Floppy disks AND drives made towards the end of the floppy era were terrible quality because they were made with one thing in mind: being cheap. The last package of brand-new Sony disks I bought around 2006 literally had about 3 disks in the pack of 10 that actually worked. The rest were completely unusable.
First off, why were floppies still being made if they were that unreliable? Second off, if a single CD or DVD costs less than a dollar, why are they stupidly reliable compared to a floppy?
Had gotten about 100 to 200 floppies for free with a mail-in rebate around 2001/2002. The one I used worked fine. I did take a magnet from a hard drive to a fe of them to see if they would still work, the did not.
LGR... what can I say? I showed this to my dad, and all he had to say was a resounding 'that's right...' with watery eyes. You're doing something that needs to be done in this world; you are the curator that most of us only incorporate in our minds through a basement-dwelling personification of a human being. You bring it all to light (beautifully, might I add). Keep the faith man. Sure, all of this will be dust in the wind eventually. Regardless, the flame needs to be maintained.
"I have… loaded programs you people wouldn't believe… Strip Poker girls totally nude off the screen in my childhood room. I watched animation glitter in the dark near the edge of the demo line. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like.. *small fart*.. candy… in… a couch. Time… to code…"
Borin81 "I watched him code, all night. It was a long slow thing. He never whimpered, and he never quit. He took all the time he had, as though he love coding very much. Every second of it. Even the pain. Then he was debugged."
I guess they're like the vinyl records of computer technology; there's a tangibility to them; you can hold them and admire them, and (unlike a disc) you don't have to worry about fingerprints. They're also physically larger than flash drives, and likewise easier to handle (and harder to lose in your pocket).
I remember using my Packard bell legend computer back in 1995. I had bought the shareware episode of biomenace from a drug store and liked hearing the 3 and a half inch floppy drive whirr and make loading noises lol.
ive always said that CDs should have been done like disketts. have the disk inside a permanent cace with lovely art and information on it, and when you need to read the CD, you just put the entire thing into the computer. that way the disk is never exposed and never get scratched unless you open the reading tab all the time.
+WaFfLeFuR Not entirely true. MiniDisc as a consumer media format failed quickly, but MD players and blank discs were super popular before the iPod took hold. Particularly since later MD models were cheap and the blank media easy to record on. You could have hours of music on a handful of discs. I know many who used them as portable recording devices too. Loved mine and still keep it around. However once the 3rd and 4th generation iPods hit, the advantages didn't hold high and iTunes on windows was a game changer. Sony made you use proprietary software and files had to be converted. It took till the later models for MD to have any kind of MP3 like support. They were a fun bit of tech...
I only own a couple of those 5 inchers, all of them for the C64. Everything else I own is either the 3.5 inch ones or that really obscure size Amstrad insisted on using in the mid 80s. Oh, and cassettes if they count. oh, those bloody cassettes.
Fuck I remember having to get a pencil in those cassette tapes and wind it back whenever it fucked up. Doesn't happen with CDs nowadays. Probably for the best but still something I feel is missing.
I've been able to get numerous 5.25 floppies to read again, mostly Commodore, by carefully taking the disk out of its case and gently wiping one side with a little alcohol and a soft cloth, letting it dry, and then doing the other side. Its not perfect, but it's worked many times and saved many disks. I have not however been able to save a single 3.5 disk that starts to fail to read. It surprises me too because it was the newer technology and you would have thought the enclosed case would better preserve the media...
As other commenters have said -- it's the data density. The more data you pack into a smaller physical area, the more sensitive and fragile the medium becomes. I bet you'll have a similar experience with 1.2MB 5.25" floppies as with the 1.44MB 3.5"... In fact, once upon a time you could format a 3.5" to 1.7MB and in the process, you risked data corruption on every write, which is why very few people ever did it.
I have ran into this issue myself when using old Apple IIGSs and the like, from my own experience, as long as the 5.25" disk wasn't physically damaged or put onto a magnet, it usually works pretty well, but 3.5" floppies, especially the newer "high density" 1.44mb ones seem to just go down hill very fast once things start to go wrong, it happened to my copy of Microsoft Word 6.1 I had on 8 3.5" floppies, one disk failed, making the program unable to install.
***** It's true that they are reliable, but even then, they won't last for decades. Disc rot is a real thing because the metal it's made out of eventually oxidizes down the years. Depending on how well you treat your CDs, when they'll finally fall apart varies. It's the sad, but inevitable truth we all face: all storage mediums eventually fail and lose everything.
oh yes, as a kid the most vivid thing about early computer experiences, was the sounds that machines made, namely, the disk drives reading disk, and oh boy, the sound of read errors.... i think these early experiences is what I get back when using older machines, and the best for me is using a word processor in mono-tasking (Ms-Dos, no distractions) and saving on disk and hearing it read and save as you progress throughout the work day. the best format is 5 1/4 inch 360k disk drives, which I find very reliable. My favorite are the mitsubishi drives, such quality builds.
I was born in 1988 so I think I was late for the floppy disk train but I do get it. This is how I feel about books. Physical, hold in your hands books. Whether they are game manuals or full sized novels. The smell, the feel of the paper, the differences between manuals, soft covers, paper backs, leather backs or hard covers in terms of textures and even reading the printed words inside is far more engaging then any digital download. They also feel so much more tangible then kindles or just reading them online. So I guess this was a big time digression but it felt relevant to my hazy 4 am mind.
Happy Birthday, Clint! I just watched this video again just for the fun of it and I swear to you, you bring tears to my eyes every single time I watch it, no matter how many times I did watch it before. I hope I'm not too creepy or something for this, I just wanted you to know I think this is probably your best video of all time.
Even though I'm only 16 I know exactly how you feel with floppies. They just have more to them than a CD or flash drive. All of them have lived a long life, of being held, inserted into drives, loaded, saved on. Maybe a young kid excitedly stuffing a disk into his C64 to play a hot new game, or a student diligently typing his college thesis on an Apple II. And you can feel all those memories just from holding it. I get boxes of floppies with my vintage computer hauls all the time. I've found many things still intact while looking through them, like graphs, RSVPs, drawings, poems, even novels. It gives me a fuzzy feeling, perhaps even nostalgia, knowing that someone lovingly typed all those things on the computer in front of me, all those years ago.
Dreadjaws It's utterly pointless, it doesn't add clarity or function (or nostalgic value). It's the grammatical equivalent of 'no elbows on the dinner table'.
Man, I have this same sentiment for physical media in general. It's quickly going extinct at the hands of the relentless tide of convenience that brought it into existance in the first place. There's a really personal experience that happens when you handle something you associate with joy, usefulness, or even just familiarity. I like to soak it up whenever I can, while I still can.
trashEverything same here. Physical Vita games are getting really hard to find. The only places that have them around me are gamestops and they just recently put them out on shelves. They kept them in shoe boxes behind the counter because they didn't have room for them.
I haven't used floppies in well over a decade now, although I certainly remember 'em. For me, their legacy is that the first hard drive on a computer is forever the C:\ drive, skipping A:\ and B:\ entirely so that the floppy drives few use anymore still have a spot saved for them. (It's kind of a wonder that modern variants of Windows haven't started assigning CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives those slots automatically; they're basically doing the same thing, barring the ability to write back to the discs.)
Of course, some can also do writing, and with a properly formatted disc, they can basically work as an arbitrary read/write drive not unlike a floppy or other such removable media system. As for the drive letter thing, this is one of the last vestiges of DOS that somehow or another has managed to survive through time, even though technically all modern versions of Windows address drive partitions internally using unique identifiers now. Drive letters made enough sense for a purely command line based OS (although whether you use letters, numbers, or something else, as long as it's easy to type, it's irrelevant.) There's not a lot of practical reason for drive letters at this point other than legacy and some rare instances where they're useful in a fully-specified path. (But again, you could use almost any other system for referencing the root of a drive.)
It could be because some people still use floppies. Whenever I used a USB floppy drive, it was always designated to A:\>. I would bet that some people would think it's weird for modern computers to still have a command-line interface in some way, shape, or form. I don't mind it all that much, which could be because the first computer OS I've used was Windows 3 back in the early 90's.
***** On that note, I believe since Windows XP, only 1.44MB 3.5" drives are supported. (Although in any mass manufacturing, that's the only drive format that made it to USB, and also managed to live the longest.) I haven't used a USB floppy drive on a Windows system in quite a while, so I can't remember the default letter assignment. I would assume it would be naturally picked by Windows as any arbitrary free letter using whatever system is uses to map any USB drive, but I could be wrong. (Also might vary what version of Windows we're talking about.) I don't think it's weird to have a CLI in a desktop computer OS, it still makes a lot of sense for scripting and general power users. I was mostly noting that drive letters are just a legacy from the bloodline that Windows comes from, which of course is DOS. As an aside, my first computer had Windows 3.1. The machine had a 100MB hard drive. I remember being so annoyed with Windows because it took up so much space (but my dad insisted it stay on there, probably for Word or something) and I remember thinking there was no way this stupid Windows thing would ever be useful.
Classic80sStuff Not really "always", it depended on a lot of factors. By default a single hard drive with a single partition and no special flags added to MSCDEX (or whatever driver you used) meant a "D:" assignment. But I had a Pentium-era machine that had two hard drives in it, and that left it with C: and D: for those drives, so the CD-ROM had to be at least E:. Some OEMs even sometimes assigned arbitrary letters to the CD-ROM (which was totally possible to do) and you'd see like an R: or some apparently nonsensical assignment.
