Does it make sense, saving my stories onto floppy disks — or have I gone mad?
Retro and vintage are all the rave and despite all those “trends”, I find myself looking backwards for quite a while regardless. It may be nostalgia, or just that I am fed up with our buzzing world and miss the “good old, simple times”. So I figured:
Vinyls are cool again and even cassettes are coming back, despite them being the inferior storage medium (disregarding personal taste) compared to more modern formats. Why not give floppy disks a chance again?
I was even planning on making fake labels for them, resembling the covers of modern games (which, of course, would never ever, not even remotely, fit on a floppy disk) or use them as storage device for a few short stories at a time.
All of it was a pretty bad idea from start to finish.
Here’s what I’ve learned…
Oh the nostalgia
I remember beginning to use PCs fondly. My very first PC was a Pentium II with 133 MHz, 16 MB Ram (yes, thats megabytes) and an awfully slow hard disk. It was as beige as it gets and it ran Windows 95. Wow.
Now that I am feeling old, lets talk about storage mediums.
CDs were just on the brink of becoming mainstream, USB-thumbdrives where still a few years off and tapedrives were only meant for big companies to backup their data in the most inconvenient and expensive way imaginable.
So, us lowly consumer folks were stuck with the 3,5 inch floppy disks. They came in all different colors and moving the metal slider back and forth was an oddly satisfying thing to do. Popping them into your drive, watching the green light go on and drive “A:” appear in Windows was a common and enjoyable thing to do. I still remember using them as boot disks, to reinstall often-crashing Windows 95 and I even had some games on floppy disks.
