For me, it must have been 20 years ago in 2005. I got Kingston’s 512MB flash drive for a Christmas present and oh my how great it felt to hold so much of memory in my pocket. After that it was clear to me that there is no use for floppies to me anymore.
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Spring 2012.
This survey ship I worked on needed updated navigational data from us in the instrumentation room from time to time. It was an old ship with an old auto pilot system, and this was the simplest way.
Not my use, but this in the news today: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-faa-says-it-will-phase-out-floppy-disks-air-traffic-control-by-2028-2026-11-05/
about a year ago, had to boot to DOS on my old WinME machine
Around 2013, when I was just 13, on the computer at my grandparents place. I had to actually ask around and spend effort to find floppys since by then they were already obsolete, but my grandparents PC only had a floppy drive available. I used it to attempt to write an OS (I know I know, daunting task but I didnt know how much I didnt know). I got as far as writing the bootloader and got it to load and print Hello World, but no further.
A few months ago. Was repairing a FANUC robotic arm, and found an incredibly dusty box. At the bottom of it was a few disks marks as “robot”
Had to find a reader, and only one of them was still readable.
A few weeks ago, as coasters.
late 2000s to save something while in computer lab, before thumbdrives took off.
Used? Just using one now, but as a coaster.
What an interesting juxtaposition on my home screen.
3 years ago. But in my defense, they were zip disks so they were a whopping 200MB, not 1.41MB.
This was for a long-time customer who had a safe full of old server towers from their business, and wanted everything backed up before destroying. They were blown away when I got 4 computer’s worth of data on 1 flash drive, and kept asking if I’m sure I got everything lol.
I told them despite me copying everything off the zip disks, and IDE & PATA HDDs, I still had about half the space available 🤯. They appreciate all the freed up room in the safe, and I appreciate some retro towers to house some killer new hardware for a sleeper (pre RAMpocalypse).
Fifteen years ago? Maybe a little more? I had old games on them I liked to play. Them no floppy drives. Then no cd drives even. Makes me sad.
Between my dad and I, we’d accumulated several hundred floppies with software, pictures, data, whatever stuff we’d accumulated over the years. I embarked on a big project somewhere around 1998 or so to copy all the contents of the floppies onto my hard drive and sort through it all, and… I just… petered out after a while.
Whatever it seemed like worth saving just really wasn’t.
I discovered that’s largely true of my Downloads folder. Every so often I go move all the contents to an archive folder, and anything that was in the archive folder gets deleted. I always think “I should keep this around in case I need it!” and whenever I do need it (like a new computer or reinstalling the OS or whatever), I just go grab what I need or install using choco or winget or of course apt for Linux or whatever… Docs/pics/vids I keep elsewhere, of course, but all that download stuff just adds up to wasted drive space. heh
I don’t remember for sure, but I’d guess late 90s at the latest, for smaller files where it wouldn’t make sense to burn a CD-R and uploading it somewhere (especially since I didn’t have a CD-RW until later) and downloading it wasn’t a viable option.
With most data transfer to friends being via BBS or later IRC DCC over the Internet, and software becoming available on CDROM, and Zip drives for backup, and CD-R and CD-RW becoming available for larger files, the use cases for floppies were already becoming limited by mid-90s.
Last year. Restoring an old Compaq notebookike one I had as a child. I bought it out of the back of a van at Vintage Computer Fest Midwest.
The save icon in so many programs are still floppy disks. So technically, I still use floppy disks pretty much daily. 😆
Not ctrl-s?
