I Bought 100 Broken Floppy Disks. Here's Why! 

My momma always said "Life is like a box of floppies, you never know what you're gonna get"

Michael MJD: "I Bought 100 Broken Floppy Disks. Here's Why!" Me: I DON'T NEED SLEEP, I NEED ANSWERS

That's a lot of SAVE button action figures!

They're listed as 'broken', but have you tried actually popping any of these into a disk drive to see what happens? I wonder if any of them can be refurbished somehow.

Maybe some of them work. They might be a part of the "we don't want to clean and format them" pile.

If you're going to put them on a wall as a backdrop, consider attaching them to a large picture frame or board. Hot glue works well for that. I'm thinking they could be fun used as a table top, with some clear resin poured over the top. I bet that website has a special whole section of their warehouse just for AOL and CompuServe disks 😉

imagine if some of them actually work lol

I bet those word perfect clipart disks work, I find it hard to believe all 7 disks don't work.

In this quarantine, I find your videos the most interesting dude! Keep it up.

13:28 I ask my friend about this disk sense he is a really big cec fan and he said that it was most likely used to start up the computer to run the animatronics most likely didn’t have a show on it because the shows were stored on vhs/cassette tapes

Man I would love to have that Chuck E. Cheese floppy! That's so cool man.

It’s weird when a technology gets cheaper and lower quality at the end of its life and people remember as being unreliable when it really wasn’t and didn’t have to be

the chuck e cheese floppy disk was used in the studio C show, studio C is the show with just the 1 robot. all the floppy disc was used for was updating the robots movements. once that was installed it was removed. The show then ran on 2 dvd players. one was for video and audio, the other dvd was for the light show and the movement of the robot for the show.

I always forget how elegant of a design floppy disks had and there was something very satisfying about using one, but man aside form ripping these up to make weird art installations I cannot think of any practical uses for broken ones. I almost wonder if there's a way to fix them or if its the disk itself thats damanaged.

MJD: *Posts an video* Me to the youtube app: *let me in LET ME INNNNNNN*

It's like 100 broken floppys when all you need is a CD

"Check this out...DOD top-secret MS Word file..." "OPEN UP, THIS IS THE FBI!!!!

0:46 I’m not sure why but that swooping sfx was like that ‘knocking on the door’ effect where it sounds like it’s right nearby, freaked me out

In 2014 I recycled 140 floppies our company still had since 1995. If I knew I could have sent them to you.

this was the worst time for hell -school- to start

I'd try to restore them if the disks inside were in good shape

5:51 Oh wow I had that version of Reader Rabbit a long time ago for me c64 c

I recently read an article that talked about how some of our nuclear launch systems in the military, still uses floppy’s for their computer systems. Reassuring, considering how often these media storage devices fail at the wrong times.

Here's a nice idea for a video: take the disks that have software on them, see if you can find other copies of the software in question and take a look at the software in other videos...

To everyone saying that some of them "might" work, they may have magnetic damage (was a pretty easy one to get, placing it over the PC speakers or a telephone and some sectors will corrupt)no matter how you try to format it, you will get a disk unusable error, thats because the drive can't even find where the disk starts and where it ends, the magnetic film needs to be recalibrated on a factory

I still have some floppy disks going back to 1993. Only half are still readable. Many are reformatted disks with different capacities.

6:49 Jaz drives! I remember seeing a 2gb version at my friends around 1998 and being amazed at the storage space.

Re: the Chuck E Cheese thing. I'm surprised those disks are 3.5", the Showbiz Rock Afire Explosion characters were all ran off Apple IIe's and 5.25" unidisk drives.

$23 for 100 broken floppy disks 😲

12:57 I love legitimate the-ay-tre.

This video reminded me the one that Techmoan made recently when he bought bunch of unknown condition MD players from Japan. I find these kind of videos oddly amusing.

Cool! Personally, I use broken floppy disks to test the physical mechanisms on floppy disk drives before I entrust them with my functioning disks. 13:18 I imagine that the "show computer" was a PC wired up to a box that controlled the animatronics, and so the disk would either be a bootable disk that loaded DOS and immediately launched into the animatronic control software, or the PC had some embedded storage device containing a stripped-down version of DOS or Windows, suppressed Program Manager or the Explorer shell, and immediately launched into the animatronic control software, set to check the floppy drive for project files to load and automatically run. At this point, it's reminding me of when I visited a club my aunt was a member of back in the mid 2000s, along with other people in my family, and we went into a karaoke room, but the player was a PC that ran Windows 98 SE in Simplified Chinese, which would load up and automatically log in and launch a desktop session like normal, with lots of application shortcuts and other files on the desktop (3 columns in either VGA or SVGA resolutions), before immediately launching into the karaoke software which suppressed the Explorer shell. That was on the smaller control monitor, but the large TV to the left of it would only receive a signal when a video was selected, so it wasn't using the native Windows "multiple monitors" functionality. 14:02 So when they got their Palm Pilot back in the day, they received quite a few disks in the box, it seems, before Palm included the software on CD-ROM and a Web download with later models. 7:56 I used Kid Pix too, but it was the later "Kid Pix Studio" for Windows XP.

