3.5" floppy disks were peak tactile feedback in storage: easy to stick in, drives had a button to immediately eject them, big enough to get labels, thin enough that stacks didn't take too much space

"didn't take too much space"

Someone never installed an operating system from floppies. Win98 was 38 floppies. Heaven help you if you didn't notice you only have 37 disks until halfway through the install.

A media format with 1.44mb per disk is not conducive to space saving even back in the day.

---

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1q14kyj/playing_with_a_retro_floppy_disk_box/

And a satisfying but not too jarring "thunk" when they seat in correctly. Plus, the activity light let you know it was safe/not safe to hit the eject button.

3.5 disks were my fidget spinners before the term existed. pulling back the slide and letting it snap shut kept my idle brain occupied for hours while waiting for stuff on the computer to happen.

OP they really were. Back in the day when I was a sysadmin I would keep a bunch of tools on a floppy that I would carry around as I did user support.

It was like carrying around a toolbox to work on things.

Growing up, my dad used to download a lot of games off BBSes for me and my brother. He would save them on 3.5 floppies and then label what game was on each one. I've got fond memories of flipping through his box of floppies seeing what new games he had for us to play.

We didn't stack them though. We kept them in those boxes with a pointless lock, and flipped through them.

Not all drives had buttons. There were workstations (Sun Sparcs) which had. motorized eject mechanisms.

Used 10 of these workstations to copy my freshly downloaded Slackware Linux to the stack of 60 floppies it took. (Twice, so I wrote 120 disks, as at least one of the disks would have read errors on average). Each time one of the Sparcs was done, it did spit out the disk and I'd insert a new one, labeling the old one with what was written on screen.

Ah the hours I spent downloading and installing 100-200 Megabytes of operating systems.

Labeling the disks would just be a sequence number, I'd label the disk boxes with the content.

Late 90s memories....

At home, I'd install the os by inserting each of these disks into my PC with16MBytes of RAM.

All that took about a day of work.

You kids don't know how good you have it, we had to fetch out Xfree86 mode lines in a wooden bucket from outside in the snow, barefoot.

The 3.5” disk was designed as a consumer product by Sony, whose industrial design is second to none. (Compare the 5¼ “ and 8” floppies, which were designed by IBM engineers and only intended for use by technical specialists.)

I wish they'd make SSDs in a similar format with plug-and-play functionality.
Stick your disk in and boot from it. Remove after shutdown and take it with you.

For similar reasons, I feel like Gameboy Advanced cartridges were the optimal size for handheld consoles. Switch cartridges are so tiny and fragile.

This and CD caddys. Nothing like spending a full minute swapping out the cd in the caddy, then getting that satisfying chunk when the mechanics kick in.

The labeling was a good thing, and stackability, but otherwise I prefer USB sticks. Tactile, easy to stick in or pull out. Esp. since even an old one replaces thousands of disks. 1GB==711floppies

Zip disks at least the 100’s had the same tactile qualities, little door to fidget and label space all while having that satisfying clicking sound each time you used them.

Not that I don't agree but... I'd take Mini Disc over them. Really similar but smaller -but not to the point of losing tactility or nice labels- and I love the eject mechanism of some players/recorders. Amazing mix of cassette tapes (usability) and CDs (capacity, non-linearity...), kinda late to the party.

UMDs are cool too, thought not as much IMHO.

Certainly better than the 5 1/4" floppies they replaced.

But, installing big programs, like Photoshop, off a stack of 30 or 40 disks was a hassle. Imagine Photoshop fitting in 40 MB, tho.

Didn't take much space, lol I remember the huge cases people used to buy to store them all.

I liked the sound they made. People have been using them to make music for ages. Best is still imperial march played on 48 floppy drives (or thereabouts).

Still remember my friend making a copy of doom 2 for me using pkzip... I think it took about 10 disks.

sad minidisk noises

3.5" were peak tactile feedback

I hear you

5 1/4"'s smell better.

And then the button jams 😞

MicroSD cards fit these requirements too

But many 3.5" disks had end labels that you could read in a stack

• Great for storing half a photo

CDs (and derivatives) have all of these features as well and orders of magnitude more capacity.

I had a cool little leather wallet that held 2 3.5" disks. Felt like a pro every time i flipped it open.

I fail to see how this is better than CDs or DVDs. They had the same advantages you mention here. You can label them. They're super thin and easily stacked, especially with a spindle. They also easily inserted and removed from the drive at the press of a button. All that, and with a way higher storage capacity.

The only advantave a 3.5 floppy had over them was being able to lock the disk from being written to with the little switch on the diskette but also still write to it if you ever needed. With CD/DVD, you needed special disks that could be written to once, or even more special disks to be able to re-write to them. And I do believe they had a limited number of re-writes you could even make.

Oh look! Another nostalgia bullshit from someone who clearly never used a fucking floppy disk.