Was just going through my old Apple II disks last night, realized about halfway through that nearly all of them were giving me a "Not a startup disk!" error. Ended up taking apart my first floppy drive to manually clean the head. It was filthy! Turned the head of a Q-tip black. Put it back together, and most of those same disks worked fine. Ended up being a satisfying experience but also taught me that maybe those old disks (and drives) giving us all errors actually *aren't* dead - maybe our drives are just dirty! I've got three more floppy drives - I plan on cleaning them all now.
I started using the family computer when I was about 3 years old (1997) and I remember all my games being on CD-ROMs but I know that my parents had floppy disks that they used but I had no interest in them because they had no games on them (at least as far as I know) I also remember that our printer used paper that had perforated edges you could tear off (super fun if you're 3 years old!) and I believe the sheets were all attached to each other? It really freaked my parents out that it was so easy for me to figure out how to use the computer at such a young age when it was still a new thing to them lol
You're talking about tractor feed paper. My first printer was a Panasonic, and we got a bunch of leftover tractor paper from my uncle, who had stopped using it for his business. As a kid, that stuff was much more fun than standard letter size :)
Kellmachine first time i remember using the home computer we had it was in 1995, i was 3 years old as well and it was an old Atari ST, i believe and you bet everything was on floppy disk. most of what we had for that was games. fast forward like... 3 or 4 years, i was given an IBM Thinkpad laptop for school work, and i would save my work on 3 1/4 inch floppy disks. i remember working with gaudy colours, 20 point comic sans and typing at like, 10 words per minute or something, and i even made the labels... it was medical tape with hilighter. my mum was a nurse. it was special. i loved the feeling of putting a 3 1/4 inch diskette into the drive, and wondering why they were called floppy disks (i had only used 3 1/4 inch ever, and to this day have never used a 5 1/2 inch). every now and then i think of getting an external floppy drive and a disk just to experience the feeling of putting one of those babies into a machine and hear the sounds again and just... live in the 1990s again, if only for scant few seconds. then get bought crashing back into the 2010s when i realize i got another bloody benefits form to fill out.
This was like a love song to floppy disks and I utterly enjoyed it. I remember when I was young and my brother and I would play Roller Coaster Tycoon. We assumed that the floppy icon you clicked to save meant to you had to insert a floppy to actually save. We had this translucent pink one we always tried to save it to. Needless to say we never really got to load a save file until years later when we found out it saves to a directory!
you, sir...are the best youtuber of all time...period! love the channel...so many memories. i miss the good old days of amiga where i had games with 10+ disks like "monkey island 2" or "indiana jones - fate of atlantis"...a chore indeed but nevertheless those where fun times. keep up the great work...and if i might ask: is there a possibility of a "moonstone" review in the near future?
They were always my favorite. We had to care for them, edit and craft custom boot or game disks to do what we wanted. Especially when we figured out how to modify autexec.bat and config.sys files to make our work building machines faster. Even having hard disk utilities on floppy disks...or the ever notorious Windows 95 on floppy disk. Truly great and missed times. Your channel inspired me to start back into retro computers. Already making local and long distance friends and contacts for parts, software, etc. Actually have 4 VLB capable 486 motherboards on the way for a couple of builds.
That's a great video. I don't have the same attachment to floppies, maybe due to growing up using a C64 with tape drive, with my only real floppy usage being on Amiga, and the vast majority of that phase being taken over by game consoles until '98 or so. I'd probably feel the same way about tapes if they weren't so slow and fiddly(head alignment etc.).
My main reason for loving floppy disks/drives is the amazing "clunk" sound when you insert a 3.5" diskette. And the read/write sound. That's the best part. EDIT: Just noticed I was here 6 months ago. Hello, old me!
My favorite game on the 5.25” floppy was Path Tactics by MECC which was for the Apple II. Also Oregon Trail. On the 3.5” floppy, I like the Microsoft Best of Windows Entertainment Pack (BOWEP) which had games like Chip’s Challenge and TriPeaks. I remember my teacher giving me a copy that had a virus on it. Those were the good ole days!
I would find it hard to believe, that kids nowadays, could feel even remotely as in awe as I was the first time I loaded up Shufflepuck Cafe on my Amiga. The artwork on the disk, then that mechanical grinding as the disk loaded, almost hearing each individual byte loading into memory. Then that glorious splash screen. It was like looking into the distant future! Somehow I don't think an Xbone or a PS4 can come even remotely close to that feeling.
Well heck even worse "kids nowadays" are most likely not even going to be able to recognize a floppy disk on sight (or audio/VHS cassette tape, vinyl record, ...) unless they regularly are in contact with somebody who cares to keep those things around. I have a 1 1/2 year old niece who picks up any rectangular shaped object and uses it like a smartphone, both holding it in her hands to push the imaginary touch screen, or the way she holds it up to her ear and pretends to talk to a phantom. Something that was unimaginable when I was a kid is just as regular as a rotary-dial phone would have been. There's something really strange about it.
Captain Southbird I mean no offense but this is terrifying to me. 1 1/2 half seems way to young for emulating this behavior. Do her parents spend anytime with her and no phone?
Nah, don't get too worked up about. My sister / her mother actually is very strongly into her playing with non-electronic toys like stuff animals, a plastic play farm, etc. and limiting her television time, encouraging going outside, etc. A recent story is she was in a doctor's office and while all the kids were engaged in their iPads, she was pushing chairs around, because that was just more interesting to her. Nonetheless, daddy's using his iPhone a lot for his work, so it's totally understandable the kid's going to pick up on these motions and behaviors.
Sure, and when we could hear our 56K modems dialling up, you had a sense of the mechanics (electronics) behind it, and realise that you were using the phone line to send sounds to communicate with other computers. Now, people think the internet comes from WiFi. There was a time when people used to have to crank the engines of their cars to start them. Now we turn an ignition, undoubtedly we've lost some of the realism of the car 'experience' but it's progression in design. When we see things from our lives being phased out, we aren't sad because those things could still be relevant, because they cannot, we're sad because we realise how obsolete we too are getting. It is a simple reminder of expendability and mortality.
when I was a kid, I was selling demos and shareware on 3.5" diskettes on a flea market. I printed the name and a screenshot of the program (using a dot matrix B/W printer of course)... good old times :'-)
You summed it up perfectly when you compared the floppys to the vinyl discs and vintage cars. This is pretty much the reason why floppys feel special, even to the younger generation like mine from the 2000s. There is sth aesthetically pleasing to the eyes when you come across a floppy disc, that is pretty much the same feeling when one sees an old vintage car or listen to an old vinyl album. For me at least.
Your analogy of the specialness of floppy disks makes me want to go out and buy a bunch of floppy disks and drives for them! XD I think it's the vintage car thing that really got me, because cars get screwed up over time, so go ahead and fix it yourself and enjoy the hell out of it!
Though I didnt get into computers until the mid-2000's, Floppy disks where a thing that was of nostalgic interest to me like how you might get interested in something your parents had when they where younger. I was born 1992, and even before I really got into computers around 12 years old, floppy disks where still around, hell some people still used it for storage, libaries and schools used it for storing word documents. Now a days, a long formated word document can sometimes exceed the capacity of a 1.44MB floppy, especially if theres graphics. The only time I ever bought floppy disks was a 10 pack of floppies for 5 bucks to make a boot disk for a Pentium II server I picked up off the curb, which needed a boot disket to boot from CD. I managed to install windows 2000 pro on it and use it as a 96 GB server for storing data like pictures, on three IDE 32GB hard disks.
+Matt Brine Oh, and the first time I ever felt 5.25 inch floppies was when I found a Commador 64 at the same place I found that Pentium II dual CPU server tower, sadly I could not figure out how to boot any games for the C64, as the games I found with it on 5.25 inch floppies kept complaining about a lack of a tape drive.
This takes me back to the C64 days when we had various daughterboards and custom software that would allow us to copy the disks that used the inherent drive problems part of their copy protection. It was rather ingenious. A game publisher would know the error codes thrown by reading from an area that was out of the normal operating range, then convert that error into a direction to read data from another part of the disk. It made copying the disks outright (without assistance) nearly impossible because the copying process would toss out the "bad commands" assuming they were being misread by the drive. Now, THAT would be a fun video - old drive-based copy protection schemes and the hardware and software solutions that got around them. Once again, thanks for the walk down memory lane!
I think that's why you can enable "Drive sound emulation" in VINE... It brings back memories of having to wait what nowadays would seem like an eternity for "Little Computer People" to load... Or is that just me?
Agreed I truly miss that sound of the 1541, and 1571 disk drives. The constant belt, and drive latch problems I had with my 2 1541 units, where how I cut my teeth as a kid learning to repair computers.
***** Lazy Game Reviews That emulation of the sound might bring you fond memories for a few minutes but it will quickly become annoying. It's not very accurate to the actual sound sound produced by an Amiga drive, which is noticeable in real life, something you have fond memories of, but is never really annoying in person. That emulation sound will get annoying eventually. Nice look back at floppy disks. I favorited it. Reading these comments I totally think LGR should have plopped a microphone by a C64/Amiga/DOS machine. That sound is certainly part of the experience just as much as the look or feel. Especially if you were an Amiga user which had such a unique sound and because few had a hard drive you were always using them. They could be terrifying even. When a disk was corrupted you knew it was coming based on the first note of the read-write error. You clinched your fists and prayed that it was not what you were thinking... Too bad the 3 1/2's were sold as smaller but bigger and better and turned out to be pieces of junk in the long haul and they took up MORE space due to their thickness. I tend to like the 5 1/4 inch ones more and I never really had that much contact with them as a kid. A floppy should flop. But it hasn't been that long since we stopped using them. Most people were still bringing power points to school with a floppy disk into 2004. Some of us even invested into a zip drive and thought we were cool stuff because some schools had them too... yeah... that one lasted... hahaha...
