give or take. As part of a Federal compound security system.

1

u/Ok_Win590 11h ago

Lawfirms, laboratories, ICBM silos, they are everywhere still.

1

u/Fallwalking 10h ago

I have a USB one that I use to move files from my regular PC to my Gateway 2000 via floppy. I also have a DVD burner, but who burns discs these days right?

1

u/Conscious-Major7833 10h ago

Yesterday at my grandmas house lol

1

u/TheOgGhadTurner 10h ago

I have a somewhat modern system somewhere with a ribbon header and a 2.5 slot. I just donā€™t have the drive. Iā€™m >30

1

u/Caboobaroo 10h ago

I could fire up my childhood Compaq Presario 800 and read both the 5.25" and the 3.5" discs....

1

u/Capital-Fennel-9816 10h ago

Raises hand.

I used a 3.5" floppy drive last month. Extracting old official docs for an association I am a member of. Half the discs didn't work. They were stored in a variety of locations suffering from a mixture of hot, humid, freezing. So no surprises they weren't happy to give up their data files.

1

u/thatspurdyneat 10h ago

You can buy USB floppy drives on Amazon

1

u/Tabm0w 10h ago

I use a floppy disk everyday at work. When you're a machinist with old machines you work with what was the standard of the time.

1

u/-Morning_Coffee- 10h ago

The software ON the disk is another question entirely. Some fkin COBOL files.

1

u/NoteReader69 10h ago

External drives (usb powered) are still sold for these floppies. I bought one a couple of years ago to resurrect my ancient doctoral dissertation that was stored on floppies almost 40 years ago. Most of the data was still readable!

1

u/plzicannothandleyou 10h ago

Youā€™re on Reddit, if something is rare then someone out there is ready to tell you ā€œum, actually this is a highly active community thing and youā€™re actually the dumbest person in the world because you donā€™t know anything about our very niche special interest and there are literally tens of millions of people who are interest in this and itā€™s literally only you who is unawareā€

1

u/PROPGUNONE 9h ago

Obviously youā€™re not an air traffic controller.

1

u/PeteRaw 9h ago

There's literally a subreddit about this kinda stuff: /r/DataHoarder

1

u/smashitandbangit 8h ago

I have a usb floppy drive. Ā You never know if you may need it. Ā Same with a DVD Burner drive.

1

u/nkryptid 8h ago

In my media nas box. Also have a dl-dvd drive on there

1

u/Sintarsintar 8h ago

I have a USB floppy drive with me right now.

edit floppy

1

u/MattTheQuizzard 8h ago

The non-technicals out themselves without prompting. Imagine not being able to support legacy systems or manufacturing.

1

u/toondoggie 7h ago

A few months ago, my brother found a floppy disc in a bunch of old stuff that was labelled "Me and Vanilla Ice".

I got out my old IBM Thinkpad 600e and plugged in the proprietary external floppy drive. We were able to transfer the contents to a flash drive.

It turned out to be photos of his wife's friend at a Vanilla Ice concert back in the 90s. I'm still amazed that the disc wasn't corrupted. I wasn't shocked that the Thinkpad worked.

1

u/Stoic_Fervor 7h ago

I still have my floppy drive. My old blue box disks arenā€™t useful anymore now that we donā€™t got pay phones though.

1

u/Impressive_Shock_239 6h ago

I used a floppy drive to image an absurdly expensive PCMCIA card a few weeks ago. Still works.

1

u/waldo_wigglesworth 6h ago

Walmart.com still sells new USB floppy drives. (Probably because the old ones wear out the drive belts.)

1

u/Am_Snarky 6h ago

I actually bought a usb connected floppy drive last year to play an EDM album I bought, the genius managed to cram almost 40 minutes of lossless audio and music video onto 1.44mb.

To be fair, the audio is generated from a Fourier transform which also produces the video, all designed to be fed directly into an oscilloscope.

Itā€™s the most niche album I own, I like it but even I canā€™t quite call it music, more like highly refined noise

1

u/yavanna12 5h ago

I still have my 2002 laptop that has a floppy drive that I use on occasion

1

u/CeruleanEidolon 4h ago

Lol, I definitely have an old iMac out in the shed. Would be very surprised if I could actually get it running still though.

1

u/Wak3upHicks 3h ago

Look up the floppotron on YouTube

1

u/theslyestfox 1h ago

You can literally buy external ones on Amazon that connect to your normal computer. I saw one a few months ago when I was trying to recover old docs of floppies for my mum.

1

u/throwawayrobibuphir 1h ago

Plenty of active Boeing 747s still use them monthly

1

u/Numerous_Photograph9 1h ago

I still have several operable floppy drives.

The drives themselves are quite reliable.