I don't think there any modern tech modern that can induce the stomach-turning horror of hearing hearing the pitiful, repetitive grinding of the floppy drive motor that presaged a "Cyclic Redundancy Check error"

Does the hard drive click of death count?

it comes close, but it's not as visceral to me. I guess it doesn't happen often to me, and considering how cheap storage has become, I can always download what was on the HDD or recover from backups. The data I had on floppy disks were more often than not, the only copy I had access to.

I once had a CD shatter inside the drive, followed by sounding like a cross between an angle grinder against metal and a blender full of rocks. It was hideous.

The CD drive repeatedly spinning up and down, then heading the head repeatedly seek to the same place.

I once had to install a Unix system that came on over 90 floppies... and failed about two before the end :-(

CD-ROM was a thing though by then

Not always - especially on laptops

I bet a sealed 38 floppy edition of Windows 98, in mint condition, would go for a million USD.

I wonder if you could build a modern-ish browser on Windows 98 and use it as a minimalist daily driver? Give me a modern browser, bash shell (perhaps an old version of cygwin?), and a decent text editor and I probably could for the most part. I'd have to really get in the '90s spirit and break out the cassette deck though because running an obese Electron app like Tidal would probably be difficult.

I guess you're limited to 3.5 GB of memory too what with Windows 98 being a 32-bit operating system which might be a pain, and perhaps a bigger problem is that no drivers have been written for a couple of decades.

IIRC Windows 9x could address only up to 1 GB of RAM. If you had more memory, you had to use the NT family to use it.

What’ll ya give me for an unopened copy of Win 3.1 on 5.25s?

How much do you need to keep it in its current state? :)

You can get Windows 95 on 15 discs on eBay here for £50.

I’m only seeing one sealed Windows 95 floppy retail box on eBay at the moment, and even though it’s sealed it looks to be in poor condition. Plus I am skeptical that it’s even the original sealing. Could have been resealed. And they want about $200 for it plus shipping.

Nah, but maybe if you take a picture of it and sell it as NFT!