I feel much the same about audio cassettes. I'm not going to argue for a second that they hold any sort of merit today, technology has rendered them obsolete and gone on to better things. But there's something about them as a tangible object that still holds appeal to me. I like the imperfections, the flaws in the sound, the noise of the motors. It's kind of difficult to put into words, and all my friends think I'm insane for still buying music on cassettes, but i'm happy in my insanity if that must be the case.
Amazing video. This is the thing about making collections that most people don't get, its not just having a bunch of things stored in a shelve in your house, it is about how this specific media makes you feel, how it brings up a unique sense of joy. That is why I collect old comic books and DVDs .
I was taping one of the two holes of the high density disks so I can use them to my Amiga as double density. Double density disks were so rare and expensive on mid '90s.
The content that you put up is among some of the funniest and most engaging stuff I've seen on the world wide internets; but this was really something special. I always get nostalgic when you display and talk about all of the old tech you have, but this one really hit me. Thanks!
I feel somewhat the same about VHS tapes and vinyl records, the color bleed of VHS and the crackling sound when you start of a vinyl there is just something special about it.
Ahhh the good old days of PC. I remember when theres a Floppy Disk drive. I once written a Starcraft shortcut into a diskette and I thought I've copied the whole game inside a diskett!! How astonished I was and then when I found out its not working, I've freaking laughed.
We can emulate software, but we can't emulate the feeling of the first time someone broke your beloved floppy disk of your favorite game. I come from a repressed area; we were using floppys all through HS to turn in homework and papers. I remember writing a NES emulator to a floppy with a single rom to play in accounting class. I graduated HS in 2008..
Same here. We were encouraged to use floppy disks up until my senior year of high school in 2006. That feel as the hard casing clicks into place... oh, the nostalgic glory of trying to fit a year's worth of PowerPoint presentations onto 1.44 MB
Yes! This right here! You hit the nail on the head. Collecting and using old computers, and by extension using floppy disks for old software, if very much something akin to collecting old classic cars. Some people just do not get it, but for those that do, it is such a wonderful experience to enjoy and tinker with.
There is something thats being lost with how media is handled today, and I think you hit the nail on the head. I never made much use of floppys as a child they were a little before my time. When I was a kid most games and software I used on PCs were on CDs, but still the feeling of holding it in your hand and putting it in the drive is something that is universally understood to anyone who grew up in the 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s. Sometimes I take out some of my old PS1 games and just look at them. I open the case, take the disc out and then just put it back. Theres something so satisfying about holding those old jewel cases and hearing the satisfying click when you open and close them, or the sound the plastic makes when you stack them on top of each other . The same could be said for cartridges in old Nintendo systems. It might sound silly, but these are things the next generation won't have. With digital distribution becoming more and more mainstream there will be less of a need for physical media. What are they going to have memories of the download bar in Steam?
1:45 Oh man! I haven't seen one of those floppy containers since 2002, when I first played Warcraft: Orcs and Humans in a bookstore. For seven hours. Until an employee taught me how to save and quit, so they could go home. Everything else in that box was some office program, but somewhere in the middle I found my new favorite strategy game. I'd completely forgotten. Thanks for the retrospective, Clint.
ironically, I think those hard and soft cover looking things could be just what modern disks need to protect them from dust, smudges, and scratching XD.
My parents bought me a BBC Master and BBC Micro from some old hobbyist dude who was moving from his (very large) house, and he didn't want to take the computers with him. I was currently the owner of an Amstrad CPC 464, with a tape deck only, and I loved to game on that machine, although it did take 5-10 minutes to load a tape, which when you're 8 years old seems like forever. When I got the BBC's home I noticed there were two 5 1/4" disk drives, and also around 4 storage cases FULL of disks, mostly unlabelled. I mean, there were HUNDREDS of disks. This guy must have been a SERIOUS hobbyist to get his hands on all that software. The next months of my life were spent loading each disk in turn, examining the contents, making labels for each one to catalogue them, of course stopping for some hours every time I found a new game to try out. I was AMAZED at the speed at which games loaded compared to my Amstrad tapes, and also the sheer amount of software I had just aquired. It felt like I had found a dragons cave full of treasure, and the dragon had gone for a long vacation so I was safe to pick up every single trinket in my own sweet time. Bottom line is, although my Amstrad had better games, graphics and music etc ... I think I rarely went back to the CPC, because after using discs I couldn't face loading tapes anymore. A few months later I got a Sega Master System anyways, then a Megadrive. The BBC Master had stopped working, because I was messing around with the ROM sockets trying to figure out what this box of EPROMS were actually used for, and I broke it. So both the BBC's found their way to my local charity shop. The Amstrad was given to a friend. A few years later after i'd played enough Sonic 2, I happened to see Doom running on a PC in a computer shop, and the rest is history...
"Those errors are what makes things special. Imperfections makes something feel more real, more alive." - LGR "Charles Babbage, the inventor of the computer in the 18th century, talked about the unerring certainty of machinery. Ok, now the problem you have with the unerring certainty of machinery is that it is a machine. When something has foibles and won't handle properly, that gives it a particularly human quality because it makes mistakes." - Jeremy Clarkson from _Love the Beast_ You and Jezza think quite alike. Cheers. =)
I just have to say I am glad I found your channel. I remember when I was 13 and I saved all summer for something very special, something I fantasized about. When I finally got it, it was beautiful, shining in the light. My friend just looked at it and said, "Why do you 20 MB of space, you'll never use it all in your lifetime!!!!!!" This channel brings back a lot of those memories.
A wonderful video indeed. Floppy disks have a special quality to them that no other storage medium ever had. When I first saw your videos, I started to snoop around thrift shops. This has led to countless floppy disks being added to my collection. I could not contain my joy when I bought a entire plastic container full of the colorful disks. ( for $3.99!) My friends always called me strange for having a unusual attachment to these disks, but it's nice to see someone else like them. ( recently I bought a Pentium III laptop with a built-in floppy drive! I put all my disks to use with it!)
Floppy Disk are amazing, I know how you feel, also you make always another set of backup of the flopy disks to be able to make it work in case of the disk is corrupted. :) Great nostalgic video.
I feel this sort of way towards old handheld cartridges, specifically GBA ones. They were my main gaming device other than random free trials on the Internet back in the early 2000s.
It's hints of nostalgia and a larger part of history. This is the same for anything that starts to fade from the light, as time progressive goes forward. I know the same feeling when booting out an old system, in my case, it was my PS - THE ORIGINAL ONE - not the one that was remade and was tinier, but the big clunky one. Also, there's something to be said about old things because when they were being develop and was still new to the playground, they had to try to build a reputation. My old PS was the very first one that my family brought and it stopped working momentarily and them started all of the sudden when I went to fiddle around with it. THAT'S THE ENDURANCE THAT THE OLD SYSTEMS HAD COMPARED TO THE NEWER ONES OF TODAY! Alas, my system just stopped once more and about 2011 and never ran again. Unlike systems today where they burn out or red ring in just a few days to few months time. You get a glimpse of "the struggle", as youths of today would call it, but really, you just viewing what was the stone pillars of gaming/history/pop culture of today. That's why I love your videos, you see the glimpses of the past and know how they structured what we now have today and learn bits of the leaps and bounds of how people moved forward to the here and now. So, thanks. Thanks for sharing with us the fundamentals and pillars of just part of technological past.
I barely got any time using floppies, I think Kid Pix was the only program I ever ran on a diskette that actually flopped, but the little plastic guys with the metal slide? Love those things. Just the feel of the slide going back and forth under pressure from my thumb and the schlick sound it makes... makes me happy. Gives a therapeutic sensation. Like a stress ball, only not as squishy and promotes calm rather than anger. I truly enjoy this digital age we live in, with a single book-sized object containing entire libraries, arcades worth of games compressed into small boxes, and millions of songs from the modern day all the way back to compositions centuries old available any time there's a tower nearby. But something hard and physical, that can be held and manipulated and felt and smelt and tasted, there'll always be room for such things in my heart. That's what the floppy represents to me, something grossly inefficient and obsolete but more firmly rooted in reality.
Thank you for such a wonderful drive down the memory lane. I too have quite a collection of floppy discs lying around from my Commodore 64, Amiga and few from IBM PC and I don't know what to do with them but like you said when I look at them it makes me happy and want to emulate those dusty diskettes to see if they still work as most of my computers from the past are history. Thanks once again for this wonderful review and really makes me happy after watching this video. :)
Great video and awesooome sound quality. I have an Electro Voice RE320 powered by a mic amp and compressor into an external usb sound device and it doesn't sound half as awesome as your rig...
If you're using a mic amp and compressor are you really losing out by converting it back to digital and running it through usb? I feel like it should be coming through on a soundcard.
this video was so satisfying and aesthetically-pleasing to watch. there's something deeply pleasing about watching a floppy disk being slid into a drive (no innuendos plz)
In my opinion the [OBJECT] that was popular when I was in my emotional teenage years is the best kind of [OBJECT CLASS} there is. The older [OBJECTS] are old fashioned and quaint while the newer [OBJECTS] are cheap and soulless.
