By Evan Ackerman
Come, children, gather around my rocking chair and I’ll tell you about how back in my day, we had to carry around these things called floppy disks if we wanted to move information from one computer to another. To print something, we had to put one of these disks into a computer and save stuff to it (which took forever and made a bunch of weird noises), and then take it out and walk uphill barefoot in the snow to a different computer with a dot matrix printer attached. Then we’d fire up Mosaic and look for ASCII porn, but that’s another story.
Anyway, if you miss those days, this 3.5″ floppy USB drive might make you feel better. It’s just a concept at the moment, but it’s a little more slick than the other one we’ve seen thanks to a USB connector that slides out when you move the disk’s metal cover. It’s not the most practical thing in the world, but it is both nostalgic and iconic, and you could probably stuff a heck of a lot of flash storage in there for relatively cheap. We’ll just have to wait and see if anything comes of this.
On a personal note, I would like to mention that the sound of a 5.25″ floppy being read by my Apple IIe is something that I’ll never forget (along with the brrzzzzzzz sound of a dot matrix printer, of course). The disk I usually had in there was Zork. Hm, I wonder what happened to that system… It’s likely it was eaten by a grue.
See? I am old. Now get off my lawn.
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