For better or worse, I am now floppy free. I have given away all of my Zip disks, I have destroyed all of my 3.5" disks, and at long last I've taken some scissors to my 5.25" disks. This is all part of the great purge for my upcoming cross-country move. I feel a little antsy about it, but in the end I think it was inevitable.
I had kept 3.5" disks for emergencies for quite a while and I admit that there were times (when dealing with legacy programs and such). And I also had some even older 5.25" floppy disks. Those things had some old Wordstar, dBase III, Wordperfect, Newsroom Pro, and other data from way back in the DOS days. At some point, my computers did not have 5.25" drives anymore and yet I still kept them thinking that someday I'd get that data off of them. That day never came, until recently. Over the years I had asked coworkers and friends if they had any old computers with that drive; no one did. I considered going to an old electronics shop or even Ebay to get one, but didn't for 2 reasons: 1) I didn't want to spend money just to transfer old data that might not even be readable anymore, and 2) for most of these years I didn't have a desktop to install it in in the first place; I was pure laptop for a good 10 years due to grad school and moving and such. I did eventually get a gaming desktop machine but never reconsidered getting a 5.25". I was all ready to just declare it lost when I stumbled across an old PC in my landlord's basement. I got his permission to cannibalize it but it turns out that I didn't really need to. I did try to take the drive out and put it in my desktop only to discover that I didn't have the right connector. But the old computer was already working and running Windows 95 I think and it booted. The drive wasn't actually attached in the computer but after swapping out the 3.5" drive with it and playing with the BIOS it actually worked. Now the transfer problem... no network on it and no CD-burner on it. Fortunately for me, my landord is a techy and he had retrofitted an old USB1 card into it. I panicked a bit when my first attempt using a jump drive failed due to compatibility. But eventually I tried out some other ones that did work and voila, I was able to get my 20 year old data off these obsolete disks. Not that I'll be able to do anything much with them but this is history and I'm sentimental.... and trying not to be. Hence when I finally got the data off... snip snip and into the trash. Actually, that felt quite good. Space is limited and I've been carrying these things around with me for 20 years.