Great video LGR I'd say one of your best ones so far. The sensations and attachments you desribe you have to your floppys is the exact same as I feel about my Laserdiscs. I could of course just stream the movie but then I would'nt get the sensation of inserting the shiny 12 inch disc and flipping it halfway through. Or opening up one of my 2,5kg boxsets with eleven discs in total. Or in some instances playing a disc for the first time and praying it isn't rotted. Long live our beloved physical medias! ;)
I've never heard anyone speak so eloquently and poetically about floppy disks. Outstanding! I recently discovered your channel and I'm loving your work. You have also inspired me, much to my wife's dismay, to look into old tech and perhaps a vintage gaming PC. (I wish I had never gotten rid of my 486.) Bad part is I'm also into vintage audio and tech in general. Keep up the great work!
I'm very newschool-- I'm always fascinated by what the next biggest technological accomplishment is, or the next new tech I can get my hands on. I remember the first time I got my hands on a PSP, it BLEW MY MIND. Like, how could something so small be capable of so much?! It's madness! CDs, DVDs, Blu Ray, and now digital-- I can now view or play on the go on my laptop things that were once limited to experiencing at home! I can totally see where you come from when you talk about floppy disks, even if I don't feel the same. Even I look back and can appreciate once in a while what was the greatest tech of the time. It's a great reminder of how far we've come, to be able to appreciate the technology of the past while being able to experience today's.
It depends on how bad the disk is damaged and in what way. If it's physical damage that won't help. If some sectors are bad, you can reformat it and if there's enough space left to re-write the files that would work. But yeah, usually when a disk goes bad, that's all folks.
also the simple limitations of the media itself. does, like, the magnetic "abilities" of the media be unable to store data after T time, regardless if it's re-written. i'm thinking it's the life limits of the media itself 5.25" floppies are my personal favorite. such fond memories with me TI 99/4a :) the TI was actually a VERY capable computer. sadly, most of the software commercially available didn't even remotely demonstrate its capabilities. i had some "underground" software, such as pretty dead-on recreations of Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger, and others, both graphics and sound wise
Great video! I still have all of my original 5.25s and 3.5s for my first PCs. They were just so difficult to come by as a kid and will always retain that implied and immeasurable value.
Can we all just look at the author of one of the games.... Lord... Fucking... British... I THOUGHT YAHTZEE WAS JOKING! I never imagined someone would actually call them selfs that!
Definitely one of my favorite videos @lgr yet of yours man, n thats hard to do as I love your channel! Everything you sed bout the old floppy is so true we should cherish them along with all physical media really
And this is why I hate nostalgia. It clouds our judgement, distort our perception. We romanticise things that, back in the day, just plainly made us upset or angry. We invent illusory qualities to things we're attached to for irrational reasons. I just can't be like that. I'm glad we've moved past floppy disks, and have no need to rely on them. I've had my share of floppy-related tragedies to way to stay completely clear of them.
+Fernie Canto Agree. I grew up with the modern 3,5"-disks and i thought they were rubbish even back then. I hated switching floppys back and forth constantly in some games (just to get a reading error after the 10th time) and all progress was lost... Same rubbish like VHS, CD, cassette players and minidisk...
+Fernie Canto And then there's me, I like most older equipment (older machines only, older electronics suck across the board despite being fascinating) because while you MAY need to do a whole single extra thing to get it to work it will run forever and if it breaks you can fix it with bailing wire till you get around to buying or machining a replacement part.
I have an unopened box of Fuji Film MD2HD 5¼-inch minifloppies containing 10 disks (can't find it on eBay, just other variants). Original foil cover, no dents, just slightly brown foil cover due to tobacco smoke but that can probably be cleaned, or keep it as a souvenir from the old computer days. There's sadly no indication of year made but it says on the box that it was made by "Fuji Photo Film, 26-30, Nishiazabu 2-chrome, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 106, Japan". I will never peel of the seal and there's just something soothing and reminiscent listening to the rattle of the disks inside when you pick up the box. I also have all eight Ultima VIII on original 3½-inch floppies with the original paper wrapping.
I feel much of the same way towards VHS tapes, audio CD's, cassette tapes and vinyl. As a kid, the computer was reserved for the business, nothing I could touch as it was extremely expensive and held sensitive information. Me and my family shared most of our memories through music and movies, and when I see those things, it evokes a feeling of enjoyment. When I think of floppies, I think if the musky smell my home office had, full of papers and boxes, not games and fun. It's just interesting to compare how people feel nostalgia.
There was nothing like installing an old DOS based game on floppies. I loved that sound of the drive spinning and churning the disk, the bleeps and burrs of the PC speaker... inserting disk 2..3..15.. and pressing any button to continue.. Ahhh...
This video is something that people can watch any number of years from now and connect with the emotions through your earnest narration. I'd title it, "Requiem for the Floppy." Thanks Clint, great video.
I’m 28 and I have a Cadillac LaSalle from 1939 and it’s completely foreign to the modern world and everything he said about the floppy’s...I feel about my old car...I get it man and thanks for keeping old awesome stuff going
I like the point you were raising at the end with comparing collecting floppy disks to driving a vintage car or listening to vinyl. It's why I still track down physical copies of Genesis and SNES games. Sure, I could just use emulators or digital services like the Virtual Console, but I love being able to insert a cartridge and boot up the genuine thing, although it can be a pain with my Genesis because it's seen better days. I've got Sonic 1-3 in their original boxes and I proudly display them; can't do that with an emulator ROM or digital copy. Plus there are also games you can't legally get on Virtual Console, such as the original Star Fox SNES (and Wii-U's VC doesn't carry Genesis games). There's something magical about tracking down a physical copy of an old NES/SNES/Genesis/whatever game and holding it in my hands.
I still have a 3.5 and 5 25 inch floppies on my shelf. Great memories. Also,i dont get why people say that these things were unreliable. They never failed me.
Floppy disks AND drives made towards the end of the floppy era were terrible quality because they were made with one thing in mind: being cheap. The last package of brand-new Sony disks I bought around 2006 literally had about 3 disks in the pack of 10 that actually worked. The rest were completely unusable.
oh hi i 8-bit guy! nice to see you here!
The 8-Bit Guy hi the 8-Bit Guy
8-bit guy, you're drunk- go home xD
First off, why were floppies still being made if they were that unreliable?
Second off, if a single CD or DVD costs less than a dollar, why are they stupidly reliable compared to a floppy?
Had gotten about 100 to 200 floppies for free with a mail-in rebate around 2001/2002. The one I used worked fine. I did take a magnet from a hard drive to a fe of them to see if they would still work, the did not.
this video:
aesthetics 10/10
comfy level 10/10
nostalgia 10/10
voiceover 10/10
man i love comfy
Being lazy: 0/10
LGR... what can I say? I showed this to my dad, and all he had to say was a resounding 'that's right...' with watery eyes.
You're doing something that needs to be done in this world; you are the curator that most of us only incorporate in our minds through a basement-dwelling personification of a human being. You bring it all to light (beautifully, might I add).
Keep the faith man. Sure, all of this will be dust in the wind eventually. Regardless, the flame needs to be maintained.
Thanks for the kind words :)
Dang that's deep.
What about God? Should we give importance to God or not? Has it been proved that God does not exist, with utmost conviction? Anybody?
@@Crazytesseract ???
Not ready reading drive A
Abort, Retry, Fail?_
I never figured out the difference between the "Abort" and "Fail" options.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abort,_Retry,_Fail%3F#Responses
Don't forget (I)gnore :)
If only those options actually worked...most would just repeat the message over and over on the screen, or you would have to hit abort 10 times over.
Nowadays under Windows 'Ignore' leads to a crash almost every time. 'Abort' is a thing of choice, always.
I guess he didn’t have any film reels handy, as he was holding a 1/4” reel to reel audio tape.
"All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
"I have… loaded programs you people wouldn't believe… Strip Poker girls totally nude off the screen in my childhood room. I watched animation glitter in the dark near the edge of the demo line. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like.. *small fart*.. candy… in… a couch. Time… to code…"
Borin81 I feel like the only commenter who actually got those references :c
Borin81 Thank you, sir, for writing the best UA-cam comment ever.
Borin81 "I watched him code, all night. It was a long slow thing. He never whimpered, and he never quit. He took all the time he had, as though he love coding very much. Every second of it. Even the pain. Then he was debugged."
"It's a shame she won't load. But then again, who does?"
I guess they're like the vinyl records of computer technology; there's a tangibility to them; you can hold them and admire them, and (unlike a disc) you don't have to worry about fingerprints. They're also physically larger than flash drives, and likewise easier to handle (and harder to lose in your pocket).
The sound of a strong floppy drive is the equivalent of receiving a firm handshake.
I remember using my Packard bell legend computer back in 1995. I had bought the shareware episode of biomenace from a drug store and liked hearing the 3 and a half inch floppy drive whirr and make loading noises lol.
How 'bout a Floppy Disk Emulator which emulates the slow loading and the noises? xD
*****
Those software exists already ;)
*****
Just a PHP Skript which loads the sites way slower :D ( github.com/DaveChild/Modem-Emulator )
+Diablokiller999 WinUAE already does this :)
+Diablokiller999 All you need is to use Internet Explorer! xD
+TylerTech that only emulates the slow loading, we need also the noises (unless you have an old modem) :P
oh look they 3d printed the "save" button
UltraGamez if you really think that you don't belong here
Mark White ofc I dont think that hahahah
UltraGamez goood.....
