You kids! It’s called a floppy drive. Back in the day, not even the drives were rigid.

When working on the bleeding edge, it's necessary to be flexible, no matter the era.

This is the best comment here

Always amazes me that people find it necessary to downvote a comment like this

If you prefer a low effort / high noise comment environment that rewards puns, there's always Reddit

HN is not immune to this phenomenon. It just has its own versions.

For what it's worth, I upvoted you. The points are free. Why be stingy?

the 5 1/4" ones were all floppy!

The disc inside is, but I'm not sure the disk as a whole is soft enough to qualify? The casing is definitely not as solid as the 3.5" or 3" ones, but it doesn't exactly flop even if held by a corner. Even folding one in half isn't especially easy.

they were totally soft, you could make a cylinder out of them and after releasing them - they got back in the original state.

"Soft", that's arguable, though I might allow it. But "floppy"? I claim not!

If you hold a 5.25" diskette at the edge, then shake/jerk your hand up and down, it resembles doggy floppy ears.

3” discs could take an eye out.

As were the 8" hard sectored diskettes. Don't forget the write-protect notch.

> Don't forget the write-protect notch.

And don't forget you can notch each side for double the storage!

May not be a great idea: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15189#p204...

```just a word of warning, copy everything off them [commercially-available flippable 5.25" BBC Micro disks] quick, as the 'side2' goes backwards to the cotton cloth cleaner inside the 5 1/4" case, so basically all the crap caught in it then end up coming out when playing other flip side :('''

(No idea how common this phenomenon might have been! - I've always had double-sided drives, so I've always used the other side of the disk in the normal fashion.)

The 1st thing you do on apple II diskettes (5.25") was using a scissors to allow the other side to be writable as well. No exceptions (alternatively you just break the plastic switch that tells if there is copy-write protection, on the floppy driver, itself)

I have taken the floppy out of the sleeves to dry them out as the entirety of my collection fell in the aquarium.

Write protect == hole punch

Writable == tape

Find me someone who used 5.25 who didn’t do this and I’ll fight you.

I punched holes in the corners of my 5.25" disks and kept them in a ring binder.

Then there were things like fdformat ... because software had a very close relationship with the hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2M_(DOS)

My first boss out of college had a side job maintaining check encoding machines for a local bank (imagine a room full of these machines, staffed by people who were glad not to be working in a warehouse anymore, who spent their hours typing in the dollar amounts people had scribbled on the paper checks they had written to the supermarket, carwash, dry cleaners, etc.)

These machines ran off a program that was stored on 8" floppies. All the workers had been told to NEVER EVER touch the floppies. Well one night, a disk went bad and had to be replaced. To the horror of the operator, my boss ripped the magnetic media out through the spindle hole, looked at it closely, and proclaimed "Yep. It's bad"

Ah, an obscure catch! Most of the 8" floppies were soft-sectored though I believe the original ones were hard sectored. I only once ever used a hard-sector drive + media.

Yeah I actually had a couple machines that used them. One was an Altos something like this http://www.vintage-computer.com/altos8000acs.shtml and the other was some single cabinet scientific job. I forget if the hard-sectored disks would work in a soft-sectored drive or not; perhaps it would just ignore the holes.

Is that the right term, "sleeve"? I always thought of the "sleeve" on my 5.25" floppies as being the tyvek/paper thingie you stuck the floppy disk inside for safekeeping (ultimately putting both in a case/cabinet - which I still have several).

Maybe the thing I thought of as a "sleeve" (analogous to a album "sleeve") is actually called something else (maybe an "envelope"?) - I never really gave it thought until now, honestly.

The white stuff is the liner.

I picked up a 5 1/4" floppy without the sleeve that was on the side of the road 20 years ago, sliced open another disc sleeve that had bad sectors and replaced it with the found disc. I still had a working XT at the time.

It had The Black Cauldron, PC Jr bootable version on it.

Nice. One time, I brought home a 3.5" disk from elementary school with a copy of Commander Keen 5 on it - the paid one that was so hard to get for a kid with no money and no modem. I somehow managed to leave it on the driveway near the car, overnight, inside of a faux leather wallets of sorts.

It snowed. It was the winter break, so there was no going back to school to see the other kid who had made the copy for me, not for 2 weeks. This was supposed to be my fun game for the break....

So, I carefully opened the disk, set it to dry over the heating vent, put it back together, and with the help of Norton Utilities 5.0's Disk Doctor, I got a mostly playable copy out of it. Absolutely amazing.