Why... why... why are the disks upside down?
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Floppys were the ultimate in security because if you looked at them wrong they become corrupted.
Stop sticking them to your fridge with a magnet
Stapling 5¼" disks to reports was another whoopsie.
If the staple is near the corner it's perfectly fine, the disc itself is round in a square sleeve. So the corners have nothing in them
I bet there was at least one case of "oh shit my assignment isn't ready, maybe I can buy some extra time using the old staple through the data trick, only get to use that once maybe twice per teacher".
One person downvoted... "Don't you DARE put a staple through a floppy disk!" Lmao
Or using a binder clip on 3.5" disks. Lost count how many times I saw that shit.
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But that's how mom shows off my rust codebase! :(
But the slide is so fun to fiddle with! Click clack click clack, why doesn't Commander Keen run anymore!?!
TBH I fidgeted with those slides a lot and don't recall fucking my shit up.
Same; amazing stim toys.
You must have started using them at the tail end of their life when stuff got cheaper including the drives.
I had to use floppies to bring my programming assignments to university in early 2000s. They were so unreliable, I had a rule to copy every assignment on at least 3 drives. I've asked them many times to setup an FTP, so students would not have to struggle, but they would not listen.
That's funny yet odd. I use floppy disk still to this day for my 200aml cnc plasma table. It's the easiest method to load the gcode on. The rs232 is to much of a p.i.a. I used to have an issue when I used a USB floppy drive into my laptop. I ended up finding a pc with a dedicated floppy drive since then. I've had zero issues. Wich is also more surprising that floppy disks even work around the big ass high voltage transformer for the plasma power source. The big servo motor drives and the welders in the shop.
I remember taking my first GIS course and having to buy ZIP discs for each project around that time. That ended up being an expensive class.
Also, the lab PCs re-imaged every time they shut down, so if the PC crashed you had no way to recover the data if you hadn't written it to the zip drive, which we usually only did at the end of the day because they were slow.
We basically had a revolt to get the university to unlock the USB ports for us to use those fancy new flash drives the next year.
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Back when shit made sense. OneDrive, eat your heart out
What kind of sense is there in storing your floppies with the shutter at the top?
the seals weren't that good so storing them facing down for long periods of time made them prone to data leaks.
It was the way of The Ancestors.
Do not cite the Deep Magic to me! I was there when it was written!
Less chance of dust and debris falling between the shutter and the rest of the disk. Plus, that was just naturally the top of the device when you pick it up. It's easier ergonomics to pick the floppy up from the sides and feed the top into the drive. Also the shutter did stick up a little bit, so if you placed them shutter down they can wobble and buzz in the container with slight vibrations (like say, from a computer sitting next to them). Bottom down makes it more likely that the shutter will get damaged or scoop material into the disk when moving them.
We also just kinda did it that way.
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Who else can smell this picture?
For some reason I have never seen one of those where the spare key was not attached to the primary key 🤔
That's because all of the other instances had the keys get lost and the owners had to break them open and buy new diskette cases.
You mean to tell me if you lost the keys you could just break them open? I threw away countless locked cases full of diskettes.
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A year’s supply of save icons.
Mate, don’t give them ideas. The enshittifiers literally will implement “save tokens” into an app as soon as it occurs to them.
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In the 90s, that would have been a single copy of photoshop.
If you've ever installed Microsoft office from floppy disks, you don't what those times back.
I remember downloading games from sketchy Warez sites on the school computers because they had a T1 line and I had dialup. They'd come in Floppy-sized segments; I'd go home each day with a stack of 10-15 floppies, copy the segment to my drive, delete it from the disk, and go back the next day to collect more. It would take weeks to get a whole game, and that's only if the warez site didn't disappear before I finished collecting parts. Then there was the butt clencher moment when I'd try to unpack the whole thing and see if it actually worked or not which, most of the time, it did not.
Those were the days.
CRC ERROR. CHECK ARCHIVE AND TRY AGAIN.
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Its funny cause you could pinch the back and lift the lid off of its hinges
Like bike locks. Very easy to circumvent, but just enough of a hurdle to deter most casual crimes of opportunity.
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gotta leave the key in the tower too so i could pretend to start it and drive it as a kid using my dads computer.
Also if you took the key out, it wouldn't have started.
Actually, I guess it depended on what kind of key it was, some cases had locks for opening them, others had the locks wired into the mobo and it wouldn't start unless the key shorted the connection. Or you could open it up and hot wire the computer lol.
Still more secure than Flock's shit.
Also I had one of those... The plastic... The color...
I was able to unlock those with a letter opener.
hackerman.jpg
I have one still from my childhood and I never had a key. The lid flexes enough to bypass the lock.
Spent some time imaging a bunch of floppies from my late father last summer, and I noticed that on every single 3.5" floppy box, the keys were the same. The locks had same bitting.
...also just noticed that the single 5.25" floppy box (of Commodore 64 floppies) I have at hand that even has a lock is currently unlocked. And the key is at my parents' place. ...have to check if the key is the same as the rest when I visit the next time.
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Fine, I'll do it:
Why the hell are the floppies in the bin with the label-side down? Nobody used these with the shutter-side up. How're you going to read the missing label when they're upside down?
Dafuq you on about this is the correct orientation.
Edit: After doing some research I may be outvoted. Huh.
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At the same time these were in vogue, you also could require a key to start the PC itself.
What kind of psychopath stored their floppies upside down like this?
UpperEndian format, clearly.
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When I was in high school we could buy floppy disks from the vending machine
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Checkmate hackers.
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