Geek Artifacts: Unboxing 8 Inch Floppy Disks Discovered In My Cubicle
A few months ago, my desk was moved, a la Office Space, into the back corner of my company’s office. I didn’t mind. I had some good neighbors, a movie fan and a celebrity internet chef, to keep me company.
This week, I went digging around in the former resident’s desk, and discovered this large box of ancient 8 inch floppy disks. Now, many tech blogs receive the awesome opportunity to un-box gorgeous products. iPhones, the Macbook Air, personal digital assistants, video cameras, and so forth.
Since no one tosses any free products the way of the Geekadelph, we’re doing an un-boxing of an 8 inch floppy disk box. Cause really, who has ever done that? No one, that’s who.
Thank God these things are Wang compatible.
Behold the entire un-boxing after the jump. Special thanks to John Freeborn for leaving these in my desk.
They’re bigger than your standard CD-R, which means they obviously can store more data.
By Ariel on Jul 8, 2008
Wow, that is crazy old, I remember when I had 386 monocromatic IBM… uhm, good old days. Hey don’t vend those or they stop working
By Paulie Danger on Jul 8, 2008
Would an 8″ Wang joke be completely inappropriate?
By Benjamin Gilbert on Jul 8, 2008
“Thank God these things are Wang compatible.”
THANK GOD!
By BRiAN on Jul 8, 2008
is there anyway you could give me one of those! i remember them! oh man actual floppy floppies!
By Tom Woolf on Jul 8, 2008
The last time I saw a working 8-incher like that was in my old college days…
Well, I have seen one since, but it was folded over and useless***.
*** Seriously - I used to work at GE, and somebody from Puerto Rico has sent one of those disks to the US with data. Unfortunately, to make it fit in the envelope they folded it into quarters…
By Suki on Jul 8, 2008
I actually recall rewiring a logic board to program a computer. From there I moved up to 80 column cards in a hopper–none of the cards had writing on them, but I could read Hollerith almost as fast as english. It was a big thing when we finally got printing on the damn cards. Then came the 96 column cards, the mag tapes, the drums (man those suckers were heavy) and finally a screen and direct entry (and storage!!) of code. What a treat.
Yeah, ok, I’m OOOOOLLLLLLLDDDDDD!
Suki
By dave alexander on Jul 9, 2008
Please don’t throw these out, if you are planning on doing that let me know as I want them! You don’t know how difficult it is to find a stash of these…but there are still 8″ floppies being made today believe it or not!
We found a special purpose for these old 8″ floppies; they hold 7″ records very nicely and create a nice, safe package for the record. My bnd Multicast did a release like this and everyone loved it! You can download the mp3s of this out of print 7″ release at obliq.net. Here are some pictures of our (mis?) usage of this technology!
http://obliq.net/images/obq03.jpg
–davealex
By Gil Megidish on Aug 7, 2008
SOOOOO WANT!
By http://motherboard.hopto.org on Dec 23, 2008
I still have an Apple 2e running!! It works fine! I never have any problems with it. I think that floppies last longer than hard drives. I have boxes upon boxes of 5 1/4 inch floppies. On my server, with 1 gig of ram, two 80 gig hard drives, and two dvd drives, I also have a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive which STILL WORKS!!
By Joe on Mar 20, 2009
Haha. I have computers that use these! In fact, I’m running out of ‘em. Does a 3M floppy beat an 8″ floppy?
These puters weigh 100lbs. The drive weighs 6lbs!
By Liz on Jun 11, 2009
Hey, can anyone read the data off one of these for me? I found one in my dead cousins important papers and I sure would like to know what he wrote.