Been throwing away a big heap of old Floppy discs that have been lying around the house for the past 2-15 years. My new computer doesn’t even have a floppy drive, so it seems they have now served their purpose. It’s amazing to think that just a few years back 3MB was all you needed to store a big bunch of documents or entertaining games. What happened to the world? How did we suddenly leap past 700MB up to 4,7GB and then to somewhere between 1-2TB and suddenly not even these enormous amount of spaces are enough to harbour our archives? Anyhow, back to the floppy discs, I thought I’d post a bit about what they contained, if it’s of any interest, if it isn’t, then don’t keep reading, because that’s all this post will contain.

First off, there were a few games such as Super Collapse, Cool World, Beasleys Death Trap, Liero, Etcetc. I also found the game Urban: The Cyborg Menace lying around, a game I remember playing on my dads laptop and one I used to love. Unfortunately it doesn’t run on XP, it crashes the computer, but I still stashed it away for possible future use. Not even the site is up anymore, it’s hard to grab ahold of it anywhere, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to run it? Maybe on a Win 98 installation on an old computer sometime ….

One floppy was filled with screensavers of Bruce Lee. A great martial artist indeed, but I don’t actually remember ever having been such a great fan of his at all. Confusing.

Ingame pictures, screenshots, that kind of stuff, pretty useless seeing as I didn’t even take any of them myself, just from the internet… and what’s the use in that?

Schoolwork. Lots of it. Will be fun going through sometime, most of it is ported from my old Mac computer, so the documents don’t always look as good as they should, but the inflo is still all there!

Liero Levels from my time back in UBG, that was three years ago!!! Seriously, the jump from Floppy discs to higher forms of media passed insanely fast, or maybe floppies just lasted longer in school since it was usually not possible to burn a CD on a piblic computer. I remember starting to upload files directly to my site and email at the end of school time though, a much better alternative.

Mac games that didn’t work are a common fill of Floppy discs. A few years back I started playing games on my old computer despite having a new one and thought, since the old MAC no longer handles the internet, that I would download a few games on my PC to play on my MAC. Turned out the MAC was too old for all the games I downloaded though, if not in terms of gameplay and performance, then in terms of not-being-able-to-open-file-due-to-file-format-unsupported-by-Macintosh-7. So, quite a few Floppies I don’t need here…

Speaking of my old Macintosh, about a tenth of all floppies discared of were backup discs for the MAC! There were thirtytwo of them in total, O_O , imagine having to reinstall the system with all of those, would take ages, so despite my lack of belief I think I’ll thank god that there’s a CD drive as well, and probably a CD with a clean system on it as well, though if the computer does crash after twenty years of loyal duty I think I’ll just let it crash and discard of the whole box as well. It’s fun having around to play old games on, amongst other things, but everything takes up it’s fair share of space, especially old computers.

Anyhow, moving on, hmm, there was some poetry too, an old edition of Windows 95, an original set of Maniac Mansion floppies (yeah I saved those, along with the win95 floppy, which was just one floppy, OMG, a whole OS that didn’t take more than 3.5MB!!), a few Floppies that didn’t work at all, a few for some old printers and programs that are lost and will never be found. So that’s that. I know there are probably a few people who could have some fun with these discs, line walls with them or what not… I know I’d be happy to line a wall with floppies if I had enough of them, and a wall of my own noone would care much about me destroying, but it just so happens that I don’t, so thus the floppies have all just been discarded.

It is a shame though, seeing as they held their stored material much better than modern CDs and DVDs do, but what to do? They’re a part of the past and of no future value, other than material value, maybe. Just one thing left to say, goodbye, farewell!

RIP.