Mitch Gann’s

Sooner or later, you have to move on.

Today I cleaned out my trove of 3.5 inch diskettes — nearly 150 of them. For those of you who grew up with giant hard-drives and CD-ROM/ DVD drives, the “floppy disk” was the way computer files were saved and distributed in the olden days.  I never thought of 3.5 disks as “floppy” myself, though many people called them that. Unlike the 5.25 disks, the smaller ones had a hard-case and did not flop.  The 3.5s that I discarded were a mixture of personal data disks and commercial installation disks — including an unused, plastic-wrapped set of MS-DOS 6.2 installation disks and a used set of Windows 3.1 installation disks, about six disks in each set.

I ran magnets across the personal disks just in case they contained sensitive info.  One of them had a label “Novel 1993.”  I assume I wrote a novel that year — or more likely the first chapter of a novel. Maybe I have a paper copy somewhere.

Those 3.5 disks held between 1.44 and 2.0 MB of data.  So altogether, the 150 disks contained at most 300 MBs — which you could put on a tiny USB thumb drive with room to spare.

I still have a box of a dozen 5.25 floppies, the oldest software and files I own.  I can’t bring myself to toss them out.  One floppy contains another novel, or so the label claims.  The rest are mostly devoted to computer programming.  There is a copy of the legendary Borland Turbo Pascal, circa 1988, the finest and fastest DOS programming compiler ever sold — and for just fifty bucks a copy.  There is a disk labeled “Play Ball” that contains a baseball game I created for my father, and a couple disks with an extensive and specialized record-keeping program I wrote for his business.

Apparently, it’s still possible to hook a 5.25 drive to your computer. You can emulate DOS, too.  I know I won’t ever bother, but I will keep the box in a back corner of my closet, just in case.