Claris was formed as a result of Apple's decision to spin off much of their software, such as MacWrite, MacPaint, and even AppleWorks. It became ClarisWorks, before finally becoming AppleWorks again. HyperCard was part of that package of software.

Plain black with white text... "Microsoft C 6.0 Runtime Libraries, That's a pretty cool one." Lmao

You never explained why other "then to resell them" and never explained why after that

I'd definitely try and pop some into a drive just to see if they can be somehow salvaged.

I don't use floppy disks, but i bid on some Maxell MF2HD disks and won to test out the floppy drive in the Dell Dimension 8400 i bought a month ago. The box hints the floppies where from the frequent buyer program. They are still in working order as well.

the chuck e cheese floppy is likely from 2017

how many more floppies before we can say mjd has a floppy hoarding problem

The Playroom diskette also brought back memories of 'Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?' Those were the DOS and Windows 3.1 days.

The Chuck E Cheese disk is a perfect example of legacy hardware still using floppies. Pizza Time Theatre is that creepy animatronic band from the 70s. Somewhere, a location was still using the system in 2017.

Would have been fun to go through and look at some of the old software, if the disks were still good. Especially if you had a supported computer. One of the things I like more than seeing what's new with the latest tech, is to go back through history and revisit software / hardware I grew up with, or even stuff before I was born. In my particular case, most things I would revisit, were mainly things I either used at one point, or just never had access to. Great video.

12:56 That disk could be ProDOS formatted for an Apple II. I watched a documentary about how they did the shows, and the whole thing is controlled by an Apple II computer with a 3.5" floppy drive. Yes, you read that right. An Apple _II_ with a 3.5 drive, not a Macintosh, and not the usual 5.25" drive. It was rare, but some people did have 3.5" controller cards for their Apple IIs. For the life of me, I can't find the video on RU-vid anymore.

Awesome video, Michael!

"Only" $24? In most cases, these end up in people's trash cans. Yea, it's definitely neat to go through them or use them as art if that's your thing, but at almost $25, I'm not so sure that's such a great buy. But hey, if it's worth it to you, and you feel that you get $25 worth of entertainment out of it, than that's all that matters.

Do you do any work with capturing the flux transitions from your "unreadable" floppies? I do, and usually recover most of them when I do this! I have videos about this on my channel!

Put tape over the hole, turn them into 740kb disks. I have gotten majority of my bad disks working again with this trick. But i only use them for non important stuff

An easy backdrop could be to build a simple frame out of 1x2's, back it with thin plywood, then you could attach the floppies to the frame. You could paint the frame or wrap it in fabric. Then you can just attach the frame to the wall, but you can move it around also if needed. And you don't end up sticking 100 floppies to your wall haha.

i love watching floppy disk stuff

Kid Pix Deluxe, on Win 95 and Mac OS... I spent so many hours on that at Grandma's house before she finally let me keep it. Good years...

Glue the backs of 'good' disks to pieces of acrylic sheet, cut into the shapes M, J, and D, and cover with a top sheet of acrylic?

This reminds me my disket back from my youth, with a little skull drawn at the label... If I had it today, I'd provably frame it and expose somewhere in home 😄

9:54 “Norton Utilities for Macintosh, this is for Windows 95” what

I actually remember kidpix from elementary school, which for me was the second half of the 00s and early 10s. I actually got Kidpix 4 working on my old computer a bit ago

Most of my floppies still work. Some don't, but most do. They were used mid-1980's. It surprises me the 5-1/4" ones are a lot more stable than the smaller ones.

Did you try some of them? Not every floppy is dead just because it can't be resold. I guess there are a few that were either used on a misaligned drive (hit them with a tape eraser or head demagnetizer) or ones that just have a single bad sector or something which would be automatically marked as bad during format (of course making them unusable for imaging) Only if Track 0 is dead, the floppy is dead.

When I was in early High School in 1987 I absolutely remember floppy disks. There was a brand called Verbatim. They were circular floppy disks used for an Apple 2 e. They had a small hole/gap in the middle of the disk. If you put them into the Apple 2 e's disk drive the wrong way up there was this hideous noise like an alarm/vacuum cleaner. I never kept those disks. But I do have some working square ones from a science lab. They are called crystal disks and they're on my shelf in a box. The last time I used software on a floppy disk was in the mid 90's when a University math DOS program came with the class textbook.

You should test those floppies for yourself to see if all them don't read or write at all, Glue dots would probably be the best way to stick them up on the wall. You'd want to use a good few per floppy on that kinda wall though.

