2003

I would have used a USB drive; I owned one back then. But I needed something that would work with the school's computers. This was back when most mice and keyboards were still PS/2 and most printers were parallel, so USB wasn't on every computer yet. At least, not at the school I went to.

The save icon in so many programs are still floppy disks. So technically, I still use floppy disks pretty much daily. 😆

Early 2000s, saving patches on a Korg Triton.

About a month ago. Found a copy of railroad tycoon on a 5 1/4" in an abandoned building and wanted to see if it still worked.

It did not

Last year. Restoring an old Compaq notebookike one I had as a child. I bought it out of the back of a van at Vintage Computer Fest Midwest.

Never

I cannot remember but I'd have to guess probably 20-25 years ago.

A couple of months ago to see the solar eclipse...
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Don't fucking judge me =_=

Couple of months ago at work. While digging through mountains of old IT stuff I found some archival floppy disks. I was curious about what was on them so I found the usb floppy drive in my box of junk inherited from the previous IT Guy and booted one up.

Found an excel file with a list of names for who to call in an emergency.

2019, I wanted to put an OS with color on an ancient laptop that was running black-and-white windows 95 despite having rgb capable hardware. Pretty impressive how anyone was able to do anything with only 1.44MB of space per disk

Legitimately? Never. For fun? A few years ago. I have a C64 and a C128 that uses 5.25 floppies and then an Atari Mega ST that uses 3.5s that I mess with just to mess with.

gotta be when Seattle's Living Computer Museum was still open several years ago. I played some commodore 64 games there off of floppy disks.

Has to be at least 15 years. Probably 20 or more.

I still have a few floppies somewhere around here, but haven't had a drive that can read them since I donated an ancient laptop to a friend of a relative.

I don't feel like splashing out £12 for a USB floppy drive right now.

Other people mention 5¼" floppies for old 8-bit computers, and I suppose I do have my old computer and drive packed away somewhere, but I haven't touched any of that in over 20 too. I'd be surprised if any of that still works and I'm kind of afraid to find out for sure.

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't own a 1541 until early 2009. I was a cassette lamer.

So for Easter 2008 I have handed in a commodore 64 executable music entry on cassette at breakpoint. I think they were the last to require entries to be submitted on physical media.

In the years after I still used a lot of 5.25" and 3.5" on my c64, Amiga and Atari.

Today I have a turbo chameleon 64, a c64 ultimate and a gotek drive on my Amiga. I don't miss diskettes.

As for USB drives. I got one for Christmas 2001. It had a whopping 32mb of storage and required proprietary drivers to mount.

I haven't used a floppy since high school. I graduated in 2003. And it would have had to have been even earlier than that, because my PC by senior year didn't even have a diskette drive.

Two weeks ago. I have my reasons.

Sometime around 2010, was working as a low level IT tech and a local dry cleaners POS system wouldn't load. Had to replace some corrupted .exe files on their dos machine from a floppy I found in the cobwebs. Took me back in time for sure.

I don't remember for sure, but I'd guess late 90s at the latest, for smaller files where it wouldn't make sense to burn a CD-R and uploading it somewhere (especially since I didn't have a CD-RW until later) and downloading it wasn't a viable option.

With most data transfer to friends being via BBS or later IRC DCC over the Internet, and software becoming available on CDROM, and Zip drives for backup, and CD-R and CD-RW becoming available for larger files, the use cases for floppies were already becoming limited by mid-90s.

Three months ago. Found some old 3.5s with school work from back in the day on it I wanted to check out. Got a USB floppy drive to try and get .imgs for them. Sadly most had bad sectors :(

I found a bunch of old floppies from gradeschool, so I picked up a USB drive to archive them. Wild seeing files with modified dates starting in 19xx.

I would guess around 2002 or so when I reinstalled TIE Fighter or Descent for the last time.

Do zip drives count?

Late 90s

3 years ago. But in my defense, they were zip disks so they were a whopping 200MB, not 1.41MB.

This was for a long-time customer who had a safe full of old server towers from their business, and wanted everything backed up before destroying. They were blown away when I got 4 computer's worth of data on 1 flash drive, and kept asking if I'm sure I got everything lol.

I told them despite me copying everything off the zip disks, and IDE & PATA HDDs, I still had about half the space available 🤯. They appreciate all the freed up room in the safe, and I appreciate some retro towers to house some killer new hardware for a sleeper (pre RAMpocalypse).

2003 at the latest on the family computer. No exact memory, but I got my own personal computer in 2004.

Probably I played Lemmings, I always returned to that game as a kid.

I cant remember when, early 00s, but it was definitely the Egg Disk for Creatures

I was cleaning today and found a box of them.

I can't remember clearly when the last time was.

But I was trying to boot to a CD and the computer only supported floppies. So I found a chainloader to make that happen.

Fifteen years ago? Maybe a little more? I had old games on them I liked to play. Them no floppy drives. Then no cd drives even. Makes me sad.

For its intended purpose? I can't remember, but I'm sure it is much less than what I imagine.

Never had to use them, i'm not even that sure i even saw one for real

I also got a 512 mb as my first flash drive. Still have it somewhere. Massive.

Used a floppy couple weeks ago for testing on my 1999 gateway solo laptop I use for retrocomputing. I just enjoy the mechanic nature of floppies. Really only good for text and tiny games for me.

Actually using ? For word docs in school 25 years ago.

Write to: 2001 I think? Maybe 2002. I remember using floppy disks at 6th form college but also Zip disks & even CD+R, but switching to email and USB by university.

Reading: 2020 when I last played around with an Amiga 1200 to see if it still worked. It did.

Like 3 months ago, cleaning out some boxes from the basement. If that counts as using them? I loaded them up, copied some files. Wrote files to a few, lol.

Nothing great on any of them. A couple form templates from my dad or uncle's work, some drivers for hardware my uncle used to have. Maybe a couple clipart collections? Or those might have been on CD.

I put a bunch of blank ones out at the yard sale we had, people ended up buying them. /shrug

Before that, if I ignore other similar cleanout/backup situations, I think I used some floppies for school assignments in middle grades.

I think also maybe at some point in between I had tried to use a boot floppy on an old computer to rescue files or install Linux.

Between my dad and I, we'd accumulated several hundred floppies with software, pictures, data, whatever stuff we'd accumulated over the years. I embarked on a big project somewhere around 1998 or so to copy all the contents of the floppies onto my hard drive and sort through it all, and... I just... petered out after a while.

Whatever it seemed like worth saving just really wasn't.

I discovered that's largely true of my Downloads folder. Every so often I go move all the contents to an archive folder, and anything that was in the archive folder gets deleted. I always think "I should keep this around in case I need it!" and whenever I do need it (like a new computer or reinstalling the OS or whatever), I just go grab what I need or install using choco or winget or of course apt for Linux or whatever..... Docs/pics/vids I keep elsewhere, of course, but all that download stuff just adds up to wasted drive space. heh

this is something that I'm too Gen Z to understand?

(Oh thanks for the daily reminder of my youth, I guess... xD)

Can't remember, but I remember when the light went on in my brain about their relationship with hard drives. I opened up a hard drive (which is surprisingly hard to open) just for fun and saw the hard disk (as opposed to a floppy disk inside those paper envelopes) and realized it was called a hard disk or a hard drive because it's hard in contrast with the floppy.