At the moment I do not have internet access at my apartment. This is something that has slowed me down for the last 6 months. Every resource I need is online which means I have to go to my technical school or someplace else to access the internet. Lucky for me I have flash drives with portable applications.

There are so many sites I visit on a regular basis it’s hard to keep track of them all. So, yesterday I decided to make myself a list of my favorite web sites. At first I was just using a plain text file. Once I had a list I thought it would be much easier to use if I turned it into an HTML file and made my list into links. So, I spent about 3 minutes dropping in all the code and even adding some CSS to make it look a bit different. Once I was done I saved it to my 4GB flash drive without thinking.

I was planning on giving this HTML file to a friend of mine at school. While I was looking through one of my stacks of DVD-R backups a floppy disk fell from its hiding place on the shelf next to one of the spindle cases. I must have put it there when I moved in and forgotten all about it. I pick up this little 1.33MB relic and wondered what might be on it. I popped it into my ancient floppy drive which was originally in a very old Windows system. It made that old familiar grinding noise and then it spat out an error message saying it couldn’t read the disk. I removed the disk and replaced it in the drive. I double clicked the A drive and presto it opened up to showed me some old text files. Nothing worth keeping so I tried to format the floppy. All the while wondering what I might be able to use this thing for. Like rediscovering a tiny box and trying to think of what might fit inside it.

Another error message saying it couldn’t format the disk popped up. I closed it and tried again. This time it worked. “Hey, my Links HTML file is only 4KB I’m sure it will fit on this floppy. “ I said to myself with a bit of excitement. Maybe floppies might be useful for trading text and HTML files. Since I work with those kinds of files, using floppies would give me a quick way to hand my files to people.

Normally I have to plug in one of my flash drives and transfer the file to the desktop. The other person uses their flash drive to save it or I email it to them. It’s kind of a pain because of the way the some of the computers at my school are setup.

Now I had a 3.5 floppy disk with an HTML of all my favorite links. I took it to my school and handed it to my friend. He looked at me like I had just handed him a dead rodent of some kind. “What is this?” he eyed it warily. “It’s a list of my favorite links in HTML format. I think you’ll like it.” I said, proud of my work and the ingenious reuse of old technology. “Sounds cool”, he said with a strange tone in his voice. “However, I don’t have a floppy drive on my MacBook Pro or any of my home systems. I haven’t needed to use floppies for years.” In that moment it was clear that the floppy has become extinct. Like the dinosaurs before them the majestic floppies will be dropped in landfills to transform into oil millions of years from now. They were useful and necessary in their time but now they are little more than useless square bits of plastic.

Luck for me I did put a copy of my links HTML on my flash drive. I decided to log into my email to send my friend a copy of the file with a small note saying, “Floppies Are Dead”.