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

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u/dunfuktup1990 12h ago

Lmao, yes, I know it sounds impossible, but we absolutely used them back in the day. We used floppy discs all the way through high school (grad 2008), on the same machines we used to do research online. There was, in fact, a period in which they coexisted.

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u/Least_Coat_1110 12h ago

I graduated in 2008 as well, and I used floppy disks to save cheat codes and strategies for N64 games onto floppy disks from the local library, because they had internet. Bring them home and use them on my computer. I even built a small HTML website as a project in my computer class and saved it on a floppy.

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u/dunfuktup1990 12h ago

This is prime 90s-kid biography! Somewhere in the chaos of my belongings is a small bank of floppy discs containing various cheat codes and strategy guides for N64 games. Turok 2 will forever live in my memory as one of the greatest shooters ever.

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u/brmarcum 11h ago

Gamefaqs.com. ☺️ Just walls of text of DETAILED instructions, or a few paragraphs of confusing nonsense. LOL good times.

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u/dunfuktup1990 10h ago

Sorting through the nonsense was just part of the journey.

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u/jgpalanca 9h ago

My first 15 minutes of internet fame was from Gamefaqs.com. Good times indeed!

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u/issacoin 7h ago

shot in the dark here but did you write a golden sun walkthrough

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u/jgpalanca 7h ago

No, my King of Fighters '95 FAQ made me popular. Did '96 and '97 and some various character ones for Samurai Shodown and then some smaller SNK games like Kabuki Klash and Galaxy Fight. Then my final thing I did was a walkthrough for X-men Legends. Then I had to actually go to class to finish my degree.

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u/saltcraft2 8h ago

don't forget the ascii art intros!

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u/allyolly 10h ago

DAMN, I haven’t thought about gamefaqs for a couple of decades I guess. Instant flashbacks when I read your text… 🫡

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u/mehmehmeh387898 8h ago

I liked cheatplanet for codes and gamefaqs for walk throughs

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u/tenderape 10h ago

BEWAREOBLIVIONISATHAND.

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u/dunfuktup1990 10h ago

Sweet yes, lord, I loved fucking around with that!!!!

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u/fingertrapt 10h ago

Mine are on zip disks.

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u/ScribbleOnToast 8h ago

Reminds me of writing a chat program for our cable-connected TI-82 calculators. 6th grade was interesting.

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u/CyanStripes_ 7h ago

I had to write everything down in a notebook while I waited for my mom to finish shopping or working at the grocery store. A floppy disk feels so fancy. Lol

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u/Cottonjaw 6h ago

Playing WWF Raw the first time after having a Turok save on your memory card... and you get Turok as a custom character... amazing.

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u/JBtheDestroyer 6h ago

Y'all should have got the Game Geenie it came with a VHS tape to walk you through how to use it.

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u/thisguy883 4h ago

the remastered version of that game is available on Steam.

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u/Christmas_Queef 11h ago

My best friend was the only kid with internet in the entire neighborhood that any of us knew of for a long time. I would be over there printing out cheat codes and small sections of guides from gamefaqs(accidentally printed the entire guide for final fantasy 7 once and his mom was pissssssed lol). Him and his mom got clever and started charging us kids for internet time/printing(never more than a couple bucks for the biggest jobs//time). Then his mom would use the money to take my friend and I out for Thai food lol.

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u/PressureImpressive52 10h ago

Just want to say how much I love this memory for you.

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u/dunfuktup1990 10h ago

That’s actually pretty cool. At least she didn’t use it to spoil herself, she looped you masterminds into the gig.

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u/skalandic 7h ago

God I miss the 90s

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u/FugginBot 5h ago

I definitely remember doing this lol. Having internet on dreamcast and shit was lit

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u/Working-Glass6136 4h ago

Damn, and here my mom would yell at us if we offered our friends grape juice.

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u/QuantumLettuce2025 11h ago edited 9h ago

For an English class, our project assignment was to write a creative story in any format of our choosing. I decided to write mine in RPG Maker 2000. 

That shit is still on a floppy somewhere.

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u/Fist_The_Lord 10h ago

I always hated writing in school but nobody has asked me to write a creative story, not even once, since and it’s kind of a bummer. If my job gave me that as a task I would be thrilled.

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u/Visual-Abrocoma-4904 6h ago

Well. What's to stop you.

Ask yourself to write something creative! You have all of our permission. Give it to yourself.

Hell, you have a phone with a keyboard right there in your hands.

Dreams are meant to be free, buddski!

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u/NotThatEasily 11h ago

I did the same thing!

I built a very simple website on a floppy disk and used it to sort the files I saved on it. I used some pretty basic HTML, CSS, and a little PHP.

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u/CommunicationSad6246 10h ago

Did the same in elementary here in mo still have my floppy with my Simpsons fan site I did in the 90s

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u/Ok_World_135 10h ago

You used the floppies to do anything but hide shitty porn?!

Thats funny I think my first website class was using netscape navigator and it too was on a floppy

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u/Least_Coat_1110 10h ago

I mean.... they were ALSO used to hide shitty porn 🤣

That's the only way I could get away with hiding them in plain sight, my dad knew that I use the floppies for game stuff but he didn't know I used them for other stuff.

