It just occurred to me that younger developers may not see the whole joke here…
For those unaware, a magnet would corrupt/destroy the contents on the floppy disk.
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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First thing i thought of, but yeah, most devs today have never held a disk like that.
Why do i always gets so extreamly nostalgic every time something from the 80s and 90s are posted... I guess everyone is like that, stuff from their childhood remains loved.
I think also because it was a fresh field, nobody knew IT so it was exciting. It was like a small interest, similar to collecting stamps or something.
I use my old floppys as coasters!
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Ive never used a flippy disk but i did get the joke. Its silly and straight forward enough that im tempted to make one for my house lmao
A lot of older data storage was very magnet sensitive, so it wasnt too hard to figure out
For the younger generation it might be a philosophical experience, because that is, The Icon of Saving!
The Icon of Saving!
Sounds like something worth questing for! (Ethereal choir singing)
I was informed everything was stored on the cloud. Why would we need these things called "floppy disks" (which don't like floppy at all)?
/s just in case
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We ed at y, sky and is a bad of is a. A it above d :(
I thought I was having a stroke lol, didn't even see the other magnets at first
Which is exactly what you'd read out of the floppy disk
Totally dude!
I am old enough to understand this joke. Sigh.
Which of your joints pops the loudest?
My whole body just sounds like Chester Thompson x Phil Collins as I walk around
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Do I miss the read/write speed? No. Do I miss the capacity? No.
...But I sure DO miss storage media that makes a satisfying "Kachunk" when loaded, and could be forcefully ejected like a spent artillery casing.
I've seen a few projects that stuff a bunch of flash memory into a floppy for crazy storage capacity, which is pretty cool. Maintains that nostalgia and commands much more respect than one of those ridiculously tiny little USBs that's easy to lose! :p
…But I sure DO miss storage media that makes a satisfying “Kachunk” when loaded, and could be forcefully ejected like a spent artillery casing.
Older computers just have a nice mechanical ambiance that newer machines don't replicate quite as well.
I don't miss having the time to go make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the computer to turn on, or having the monitor scream the entire time it's on, but I do miss hearing the hard drive spin-up, and all the POST beeps and drive stepper noises when the computer's booting up.
Floppy disks were a human size. When we need removable media now, it's either a microSD card, which are so tiny there's no way to label them, and thumb drives, which...USB-A is irritating.
I miss those "giant" zip disks that lasted like 5 years as a storage media. They were between 3.5 floppies and burnable CD Roms.
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"System disk erase, Restore do not"
Don't dead, open inside
It's that you, Yoda?
Restore, or do not restore. There is no backup
Is this a magnet you can buy? That would be a cool little gift
Finding the magnet is easy, but finding the save icon could be tricky.
I feel old now. I can almost hear the noise of the drive trying to chew on this one.
Anyway, have some on-theme music video: BAD SECTOR by unfa (youtube.com)
Today, I noticed that my glasses case sticks to my work laptop like a magnet.
I played around with it for a few seconds, then the thought struck me, that it might be my glasses case that's magnetic, and I might be fucking up the electronics or the HDD or something by holding it close to my laptop. Pulled away real quick then. 😅
I did try with my keys later, and well, turns out that it's my work laptop that's magnetic, so I guess, I wasn't fucking anything up after all...
That's probably integrated speakers. Those can have quite powerful magnets. If it has old spinny hard drives, those have magnets, too. Sometimes the lid also has a magnet if there is a hall effect sensor for detecting if it's closed.
Usually it's hard to find a magnet that'd be strong enough to make electronics inside a laptop malfunction without breaking the case open. Your regular fridge magnets are too weak for that kind of application, so are the ones usually found in glasses cases. And if you happen to be an owner of a chonky magnet, you probably already know the thing is dangerous.
Some laptops use magnets to help the lid snap closed. I took the back off an old Lenovo and could see the magnets clipped inside.
Or magnets for hall effect sensors to tell when the lid is closed.
Ah yeah, that seems to be it. When I drop my keys in the right place, it goes into suspend. If I lift them back off afterwards, it wakes back up.
Neat. 🙃
I'd give it a 50 chance of still working. Those old ferrite magnets had relatively-weak spread-out fields. It obv would have affected the whole platter, but the drives/software were pretty good at dealing with weak signals. We had disks, we had magnets and some of us were youngish and bored. you had to be a little persistent to even fuck the disk up a little.
Now, you place a running AC box fan's motor right up to the drive, i'll corrupt the f out of the disk, i did that before.
this is art
weed at y sky & is a bad of is a
Honey i found that disk you were desperatly looking for.
With 5¼" disks, it was more convenient to keep them in a ring binder by punching holes in them.
The other similar story I've heard is someone asking for the backup copy of a disk and being handed a photocopy.
Imagine, if you will, the person who is wise to the effect on a floppy disk, but uses a CD instead (Or DVD). They use it a few times but then it too stops working. Why?
Answer:
Repeated clamping between the fridge and the magnet scratches or destroys enough of the metal layer, which is on the label side, to the point that the disc becomes unreadable.
There's also that leaving a disc out in daylight for long enough can destroy its readability, especially if it's a user-written (burned) disc.
What kind of system are you backing up on a single 1.44 mb disk? I guess “restore” just had the restore utilities.
You could boot an old pc from floppy like what later would be called a live CD. Though you were constantly switching disks. Like if you ever played Monkey Island on 5.25” floppies.
Older PCs couldn't always boot from CD. In those cases, you needed a boot disk. It had just enough OS to get the cd drive working and allow for a full install. They also allowed for basic repair or maintenance tasks e.g. resizing the windows partition.
Veterans kept a couple about at home. Nothing like the catch 22. "I need a boot disk to fix my PC/I need my PC to make a boot disk."
A lot of terraform and docker compose files could fit on a floppy still.
Actually, that might be a fun thing to play with. It might not have data. But you could back up a good amount of config and deployment information and have a system to restore data to.
I believe it's a practical joke and there isn't actually anything important on that drive.
Not anymore!
When the OS is DOS you can easily fit the entire thing on a floppy.
Mac OS system 6 too, I think.
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The real question is where are the people in that picture now?
Behind you.
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