💾 Is it a good idea to buy used floppy disks? 💾

Comments · 612

• TH

  @thomaskendall452 · 3 years ago (edited)

  Believe it or not, I still have a client who sends me files on 3.5" floppies via snail mail! (He's 87 and wants nothing to do with the internet.) So I got a 3.5" USB floppy drive for about $20. It, and his 30-year-old floppies, work just fine on my Windows 10 machine.

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• SC

  @scorch527 · 3 years ago

  SC2 files are SimCity 2000 save games. It looks like this person tried recreating Harvard in SimCity 2000.

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• EI

  @eionthegod · 2 years ago

  You see my curiosity would’ve had me opening all those files

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• NR

  @nrdesign1991 · 3 years ago (edited)

  Whoever this person was, they probably were a college student in electronics/embedded technology engineering. VHDL is a programing language for "programming" a hardware onto CPLDs and FPGAs.

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• TH

  @thejoneseys · 3 years ago

  Having grown up in the tape and floppy disk era I loved this! I still love the sound of a floppy disk drive 👍🏻

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• SV

  @SvetCookie · 3 years ago

  SUSIE was an industry standard gate-level logic sim by Aldec from the 80s that was generally used in conjunction with OrCAD (which is still maintained today). Looks like it's not archived anywhere on the internet, sadly

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• MI

  @millsyinnz · 3 years ago

  I remember floppy disks as a student. Really fun working on an assignment and and then having it vanish from your PC and the disk because it is corrupt, having to redo it from scratch. Amazing how we could fit so much stuff on them, even though it was only 1.44MB. The text data files I worked with at my old job were generally larger than that. I left all that behind when I got a 64MB USB drive in 2003.

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• OB

  @ObiWanBillKenobi · 3 years ago

  Last year at a thrift store I found some Zip disks.  One of them still contained the LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU virus from about 20 years earlier.

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• RO

  @Rouxenator · 3 years ago

  I had an original Lemmings disk, and it too had those weird directories on them. I believe it has to do with the copy protection, so who ever made that copy did a good job?

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• RE

  @ReyMysterioX · 3 years ago

  The VHDL code might have been interesting. The disk labelled Xilinx, Susie and that VHDL code make clear that there was somebody involved with FPGA development.

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• TH

  @TheSudsy · 3 years ago

  Being an original Amiga user i found about 60-65 % of the DD 3.5 actually work reliably, bought as used.

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• RA

  @rager-69 · 3 years ago

  I've never heard someone refer to it as "dot bump".

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