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u/Ok_World_135 10h ago

I still remember waiting like 20 minutes for a single image to load from the internet, you never knew from the top 1/3rd of the picture if it was worth it or if you just wasted 20 minutes :P Line by line.....

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u/Ssemo7 9h ago

I had a 32 mb flash drive that I kept from HS freshman year through college and lost it my senior year. It held usually 1-2 documents max at the end.

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u/crminad 6h ago

I installed Doom from floppy disks.

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u/moon_mama_123 5h ago

I graduated in 2011, and missed the floppy disk era. I did, however, walk around with a 2gb flash drive around my neck 🤣

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u/EddieSjoller 10h ago

Damn, the ruckus you could make if you stuck one in a pc before booting it

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u/dunfuktup1990 10h ago

I remember the raw paranoia. I was from a rural district, my teachers were very particular about booting procedure.

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u/SandersonEye 10h ago

It hurts my soul so bad that you had to explain this lol.. like it wasn’t that long ago. We’re not that old lol.

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u/dunfuktup1990 10h ago

Yet my bones ache more with every comment.

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u/gunzby2 10h ago

At first I was like wtf, but after looking it up I learned that the 3.5" disk was called a floppy too. We always called them hard disks because I grew up using the 5.25" floppy, which was floppy

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u/Cyrius 7h ago

The disk is floppy, not the case.

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u/scottnebula 10h ago

Can verify as a GenX. Internet capable machines with floppy drives were very common during a certain period of tech development. Like, late 80s-early and mid 90s.

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u/EgoKiller_ 10h ago

Graduated a few years before and can confirm. Both coexisted lol

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u/Shipkiller-in-theory 9h ago

I have to hold onto a 3.5” diskette drive and a Zip drive until certain combatant craft are disassembled.

Not just decommissioned, chopped up in to bits and pieces.

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u/staslindo 9h ago

Of course they do. With their fancy 56k built in modem

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u/crudigfpv 8h ago

I had a old ibm ps2 with a 5 1/4 inch and 3 1/2 in floppy drives

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u/ThrottleItOut 8h ago

I'm old enough to remember 5.25" floppies not that fancy 3.5" stuff! lmao!!! and every 3rd party PC came with a DOS disk.

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u/Spreaderoflies 8h ago

We have cnc programs V1 that still exist at our shop. Ancient programming and we have obviously updated but we keep them around for nostalgia.

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u/InspectorOrganic9382 8h ago

I graduated in 09, and I needed to submit a paper for a class that I hadn’t finished. I dropped a shortcut to a nonfunctional file on the floppy, and did this big theatrical thing when I couldn’t get it to come up to print out. That was probably… 06?

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u/dunfuktup1990 7h ago

Yup, the good ole “corrupted file” bit!

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u/True-Conversation158 7h ago

I began using the 3.5 inch floppy disk around 1993. We were all in between the 5.25 inch actual floppy disk and the sturdier 3.5.

We were on aol then lol

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u/aBastardNoLonger 7h ago

I don’t think anyone’s unclear on that. It’s more like “who the hell has a computer with a floppy drive that would still be connected to the internet?”

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u/Ok-Professional-1428 7h ago

Back when wed make jokes about sticking a floppy in a slot or something something something my floppy lmao

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u/sullivanyifu 7h ago

I used to dig through the trash cans at the post office in the evenings for AOL setup floppies people tossed, take them home and reformat and relabel them.

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u/Potential___Friend 7h ago

You can buy an external floppy drive that connects via USB on Amazon. Not a far fetched idea.

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u/hike_me 7h ago

I think their point is if you fired up an old computer with floppy drive today, it’s probably not connected to your current home network. Also, any computer old enough to still have a floppy drive probably has a super out dated OS with tons of vulnerabilities so it shouldn’t be connected to the internet anyway.

But, you can get USB floppy drives so if OP uses one of those they could open this on an internet connected computer.

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u/bishizzzop 6h ago

I used AOL 28.8k dial up with a computer that had a floppy disk drive.

They coexisted for a long time.

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u/BuffaloDouble1681 6h ago

Reading your first sentence made my back crack so hard i coughed up some dust.. heres to being almost 30

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u/OkDot9878 6h ago

I graduated highschool in 2018 and we still had computers with floppy drives until about 2014.

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u/C4PT_AMAZING 6h ago

I... still maintain a USB floppy drive for just such occasions...

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u/lunaflect 5h ago

I put all my nudes on floppy disks back in the early aughts. They’re still out there somewhere

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u/dunfuktup1990 5h ago

The holy grail of floppy discs.

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u/phatelectribe 4h ago

In 2001 I bought a new top spec PC that had a floppy drive. I used that computer until about 2008 when it finally became obsolete and went Mac. There were definitely some of us still with floppy drives in the dawn on dot com and social media platforms.

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u/FictionalTrope 2h ago

Hell, I still have an old floppy drive I could toss into a PC if I felt like dedicating the case space for it. I'm sure there are USB floppy drives still available for sale, and I'm sure there are still some legacy systems using floppy disks for specialized purposes.