I have a troubleshooting boot disk from back in the day in a ringbinder pocket folder thing. I keep on thinking of getting rid of them but Im kinda nostalgic about it and don't. does not take up all that much space. also tracking software.

Used? Just using one now, but as a coaster.

The save icon in so many programs are still floppy disks. So technically, I still use floppy disks pretty much daily. 😆

What an interesting juxtaposition on my home screen.

2003

I would have used a USB drive; I owned one back then. But I needed something that would work with the school's computers. This was back when most mice and keyboards were still PS/2 and most printers were parallel, so USB wasn't on every computer yet. At least, not at the school I went to.

About a year or 2 ago. Remember when you stick a brand new floppy into the drive and tries to boot and it says something like, "Non-system disk. Please remove and press any key"? We'll that's actually a program coded on the floppy (which was preformatted by the manufacturer) and each manufactuer coded it a little different. I was ripping the image off different brands to compare their code.

Not exactly a floppy, but close: more than 20 years ago a very dear person gave me an Iomega Zip drive and a couple of disks. Game changer. My hard drive was 40 MB, so for the first time my backup was bigger than my computer. Same speed, too, so not much of a sacrifice.

Later came the tiny Clik! disks: great as a music player, and perfect for carrying data around when 100 MB was a HUGE amount of memory. Through all my university years the Zip was my go-to. I just learned to pray every time I heard a click that wasn’t the brand name. :D

About a month ago. Found a copy of railroad tycoon on a 5 1/4" in an abandoned building and wanted to see if it still worked.

It did not

Around 2013, when I was just 13, on the computer at my grandparents place. I had to actually ask around and spend effort to find floppys since by then they were already obsolete, but my grandparents PC only had a floppy drive available. I used it to attempt to write an OS (I know I know, daunting task but I didnt know how much I didnt know). I got as far as writing the bootloader and got it to load and print Hello World, but no further.

A few weeks ago, as coasters.

I don't remember for sure, but I'd guess late 90s at the latest, for smaller files where it wouldn't make sense to burn a CD-R and uploading it somewhere (especially since I didn't have a CD-RW until later) and downloading it wasn't a viable option.

With most data transfer to friends being via BBS or later IRC DCC over the Internet, and software becoming available on CDROM, and Zip drives for backup, and CD-R and CD-RW becoming available for larger files, the use cases for floppies were already becoming limited by mid-90s.

The event production world is simultaneously very advanced and antiquated at the same time. I used a floppy disc earlier this year because some lighting consoles still use them. We then used said lighting console to control a projection mapped surface with motion tracking.

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't own a 1541 until early 2009. I was a cassette lamer.

So for Easter 2008 I have handed in a commodore 64 executable music entry on cassette at breakpoint. I think they were the last to require entries to be submitted on physical media.

In the years after I still used a lot of 5.25" and 3.5" on my c64, Amiga and Atari.

Today I have a turbo chameleon 64, a c64 ultimate and a gotek drive on my Amiga. I don't miss diskettes.

As for USB drives. I got one for Christmas 2001. It had a whopping 32mb of storage and required proprietary drivers to mount.

Not my use, but this in the news today: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-out-floppy-disks-air-traffic-control-by-2028-2026-11-05/

A couple of months ago to see the solar eclipse...
...
...
Don't fucking judge me =_=

I cannot remember but I'd have to guess probably 20-25 years ago.

Early 2000s, saving patches on a Korg Triton.

Back in 2017 I found a bunch in our garage. I bought a cheap USB floppy drive off Amazon and went through them. It was real nostalgic hearing that noise and seeing the A: drive show up on the explorer sidebar. I archived them all on what is now my NAS.

Prior to that, probably the early 2000s. My parents bought a computer in 2004. It was the last one I can remember coming with an internal floppy drive.

Last week to store recovery codes from 2fa

Last year. Restoring an old Compaq notebook like one I had as a child. I bought it out of the back of a van at Vintage Computer Fest Midwest.

This week, because I'm wiping old data for someone who wants to get rid of computer equipment.

Three months ago. Found some old 3.5s with school work from back in the day on it I wanted to check out. Got a USB floppy drive to try and get .imgs for them. Sadly most had bad sectors :(

A few months ago. Was repairing a FANUC robotic arm, and found an incredibly dusty box. At the bottom of it was a few disks marks as "robot"

Had to find a reader, and only one of them was still readable.

Never

Do zip drives count?

Fifteen years ago? Maybe a little more? I had old games on them I liked to play. Them no floppy drives. Then no cd drives even. Makes me sad.

Between my dad and I, we'd accumulated several hundred floppies with software, pictures, data, whatever stuff we'd accumulated over the years. I embarked on a big project somewhere around 1998 or so to copy all the contents of the floppies onto my hard drive and sort through it all, and... I just... petered out after a while.

Whatever it seemed like worth saving just really wasn't.

I discovered that's largely true of my Downloads folder. Every so often I go move all the contents to an archive folder, and anything that was in the archive folder gets deleted. I always think "I should keep this around in case I need it!" and whenever I do need it (like a new computer or reinstalling the OS or whatever), I just go grab what I need or install using choco or winget or of course apt for Linux or whatever..... Docs/pics/vids I keep elsewhere, of course, but all that download stuff just adds up to wasted drive space. heh

Sometime around 2010, was working as a low level IT tech and a local dry cleaners POS system wouldn't load. Had to replace some corrupted .exe files on their dos machine from a floppy I found in the cobwebs. Took me back in time for sure.

Two weeks ago. I have my reasons.

I haven't used a floppy since high school. I graduated in 2003. And it would have had to have been even earlier than that, because my PC by senior year didn't even have a diskette drive.

Has to be at least 15 years. Probably 20 or more.

I still have a few floppies somewhere around here, but haven't had a drive that can read them since I donated an ancient laptop to a friend of a relative.

I don't feel like splashing out £12 for a USB floppy drive right now.

Other people mention 5¼" floppies for old 8-bit computers, and I suppose I do have my old computer and drive packed away somewhere, but I haven't touched any of that in over 20 too. I'd be surprised if any of that still works and I'm kind of afraid to find out for sure.

gotta be when Seattle's Living Computer Museum was still open several years ago. I played some commodore 64 games there off of floppy disks.

Mid 2000s, when the games we played at the boys and girls club were on floppy disk. Plus, my mom gave me her old floppy disks from college rather than buy me CDs for school.

I would guess around 2002 or so when I reinstalled TIE Fighter or Descent for the last time.

2019, I wanted to put an OS with color on an ancient laptop that was running black-and-white windows 95 despite having rgb capable hardware. Pretty impressive how anyone was able to do anything with only 1.44MB of space per disk

I found a bunch of old floppies from gradeschool, so I picked up a USB drive to archive them. Wild seeing files with modified dates starting in 19xx.

Legitimately? Never. For fun? A few years ago. I have a C64 and a C128 that uses 5.25 floppies and then an Atari Mega ST that uses 3.5s that I mess with just to mess with.

Couple of months ago at work. While digging through mountains of old IT stuff I found some archival floppy disks. I was curious about what was on them so I found the usb floppy drive in my box of junk inherited from the previous IT Guy and booted one up.

Found an excel file with a list of names for who to call in an emergency.

Spring 2012.

This survey ship I worked on needed updated navigational data from us in the instrumentation room from time to time. It was an old ship with an old auto pilot system, and the simplest way was to copy over the data and sneakernet it up to the bridge.