I would not be confident using refurbished 3.5" floppies. I had *so much* trouble with them, they were super unreliable. I used them regularly until 2004, when I bought my first USB flash drive. I was using them bringing downloaded stuff (mostly datasheets and service manuals) home from the school, because we did not have internet access at home until 2009. I was struggling with these bloody floppies, I was happy if I was able to use one three times before they failed. If something was important, I put multiple copies of it on the same disk, and have a backup disk for it. The main issue was probably dirty drives. When dust falls into these 3,5" floppies, it scratches the surface what makes sectors unreadable. If it affects sector 0, all the disk contents are gone. Most old PC cases had airflow issues, and a lot of air was sucked in through floppy and optical drives' bays and through the drives themselves, therefore dust accumulated in the floppy drives. The PCs in my school's library in 2002-2004 were Pentium 166 to 233MHz machines from around 1994-1996, running Windows NT, hooked up to 50ohm coaxial ring Ethernet. I'm sure their drives were super dirty after all these years of use.

*sees a Kid Pix floppy* I had the CD version of Kid Pix for Windows 95 and 98 SE. I have a very old Logitech floppy and a full back up of Windows 98 SE from my old computer from 1999.

Yes I still have a DOS computer and it does work.

Hey Michael! Can you please make a reddit? It would be nice to chat with you on there.

Cool deal. It's always fun to go down the nostalgia road and see things like an AOL or IBM disk.

No offence, but if I found a treasure chest and it was full of broken floppies I’d be pretty miffed

you should try some out because some of those the broken part is the fact it has a label on it and the removal process isn't worth the profit margin.

I want to see the wall-art being made, def

Where I work, we have boxes of floppy discs, Some are software/driver discs, some still have proprietary information. We have older plastic injection molding machines, CNC milling machines and CNC wire EDM machines that rely on floppy discs.

finna buy some of these and an old floppy case to use as coasters, e-cycling ftw

Next video should be about installing Doom Eternal form floppy discettes

Here's Why! = "Cuz it's cool"

You should order more of these. This was a really interesting video!

Someone I used to work with made a pen holder out of dysfunctional 3 1/2 inch floppy disks.

Some of my PCs only have floppy drives as options for external media, including a 386DX40 desktop, an IBM PS/2 tower, and a Pentium 75 laptop. Thankfully I acquired several floppy disks that were being thrown away from former employers, so I can definitely see the need for having them. Oh and my PS/2 and P75 laptop themselves were also throwaways from those jobs as well, and the 386 was a $5 find in a thrift store eons ago.

I wished I'd known floppies were still in demand - I just threw out 2 tea cheats full of unopened 5.25" and 1 1/2 chests of 3.5" floppies...

I remember playing Mario Teaches Typing and Kid Pix (the third one, not the second like one seen on the video) on a local computer course.

I'd be tempted to see if some of these disks work.

This video has LGR Blerb vibes. I love that.

Hello floppy, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again.

@Michael MJD Really enjoyed your video, it was very thorough, professional and entertaining. Try out at least some of the floppy disks and see what happens. I know that they were sold as broken, but you never know until you try. Keep up the good work! 😉

In my recent, lengthy time of unemployment, I kept my sanity by making magnets out of old computer components for fun (RAM sticks, 5V fans, delidded laptop CPU's). If you're down, MJD, I'll trade you something for an AOL disk - and pay postage. HMU somehow! Also: Can't wait to see the backdrop.

I wonder if they are all 100% dead or if they are media that the supplier didn't want to put time in to? They could be 2SDS fails where the drive writes both sides at the same time at double speed (600rpm vs. 300rpm). Some disks that fail this process work fine in normal drives after a format. My first job was for a disk duplicators. I could count floppy disks in my sleep.

I know that floppies are fragile but this is beyond what I expected

Kid pix was life growing up!

What version is the Jaz drive install ? I may be interested in a copy of that floppy.

Aw man, the ones with hand writing are the coolest! Especially when they work...

You should try putting some of these in a disk drive and see if any of them work? This is bugging the hell out of me not knowing

I want a 5 1/4 diskette drive for my Compaq Presario but I can't find any ;( EDIT: Oh and I have like 7 AOL CDs but I don't know what to use them for.

_You are opening the Floptical Diskettes_

When you don't have a floppy drive. To be honest, there's not much point of floppy disks now as CD's are much better and they still work amazing (even though they are removing CD drives in computers now).

Actually, broken diskettes could be used as props too in things like films and movies.

Just notice something , 8:03 : Those spring like the one laying on the table, isn't that the same springs they use in ps3 controllers?

Low-key I would wanna go through the floppy disks for personal use.... Imagine finding like a diary or something

Nice

Fun fact: The Chuck E Cheese disk is actually an update disk for the alpha C stage

Haha, this is really neat, it's kind of like opening up a pack of Pokémon cards I guess!

Hi Keep up the great work I love your videos

MJD’s Great Great Great grandson in 2120: i bought 100 broken holographic micro disks

They make good drink coasters for geeks!

i am curious if some of the Broken Floppy Disks still work

They still sell brand new floppy disk (3.5") on Amazon. Why would I buy used ones?