UltraGamez mainly for MS Office though :P... Open Office and Libre Office have switched it to HDD icon.
young_eng. those bastards
ive always said that CDs should have been done like disketts. have the disk inside a permanent cace with lovely art and information on it, and when you need to read the CD, you just put the entire thing into the computer. that way the disk is never exposed and never get scratched unless you open the reading tab all the time.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(hardware)
+Snowfall Thecat *holds up movie/game/software/dlc/expansion pack case and one of those small square containers*
+Taylor Kingct That's storing something in it, not having it actually be inserted into the computer that way.
+Snowfall Thecat sony minidisk never took off
+WaFfLeFuR Not entirely true. MiniDisc as a consumer media format failed quickly, but MD players and blank discs were super popular before the iPod took hold. Particularly since later MD models were cheap and the blank media easy to record on. You could have hours of music on a handful of discs. I know many who used them as portable recording devices too. Loved mine and still keep it around. However once the 3rd and 4th generation iPods hit, the advantages didn't hold high and iTunes on windows was a game changer. Sony made you use proprietary software and files had to be converted. It took till the later models for MD to have any kind of MP3 like support. They were a fun bit of tech...
I only own a couple of those 5 inchers, all of them for the C64.
Everything else I own is either the 3.5 inch ones or that really obscure size Amstrad insisted on using in the mid 80s.
Oh, and cassettes if they count. oh, those bloody cassettes.
Obligatory "Larry is everywhere" comment. Little wonder you like LGR, Larry. I still wonder if you'll ever do any more retro gaming stuff yourself.
"Hi, wanna play Popeye on the C64?"
"Nope, takes too long to load off cassette."
"Alex Kidd it is then."
Hey Larry, could you share this floppy disks video with Ashens please? I think he would really love this one.
Fuck I remember having to get a pencil in those cassette tapes and wind it back whenever it fucked up. Doesn't happen with CDs nowadays. Probably for the best but still something I feel is missing.
Ahem, you don't remember buying a magazine then, and typing in the source code they shared? Neither do I, but it was a thing.
Floppy disks are like Jesus. They died so they could become the icon of saving.
Best allegory ever.
Amen
Hallelujah! Praise be to our saviour. The Holy Floppy Disk 💾
I will quote this, make tshirt and post it on Reddit.
I've been able to get numerous 5.25 floppies to read again, mostly Commodore, by carefully taking the disk out of its case and gently wiping one side with a little alcohol and a soft cloth, letting it dry, and then doing the other side. Its not perfect, but it's worked many times and saved many disks.
I have not however been able to save a single 3.5 disk that starts to fail to read. It surprises me too because it was the newer technology and you would have thought the enclosed case would better preserve the media...
My experience is very much the same. Far more 3.5" disks that are too far gone to be recoverable.
I suppose the higher density of 3.5" makes it harder to salvage.
As other commenters have said -- it's the data density. The more data you pack into a smaller physical area, the more sensitive and fragile the medium becomes. I bet you'll have a similar experience with 1.2MB 5.25" floppies as with the 1.44MB 3.5"... In fact, once upon a time you could format a 3.5" to 1.7MB and in the process, you risked data corruption on every write, which is why very few people ever did it.
I have ran into this issue myself when using old Apple IIGSs and the like, from my own experience, as long as the 5.25" disk wasn't physically damaged or put onto a magnet, it usually works pretty well, but 3.5" floppies, especially the newer "high density" 1.44mb ones seem to just go down hill very fast once things start to go wrong, it happened to my copy of Microsoft Word 6.1 I had on 8 3.5" floppies, one disk failed, making the program unable to install.
*****
It's true that they are reliable, but even then, they won't last for decades. Disc rot is a real thing because the metal it's made out of eventually oxidizes down the years. Depending on how well you treat your CDs, when they'll finally fall apart varies.
It's the sad, but inevitable truth we all face: all storage mediums eventually fail and lose everything.
oh yes, as a kid the most vivid thing about early computer experiences, was the sounds that machines made, namely, the disk drives reading disk, and oh boy, the sound of read errors.... i think these early experiences is what I get back when using older machines, and the best for me is using a word processor in mono-tasking (Ms-Dos, no distractions) and saving on disk and hearing it read and save as you progress throughout the work day. the best format is 5 1/4 inch 360k disk drives, which I find very reliable. My favorite are the mitsubishi drives, such quality builds.
This is poetry.
Thank you for your elucidation and acumen on the floppy.
I was born in 1988 so I think I was late for the floppy disk train but I do get it. This is how I feel about books. Physical, hold in your hands books. Whether they are game manuals or full sized novels. The smell, the feel of the paper, the differences between manuals, soft covers, paper backs, leather backs or hard covers in terms of textures and even reading the printed words inside is far more engaging then any digital download. They also feel so much more tangible then kindles or just reading them online. So I guess this was a big time digression but it felt relevant to my hazy 4 am mind.
Happy Birthday, Clint! I just watched this video again just for the fun of it and I swear to you, you bring tears to my eyes every single time I watch it, no matter how many times I did watch it before. I hope I'm not too creepy or something for this, I just wanted you to know I think this is probably your best video of all time.
Even though I'm only 16 I know exactly how you feel with floppies. They just have more to them than a CD or flash drive. All of them have lived a long life, of being held, inserted into drives, loaded, saved on. Maybe a young kid excitedly stuffing a disk into his C64 to play a hot new game, or a student diligently typing his college thesis on an Apple II. And you can feel all those memories just from holding it.
I get boxes of floppies with my vintage computer hauls all the time. I've found many things still intact while looking through them, like graphs, RSVPs, drawings, poems, even novels. It gives me a fuzzy feeling, perhaps even nostalgia, knowing that someone lovingly typed all those things on the computer in front of me, all those years ago.
ElementaIChaos (MOVED CHANNEL) YES COPY
Floppy disks remind me of a time when games seemed like they could actually be anything.
Garrette Very true. That was a point where it really did seem like an adventure every time you put one of those disks in.
Lazy Game Reviews LGR, you're a grown man. You should know better! Never end a sentence with a preposition!
geoff4376 ??? Is that a joke? There's no grammatical rule that establishes such a thing, it's just something some language snobs made up.
geoff4376 www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition :)
Dreadjaws
It's utterly pointless, it doesn't add clarity or function (or nostalgic value). It's the grammatical equivalent of 'no elbows on the dinner table'.
Man, I have this same sentiment for physical media in general. It's quickly going extinct at the hands of the relentless tide of convenience that brought it into existance in the first place.
There's a really personal experience that happens when you handle something you associate with joy, usefulness, or even just familiarity. I like to soak it up whenever I can, while I still can.
I'm thinking about even going through the hell-on-earth to get a physical game for the Vita for this reason alone!
trashEverything same here. Physical Vita games are getting really hard to find. The only places that have them around me are gamestops and they just recently put them out on shelves. They kept them in shoe boxes behind the counter because they didn't have room for them.
Admit it, floppy disks just look cooler than CDs. Same with vinyl records.
imagine if floppy cds were a thing
@The Uncanny One: Oooooh, boy. You done walked into the wrong comment section.
The Uncanny One go the fuck away then
what is "embarrassing" about it?
Hey, I actually really like my optical media, and I think they look pretty cool!
Though I will say, floppy disks do look cool too.
That Undercover background music! What a great mixture of great video and music.
I haven't used floppies in well over a decade now, although I certainly remember 'em.
For me, their legacy is that the first hard drive on a computer is forever the C:\ drive, skipping A:\ and B:\ entirely so that the floppy drives few use anymore still have a spot saved for them. (It's kind of a wonder that modern variants of Windows haven't started assigning CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drives those slots automatically; they're basically doing the same thing, barring the ability to write back to the discs.)
Of course, some can also do writing, and with a properly formatted disc, they can basically work as an arbitrary read/write drive not unlike a floppy or other such removable media system. As for the drive letter thing, this is one of the last vestiges of DOS that somehow or another has managed to survive through time, even though technically all modern versions of Windows address drive partitions internally using unique identifiers now. Drive letters made enough sense for a purely command line based OS (although whether you use letters, numbers, or something else, as long as it's easy to type, it's irrelevant.) There's not a lot of practical reason for drive letters at this point other than legacy and some rare instances where they're useful in a fully-specified path. (But again, you could use almost any other system for referencing the root of a drive.)
Windows uses E for Disc Drives at least on my PC.
It could be because some people still use floppies. Whenever I used a USB floppy drive, it was always designated to A:\>.
I would bet that some people would think it's weird for modern computers to still have a command-line interface in some way, shape, or form. I don't mind it all that much, which could be because the first computer OS I've used was Windows 3 back in the early 90's.
***** On that note, I believe since Windows XP, only 1.44MB 3.5" drives are supported. (Although in any mass manufacturing, that's the only drive format that made it to USB, and also managed to live the longest.) I haven't used a USB floppy drive on a Windows system in quite a while, so I can't remember the default letter assignment. I would assume it would be naturally picked by Windows as any arbitrary free letter using whatever system is uses to map any USB drive, but I could be wrong. (Also might vary what version of Windows we're talking about.)
I don't think it's weird to have a CLI in a desktop computer OS, it still makes a lot of sense for scripting and general power users. I was mostly noting that drive letters are just a legacy from the bloodline that Windows comes from, which of course is DOS.
As an aside, my first computer had Windows 3.1. The machine had a 100MB hard drive. I remember being so annoyed with Windows because it took up so much space (but my dad insisted it stay on there, probably for Word or something) and I remember thinking there was no way this stupid Windows thing would ever be useful.
