I just had a memory. I’m having to format some floppies (yes, the earth just stopped for a moment). I remember being in the 8th, 9th or 10th grade and hanging out at a friend’s house. I’m pretty sure it was Chuck’s house. Chuck later followed me to TN to become my first roommate in college but that’s a different story. On this particular day we were testing the warnings about floppy disks. This was also when a floppy disk was floppy and 5 and 1/4 inches square. I think they only held 760kb unless you were fortunate to afford the nice HD (high density ones) that were 1.4 mb. Remember those expensive disks that that the pretty red raised letters on them? I can almost remember the brand! Oh yeah! The disks held 380kb and the HD ones held 760kb but a wise computer geek would use a hole punch to “double-side” the disks thereby making a LD 760kb and an hd 1.44 amazing megabytes! I remember mail ordering the disks cheap (prior to ecommerce remember) and upselling the things. If memory serves correct the bulk disks started out at 14 cents a disk and eventually worked down to about 2 cents a disk. (I’m probably wrong no those prices).
Anyhow, we tested the warnings. We removed the disk from its protective case (naturally used it in the computer that way and it worked. We rubbed it on our pants and it worked. We wrote on it in pencil and it worked. (Now for my favorite) We poured koolaid on it and it worked. We washed the koolaid off before sticking it back in the computer but in hindsight that was a dumb thing to do. The final killing move was to crease the disk. Folding it in half and unfolding it destroyed the readibility of the floppy disk.
