LGR - A Floppy Disk Retrospective

Really glad to hear it dude, thanks :)

LGR

Great video :D

StigDesign1

The easy option to comment is to "me too" and rattle off memories of a bygone time. But nae. All I will say is this: For 5 minutes and 32 seconds, you touched my soul as a retro enthusiast. The video was almost tactile, just like the experience of using the eponymous magnetic wonder. This right here is why I'm a Patron. Never change, you glorious bastard.

RetroSwim

Ah, floppies. So much awesome packed into such thin packages. I still recall the days when I'd sometimes need to use one in the old family 286 and would sit with eager anticipation while the drive read off it to load the game I was about to play. I miss that old machine. Still wish I hadn't throw it away when it died, and only 2 years from learning about the vintage tech scene, too :(

So much awesome stuff there- you have a lot of great items from my childhood there- Museum Madness, Master Blaster, Catacomb Abyss (I never had the 5.25'' ones). I guess nostalgia and a general fondness for them explains why I shelled out a fairly ridiculous amount for Epic Megagame's back catalog using an equally antiquated payment method. I'd mention the various floppy drive dumpers & drive emulators, but you know them all already I'm sure.

Steven Zakulec

I have Commodore PET computer and I purchased a third party disk drive and I thought I was in heaven. It was double 5.25 inch drive I transferred my programs from cassette tape to disk. This is when I first learned about sectors and how they can increase a program's size.

Just out of curiosity, was the piece at 4:22 inspired by the response you sent me on emulation? Also, vintage cars, records, film .... I mean, I see the appeal in something old working but I'd pick modern every time (unless the modern was worse than past entries). But we're not clones, so, that makes sense.

The Disgruntled Cactus

A very passionate look at a storage medium that is long gone. That was interesting, thanks. And I agree: There is something special about holding, and sometimes struggling with, the physical copy of a game (whether it be a cartridge or a floppy).

Jeff D Smallman

Thank you, I'm really grateful to all the patrons who have made this stuff possible :)

LGR

If you have the space and come across some good deals, go for it. I have some big box copies of games like Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, just to have them on my shelf.

Alyxx the Rat

you can wax yer nostalgic carrot all you like. I have to agree with EVERYTHING you said and love to see you try and articulate it. Great footage too, this makes me really glad you got the updated hardware that can do wide shots and close up high detail.

Sterling Treadwell

The sound of floppy reading/writing/seeking/etc. is right up there with the old modem connecting sounds for me. On the other hand you'd often be able to tell that your disk had gone south by the repeated "brrr, brrr, brrr". Re-insert and hope that loser General Failure isn't reading your disks again.

I greatly enjoyed this. I only had a few "floppy" floppy disks, but had (and still have) a buttload of 3.5" disks. They remind me of playing shareware games in the 90's and installing Windows 95 from 13 disks. 5.25" disks remind me of hours spent on the Apple ][ computers at school, where we were allowed to program things in BASIC and save them to our own disk.

Zabe

"When I put a diskette between my fingertips, I smile inside every single time" That sums it up for me.

Insert Disk 2

You hit the nail on the head when describing them. We like them because they are essentially sandwiches! While CDs and DVDs are just coasters.

Deveron

Nice video! Like others said you nailed it on the feels. It's really difficult to describe why floppies are interesting besides just "I know these!". More and more I feel detached from physical reality because all data is available all the time at incredible speeds. Even computers are disappearing into thin air - buttons disappearing into motionless glass panes. The sense of sight and hearing take priority now, the sense of touch taking a back seat. The artifact matters, man! BTW - do you know of any companies still making new stock of 5.25 and 3.5 inch floppies? New drives still getting made that are worth any money?

ACG

Floppies were satisfying to insert, often with a nice clunk - not like a CD!

Brett Garfitt

Nailed it! In the very beginning as you were questioning your attachment to floppies, I was thinking about classic cars and vinyl. We are definitely on the same page. I have this kind of connection with Nintendo cartridges. They are symbols of my gaming past. They are how I was introduced to gaming and that's something that I will never forget. There is something special about my old Nintendo 64 cartridges because they were the first games that were mine and mine alone. It's a shame that we are moving past the days of physical media because it's very special to hand a physical, tangible something and saying "this is mine." Now we have all of our stuff on some server with whatever company we bought it from and they tell us "this isn't actually yours but you can use it."

Kevin

Ooh, you stuck them in to test out? Neato!

Steve Martin

Ahh, floppies. Nothing like cycling 5 kilometres to my dad's workplace to download some demos from THE INTERNET, ride back home and to find the disk no longer working ... gah! At least I got a workout. A friend and I once transferred Destruction Derby from my computer to his using one or two floppies (not sure why we didn't have more). It involved a lot of running back and forth our places on a hot summer day. After 5 or 6 trips we had it up and running! Those were the days :)

Eigen

I wish I had an excuse to work with floppies again..

