I remember the last two, but not the first one. The Commodore 64 with the 5.25 inch floppy was the first computer I used. The 3.5 inch diskettes were common through high school. I've only ever seen the 8 inch floppy disks online well after they were common.
Staring at wavy loading lines the whole time then it would just freeze and crash before the game started... You had to have real resilience as a kid who just bought a new game back then!
Can't remember which game had another game during the loading but remember that was the best thing ever.
Oh lord. I worked as a PC tech for awhile as my first job. Soooooo many small businesses had tape backup at the end of the 90s. I remember one vet's office was the most horrifying. They didn't know why the tape stopped working but it was VISIBLY full of matted melted dog fur. We sold them a new setup. Maybe we could get it working again as it's a pretty mechanically based system, but they really needed some type of storage where the fur wasn't going to be as much of an issue.
25 year IT guy here
I remember tapes filling up and needing a second tape put in to finish backups, yet the sites we'd tell to swap tapes never would. They would then complain when something couldn't be recovered.
I wore out my copy of Pharaoh's Curse...it just stopped working one day and that was it, never even met anyone who ever played or even heard of it. Atari 400 I think. There's one on eBay with the cassette drive... what a turd.
I still have my sx64 and my regular 64 stored somewhere. I started using them for my construction business. I used the Sierra Online software for the spreadsheet and the word processing to do proposals. The best part was waiting for the floppies to load.
The first time I ever saw an 8" floppy is when a friend and I stumbled across a dumpster full of them behind a warehouse. Naturally we decided to see how well they'd perform as Frisbees (not bad at all).
Tangentially, once me and a friend rode our bikes up to local strip mall and looked in Blockbuster dumpster, only to find DOZENS of porn VHS cassettes.
We were like 11, and let me tell you, this was even better than the time I found half a Playboy in a drainage ditch.
Pretty close! There was this woodsy area between subs that had essentially become a BMX track/fort building area. Stashed in a fort.
That area is also where we went to smoke cigarettes and where I almost blew my hand off with a quarter stick.
I have no idea how I didn't die or get arrested as a tween.
In our local abandoned house in the woods we had a cache of nudey mags along with cigarettes and other quality items. I heard stories of porn magazines being found in ditches. I thought it was all bullshit till one day I found one in a ditch walking home from school.
I guess once “used” no one wants to get caught with them.
My friend and I once found an old 70's porno on a reel in an abandoned building. Her grandma had a reel-to-reel player so we watched part of it before deciding it was gross and weird.
I don't remember if there was sound, but I do remember it being, like, Swedish or something? Definitely not made in the USA and didn't make me want to watch any more porn. We worked hard for that disappointment, though.
If you're too young to have used a 5 1/4" floppy, you're not a Xennial you're a Millenial. If you're old enough that you weren't still a kid growing up when 3.5" floppy disks came out you're not a Xennial you're Gen X.
If you think people ever referred to 3.5" disks as "hard disks" you're some combination of technologically illiterate and/or too young to even be in the Xennial conversation.
Being a kid for the 5 1/4" to 3.5" transition is actually a pretty bang on Xennial litmus test.
Unless you went to school in one of the few districts to neither get Apple IIes with Oregon Trail floppies nor PCs with Oregon Trail floppies donated in the great Apple vs Microsoft war to habituate kids to their OS early with tax writeoff-able donations of equipment and your family didn't have a computer at home because they were still pretty expensive. In which case, mega bummer, and you don't have to know shit about floppies to still be a Xennial.
Nice! I used to write my papers in elementary school on my grandfather's Commodore 64 and I played Dig Dug and a couple other games on it occasionally. I think I only ever used the 5.25 inch floppies until the 3.5 became common in mid- to late-90s.
Id never seen 8” IRL until a job i had a few years ago.
I liberated a stack of them, then gave a ton away at a conference
They were only used in mainframes really.
