I was gifted an unopened pack of 3.5" floppy disks. What should I do with them? (wrong answers only)

superkret@feddit.org to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 469 points –

I wonder what "limited lifetime warranty" means.

225

  1. Pick some friends that you like
  2. Download "I Am Never Going To Give You Up" by Rick Roll
  3. Put the song on the disk in very low quality .mp3
  4. Give the disks away as "fun, retro" drink coasters
  5. Watch as they use the coasters, unaware that you Rick Rollered them

this...is a great idea!
Especially since I have friends who will go to some effort to find out what's on the disk out of curiosity.

Make sure to name the file inconspicuously but temptingly, relating to the old days, like Bill Gates confession.mp3 or DJ Mike Llama - Llama Whippin' Intro.mp3

Poor Mr. Astley, forever known as Mr. Roll

He had his run during the 80s. He's enjoying a second wind with the Rick roll.

It made me wanna listen to the rest of his music once I actually fully heard Never Gonna Give You Up

We use old floppies as coasters!

I have people all the time ask "these are so cute, where did you get them?". RadioShack. 25 years ago.

just in case someone sticks it in a working drive, add a file to the floppy named

autorun.inf

and add the following to it with a text editor:

[autorun]
open=Microsoft.Media.Player.exe
icon=icon.ico

while i doubt it will actually work, if it does, it would be quite hilarious in my opinion. there's probably, hopefully, safeguards that prevent such a thing from working and i likely have the syntax wrong, i haven't used windows in years.

I don't think autorun worked with floppy disks, only with CDs and USB units.

I don't think the OS was sophisticated enough to tell the difference... A drive letter is a drive letter...

There are USB headers, PCI(-E) slots, SATA and some older ones. To get storage devices working on each one you will need a different driver.

Windows disabled autorun for USB sticks before win10.

Also if you list the devices on Linux they will show up as sd(a, b, c…) for SSDs, hd(a, b, c…) for HDDs and nvmen(0,1,2…) for NVMe drives. So yes the OS must be able to differentiate.

Windows assigning letters is just weird IMO.

Also to my knowledge the floppy would show up as disk A on Windows.

I fuckin LOVE this!!!! It’s absurd in the extreme and yet, so fuckin cool!

I humbly bow to your greatness of creativity.

Thanks! I was intending for it to be more of a shitpost, but I guess I'm not very good at those, it turns out

Nah it’s awesome. Like you can then tell them “Hah you’ve been rickrolled” haha.

Label in sharpie as "Bitcoin password" and superglue to the sidewalk in a busy area. Watch people try to pick up.

This is 98% the right answer, but you drop them somewhere that keeps them intact, and believable enough so that people take them, and spend the rest of the weekend going to thrift stores trying to find an external floppy drive, and the next month trying to figure out how to get their iPhone to mount it.

This but put your own floppy drives up on local listing sites for ridiculous prices. Lmao it's almost too evil.

Alternatively, you could write

  • "Someone help me I'm trapped in here!"
  • "Nuclear attack scenarios"
  • "You put this disk here to save your life, do not ignore"

Yeeessssss...

Cover the paper label with packing tape (cheap mans laminate).
Use quick set epoxy for a better bond.

Dude. RAID.

https://hackaday.com/2022/06/30/its-raid-with-floppy-drives/

If this is wrong, I’m not sure I want to be right.

Click on them to save your files.

Just carry one around with you and whenever something important happens or you are about to do something risky, pull it out, press it with your finger and loudly say "Save".

Edit: Bonus points for carrying a huge cardboard mouse pointer to click with.

Edit 2: I really should read all the replies before starting to type.

Label one “Important Documents” and then attach it to your refrigerator door using a fridge magnet

Thank them for the retro-themed coaster set

"Omg, you 3D-printed a save icon!"

I think we finally threw out the last of our diskettes about a decade ago - most were too corrupted to recover anything useful. I guess I could 3D print one now ...

I actually bought some online about a year ago because I’m doing some retro stuff. I even got a usb floppy drive.

I probably still have a USB floppy drive in the Bin of Peripherals. Haven't really actively worked with floppies since 2012 though.

Ok, this is a sidetrack but hear me out. Floppy disks would make awful coasters. A coaster has to be somewhat absorbent to avoid spilling condensation water on the table. This is why cork is the most popular material for coasters. The best coasters are a cloth top over a cork shape with a plastic rim and a felt bottom. This ensures total protection to the table and gives enough freedom to be creative with shapes, prints, colors and figures. The novelty printed plastic disks are the worst coasters possible, and floppy disks will only drip all over the table defeating the purpose of a coaster.

