The Floppy Disk: Out of Retirement for One Day

This semester I’m taking Intro. to Software Development and it’s pretty fun.  It’s also tedious and stressful at times, but that’s not important.  Basically, the class is divided into teams of two, and instructed to build and program a 2-wheel-driven Lego robot.

That all sounds fine and good, and it was.  We had completed our first real programming assignment and even accumulated a sizable chunk of extra credit.  It was a good day, except for one small problem.  Each team member must submit their team’s source code file to the project drop-box online; and I didn’t have it.  I had an early revision saved, but my partner had the final version—from which our hard copy was printed and that actually ran the robot.  Of course, that day I was plenty busy and I didn’t get to submitting my files online until late in the evening, much too late to remedy my situation.  Instead of a glorious %130, I took a zero.  $^@%!

What I realized later is that I need a better, faster, method of transferring our work between the two of us.  At first, there’s only one file containing our source code, since we do our coding on one machine.  Except, we both need it to turn in later.  We have been using USB flash drives to make copies, but they’re kind of a pain.  First I have to plug it in.  Then, Windows searches for a driver.  After the driver is loaded, the file-system is mounted.  Do you see what I’m getting at?  This process takes too much of my time!  And when I want to remove the drive and go on my merry way, I have to waste more time safely ejecting the media, because that properly unmounts the filesystem.  If not, I could risk losing files due to read/write caching.  (As in, not everything may be written to the drive yet—I’ll get back to this.)

Enter the floppy disk—a throwback to the ‘90s, before WiFi, before iPhones, and when America Online was all the rage (I guess)—it’s a deprecated data storage device that’s flat, about three and a half inches squared, and covered with plastic.  It doesn’t hold much data by today’s standards—a little less than a megabyte and a half—but it works.  I used a floppy in my high school computers classes and didn’t run out of space, because written documents don’t occupy very much.  Also, it performs quite well for one important task: I can eject that thing from its drive on one computer and insert it into another SO FAST!  And I can do that because Windows doesn’t perform any write caching for a floppy disk.  There is no “Safely Remove Hardware” thingy to click on.  After the read/write light on the front goes off...IT’S DONE!

But the best part of this story is that I still have that same disk from high school in a pocket in my backpack!  So, last week—Tuesday the 15th, to be precise—when I needed to save my work, I pulled the old floppy out of my backpack and put it to use.  For the first time in about three years, I heard the ker-chunk inserting it into the drive, the whispering of the rotating media, the deep hum of control motors.  I was feeling nostalgic, playful, and maybe even a bit foolish when my partner looked at me with a perplexed smirk and said, “Is that a floppy disk?”

Yes it was.

And later, when I went to the computer lab to complete the last bit of the assignment and submit it, my fiancée had a similarly curious smile on her face when I pulled out the trusty floppy.  Then, tragedy struck—the drive in the lab computer I was at wasn’t working and I needed to relocate to another.  Thus, the Achilles' heel of the venerable floppy disk.  Their drives aren’t as reliable anymore.  I guess they just don’t make’em like they used to.

They really don’t.  Somewhere I have a few 15+ year old disk drives that are still rock-solid.  So, while I think the idea of using a floppy disk to save my work was inspired, it’s gone back into retirement.  But don't worry, now I’m almost neurotic about getting my copy of the darn source code.

Christmas Lights!

Saturday, I went on an adventure.  My fiancée and I drove to UNR and walked around campus.  But it was not an ordinary walk.  I was on a mission to find a most wonderful (for nerdy guys like me) place.  A place where, supposedly, unneeded used or sometimes new surplus electronic components are discarded.  So, I was possibly going dumpster diving.  There were two locations I was instructed to find.  One inside, probably in the basement of the engineering building, and the other an outside location near a “fenced area.”

Unfortunately, I didn't find both places.  I only found the dumpster outside, and it didn't contain what I was expecting.  Mostly it was full of larger equipment, beat up and weathered.  We saw parts of an old x-ray machine.  I did find something exciting, though—Christmas lights.  Silver and blue Christmas lights in a large bag, there were probably a couple thousand of them.  I pulled one strand in nearly-new condition and a second for spare bulbs.  But wait, there's more—an old chair.  “Who would throw away a perfectly good chair?” I thought.  My fiancée really liked the little chair, so we brought it home too.  But the chair is cursed.  It sheds this awful yellow powder everywhere.  I suspect the powder is crumbling foam, hardened over eons, from the cushion inside.  And that might be why someone was throwing it away.  So, we're not sure what to do with it.  We might get rid of it; we haven't decided.  It was a fun day.