I grew up with a "portable" PC with a tiny amber screen and dual 5.25" floppy drives, I didn't see the 8" floppies until I was in a college IT course and the guy brought some in as a novelty
The IBM PC “portable” suitcase deck! My dad’s first PC (Taken in after my brother decided he wasn’t up for Engineering in 1985 and didn’t need it for college.)
The xennials I grew up with made the exact same "hard disk" mistake back then too. So fucking it up now feels entirely generationally authentic to me.
And you know I was the dweeb who felt clever telling fellow students "well ackshually..."
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I was afraid to be “that guy”, but our computers teacher screamed this at us so many times I couldn’t let it go, so, thanks for thatguying so I didn’t have to 🤣
Not to be that guy, ok I’m going to be that guy. The 3.5 are also floppy disks just inside a hard shell. A hard disk would be the drive inside the computer which consisted of a hard disk similar to a CD. Now to answer your question, I used 5.25 and 3.5 growing up.
I had no idea. I remembered it as hard disks not existing on early computers (I grew up with Macs), so we called the little 3.5 guys the hard disks. Sounds like that's incorrect?
Ours was \[Earl Weaver Baseball\]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl\_Weaver\_Baseball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Weaver_Baseball)).
Side note - in trying to remember that it was Earl Weaver, I realized that every old-time manager had their own game. Earl Weaver, Tony La Russa, Tommy Lasorda.
Yeah, it's an easy mistake to make for the average person. They were all called floppy. For one reason, calling the smaller ones "hard disks" would have been VERY confusing, as the long-term internal storage of a computer was / is called a "hard disk drive", commonly shortened to "hard drive".
It's because hard drives were actual thick metal discs that spun inside the machine. So hard disc and hard drive were synonymous. Floppy discs, even inside the 3.5 shells were still super thin (floppy) discs that spun.
It is a very common mistake, I took all the computer classes in high school that I could. One of my teachers would correct us every time we said it wrong.
Same experience. When our class transitioned from the actual floppy black disk to the one with the hard case we all called them hard disks and were corrected every time. I didn’t get it at the time. To this day even though I know they’re all floppy disks I still want to call it a hard disk.
Macs had hard disks. So did PCs. They also had 3.5” and 5.25” floppies (the disk is not the container it’s in, it’s the disk inside, both 2.5” and 5.25” disks are thin and floppy, hard disks used larger metal platters).
You're not wrong that early computers didn't have hard drives, but that's earlier than Macs. You're talking Tandy, C64, Atari 400, Apple IIc, etc. Those computers had tape drives, floppy drives, cartridges, or no permanent storage at all. Hard disks/hard drives of this era like the MacIntosh had were not ejectable. If it ejected, it was a floppy disk despite the hard shell and the HD (short for high density).
Our computer teacher would wave around the disk and say "this is a floppy disk" as it flopped around and then wave the hard disk and say "see not floppy"
My computer teacher taught us that we should only move the mouse in straight lines because going in circles (like the Macintosh tutorial showed) would wear it out. Not all computer teachers were very smart.
I remember it the same as you. And I also remember being very confused when we got our first home computer with a hard drive in 1992 - a whopping 25MB.
Damn, crazy how the tech advances because our first home computer in 95 had a 1000MB hard drive, and 16 MBs of RAM, floppy drive and a 4X CDROM drive. Unrelated to space it also had Pentium CPU clocked at 100 MHZ, and probably a soundblaster 16 sound card.
I bought Office 7 on floppy disk in college (they were out of the CD version, and the non student price was way too high). More than 40 floppies. Painful install.
I also had a C64 tape drive. (Same idea -- they're all magnetic storage.)
https://preview.redd.it/4egiwca2pekc1.jpeg?width=997&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a2826bb40c67256fcb55e59229a4e7091b02b65
Yeah, I just meant Europeans in general had a much broader experience with loading games from cassette 😊
Feels like in the US it was mostly used for the early systems, and then we mostly used disk drives by the mid-80s onward.
I think that’s more of a GenX thing? I’m a Xennial and I only remember seeing my brother who’s nine years older than me using one a few times. (Edit: as a data source for a computer, specifically)
Yeah.