Classic80sStuff Not really "always", it depended on a lot of factors. By default a single hard drive with a single partition and no special flags added to MSCDEX (or whatever driver you used) meant a "D:" assignment. But I had a Pentium-era machine that had two hard drives in it, and that left it with C: and D: for those drives, so the CD-ROM had to be at least E:. Some OEMs even sometimes assigned arbitrary letters to the CD-ROM (which was totally possible to do) and you'd see like an R: or some apparently nonsensical assignment.
Was just going through my old Apple II disks last night, realized about halfway through that nearly all of them were giving me a "Not a startup disk!" error. Ended up taking apart my first floppy drive to manually clean the head. It was filthy! Turned the head of a Q-tip black. Put it back together, and most of those same disks worked fine. Ended up being a satisfying experience but also taught me that maybe those old disks (and drives) giving us all errors actually *aren't* dead - maybe our drives are just dirty! I've got three more floppy drives - I plan on cleaning them all now.
I started using the family computer when I was about 3 years old (1997) and I remember all my games being on CD-ROMs but I know that my parents had floppy disks that they used but I had no interest in them because they had no games on them (at least as far as I know)
I also remember that our printer used paper that had perforated edges you could tear off (super fun if you're 3 years old!) and I believe the sheets were all attached to each other?
It really freaked my parents out that it was so easy for me to figure out how to use the computer at such a young age when it was still a new thing to them lol
You're talking about tractor feed paper. My first printer was a Panasonic, and we got a bunch of leftover tractor paper from my uncle, who had stopped using it for his business. As a kid, that stuff was much more fun than standard letter size :)
Kellmachine first time i remember using the home computer we had it was in 1995, i was 3 years old as well and it was an old Atari ST, i believe
and you bet everything was on floppy disk. most of what we had for that was games.
fast forward like... 3 or 4 years, i was given an IBM Thinkpad laptop for school work, and i would save my work on 3 1/4 inch floppy disks.
i remember working with gaudy colours, 20 point comic sans and typing at like, 10 words per minute or something, and i even made the labels... it was medical tape with hilighter. my mum was a nurse.
it was special. i loved the feeling of putting a 3 1/4 inch diskette into the drive, and wondering why they were called floppy disks (i had only used 3 1/4 inch ever, and to this day have never used a 5 1/2 inch). every now and then i think of getting an external floppy drive and a disk just to experience the feeling of putting one of those babies into a machine and hear the sounds again and just... live in the 1990s again, if only for scant few seconds.
then get bought crashing back into the 2010s when i realize i got another bloody benefits form to fill out.
look up "we shred your comments" on UA-cam, enjoy
lol i was playing gta vice city on pc when i was 3
This was like a love song to floppy disks and I utterly enjoyed it.
I remember when I was young and my brother and I would play Roller Coaster Tycoon. We assumed that the floppy icon you clicked to save meant to you had to insert a floppy to actually save. We had this translucent pink one we always tried to save it to. Needless to say we never really got to load a save file until years later when we found out it saves to a directory!
you, sir...are the best youtuber of all time...period! love the channel...so many memories. i miss the good old days of amiga where i had games with 10+ disks like "monkey island 2" or "indiana jones - fate of atlantis"...a chore indeed but nevertheless those where fun times.
keep up the great work...and if i might ask: is there a possibility of a "moonstone" review in the near future?
Thanks!
And yes, Moonstone is one I hope to cover someday.
They were always my favorite. We had to care for them, edit and craft custom boot or game disks to do what we wanted. Especially when we figured out how to modify autexec.bat and config.sys files to make our work building machines faster. Even having hard disk utilities on floppy disks...or the ever notorious Windows 95 on floppy disk. Truly great and missed times. Your channel inspired me to start back into retro computers. Already making local and long distance friends and contacts for parts, software, etc. Actually have 4 VLB capable 486 motherboards on the way for a couple of builds.
Loved the part were you said about how diskettes make you feel....I got that same old school feel about them too. Fond childhood memories.
That's a great video. I don't have the same attachment to floppies, maybe due to growing up using a C64 with tape drive, with my only real floppy usage being on Amiga, and the vast majority of that phase being taken over by game consoles until '98 or so. I'd probably feel the same way about tapes if they weren't so slow and fiddly(head alignment etc.).
This is a tear-jerker, for sure, haha. Great episode, man!
My main reason for loving floppy disks/drives is the amazing "clunk" sound when you insert a 3.5" diskette.
And the read/write sound. That's the best part.
EDIT: Just noticed I was here 6 months ago. Hello, old me!
The disk in drive A: needs to be formatted.
"but it is formatted you stupid machine!"
format a:
General failure reading drive A:
ABORT, RETRY, FAIL
My favorite game on the 5.25” floppy was Path Tactics by MECC which was for the Apple II. Also Oregon Trail. On the 3.5” floppy, I like the Microsoft Best of Windows Entertainment Pack (BOWEP) which had games like Chip’s Challenge and TriPeaks. I remember my teacher giving me a copy that had a virus on it. Those were the good ole days!
I would find it hard to believe, that kids nowadays, could feel even remotely as in awe as I was the first time I loaded up Shufflepuck Cafe on my Amiga. The artwork on the disk, then that mechanical grinding as the disk loaded, almost hearing each individual byte loading into memory. Then that glorious splash screen. It was like looking into the distant future!
Somehow I don't think an Xbone or a PS4 can come even remotely close to that feeling.
Well heck even worse "kids nowadays" are most likely not even going to be able to recognize a floppy disk on sight (or audio/VHS cassette tape, vinyl record, ...) unless they regularly are in contact with somebody who cares to keep those things around. I have a 1 1/2 year old niece who picks up any rectangular shaped object and uses it like a smartphone, both holding it in her hands to push the imaginary touch screen, or the way she holds it up to her ear and pretends to talk to a phantom. Something that was unimaginable when I was a kid is just as regular as a rotary-dial phone would have been. There's something really strange about it.
Captain Southbird I mean no offense but this is terrifying to me. 1 1/2 half seems way to young for emulating this behavior. Do her parents spend anytime with her and no phone?
Nah, don't get too worked up about. My sister / her mother actually is very strongly into her playing with non-electronic toys like stuff animals, a plastic play farm, etc. and limiting her television time, encouraging going outside, etc. A recent story is she was in a doctor's office and while all the kids were engaged in their iPads, she was pushing chairs around, because that was just more interesting to her.
Nonetheless, daddy's using his iPhone a lot for his work, so it's totally understandable the kid's going to pick up on these motions and behaviors.
Sure, and when we could hear our 56K modems dialling up, you had a sense of the mechanics (electronics) behind it, and realise that you were using the phone line to send sounds to communicate with other computers. Now, people think the internet comes from WiFi.
There was a time when people used to have to crank the engines of their cars to start them. Now we turn an ignition, undoubtedly we've lost some of the realism of the car 'experience' but it's progression in design.
When we see things from our lives being phased out, we aren't sad because those things could still be relevant, because they cannot, we're sad because we realise how obsolete we too are getting. It is a simple reminder of expendability and mortality.
Captain Southbird Good to hear. All the best Capt. Southy. :)
when I was a kid, I was selling demos and shareware on 3.5" diskettes on a flea market. I printed the name and a screenshot of the program (using a dot matrix B/W printer of course)... good old times :'-)
I really enjoyed the cinematography this episode, LGR. good work...
You summed it up perfectly when you compared the floppys to the vinyl discs and vintage cars. This is pretty much the reason why floppys feel special, even to the younger generation like mine from the 2000s. There is sth aesthetically pleasing to the eyes when you come across a floppy disc, that is pretty much the same feeling when one sees an old vintage car or listen to an old vinyl album.
For me at least.
Fantastic video - I'm hooked on this channel. You're really bringing back some memories for me and I thank you for that!
Awesome to hear :) Hope you continue to enjoy!
+Lazy Game Reviews You've given many reasons for your videos to be easily enjoyed :D
Your analogy of the specialness of floppy disks makes me want to go out and buy a bunch of floppy disks and drives for them! XD I think it's the vintage car thing that really got me, because cars get screwed up over time, so go ahead and fix it yourself and enjoy the hell out of it!
Though I didnt get into computers until the mid-2000's, Floppy disks where a thing that was of nostalgic interest to me like how you might get interested in something your parents had when they where younger. I was born 1992, and even before I really got into computers around 12 years old, floppy disks where still around, hell some people still used it for storage, libaries and schools used it for storing word documents.
Now a days, a long formated word document can sometimes exceed the capacity of a 1.44MB floppy, especially if theres graphics.
The only time I ever bought floppy disks was a 10 pack of floppies for 5 bucks to make a boot disk for a Pentium II server I picked up off the curb, which needed a boot disket to boot from CD. I managed to install windows 2000 pro on it and use it as a 96 GB server for storing data like pictures, on three IDE 32GB hard disks.
+Matt Brine Oh, and the first time I ever felt 5.25 inch floppies was when I found a Commador 64 at the same place I found that Pentium II dual CPU server tower, sadly I could not figure out how to boot any games for the C64, as the games I found with it on 5.25 inch floppies kept complaining about a lack of a tape drive.
This takes me back to the C64 days when we had various daughterboards and custom software that would allow us to copy the disks that used the inherent drive problems part of their copy protection. It was rather ingenious. A game publisher would know the error codes thrown by reading from an area that was out of the normal operating range, then convert that error into a direction to read data from another part of the disk. It made copying the disks outright (without assistance) nearly impossible because the copying process would toss out the "bad commands" assuming they were being misread by the drive. Now, THAT would be a fun video - old drive-based copy protection schemes and the hardware and software solutions that got around them. Once again, thanks for the walk down memory lane!