What a Buzz Killington.

I know, I agree. It's just, I'm tired of people using bad coasters then complaining when they stick to the bottom of their glass spilling condensation water all over their lap and shirt. This is the reason that happens. That said, I would totally love to have good floppy disk look alike coasters. But being given an actual one as a coaster won't amuse me, it would make me groan.

Contact TDK about extending that limited lifetime warranty.

Get a few suitcases at Goodwill or something, stick a floppy and some 'redacted' papers in a red envelope, leave them in random places around town and observe what happens. Make sure to wear a trench coat and sunglasses when you 'forget' them at each drop point.

Conspicously leaving random packages around town is how you get the bomb squad called and you wind up in an interogation room.

Whatever you do, as soon as you crack it open get your nose right up there and inhale deeply.

Floppy disks are a way to install linux on your microwave try a distro like arch linux it's microwave safe

Load virus on to banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation.

OP said wrong answers only.

If fucking Citibank has one goddamn floppy drive living in a building somewhere I will shove a Frisbee down my throat until I can't see it anymore.

Don't forget to make up a Da Vinci virus to sink ships and blame it on hackers in case shit hits the fan.

Put all your precious documents on the disks and then rub a magnet on each one of them to make sure they are properly energized. The stronger the magnet the better.

Put a 240p rick and roll video inside and write cryptic labels on them. Spread them around the city and rest knowing that someone is going to go through hoops only to get Rick rolled.

Oh man, make it a split zip file of 1.44Mb on each disk, hidden in separate places with hints. A Rick roll treasure hunt

OP said wrong answers only, not the only right answer

Write your own copy of Windows 10, minus the bloat. You'll probably have 2 floppies left

With those in hand, start waving them around maniacally and shout "WHY IS IT CALLED A FLOPPY IF IT'S SO DAMN HARD!?"

Split up something like Puppy or Damn Small Linux across them all.

Build a PC with 15-20 floppy drives and insert and mount them all.

Boot Linux off of all the floppies.

Build a PC with 15-20 floppy drives and insert and mount them all.

10 floppy drive raid, please. don't want to lose that critical data

Once upon a time, there was a Linux distro that would fit on a single floppy, it was intended for system rescue, diagnostics, that sort of thing...

Start a porn collection of high quality pictures. Be sure to zip span them across all disks… all 1 photo

Pirate Windows 95

95 was on CD. This might be enough to pirate Doom though

It was available on floppy. So was Win98.

Yep I had 95 on floppy. It was like 30 disks. That installation was hell, you had to sit there and swap disks for several hours.

When one of these is corrupted then it's all for nothing lol. I mean CD Rom was so ubiquitous here by 95, 98 that this idea seems silly but I guess it existed.

It was more for upgrading 386 computers from 1992-1994 if I remember right. Or maybe we had a 486. I dunno. It was definitely pre Pentium. Back in the dark ages!

As I recall, my windows 95 CD-ROM contained a bunch of floppy-sized .cab files in a folder, so it's entirely possible it was available as a set of floppies...

sure, use arj to compress doom to your disk:
c:\games\doom\ arj a -va a:\doom.arj

It fits on 4 floppies that way is I remember correctly.

Several years ago, I found a 3.5" floppy in an old desk, so I wrote "(My company's product) Production backup - DO NOT LOSE" on the label, and then left it on the floor in a main hallway of our office.

In my mind, it hopefully made a few people chuckle, but my real dream was that someone picked it up and tried to return it to the development team.

Now I want to do this at my job... I actually have a box of 5.25" floppies somewhere...

When Windows 95 was still sold on floppy, it came on 25 fucking floppies in the box.

So I say put Windows 38 on them.

Sell them to someone who will test and resell them to the airline or medical industry... Manufacturing is a likely customer as well, plenty of legacy equipment there that's airgapped and still running decades-old hw/sw.

Youtube warning, some Boeing 747s

Recent BBC article

(This is a wrong answer since you only have a single pack. If you had several cases, you might actually be able to make a buck)

You could use them as a memory card for ps1 games.

Press them to make a real world save point.

open it in a non-destructive manner, switch every read/write lock slider, put it back together.

You mean 3.5" drink coasters?

This is actually a good answer, not a wrong one.