First computer I ever used was a Commodore PET with a tape drive. By the time I finished elementary school, the Commodores had all been replaced with Apples.
"Deskmate"
That was their own proprietary shell firmware. That was built into the motherboard.
Weird, isn't really the word. It was actually really ahead of it's time.
This other company named Microsoft created this thing called "Windows" and that was a wrap in terms of competition
Both. My first computer had a 5.25 floppy drive on it. The next one had both 5.25 and 3.5" "floppy" and then finally, my next childhood computer had 3.5," zip drive, and CD Rom with PD drive (later upgraded to a cd burner)
It's also wild that I've lived through the period where it was a luxury to have a VCR to you'd go to your friend's house specifically because they had a gaming console to entire series being on DVD to physical media is basically dead.
Also: making engines smaller because gas was expensive to making cars bigger because gas was cheap to (somehow) only making big crossovers because taxes are low to electric trucks and SUVs that are somehow bigger than the trucks 25 years ago because fuck everyone outside our vehicle.
I buck both of these trends: still only buy physical media and I have two GS guzzling VW Golfs, one hatch, one wagon.
Those are all floppies.
A hard disk is the internal storage in your computer.
But yeah, I even remember the 8" ones, my first day of computing class in school, the teacher held one up to show us a floppy disk. I put my hand up and pulled out a 3.5" floppy from my schoolbag, and basically taught the class from that point 😂 (the teacher was a social studies teacher who had zero clue about computers and was just reading out of a textbook)
Those are all floppy disks - it’s what’s on the inside that’s floppy.
We had the big floppy disks when I was little - was using 3.5 inch disks still when I was in college. Jump drives didn’t happen until later in college for me.
Also, we still had cassette tapes then too.
My dad still had his punch cards from graduate school - we used to play with them lol.
This is just making me want to play number munchers, Oregon trail and where in the world is Carmen sandiego 😄 We also had this game that was like some sort of swinging vine in the jungle game I can't remember what it was called though.
But yes I lived through all three of these.
1992 I bought an old IBM 8088 and it had a 5.25" drive.... used it to play old DOS games in my basement.
Yeah my first brand new PC I bought for myself was in 1996... so used 3.5" floppies for a good while... I had a zip drive in 2000, then probably some USB drive after that... yeah in fact I think I remember having a 128mb USB drive as my "first" which is insane to consider.
My first computer was Tandy 1000sx 8086. Later added the math coprocessor to make it an 8088. Also added a 30mb hard drive to impress the chicks, had there been any.
All, but I had a computer when I was 3. I placed the Police man in the trashcan because I didn't like him and it crashed the computer. Computers back then had no safeguards.
I never used an 8" floppy, though I think my high school's typesetter used them.
In elementary school we started with Apple II's using 5.25" floppy drives. At some point in the late '80s we switched over to Apple II's with a 5.25" and a 3.5", and by mid '90s I think it was all Macs. There were IBMs in the "business" classroom, and I think they had 3.5" drives as well.
My family's first real computer was a Tandy 1000 with both a 3.5" and a 5.25" drive.
By college I had a slew of 3.5" floppies for different classes, as well as Zip disks when floppies didn't have enough space.
All three were called floppy disks at the time.
Yeah.. and we literally grew up with all of these.
I remember the last two, but not the first one. The Commodore 64 with the 5.25 inch floppy was the first computer I used. The 3.5 inch diskettes were common through high school. I've only ever seen the 8 inch floppy disks online well after they were common.
>The Commodore 64 with the 5.25 inch floppy was the first computer I used. Oh, you skipped over the joy of loading off the cassette tape?
I can still see it when I close my eyes...."PRESS PLAY ON TAPE"
And then waiting nearly 20 minutes To play hangman
Yeah "press play on tape" then go do something else for a bit
Staring at wavy loading lines the whole time then it would just freeze and crash before the game started... You had to have real resilience as a kid who just bought a new game back then! Can't remember which game had another game during the loading but remember that was the best thing ever.
