this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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If you've ever installed Microsoft office from floppy disks, you don't what those times back.
I remember downloading games from sketchy Warez sites on the school computers because they had a T1 line and I had dialup. They'd come in Floppy-sized segments; I'd go home each day with a stack of 10-15 floppies, copy the segment to my drive, delete it from the disk, and go back the next day to collect more. It would take weeks to get a whole game, and that's only if the warez site didn't disappear before I finished collecting parts. Then there was the butt clencher moment when I'd try to unpack the whole thing and see if it actually worked or not which, most of the time, it did not.
Those were the days.
CRC ERROR. CHECK ARCHIVE AND TRY AGAIN.
ah man I remember unzipping 50 part rar files only to find another 50 part zip files inside. All because of some IRC file size limit or something.
I bought a first gen zip drive for home because the school had one PC with one and I wanted to avoid the floppy fest lmao.
The only thing i want back from floppy disks is the form factor
We've already got the technology to remake them as SSDs too. SATA drives are small and light enough, and eSATA is removable, possibly hot swappable. We've been able to eject optical discs with software for decades. A physically small drive inside a floppy shaped caddy wouldn't take much work, and could be much faster than flash memory based drives.
I don't know enough about nvme drives, but they could be even better again :)
NVME drives are already very thin, probably you can remove the shell and put them inside a floppy one...i want a floppy SSD so bad now
I recently bought 20 floppies from diskduper and man they are fun to hold, very tactile. Much lighter than I remembered too.
One bad disk or error on your part going through an 8 disk install… yeah. But we went from tape drives to 5 1/4” to 3 1/2” to the phenomenal speeds of a 32x CDRW drive. Nothing beat a CD install. I don’t even bat an eye at 30GB game update download anymore, you could fit an amazing game on 1-4 CDs and watching it install was more exciting than waiting for these massive game DLs we have today.
I remember installing Half-life 2 off of 5 CDs, while wondering what the fuck this "Steam" shit was and why I needed it in order to play.
Ugh, never. But installing the OS ... also ugh
Windows 3.1 was only about 10 floppies with DOS being about four. But Office was about 40.
I recall a Win95 installation involving on the order of 20 diskettes.
I never purchased or manually installed MicroSlop Office prior to the advent of fully administrated local area networks, so from such specific pain I was spared
I already had my first CD-ROM drive (so futuristic!) when 95 came out. But I did install Office on Win3.1 from floppies. Soon after that I switched to OpenOffice and haven't used commercial software (other than the Windows that came with the PC) ever since.
I could be wrong, but I think I bought (or rather, my parents bought) my first CD-ROM drive for installing Windows 95. I think that might have been the very first disc I put in the drive.
I had the CD-ROM drive running with 3.1. But they only really became mainstream after 95 came out.
I think Slackware dwarfed even Office on floppy count, but it may have depended on which modules you needed.
I've had the pleasure of installing Windows 95 and Slackware from floppy and I can't say I miss that part.
I also have a box just like the one in the picture sitting in my drawer right now. With floppies. One of them has Netscape on it. I really should clean some day.
While I disagree for the most part, that's just me being super cynical because of how super shitty things are right now. Also, I feel like there was a vanishing small window of time that MS Office way the go to suite and you didn't use a CD for installation. My copy of Office 97 came on CD and Word Perfect was still very popular then.
I remember getting an error on the 8th disk and crying with a bricked system