Bought a $5 box of floppy disks at a yard sale and found someone's unfinished novel from 1993

I was at a yard sale in my neighborhood last Saturday and grabbed a box of 3.5 inch floppy disks for five bucks. Didn't think anything would actually work, but I have an old USB floppy drive I keep around for no good reason. Popped one in and it had like 80 pages of a sci-fi story saved as a WordPerfect file. The formatting was all messed up but I got most of it readable. Has anyone else found random personal stuff on old media like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

robin7776d agoOG Member

Actually 3.5 inch disks are pretty reliable, I've pulled stuff off old ones from the 90s that worked fine. That WordPerfect formatting is always a mess though, I remember dealing with that back in college.

ross.jason6d ago

Yeah, I read something recently about how those 3.5 inch disks actually hold up better than people think because the magnetic coating is more stable than the older 5.25 inch ones. I always had trouble with WordPerfect files too, the formatting would just break completely if you tried to open them in anything else. Still, it's pretty wild that we trusted all our school papers to such tiny little plastic squares.