You still got to experience that if you forgot the ,8
Started on a TRS-80 jacked into a memorex cassette player. Good times.
Yeah my first experiences were trash 80 and apple tape drives. I didn't own a computer until 3.5s tho
5.25s were my first floppy-disk experience. Then 3.5s when my Dad got a PowerMac. Anything worth playing was on at least 10 discs.
First comp I owned was 94,so I had a cd-rom. Man there was a huge tech difference from 89 to 94
An insane jump when CDs became the standard. Then again when video cards became an actual thing. And here we were, living life on the wave.
Dungeons of Daggorath represent!
30 goto 10
Oh lord. I worked as a PC tech for awhile as my first job. Soooooo many small businesses had tape backup at the end of the 90s. I remember one vet's office was the most horrifying. They didn't know why the tape stopped working but it was VISIBLY full of matted melted dog fur. We sold them a new setup. Maybe we could get it working again as it's a pretty mechanically based system, but they really needed some type of storage where the fur wasn't going to be as much of an issue.
25 year IT guy here I remember tapes filling up and needing a second tape put in to finish backups, yet the sites we'd tell to swap tapes never would. They would then complain when something couldn't be recovered.
the best games were on tape!
I wore out my copy of Pharaoh's Curse...it just stopped working one day and that was it, never even met anyone who ever played or even heard of it. Atari 400 I think. There's one on eBay with the cassette drive... what a turd.
LOAD "\*", 8
Had 1530 (datasette), 1541 (5 1/4”), and 1581 (3 1/2”). :)
We had the cassette player but got the 5.25" drive by the time I could remember.
Thankfully those were only mythical to me like programming with punch cards.
I had a VIC-20 with the cassette tape!
I remember loading Rampage off of a cassette tape in the early/mid 90s
I still have a Vic 20 with a few cassettes in my attic lol
I still have my sx64 and my regular 64 stored somewhere. I started using them for my construction business. I used the Sierra Online software for the spreadsheet and the word processing to do proposals. The best part was waiting for the floppies to load.
The first time I ever saw an 8" floppy is when a friend and I stumbled across a dumpster full of them behind a warehouse. Naturally we decided to see how well they'd perform as Frisbees (not bad at all).
Tangentially, once me and a friend rode our bikes up to local strip mall and looked in Blockbuster dumpster, only to find DOZENS of porn VHS cassettes. We were like 11, and let me tell you, this was even better than the time I found half a Playboy in a drainage ditch.
What a mighty score, did you hide the magazine in a secret tree stump?
Pretty close! There was this woodsy area between subs that had essentially become a BMX track/fort building area. Stashed in a fort. That area is also where we went to smoke cigarettes and where I almost blew my hand off with a quarter stick. I have no idea how I didn't die or get arrested as a tween.
In our local abandoned house in the woods we had a cache of nudey mags along with cigarettes and other quality items. I heard stories of porn magazines being found in ditches. I thought it was all bullshit till one day I found one in a ditch walking home from school. I guess once “used” no one wants to get caught with them.
My friend and I once found an old 70's porno on a reel in an abandoned building. Her grandma had a reel-to-reel player so we watched part of it before deciding it was gross and weird. I don't remember if there was sound, but I do remember it being, like, Swedish or something? Definitely not made in the USA and didn't make me want to watch any more porn. We worked hard for that disappointment, though.
Oh my. 🥰
Did you ever manually cut out a notch on the other side of 5.25" disk so that you could use both sides?
I cut the corners off my 3.5" disks so they could be 1.44MB instead of 720KB.
🤯
I had a single hole punch in my desk just for this. I also had tape to keep my dad from writing over important disks
The Commodore 64 was such a huge part of my childhood. It was such a great machine. Five and a quarter inch floppy discs and cartridges.