Any Commodore 64 fan no doubt misses the familiar grinding of a beloved 1541 disk drive.
I think that's why you can enable "Drive sound emulation" in VINE... It brings back memories of having to wait what nowadays would seem like an eternity for "Little Computer People" to load... Or is that just me?
***** WinUAE has this feature as well, it's pretty sweet.
Agreed I truly miss that sound of the 1541, and 1571 disk drives. The constant belt, and drive latch problems I had with my 2 1541 units, where how I cut my teeth as a kid learning to repair computers.
Lazy Game Reviews I seriously didn't know that - must be because I very rarely emulate the good old Commodore Amiga.
***** Lazy Game Reviews
That emulation of the sound might bring you fond memories for a few minutes but it will quickly become annoying. It's not very accurate to the actual sound sound produced by an Amiga drive, which is noticeable in real life, something you have fond memories of, but is never really annoying in person. That emulation sound will get annoying eventually.
Nice look back at floppy disks. I favorited it. Reading these comments I totally think LGR should have plopped a microphone by a C64/Amiga/DOS machine. That sound is certainly part of the experience just as much as the look or feel. Especially if you were an Amiga user which had such a unique sound and because few had a hard drive you were always using them. They could be terrifying even. When a disk was corrupted you knew it was coming based on the first note of the read-write error. You clinched your fists and prayed that it was not what you were thinking...
Too bad the 3 1/2's were sold as smaller but bigger and better and turned out to be pieces of junk in the long haul and they took up MORE space due to their thickness. I tend to like the 5 1/4 inch ones more and I never really had that much contact with them as a kid. A floppy should flop. But it hasn't been that long since we stopped using them. Most people were still bringing power points to school with a floppy disk into 2004. Some of us even invested into a zip drive and thought we were cool stuff because some schools had them too... yeah... that one lasted... hahaha...
I've got like 60 3,5 inch floppys, but only 5 or 6 of them still work! But I keep all of them because they're cool to look at.
I feel much the same about audio cassettes. I'm not going to argue for a second that they hold any sort of merit today, technology has rendered them obsolete and gone on to better things. But there's something about them as a tangible object that still holds appeal to me. I like the imperfections, the flaws in the sound, the noise of the motors. It's kind of difficult to put into words, and all my friends think I'm insane for still buying music on cassettes, but i'm happy in my insanity if that must be the case.
Amazing video.
This is the thing about making collections that most people don't get, its not just having a bunch of things stored in a shelve in your house, it is about how this specific media makes you feel, how it brings up a unique sense of joy.
That is why I collect old comic books and DVDs .
I always taped over the square cutout on floppy disks so I could copy them. Hacking 1986 style!
I was taping one of the two holes of the high density disks so I can use them to my Amiga as double density. Double density disks were so rare and expensive on mid '90s.
The content that you put up is among some of the funniest and most engaging stuff I've seen on the world wide internets; but this was really something special. I always get nostalgic when you display and talk about all of the old tech you have, but this one really hit me. Thanks!
That made me all misty-eyed!
This is the best video you have ever made. Excellent writing and production quality. I hope to see more of these.
I remember my buddy who works with computers saying that some kids say”look somebody 3D printed a save icon”
I feel somewhat the same about VHS tapes and vinyl records, the color bleed of VHS and the crackling sound when you start of a vinyl there is just something special about it.
Ahhh the good old days of PC. I remember when theres a Floppy Disk drive. I once written a Starcraft shortcut into a diskette and I thought I've copied the whole game inside a diskett!! How astonished I was and then when I found out its not working, I've freaking laughed.
I feel like you about floppies, but also when it comes to CD and DVD's.
It's just the feeling of putting it in that i really like!
We can emulate software, but we can't emulate the feeling of the first time someone broke your beloved floppy disk of your favorite game. I come from a repressed area; we were using floppys all through HS to turn in homework and papers. I remember writing a NES emulator to a floppy with a single rom to play in accounting class. I graduated HS in 2008..
Same here. We were encouraged to use floppy disks up until my senior year of high school in 2006. That feel as the hard casing clicks into place... oh, the nostalgic glory of trying to fit a year's worth of PowerPoint presentations onto 1.44 MB
You are amazing. You wrote a whole emulator just for you to play when you felt like it. Infinity stars out of 3.
Devlin House I think he meant loading a pre existing emulator onto the disc, rather than building it from scratch. Still cool though.
Yes! This right here! You hit the nail on the head. Collecting and using old computers, and by extension using floppy disks for old software, if very much something akin to collecting old classic cars. Some people just do not get it, but for those that do, it is such a wonderful experience to enjoy and tinker with.
I came here from LGR Blerbs
There is something thats being lost with how media is handled today, and I think you hit the nail on the head. I never made much use of floppys as a child they were a little before my time. When I was a kid most games and software I used on PCs were on CDs, but still the feeling of holding it in your hand and putting it in the drive is something that is universally understood to anyone who grew up in the 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s. Sometimes I take out some of my old PS1 games and just look at them. I open the case, take the disc out and then just put it back. Theres something so satisfying about holding those old jewel cases and hearing the satisfying click when you open and close them, or the sound the plastic makes when you stack them on top of each other . The same could be said for cartridges in old Nintendo systems.
It might sound silly, but these are things the next generation won't have. With digital distribution becoming more and more mainstream there will be less of a need for physical media. What are they going to have memories of the download bar in Steam?
*HOLD UP*
You drive a mustang?
Nah, that was one owned by someone near me.
1:45 Oh man! I haven't seen one of those floppy containers since 2002, when I first played Warcraft: Orcs and Humans in a bookstore. For seven hours. Until an employee taught me how to save and quit, so they could go home.
Everything else in that box was some office program, but somewhere in the middle I found my new favorite strategy game. I'd completely forgotten. Thanks for the retrospective, Clint.
ironically, I think those hard and soft cover looking things could be just what modern disks need to protect them from dust, smudges, and scratching XD.
My parents bought me a BBC Master and BBC Micro from some old hobbyist dude who was moving from his (very large) house, and he didn't want to take the computers with him. I was currently the owner of an Amstrad CPC 464, with a tape deck only, and I loved to game on that machine, although it did take 5-10 minutes to load a tape, which when you're 8 years old seems like forever.
When I got the BBC's home I noticed there were two 5 1/4" disk drives, and also around 4 storage cases FULL of disks, mostly unlabelled. I mean, there were HUNDREDS of disks. This guy must have been a SERIOUS hobbyist to get his hands on all that software. The next months of my life were spent loading each disk in turn, examining the contents, making labels for each one to catalogue them, of course stopping for some hours every time I found a new game to try out. I was AMAZED at the speed at which games loaded compared to my Amstrad tapes, and also the sheer amount of software I had just aquired. It felt like I had found a dragons cave full of treasure, and the dragon had gone for a long vacation so I was safe to pick up every single trinket in my own sweet time.
Bottom line is, although my Amstrad had better games, graphics and music etc ... I think I rarely went back to the CPC, because after using discs I couldn't face loading tapes anymore. A few months later I got a Sega Master System anyways, then a Megadrive. The BBC Master had stopped working, because I was messing around with the ROM sockets trying to figure out what this box of EPROMS were actually used for, and I broke it. So both the BBC's found their way to my local charity shop. The Amstrad was given to a friend. A few years later after i'd played enough Sonic 2, I happened to see Doom running on a PC in a computer shop, and the rest is history...
"Those errors are what makes things special. Imperfections makes something feel more real, more alive." - LGR
"Charles Babbage, the inventor of the computer in the 18th century, talked about the unerring certainty of machinery. Ok, now the problem you have with the unerring certainty of machinery is that it is a machine. When something has foibles and won't handle properly, that gives it a particularly human quality because it makes mistakes." - Jeremy Clarkson from _Love the Beast_
You and Jezza think quite alike. Cheers. =)
great writing in this one i dont normally comment even though i watch all your stuff LGR this is one of my favourites so far really well said sir
Fun Fact: Kao, the brand that appears at 1:30, also makes cosmetics under the John Frieda brand.
Makes sense, seeing as they deal with all sorts of chemicals and plastics in their other ventures!
I'll mark that down as a good trivia fact to remember later on!
I just have to say I am glad I found your channel. I remember when I was 13 and I saved all summer for something very special, something I fantasized about. When I finally got it, it was beautiful, shining in the light. My friend just looked at it and said, "Why do you 20 MB of space, you'll never use it all in your lifetime!!!!!!" This channel brings back a lot of those memories.
almost cried at the end
A wonderful video indeed.
Floppy disks have a special quality to them that no other storage medium ever had. When I first saw your videos, I started to snoop around thrift shops. This has led to countless floppy disks being added to my collection. I could not contain my joy when I bought a entire plastic container full of the colorful disks. ( for $3.99!) My friends always called me strange for having a unusual attachment to these disks, but it's nice to see someone else like them. ( recently I bought a Pentium III laptop with a built-in floppy drive! I put all my disks to use with it!)
This video is beautiful!
Floppy Disk are amazing, I know how you feel, also you make always another set of backup of the flopy disks to be able to make it work in case of the disk is corrupted.
:) Great nostalgic video.
I feel this sort of way towards old handheld cartridges, specifically GBA ones. They were my main gaming device other than random free trials on the Internet back in the early 2000s.
Great video, I think it really captures what makes floppies, and vintage computing in general, special! Really nicely shot too.
I always collect diskettes I find abandoned even if they don't work.
It's hints of nostalgia and a larger part of history.
This is the same for anything that starts to fade from the light, as time progressive goes forward.
