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…
My mom’s machine is running ’98 still…