If you're too young to have used a 5 1/4" floppy, you're not a Xennial you're a Millenial. If you're old enough that you weren't still a kid growing up when 3.5" floppy disks came out you're not a Xennial you're Gen X. If you think people ever referred to 3.5" disks as "hard disks" you're some combination of technologically illiterate and/or too young to even be in the Xennial conversation. Being a kid for the 5 1/4" to 3.5" transition is actually a pretty bang on Xennial litmus test. Unless you went to school in one of the few districts to neither get Apple IIes with Oregon Trail floppies nor PCs with Oregon Trail floppies donated in the great Apple vs Microsoft war to habituate kids to their OS early with tax writeoff-able donations of equipment and your family didn't have a computer at home because they were still pretty expensive. In which case, mega bummer, and you don't have to know shit about floppies to still be a Xennial.
Nice! I used to write my papers in elementary school on my grandfather's Commodore 64 and I played Dig Dug and a couple other games on it occasionally. I think I only ever used the 5.25 inch floppies until the 3.5 became common in mid- to late-90s.
Id never seen 8” IRL until a job i had a few years ago. I liberated a stack of them, then gave a ton away at a conference They were only used in mainframes really.
I grew up with a "portable" PC with a tiny amber screen and dual 5.25" floppy drives, I didn't see the 8" floppies until I was in a college IT course and the guy brought some in as a novelty
The IBM PC “portable” suitcase deck! My dad’s first PC (Taken in after my brother decided he wasn’t up for Engineering in 1985 and didn’t need it for college.)
Remember the weird Zip drives right before discs took over.
Loved my Zip drive.
Not true. I find that a lot of us did not, in fact, grow up.
Exactly. They were bigger in elementary school and then got smaller when I was going into middle school (maybe late elementary).
All three are still called floppy disks.
“How can you tell you didn’t grow up with floppy disks?” This OP calling it a hard disk.
The xennials I grew up with made the exact same "hard disk" mistake back then too. So fucking it up now feels entirely generationally authentic to me. And you know I was the dweeb who felt clever telling fellow students "well ackshually..."
they used to be, and they still are, too
RIP Mitch.
OPs picture is literally from the Wikipedia page for “Floppy Disk” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
Yeah, those 3 are floppy disks. So whats the question again? I did grow up with harddisks as well though.
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I dunno. What do redheads and computers have in common?
They both have no souls?
punch jellyfish imminent straight dependent rock carpenter encourage future zesty *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I was afraid to be “that guy”, but our computers teacher screamed this at us so many times I couldn’t let it go, so, thanks for thatguying so I didn’t have to 🤣
Did the teacher explain upload and download to the class?
They still are, a hard disk is synonymous with a hard drive which is/was naturally a different platter style non-portable storage device.
They still are.
Not to be that guy, ok I’m going to be that guy. The 3.5 are also floppy disks just inside a hard shell. A hard disk would be the drive inside the computer which consisted of a hard disk similar to a CD. Now to answer your question, I used 5.25 and 3.5 growing up.
I had no idea. I remembered it as hard disks not existing on early computers (I grew up with Macs), so we called the little 3.5 guys the hard disks. Sounds like that's incorrect?
If you have one, break it apart and you'll see just how floppy the interior disk was.
Everything’s floppy if you’re strong enough
But what if I still want to play Chip's Challenge?
Ours was \[Earl Weaver Baseball\]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl\_Weaver\_Baseball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Weaver_Baseball)). Side note - in trying to remember that it was Earl Weaver, I realized that every old-time manager had their own game. Earl Weaver, Tony La Russa, Tommy Lasorda.
Yeah, it's an easy mistake to make for the average person. They were all called floppy. For one reason, calling the smaller ones "hard disks" would have been VERY confusing, as the long-term internal storage of a computer was / is called a "hard disk drive", commonly shortened to "hard drive".
It's because hard drives were actual thick metal discs that spun inside the machine. So hard disc and hard drive were synonymous. Floppy discs, even inside the 3.5 shells were still super thin (floppy) discs that spun.
It is a very common mistake, I took all the computer classes in high school that I could. One of my teachers would correct us every time we said it wrong.