I know the same feeling when booting out an old system, in my case, it was my PS - THE ORIGINAL ONE - not the one that was remade and was tinier, but the big clunky one.
Also, there's something to be said about old things because when they were being develop and was still new to the playground, they had to try to build a reputation. My old PS was the very first one that my family brought and it stopped working momentarily and them started all of the sudden when I went to fiddle around with it. THAT'S THE ENDURANCE THAT THE OLD SYSTEMS HAD COMPARED TO THE NEWER ONES OF TODAY!
Alas, my system just stopped once more and about 2011 and never ran again. Unlike systems today where they burn out or red ring in just a few days to few months time.
You get a glimpse of "the struggle", as youths of today would call it, but really, you just viewing what was the stone pillars of gaming/history/pop culture of today.
That's why I love your videos, you see the glimpses of the past and know how they structured what we now have today and learn bits of the leaps and bounds of how people moved forward to the here and now. So, thanks. Thanks for sharing with us the fundamentals and pillars of just part of technological past.
I have a few flopy disks they are so old
I barely got any time using floppies, I think Kid Pix was the only program I ever ran on a diskette that actually flopped, but the little plastic guys with the metal slide? Love those things. Just the feel of the slide going back and forth under pressure from my thumb and the schlick sound it makes... makes me happy. Gives a therapeutic sensation. Like a stress ball, only not as squishy and promotes calm rather than anger.
I truly enjoy this digital age we live in, with a single book-sized object containing entire libraries, arcades worth of games compressed into small boxes, and millions of songs from the modern day all the way back to compositions centuries old available any time there's a tower nearby. But something hard and physical, that can be held and manipulated and felt and smelt and tasted, there'll always be room for such things in my heart. That's what the floppy represents to me, something grossly inefficient and obsolete but more firmly rooted in reality.
I've gone through shit in life with no problems, but this almost made me cryWhat the fuck
This fucking Kindle..
Thank you for such a wonderful drive down the memory lane. I too have quite a collection of floppy discs lying around from my Commodore 64, Amiga and few from IBM PC and I don't know what to do with them but like you said when I look at them it makes me happy and want to emulate those dusty diskettes to see if they still work as most of my computers from the past are history. Thanks once again for this wonderful review and really makes me happy after watching this video. :)
Great video and awesooome sound quality. I have an Electro Voice RE320 powered by a mic amp and compressor into an external usb sound device and it doesn't sound half as awesome as your rig...
Thanks! And mine is just a Blue Snowball USB mic, but it's pretty solid :)
Yeah maybe its just your voice work ;) No kidding, its sounds really good. Cheers
If you're using a mic amp and compressor are you really losing out by converting it back to digital and running it through usb? I feel like it should be coming through on a soundcard.
this video was so satisfying and aesthetically-pleasing to watch. there's something deeply pleasing about watching a floppy disk being slid into a drive (no innuendos plz)
In my opinion the [OBJECT] that was popular when I was in my emotional teenage years is the best kind of [OBJECT CLASS} there is. The older [OBJECTS] are old fashioned and quaint while the newer [OBJECTS] are cheap and soulless.
Great video LGR I'd say one of your best ones so far. The sensations and attachments you desribe you have to your floppys is the exact same as I feel about my Laserdiscs. I could of course just stream the movie but then I would'nt get the sensation of inserting the shiny 12 inch disc and flipping it halfway through. Or opening up one of my 2,5kg boxsets with eleven discs in total. Or in some instances playing a disc for the first time and praying it isn't rotted.
Long live our beloved physical medias! ;)
I was born in the mid 90s. For me, floppies meant "DEAR GOD DONT START YOU COMPUTER WITH ONE IN IT OR DADS GOING TO BE PISSED!"
I've never heard anyone speak so eloquently and poetically about floppy disks. Outstanding! I recently discovered your channel and I'm loving your work. You have also inspired me, much to my wife's dismay, to look into old tech and perhaps a vintage gaming PC. (I wish I had never gotten rid of my 486.) Bad part is I'm also into vintage audio and tech in general. Keep up the great work!
Woah dragons lair took up 13 disks
I'm very newschool-- I'm always fascinated by what the next biggest technological accomplishment is, or the next new tech I can get my hands on. I remember the first time I got my hands on a PSP, it BLEW MY MIND. Like, how could something so small be capable of so much?! It's madness! CDs, DVDs, Blu Ray, and now digital-- I can now view or play on the go on my laptop things that were once limited to experiencing at home!
I can totally see where you come from when you talk about floppy disks, even if I don't feel the same. Even I look back and can appreciate once in a while what was the greatest tech of the time. It's a great reminder of how far we've come, to be able to appreciate the technology of the past while being able to experience today's.
i wonder ...... if you took an old floppy disk and re-wrote the same data right back onto it, would it "restore" the lifetime of the disk?
It depends on how bad the disk is damaged and in what way. If it's physical damage that won't help. If some sectors are bad, you can reformat it and if there's enough space left to re-write the files that would work. But yeah, usually when a disk goes bad, that's all folks.
also the simple limitations of the media itself. does, like, the magnetic "abilities" of the media be unable to store data after T time, regardless if it's re-written.
i'm thinking it's the life limits of the media itself
5.25" floppies are my personal favorite. such fond memories with me TI 99/4a :)
the TI was actually a VERY capable computer. sadly, most of the software commercially available didn't even remotely demonstrate its capabilities. i had some "underground" software, such as pretty dead-on recreations of Ms. Pac-Man, Frogger, and others, both graphics and sound wise
Great video!
I still have all of my original 5.25s and 3.5s for my first PCs. They were just so difficult to come by as a kid and will always retain that implied and immeasurable value.
Can we all just look at the author of one of the games.... Lord... Fucking... British... I THOUGHT YAHTZEE WAS JOKING! I never imagined someone would actually call them selfs that!
Yes, Garriott is a larger than life fellow, haha
Definitely one of my favorite videos @lgr yet of yours man, n thats hard to do as I love your channel! Everything you sed bout the old floppy is so true we should cherish them along with all physical media really
And this is why I hate nostalgia. It clouds our judgement, distort our perception. We romanticise things that, back in the day, just plainly made us upset or angry. We invent illusory qualities to things we're attached to for irrational reasons. I just can't be like that. I'm glad we've moved past floppy disks, and have no need to rely on them. I've had my share of floppy-related tragedies to way to stay completely clear of them.
+Fernie Canto Agree. I grew up with the modern 3,5"-disks and i thought they were rubbish even back then. I hated switching floppys back and forth constantly in some games (just to get a reading error after the 10th time) and all progress was lost...
Same rubbish like VHS, CD, cassette players and minidisk...
+Fernie Canto
And then there's me, I like most older equipment (older machines only, older electronics suck across the board despite being fascinating) because while you MAY need to do a whole single extra thing to get it to work it will run forever and if it breaks you can fix it with bailing wire till you get around to buying or machining a replacement part.
I have an unopened box of Fuji Film MD2HD 5¼-inch minifloppies containing 10 disks (can't find it on eBay, just other variants). Original foil cover, no dents, just slightly brown foil cover due to tobacco smoke but that can probably be cleaned, or keep it as a souvenir from the old computer days. There's sadly no indication of year made but it says on the box that it was made by "Fuji Photo Film, 26-30, Nishiazabu 2-chrome, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 106, Japan". I will never peel of the seal and there's just something soothing and reminiscent listening to the rattle of the disks inside when you pick up the box.
I also have all eight Ultima VIII on original 3½-inch floppies with the original paper wrapping.
Hey don't copy that floppy!
sounds like a 80s psa punchline
It was
lonewolf031 ha ha ha ha ha I remember completely ignoring that as a kid
I feel much of the same way towards VHS tapes, audio CD's, cassette tapes and vinyl. As a kid, the computer was reserved for the business, nothing I could touch as it was extremely expensive and held sensitive information. Me and my family shared most of our memories through music and movies, and when I see those things, it evokes a feeling of enjoyment. When I think of floppies, I think if the musky smell my home office had, full of papers and boxes, not games and fun. It's just interesting to compare how people feel nostalgia.
There was nothing like installing an old DOS based game on floppies. I loved that sound of the drive spinning and churning the disk, the bleeps and burrs of the PC speaker... inserting disk 2..3..15.. and pressing any button to continue.. Ahhh...
Got recommended this channel a MONTH ago and I'm hooked! Love it!!
This video is something that people can watch any number of years from now and connect with the emotions through your earnest narration. I'd title it, "Requiem for the Floppy." Thanks Clint, great video.
I’m 28 and I have a Cadillac LaSalle from 1939 and it’s completely foreign to the modern world and everything he said about the floppy’s...I feel about my old car...I get it man and thanks for keeping old awesome stuff going
I like the point you were raising at the end with comparing collecting floppy disks to driving a vintage car or listening to vinyl. It's why I still track down physical copies of Genesis and SNES games. Sure, I could just use emulators or digital services like the Virtual Console, but I love being able to insert a cartridge and boot up the genuine thing, although it can be a pain with my Genesis because it's seen better days. I've got Sonic 1-3 in their original boxes and I proudly display them; can't do that with an emulator ROM or digital copy. Plus there are also games you can't legally get on Virtual Console, such as the original Star Fox SNES (and Wii-U's VC doesn't carry Genesis games). There's something magical about tracking down a physical copy of an old NES/SNES/Genesis/whatever game and holding it in my hands.
I still have a 3.5 and 5 25 inch floppies on my shelf.
Great memories.
Also,i dont get why people say that these things were unreliable.
They never failed me.