Nothing says Christmas like old floppy disk covers
It’s always an adventure to find out what packing material is used in sending an item won on eBay. In this case, the item was a Christmas present and the packing material was… crumpled-up 5.25″ floppy disk sleeves.
Here’s a sampling:
I’m amazed by the variety of floppy disk brand names the eBay seller decided to include: 3M, Broderbund, Sony, Fuji Film, Electronic Arts, IBM, and a few others. All familiar brands even today.
For those who don’t remember (or aren’t old enough to remember), 5.25″ floppy disks (or diskettes) held around 360k of data. Today, that’s about enough for a couple of low-res photos or maybe a short song clip. Years ago, 360k was all you needed for a brand new copy of Lotus 123. And yes, floppy disks were actually floppy.
The best part is the how-not-to-kill-your-floppy-disk series of pictures on the back of each one:
And yes, the eBay item arrived safe and sound. Since the sleeves are made of some kind of magic paper that can’t be torn, they did a nice job at protecting it.
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What a great way to recycle something that has lost all of its original usefulness! And it brings back memories as well.
Ricky, you have to find a new way to reuse them.
Sorry, I already reused them right into the garbage. I wonder where all of the disks are that were inside these sleeves. Or did the eBay seller simply have a surplus of sleeves.
Definitely no surplus! I found this post while trying to find a place to buy extra sleeves for the ones that have disappeared from my collection of commodore 64 disks. They’re like socks in the dryer – you put in two and only one comes out.