Timberline Employee Blog

Remember these? Long ago there was a time that we used floppy disks that were actually floppy. The 5.25 inch disks is what most households had who had computers with disk drives. The common format was a singled sided 5.25 inch 180K disk.

5.25 inch floppy disks had a hole along the side that when covered acted as a mechanical write protect when this hole was covered.  This notcher would put a hole in the flip side of the disk so the drive would think you were working with an unprotected disk when you flipped it over. In effect you now have 360K to work with on a single disk.

Floppy disk manufactures didn’t tell you that the single sided disks they were selling actually were double sided disks. These manufacturers eventually came out with the statement that the flip side often contain manufacturing errors. I had no problems on the flip sides when I used this device.

It became unnecessary to use this device once you upgraded your hardware to a double sided disk drive.

Goodbye CompUSA http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/CompUSAToCloseAllStores.aspx

And goodbye to the hundreds of rebates you made us fill out to make your prices competitive with everybody else.

I have watched several stores go in and out of the Jantzen Beach mall complex in Portland, OR. I still have a pristine Computer City mouse pad.  I also have a nearly full case of unopened floppy disk 10 packs from the same store.

That would be the floppy disk. The last widely used version was a 3.5 inch disk in a hard shell. Inside it may have been floppy but anybody could quickly figure out that actually folding this disk would lead to its immediate destruction.

Flash drives and other media formats have done in the floppy disk. With emphasis now towards digital media content, typically the floppy disk can’t hold a single song under medium to high quality encoding. 

Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and MS-DOS 6.22 was distributed on less than a dozen 3.5 inch floppy disks. The Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems would have only taken around 450 floppy disks if distributed that way.  Windows Vista, if distributed on floppy disks would take over 2000.

Even the smallest flash drives you can find for free hold 50 times the space these disks can hold. A common flash drive size is now 4GB which is approximately 2500 times the size of a 1.44MB floppy disk.

So what do you do with all your old floppy disks?