this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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And a few of them weren't AOL.
Prior to CDs, AOL shipped 3.5" microfloppies. These sometimes got erased and used as free storage.
kagis
Apparently people are still selling them, decades later. Honestly, I don't even know if, in 2025, you can read a 3.5" microfloppy that was last written in the 1990s.
kagis
https://www.arcserve.com/blog/data-storage-lifespans-how-long-will-media-really-last
I'm kind of surprised that I'm not turning up harder information on longevity, but that sounds plausible to me. Note that they aren't mentioning the capacity that the disk was initialized for
it was possible to, given a drive and disk that supported a higher capacity, to initialize for lower capacity. I don't know if doing that might extend longevity. But I'd be a little skeptical that the actual contents of the disk are readable today.
I've never heard anyone call 3.5" discs, microfloppies. They are just floppies, despite not being the original size or even floppy anymore.
Get off my lawn, whippersnappers. shakes fist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk
My gf calls me a 3.5" microfloppy :/
Yea, but that's warranted.
Duh, everyone knows they’re called save icons.