"3D save button coasters"

Buy a USB floppy drive for each one and then create a RAID 0 disk array. It'll be super quick and gloriously noisy.

For anyone not familiar... That would give you 14.4 MB (1.44 MB formatted x 10) of capacity. The rated speeds for a floppy drive is 1000 kilobits per second. So if you did a Raid-0 (striped), let's just say that gives you 10,000 kilobits per second. We convert transfer speeds to storage speeds (8 bits to 1 byte)... Means 1.25MB/s. So best case, it takes you about 11.5 seconds to do a full transfer of the 14.4MB. it actually be much slower because this is best case scenario.

So you’re saying we just need a few (hundred) dozen more disks and drives? Look out Seagate, you’ve got a zombie competitor coming.

Unwrap them and open it and then put them all back so they look used. Write on the box in sharpie "Backups 1/127". Delete the critical production system at your work. When someone asks where the backups are, hand them these.

see how many of them it takes to hold a single 4K image

That's just over 8MP.
You could easily store a 4K Image on a floppy in half-way decent quality, two with visible jpeg artifacts.

Gift them as cup coasters.

manually etch the bits yourself. Just use a hammer and chisel

Inserting your floppy is a time honored tradition. Have a few too many beers, and give it a go. You have 10 chances to succeed, it seems.

Use them to make a bootleg copy of Duke Nukem to share with your friends. That's what we used to do with them lol

It says they're high density, so use them as ammo for your rail gun

Fuck being incorrect. Buy an old AKAI sampler and make music from floppy disks libraries, I still do with my S-1100. Wrong answer would be to ritually burn them...don't.

TDK's revenue has been increasing steadily at least starting from 2010. When was the last time you bought a TDK product?

You probably have one of their chips or components in your computer, phone, tv, charger brick, etc.

Tdk makes chips, really?

Honestly I had a hard time figuring it out by just going to their website because it’s full of corporate nothing-speak but…I think so? Or maybe just components?

Finally update device drivers in Windows the right way!

Sue the maker for false advertising. 1.44MB is clearly not High Density.

It is compared to their predecesssor.

The 720kb "double density" diskette used for example, in Commodore Amiga computers.

Mount nine of them on a square board so that they're all focused on a single point for a mild solar furnace.

Use the last one to look at yourself, the proud owner of a mild solar furnace.

You… don’t know what a floppy disk is, do you?

I do, I just don't pay careful attention to details and just run with what I think things are saying.

My first computer was an Atari 520ST. No hard drive (its OS ran off a chip), and every program ran off a floppy. And your storage was on a floppy.

Yeah, I know floppies. I used to have shoeboxes of them.

What kind of floppies are you thinking of? the very little metal on those discs aren't that reflective.

I was too far in the future, using CDs. Floppies, wow.

Now I'm going to have to rethink my whole thing.

Glue two on top of your flip flops. You now unlocked the floppy flip flops

find the most complex AI model file you can put on it

Epoxy them into coasters and sell them as save icon coasters.

Write “If found, please return to Minot AFB, ND c/o Duane” on them & scatter them in various airport restrooms across the US.

Put them in a mdadm raid array

Fill a silicone cube with deepset epoxy, toss that bad boy in. Fill a 2" thick and 6' tall PVC pipe with epoxy. Let it all dry then affix the epoxy rod to that cube and make a wizard's staff

Throw them away and find a shugart compatible disk

I wonder what “limited lifetime warranty” means.

It probably means you can complain any time about a manufacturing defect, but not anything else.

Anyway, the terms should be printed somewhere on the box or in a paper inside.

You’ll want to download and install the most up-to-date drivers. I believe this model benefits from a slight overclock too, so maybe look at purchasing a decent aftermarket cooler

Your should install Lady Sia, a game published by TDK on it

Zip tie them into a 2x1 rectangular box with a flip top lid. A drill may be needed.

Oh, man. This brings me back to my Amiga 500 days. So slow to load, but I loved that thing. Wish I hadn't sold it.

Write MP3s to them and use them to play one song in a modern car.

(I saw a video of someone playing a clip of music using a USB floppy drive)

Attach one to a light pole with a paper that says "Government access codes"

Kind of hard to give right answers to something that time has rendered utterly useless. I guess you could sell it as an antique

Saw a post on mastodon in the last day or so that someone dug up a network card for the old 486 they had been working on getting back to life. Might be a use case there, as well as in aviation and medicine - fields that move exceptionally slowly and tend to have expensive equipment with long lifetimes.