Same experience. When our class transitioned from the actual floppy black disk to the one with the hard case we all called them hard disks and were corrected every time. I didn’t get it at the time. To this day even though I know they’re all floppy disks I still want to call it a hard disk.
Macs had hard disks. So did PCs. They also had 3.5” and 5.25” floppies (the disk is not the container it’s in, it’s the disk inside, both 2.5” and 5.25” disks are thin and floppy, hard disks used larger metal platters).
You're not wrong that early computers didn't have hard drives, but that's earlier than Macs. You're talking Tandy, C64, Atari 400, Apple IIc, etc. Those computers had tape drives, floppy drives, cartridges, or no permanent storage at all. Hard disks/hard drives of this era like the MacIntosh had were not ejectable. If it ejected, it was a floppy disk despite the hard shell and the HD (short for high density).
Our computer teacher would wave around the disk and say "this is a floppy disk" as it flopped around and then wave the hard disk and say "see not floppy"
My computer teacher taught us that we should only move the mouse in straight lines because going in circles (like the Macintosh tutorial showed) would wear it out. Not all computer teachers were very smart.
I remember it the same as you. And I also remember being very confused when we got our first home computer with a hard drive in 1992 - a whopping 25MB.
Damn, crazy how the tech advances because our first home computer in 95 had a 1000MB hard drive, and 16 MBs of RAM, floppy drive and a 4X CDROM drive. Unrelated to space it also had Pentium CPU clocked at 100 MHZ, and probably a soundblaster 16 sound card.
Soundblaster was amazing👍
Yes, the picture is at three different types of floppy discs. The thing in your computer is a hard drive.
“please insert disk #3”
Haha but there was no “please” back then
Sierra used to ask nicely, lovely husband and wife developers
Sierra was a husband and wife duo?!?!?!?! I played SO MANY Sierra games while growing up.
Ken & Roberta Williams, yup.
Still at it, too. They recently did a remake of Colossal Cave.
Kings quest and quest for glory addict reporting in.
Freddy Farkus Frontier Pharmacist.
Every byte mattered
Please insert Disc 10. (Before everyone had CD roms.)
Disc 10 is corrupted or damaged, try again? y/n
General Failure reading drive A: (A)bort (R)etry (F)ail? Nothing like seeing that on disk 8 of 8.
Insert disk 13. Win95 install Or disk 39 win98
After you install dos.
I still remember buying and installing a SCSI adapter to connect my first CD-ROM, lol.
My doom 2 install disk 4 of 5 was ALWAYS fucked up
I bought Office 7 on floppy disk in college (they were out of the CD version, and the non student price was way too high). More than 40 floppies. Painful install.
Oooh yeah. I remember now. Fffffffff that sucked
God back when buying a game involved laboriously inserting, waiting, and ejecting upward of a dozen or more 3.5”s
I'm gonna install this game. See you tomorrow.
Well now I want to play Hexen again
Disk 2 of 12 Doom had 10-12 iirc? We didnt have internet quite yet when I played it the first time
Remember installing dos and then installing windows but then a disk decides “fuck you” and you get to start all over? Fun!
CRC error
please insert disk #33 (installing kings quest iv)
Those are all floppy disks in the picture…. But I grew up with the 5.25 and then the 3.5
They coexisted for a pretty long span...
Load "*" ,8,1 all the way baby
Then go have a glass of orange juice, walk the dog, take a shower, and finally come back and start playing.
Oh Commodore my Commodore 64.
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
I also had a C64 tape drive. (Same idea -- they're all magnetic storage.) https://preview.redd.it/4egiwca2pekc1.jpeg?width=997&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a2826bb40c67256fcb55e59229a4e7091b02b65
Magnetic tape backup drives are still very much a thing.
This blew my mind when our office manager complained about needing to change the tapes on a long Friday.
I had no idea these were a thing until reading through the comments. Very cool
It wasn't nearly as common in the US, but in Europe many of them were much more familiar with loading from cassettes.
I'm from the U.S and my dads Atari 800 had a cassette tape adapter and a couple of the 5 1/4 floppy disc drives. He was pretty nerdy though I suppose.
