Why “floppies” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
Survivorship bias. Floppies failed all the time. Flash can be unreliable if you’re talking about the cheapest or abused the wrong way, but flash SSDs handled wisely are much bet…
by scratcheee · Nov 7, 2026
I have absolutely no understanding of ATC systems, though I would’ve thought that having a well established and (I would assume at this point) robust process of using a somewhat…
by jamesbfb · Nov 7, 2026
Of course some will last longer. It's not a cliff, just "not recommended to use for longer than...". But a lot depends on the conditions of storage, how much usage they got, etc…
by viraptor · Nov 7, 2026
My Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked. They were probably k…
by cobbaut · Nov 7, 2026
Me too, and I didn't need to wait 30 years for that. They were corrupted when floppies were still the default.
by cm2187 · Nov 7, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "floppies" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "floppies" over time.
A floppy disk, diskette, or floppy diskette is a type of disk storage made from a thin, flexible disk coated with a magnetic storage medium. It is enclosed in a square or nearly square plastic shell lined with fabric to help remove dust from the spinning disk. Floppy disks store digital data, which can be read or written when inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or built into a computer or other device. The three most popular formats of floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch versions. Read more on Wikipedia