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Check out the Q&A from the last week or so. There is someone in there doing development in MS-DOS and can't seem to be able to find various pieces of software that will work with it. Apparently he found a functional floppy disk drive though.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Rick York wrote: Apparently he found a functional floppy disk drive though.
My last 2 or 3 motherboards lacked a floppy drive connector, so I couldn't install a non-USB drive if I wanted to. First time it happened I was disappointed -- I had a floppy drive that included a 8-in-1 card reader (drive had USB cable as well as EIDE), and I wanted to install it for the card reader. But stick-type SD-card readers are so common these days -- I have 5 or 6 sitting on my desk at home.
I have an unopened box of 3.5" floppy disks on my desk -- found it in the back of a supply cabinet. It's a novelty.
It's bizarre to think of 1.44 MB of storage compared to the the idea that 16 to 64 GB flash drives are so inexpensive.
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Very true. I have lots and lots of files that one fit on a floppy. They are virtually useless today.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Also, an autorun.inf file on a CD.
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What is this newfangled "CD" of which you speak? Is it anything like a 5¼" floppy? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: 5¼" floppy
Huh! Nothing! Back in my days, we used 8" floppy disks! AND we had cold gravel for dinner! 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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Never argue with a fool. Onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
Mark Twain
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Luxury! We used to dream of having cold gravel for dinner!
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Yea, well, that's nothin'. Back in my day, before the 1 was discovered, we had to write all our programs using only 0s!! 
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Ah, the original Ghost script.
👻 000000000000000! 👻
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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WRONG ! I'm so old, we learned to program using 0 and lower case l's. None of your fancy 1's for us. Too easy.
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in 83 I had a cpm system running at 4Mhz with an 8" floppy, But also a 10 MEGA BYTE external hard drive, with removable platters. Luxury.
The rest of the system was crap.
Filled up my car if I took it home to work.
Ah. The good old days.
ASM all the way.
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Floppy? I had a teletype with punched tape.
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We had three teletypes in high school. Connected to a PDP-8 and PDP-12 at the university across town via acoustic coupler. One day someone dumped the hopper full of the holes from the punched tape all over the floor.
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When one of my friends married, we used stuff as a replacement for rice. (The groom was also a computer guy.)
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That wasn't a good idea. Those little paper discs were actually quite dangerous.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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I guess the rice could be said to be dangerous as well.
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I learned my first BASIC using one of those - located in the school's bomb shelter: Huge room with concrete walls, floor and ceiling. Just the right acoustics for a TTY!
Down in my basement, I have still got a few of those paper tapes.
(I also got a small pile of punch cards. As well as a core dump, in the physical sense: A frame with 1152 ferrite rings weaved together. I have no idea about the contents of those 1152 bits.)
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I started that way -- with punched tape, a teletype and remote GE time-share system using some flavor of BASIC.
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Part of my first job - machine code programming a DEC LSI-11 (4K core memory + 16k RAM) to control a tomographic medical scanner and reconstruct the images (using de-convolution and back-projection). Teletype was only for development - working machine just had the core memory.
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Been there, done that 
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Punch tape? You were lucky; we started with punched cards and a manual punch. We progressed to a 12 hole punch with numeric keys, where you could press multiple keys at once, and it automatically moved the card on one column. pic[^] Before that, we'd literally used a jig that held the card securely while you poked a square pokey-thing through the card over a cut-out behind; once you'd done all the holes for that column, you moved the card along by pressing a separate lever that moved it the right amount.
As for ancient enough to understand the autoexec.bat joke, yes... but not to find it funny!
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My first PC had 16K of memory and used a audio-cassette player for storage.
At least it was better than what the Navy had. Discrete component processers where the CPU weighed 60 pounds.
Now those where the good old days when booting a computer meant kicking the side with your foot to settle the cards in place.
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When I started I was hanging out with Lady Lovelace, or was it Linda...
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Are you sure you're not thinking of Mark Felt[^]? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Geee ... Linda, I haven't heard a word from her for more than 25 years. I had almost forgotten her completely.
Or for that sake, that Lovelace girl. She's been quiet for a number of years as well.
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