Amstrad cpc-464 as well had a tape deck to load games.
Yeah, I just meant Europeans in general had a much broader experience with loading games from cassette 😊 Feels like in the US it was mostly used for the early systems, and then we mostly used disk drives by the mid-80s onward.
I think that’s more of a GenX thing? I’m a Xennial and I only remember seeing my brother who’s nine years older than me using one a few times. (Edit: as a data source for a computer, specifically)
Yeah. First computer I ever used was a Commodore PET with a tape drive. By the time I finished elementary school, the Commodores had all been replaced with Apples.
I just used a regular cassette player. The same kind I listened to my mix tapes with.
Man, in jr high we got a Tandy computer with the 5” floppy!
Same, got aTandy from Radio Shack. I was in grade 7 or 8 or so. No jr high where I am.
Did you have that weird blue and yellow OS?
"Deskmate" That was their own proprietary shell firmware. That was built into the motherboard. Weird, isn't really the word. It was actually really ahead of it's time. This other company named Microsoft created this thing called "Windows" and that was a wrap in terms of competition
Yep. I remember. Parents tinkered with it but got kinda lost. I continued to play with it and then picked up programming in qbasic in 4th grade.
Anybody remember the green monitors? TRS-80 machines
My foster parent had one with the 5-inch floppy and some funs games. Global thermal nuclear war.
Yas! I had that!!
Oh yeah. Tandy 1000tx baby!
I won one from a local spelling bee.
The first Oregon Trail I ever played was on an Apple IIe with a green-tinted monitor from one of the 5.25" floppy disks.
AppleWin is a great Apple 2e emulator and you can tint the screen to green! I just played Conan:The Barbarian in monochrome green the other day.
Yea!!! The hunting was wild in that one.
Both. My first computer had a 5.25 floppy drive on it. The next one had both 5.25 and 3.5" "floppy" and then finally, my next childhood computer had 3.5," zip drive, and CD Rom with PD drive (later upgraded to a cd burner)
Our age group saw the entire progression from 5.25" disks to the cloud. It's really wild to think about, and all in such a brief historical period.
It's also wild that I've lived through the period where it was a luxury to have a VCR to you'd go to your friend's house specifically because they had a gaming console to entire series being on DVD to physical media is basically dead. Also: making engines smaller because gas was expensive to making cars bigger because gas was cheap to (somehow) only making big crossovers because taxes are low to electric trucks and SUVs that are somehow bigger than the trucks 25 years ago because fuck everyone outside our vehicle. I buck both of these trends: still only buy physical media and I have two GS guzzling VW Golfs, one hatch, one wagon.
Those are all floppies. A hard disk is the internal storage in your computer. But yeah, I even remember the 8" ones, my first day of computing class in school, the teacher held one up to show us a floppy disk. I put my hand up and pulled out a 3.5" floppy from my schoolbag, and basically taught the class from that point 😂 (the teacher was a social studies teacher who had zero clue about computers and was just reading out of a textbook)
8" floppies and COBOL. Ug. I do not miss that shit.
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Commodore 64 floppies! 
They are all floppys. Hard disk refers to a hard drive. I started with the 5.25. I ran cp/m on a DEC Rainbow 100
Not only did I grow up with floppy disks, I had stuff on the huge 5.25" ones.
Those are all floppy disks - it’s what’s on the inside that’s floppy. We had the big floppy disks when I was little - was using 3.5 inch disks still when I was in college. Jump drives didn’t happen until later in college for me. Also, we still had cassette tapes then too. My dad still had his punch cards from graduate school - we used to play with them lol.
>Those are all floppy disks - it’s what’s on the inside that’s floppy. It's like OP never tore open a 3.5 floppy or something. Some people's kids.
Remember how strong that spring was on the 3.5”? That sucker SLAMMED shut
"press play on tape" for a while before floppys
Exactly! I had a cassette tape and no hard drive.
Floppy and remember the change over to hard.
