For reasons that will become clear in a later post, I found myself in need of a floppy drive today. Remember those things? 1.4 MB capacity, transfer rate of about 25 K/sec?

The adventure went something like this:

• Dig through all the old computers in the house to find one that (A) has a floppy drive present, and (B) still works.
• Dig through all the old computer junk in the house to find floppy disks.
• Boot up old computer to find… Windows 98!
• Shake most of the dust off of the floppy disk and stick it in the drive.
• Get a refresher course in how bad Internet pr0n was, circa 1996.
• Reformat floppy disk.
• Discover that Windows won’t let me do a raw, byte-for-byte transfer from a disk image to a floppy (or if it can, I can’t remember how). This is important because I’m dealing with a long-dead filesystem that Windows can’t speak.
• Scrounge around on the Intarwebs to find a floppy-disk-image program. Move it over to the ancient Win 98 machine on a USB drive.
• Get a refresher course in how bad USB support was, circa 1998.
• Use disk-image program to write my precious floppy.
• Remember how phenomenally unreliable floppies are.
• Write another 5 copies, in hopes one of them will work.
• Genuflect before the Gods of Technology for giving us flash drives, CD-Rs, and cheap portable hard drives, and wonder how the hell we ever got anything done back then.

Hopefully by this afternoon I’ll show you WHY I needed these floppies…