when did you last use a floppy disk?

i really miss those old things XD

the last time i used them out of neccesity on a regular basis was as late as 2009

i actually still keep cases with old 5¼ and 3½

i dont have any way to see whats on the 5¼ anymore, but i occassionaly pop one of the 3½ on an old refurbished toshiba laptop i have just to see what kind of crap i saved on it back on high school

so when was the last time you used a floppy?

Um.. never.. I'm from the wrong generation :(
But i remember when i was little my father gave me an unused one as a toy to play with.

...


I don't know! I do know I had Tie Fighter on floppy disk

Like for actual document storage purposes? Seventh grade, I think. After that we started requiring USB drives for our supply lists.

Other than that, I've used them when I've wanted to play games on the Atari ST when I still had that out and set up in my room.

Dunno. But I remember 3,5".

I used 1,4" disks on my Pentium 166MMX/S3 Trio 1MB/32MB Ram/1,6GB HDD in '98-00 it was a last time, I guess.

I've seen and have access to dozens of the things, but I've never once used one and have nothing to read them with anyways. They just sort of sit about as a bulk collection of odd little doodads. Now VHS tapes? That's a completely different story.

Just the other night.

When I misplaced my coaster.

Probably 2004-5, as that's when my last desktop machine had a floppy drive. I've been using only laptops since then, and none of them had FDD.
Even then I didn't use them much, since I had a removable HDD enclosure in one drive bay, so I did backups on that and over the network.
In the 90's I used the floppies a lot more. I even downloaded all 50 or so Slackware disk images in 1995 and wrote them to floppy. A few years later I stumbled on a Win95 disk set of about the same number of floppies, in some computer lab drawer. But I guess Win98 wasn't released on floppy like that, and already they were being phased out.
I had some old Doom wads made with DCK on some floppies, but have no idea what happened to them. Ditto with MODs (well I used Screamtracker 3, so S3M's) and various Turbo Pascal games and demoscene-related stuff. It was all pretty amateur level stuff, so I never bothered to upload anywhere...

Several years ago. A decade and a half at least.

Voltcom9 said:

Sometime back in the mid 90's.

Probably the same for me.

I've had always-on internet since around 1999, so I can't imagine that I've used a floppy for its intended purpose (storing and transferring files) since then. I might have used one as a boot disk while reinstalling Windows 98 / XP or something, though.

I definitely remember circa 1996 or 1997 though, putting some downloaded WADs and DEHs onto a floppy disk for a friend to play with.

2005 or 6. My dad showed me how they worked once, on our old decaying computer.

In 2003-2004 for school if I recall correctly.

a few months ago, actually. i found a big ol' box of floppy discs my mom used to use, so i put them into an external floppy drive to see what was in them.
a lot of them were empty, sadly. but i did couple of cool things, like a really awful game my brother said he played in like 1996, when we still had the windows 3.1 computer.

I moved a few out of storage to put back into storage again. My dad's company building has maybe ten floppy carriers stuffed with the damn things, keeping old files and memos on hand.

Feb 2012, was going through some old files backed up from when I was 14-15. Needless to say, embarrassment ensued.

I was trying to fix an unstable PC in 2007 and decided to update the BIOS. The only way to do that was to install a floppy drive because the utility from Asus didn't work on Vista. Turned out I didn't have the floppy power cable for my modular PSU with me and had to power the drive by connecting it to the decaying skeleton of some old PC from the 90s I found in the basement. It didn't fix my unstable computer.

I may have done something with someone else and a floppy disk more recently, but I don't remember. USB drives are awesome and so is the internet.

Last time I used them on any regular basis was probably about 1996-1997. I used to exchange disks with my friends with stuff on. When I started university in 2000 all the workstations had zip drives and I had a parallel port zip drive on my personal machine, so I switched to those since 100MB made all the difference. By the time I left university a few years later, most operating systems supported USB mass storage devices and I'd commonly use a CompactFlash card with a USB card reader (which were already cheap). Then integrated USB flash drives became more common and I've never looked back. I don't miss floppy disks.

Last time I *actually* used a floppy disk was probably when I dumped the contents of several old disks from my Sinclair QL a couple of years ago.

'01, to bring downloaded WADs and MP3s (split across 5-6 disks!) from uni to my unconnected home pc. The floppy drives were usually disabled on their Win NT clients, so I had to download the stuff I wanted first, then boot the lab PC in dos mode to arj/zip the stuff I wanted over to a pack of floppies. That's determination!

Unless for a boot disk, I haven't used one since I got a CD/R in 1998 or something.

Definitely no later than 2002/2003 or so. I remember having a 16 meg USB stick not long after..

The first hard copy of Doom2 I ever saw (wasn't mine) was 4 individual floppies. Not sure if it was bootlegged or authentic.

I think it was sometime around 2002 or 2003 for me as well. Maaaaaybe 2004 at the very latest. For sure it would have been a 3.5" floppy. If it wasn't a floppy with some of my own data on it, it was when I helped someone out at work with theirs.

If you count MiniDiscs, then the last time would have been last year.

I still have a brand new box of 5.25" Verbatim disks sitting here at home, though, even though I've never owned a computer with such a drive.

a couple of months ago, we have an old CNC machine at work that uses them

I restored a ~17 year old machine just a few weeks ago. I tried 7 different floppy drives before I found one that worked (I was really hoping the 1988 tandy would work but no chance). Then I went through about 30 diskettes before I found one that would actually allow me to format and start writing to.

For actual usage though as opposed to nostalgia-usage, I'd say probably BIOS updates around 1999-2000ish. Even storing my diskettes in a latch-sealed plastic box away from magnetics, most were unreadable by 1998 including that set of life-changing doom2 install disks.

God, I want to build a really old computer. Maybe something from the 80's, for fun. Probably expensive as fuck though.

I use the damn things pretty frequently. A lot of older PLC controllers and PC systems for machines I work on use floppies for the programs that they run. For example, a metal-working CNC machine or an automated sorting table from the late 90s.

There are branches of the US government that still use floppies on a regular basis. Don't replace the computers? Then don't replace the storage media, I guess. On top of that they use a lot of Windows XP so it shouldn't be much of a surprise.

If you believe the news the US nuclear arsenal relies heavily on 8" floppies. I think I've only ever seen one of those in my life and it wasn't being used for anything at all.

Probably sometime between 2004-5 while I was attending a TAFE course.

Well last night before I went to sleep...

...oh wait, it said floppy DISK. Whoops.

The last time I used a floppy disk was when I was fifteen. I was saving information about local cars for sale.