Hardts

Same here. Would make collecting a lot more fun for me though... sadly I spend most of my time playing modern games nowadays and my interest in old games is not big enough to warrant the investment into a proper oldschool computer. DOSBox is enough for me.

Alyxx the Rat

Mm, ain't that the truth. Not much charming about 5 minutes of initial load times.

LGR

Oh definitely. Each thuwp and slide meant we were closer to playing our new game... Only thing that recently gave me the disk swapping anticipation of great things to come was installing my orchestral musical instruments VST, which came in 8 duel layer DVDs...

Douglas Holmes

Tell you one thing about floppies, they were a damn sight better than the cassette drive I had on my Vic-20!

Kevin Furr

Those USB floppy drives are great, I wish 5.25" USB drives were more prevalent.

LGR

You betcha, I did a video on what I use: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqLv8d-W-9c" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqLv8d-W-9c</a>

LGR

Floppies hold a special place in my heart. They are part of some of my earliest PC gaming memories and even today I still use them simply for nostalgia and to hear the sound. I got a USB floppy drive that works well with my Windows 7 system and setting it up in DOSBox is easy as pie, so whenever I go into DOSBox, insert a floppy and go fullscreen, it almost feels like I'm back in the early 90's again.

Alyxx the Rat

So here's a question ... As corruptible as floppies can be do you archive your collection to something a bit more reliable so at least if the floppies go you have the software somewhere?

DGDW (Derek G. Weber)

That thuwp sound is key to the experience, isn't it?

LGR

Oh yeah, don't get me wrong I am SO GLAD we don't have to deal with these things day-to-day anymore. But it's a pleasure to go back and selectively deal with the headaches :D

LGR

We got our first computer in 1991, and it came with a 5.25" and a 3.5" floppy drive. I always loved the thuwp sound that came with inserting the 3.5" disks. To install our first CD drive we had to get rid of the 5.25" drive and that rendered the games we had in that format obsolete. I wish we kept the disks and boxes though. Some great classics. We do, however, still have a ton of 3.5" floppies around...

Douglas Holmes

I've never encountered an 8" disk in person, but I still have virtually ALL of my old 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" disks. :B TBH though, I'm glad technology has surpassed the need for them because I definitely don't miss all the problems I ever ran into thanks to bad sectors, disk rot, copy protection, slow read/write times, formatting... ...actually, I'm kinda sad we don't have Isolinear Chips yet; Best-looking storage medium EVER! ;D

Kris Asick

"Realness" is something that's high in demand but low in supply at times. I'll take it where I can get it, hehe.

LGR

Nice memories indeed :)

LGR

Yup!

LGR

Well thank you, I wish it did too if it wasn't so much work :)

LGR

I've shot a few there, including this one! But yes, I hope to do a tour video in the coming months.

LGR

Ah yes, the floppy disk. I love them as well. I wish they would last forever, but man, I guess we just gotta be fortunate with what we got going so far! Though yeah, emulation just can't beat the real deal, or the real interactions you get. Hehehe

ReeseRiverson

Wow, this was unexpectedly profound and deep... more than I thought it would be, at least. I'm not surprised you made a video about floppy disks. I think you do well with a rambling style of video such as this one. :) Speaking of, seeing all these floppies from your stash makes me wonder when we're getting a video tour of your storage room that you've been setting up! Have you been shooting videos there much at all yet?

Lindsay Michelle

I wish this video lasted forever.

CallOfSaregnar

They remind me of checking out second hand stores and markets with my dad bugging him to buy me the old pc's with the 5.25" floppy drives ^_^ he gave in once i cant remember what sorta of pc it was but its what got me into pc's in general .....Good times

Darkireland

Makes me wonder if the 3.5's in the Aces Over Europe box I sent you still work.

Steve Martin

You totally get it, yup :) When you pick one up and a flood of odd memories surface, it's something awesome.

LGR

Every time I interact with a 5.25" floppy, I think of the old Sperry 286 my dad brought home from work.. Accidentally formatting our Addams Family print shop disk because I just had to know what the "Format" command in my DOS for Dummies book did. 3.5" floppies bring back the times where my brother and I would huddle around the computer we got from my uncle and play Epic Pinball or The Summoning... So yeah, needless to say, I know EXACTLY what you're talking about.

Randall Strye

Yup, by about 1996 or so all the games I got were on CD too. I loved it at the time, but now... give me some floppies any day.

LGR

By the time I got my first PC (1995), all of the games that came with my PC and all the subsequent games bought for me were on CD.