3 1/2 Floppy (A:) – Why floppy disks rule OK

One day a couple of years back I went to visit a friend in his lab. I found him in a considerable amount of distress. He needed to get some data off a computer with no USB ports, internet connection or CD drive. The printer didn’t even work. All it had was a floppy drive. I grinned cunningly, fished around in my bag and produced a floppy, thus saving the day.
To this day, I refuse to give an explanation as to what that disk was doing in my bag.

I absolutely love floppy disks. I find their astute sturdiness reassuring. I love flipping the metal bit back and forth with my thumb. Metallic click click click snap. They do their job without the rainbow flashyness of a compact disk. Plus you could get them in a variety of translucent colours so you could stare inside and look at the mechanism. Oh and the noise the drive makes when it reads and writes makes me blither with ecstasy. OH AND ALSO ejecting the disk was so much fun, my school had a computer with an over zealous mechanism that would shoot them across the room.

When I was in primary school, I used to be the one going around in glee whenever any of the other children were having problems starting up their computers. “You’ve left the floppy in the drive, silly, it’s trying to boot from that. I doubt you could boot on 3 Paint files” I would say in a condescending tone. Oh what a little twerp I was.

I don’t like the 8 inch ones because they really are floppy. I always liked the oxymoronic nature of the name, besides they were a bit (read: a lot) before my time.
I have Windows 95 on 35 1.44 MB floppy disks. Oh what fun that was to install. Unfortunately, I seem be missing disk numbers 17, 26 and 29.

The number of times I’ve had to do an emergency boot with a floppy on a ‘modern’ computer is reason enough for why Sony should not stop manufacturing them in 2011.
In conclusion, I know how a floppy disk works. I do not know how a flash drive works. Ergo elk, the end.