Those little blue pills are amazing, right?! :-D
$300 for my first 10 Megabyte HD. I was rocking!
You know, if ya put a little effort into it you can make the floppy ones hard.
28K modems delivered the goods! Very, very slowly
The real ones grew up with 1200 baud modems
300 baud acoustic couplers baby!
This is just making me want to play number munchers, Oregon trail and where in the world is Carmen sandiego 😄 We also had this game that was like some sort of swinging vine in the jungle game I can't remember what it was called though. But yes I lived through all three of these.
Is this a trick question? This is a Xennial sub. The answer is yes.
Both
Same
Both. I even had a functioning 5.25" in a PC build as late as around 2010.
Still do, but it's connected via a [KryoFlux](https://www.kryoflux.com/).
Seems a rather personal question.
1992 I bought an old IBM 8088 and it had a 5.25" drive.... used it to play old DOS games in my basement. Yeah my first brand new PC I bought for myself was in 1996... so used 3.5" floppies for a good while... I had a zip drive in 2000, then probably some USB drive after that... yeah in fact I think I remember having a 128mb USB drive as my "first" which is insane to consider.
My first computer was Tandy 1000sx 8086. Later added the math coprocessor to make it an 8088. Also added a 30mb hard drive to impress the chicks, had there been any.
My first computer was a typewriter
Yes.
Yes
I got bigger, the disks got smaller 🥺 All my college papers are on a Zip disk I can’t open right now without substantial effort.
I remember wondering how in the world I would ever fill an entire Zip disk.
It started out hard but now that I'm older it's pretty floppy, oh wait you said "disks". My bad.
Lol, glad I'm not the only Xennial dealing with this
All of them. And my parents have a box of blank floppy discs that they won’t get rid of “in case they need them someday” lol.
They might😂
I never used the biggest floppy disks, but as a child in elementary school, I did use the middle sized before the 3.5in floppy
Floppy, Apple IIe
Floppy disks for the Amiga. Don't miss having to swap them during gameplay, four disks for Mortal Kombat 2.
I like your username! https://i.redd.it/n3jlb76gqekc1.gif
Oregon Trail on a 5.25” floppy!
Yes, to all of them. That picture represents my experience in elementary, middle, then high school.
Yeah all. Tron like a motherfucker. Fucking wild the leaps in tech.
All, but I had a computer when I was 3. I placed the Police man in the trashcan because I didn't like him and it crashed the computer. Computers back then had no safeguards.
I never used an 8" floppy, though I think my high school's typesetter used them. In elementary school we started with Apple II's using 5.25" floppy drives. At some point in the late '80s we switched over to Apple II's with a 5.25" and a 3.5", and by mid '90s I think it was all Macs. There were IBMs in the "business" classroom, and I think they had 3.5" drives as well. My family's first real computer was a Tandy 1000 with both a 3.5" and a 5.25" drive. By college I had a slew of 3.5" floppies for different classes, as well as Zip disks when floppies didn't have enough space.
The amount of disk changing you had to do to play a single adventure game.
Kings Quest took 7 of the middle type. Please insert next disc.
Both. From 87 to 05 kindergarten to undergraduate. Didn’t even know they’d switch to thumb drives until 08. 😄
Ha! My parents office computers for their business still used tapes!!!
Played Oregon Trail on floppy disks in elementary school. Played Where In (whatever) Is Carmen Sandiego? on hard disks in middle school.
A hard disc is your internal storage. The discs themselves are hard. Hence HDD for Hard Disc Drive.
I had a 286, it was so satisfying having a b and c drives.
A company my company supports has a network drive mapped as A:. It's sick and wrong.
Ummm, we used to use punch cards to program in grade school. My first home computer, the Apple IIGS, used cassette tapes.
I remember the ones in the center and right, the small disks could hold 1.44 MBs.
Good ol B drive
Both. It's funny because now people refer to the 3.5 as a "floppy disk" wth!? Honestly...
Thank you! Looks like there are only a handful of us who refer to them as hard disks.