Tag Archives: floppy disk

Floppy Disk Lampshade: What Drunk Geeks Wear on Their Heads

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Have a bunch of old 3.5″ floppy disks lying around? If you still have some left over after converting them into paintings or handbags, you might want to redecorate your room with a floppy disk lampshade.

floppy disk lampshade 2

That’s exactly what Instructables contributor Technohippy did with his spare floppies. All it took to make this floppy disk lampshade was 17 floppy disks, 44 cable ties, and some basic hand tools. While this particular design was for a ceiling fixture, there’s no reason you couldn’t apply the same concept to a table or floor lamp too. Keep in mind that you’ll want to go with a fluorescent or LED lamp inside the fixture so as not to melt your floppies, and fill your home with the noxious fumes of burning plastic.

Pop on over to Instructables for the full build instructions. I wonder what we’ll make out of USB flash drives when they’re eventually obsolete and replaced with holographic memory or something altogether different.


Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad

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HP details history of the floppy drive, recalls the good sectors and the bad

There's been a lot of nostalgia circulating around the PC world in the past year, but there's only one element of early home computing history that everyone shares in common: the floppy drive. A guest writer posting at HP's Input Output blog, Steve Vaughan-Nichols, is acknowledging our shared sentimentality with a rare retrospective of those skinny magnetic disks from their beginning to their (effective) end. Many of us are familiar with the floppies that fed our Amigas, early Macs and IBM PCs; Vaughan-Nichols goes beyond that to address the frustrations that led to the first 8-inch floppy at IBM in 1967, the esoteric reasons behind the 5.25-inch size and other tidbits that might normally escape our memory. Don't be sad knowing that the floppy's story ends with a whimper, rather than a bang. Instead, be glad for the look back at a technology that arguably greased the wheels of the PC era, even if it sometimes led to getting more disks than you could ever use. Sorry about that.

[Image credit: Al Pavangkanan, Flickr]

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Writer breaks down floppy drive history in detail, recalls the good sectors and the bad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 01:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Turn a Floppy Disk into the Millennium Falcon and an X-Wing

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floppy disk star wars Turn a Floppy Disk into the Millennium Falcon and an X Wing
Got some spare floppy disks lying around? Use a few simple tools to turn them into cool miniature Star Wars spaceships. This Instructable shows you how (with bonus rubber band ball Death Star). You’ll need 3 floppies, plyers, a hammer, and small finishing nails. And if you complete that, you can now move on Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter:
Darth Vaders TIE Advanced X1 made from Floppy Dis Turn a Floppy Disk into the Millennium Falcon and an X Wing
That’s a 5 floppy ship, for advanced builders only. Sweet but my skill and patience level ends at turning old floppies into coasters…. I mean landing pads for spaceships.

Turn a Floppy Disk into the Millennium Falcon and an X-Wing


DIY Star Wars Toys from Old 3.5″ Disks: The Floppy Strikes Back

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Got some old floppy disks lying around? How about a little spare time? Are you a Star Wars fan? If you answered yes to all three of those questions, here’s the perfect project for you – a Millennium Falcon, X-Wing Fighter and Death Star cobbled together from old floppy disk parts.

star wars floppy toys

Instructables contributor Jetpack5 has put together a tutorial showing how you can make these fun desk toys using old 3.5-inch floppies, and a couple of everyday tools like needlenose pliers, a hammer and a nail. Oh, and the Death Star requires a bunch of rubber bands too. Both the Falcon and the Death Star are made identifiable by the round metal floppy spindle, while the X-Wing is comprised mostly of those metal shutters which used to protect the delicate floppy disk innards.

xwing fighter floppy disk

I think these little models manage to capture the spirit of the originals, despite their relatively primitive shapes. If you’d like to make some for yourself, use the Force and head over to Instructables for the full instructions.

What other Star Wars creations do you think you could make from old floppies? I think you could probably make a pretty cool Darth Vader helmet from old black 5-1/4″ floppies. Any volunteers?


Floppy Disk Coasters

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floppy disk coasters Floppy Disk Coasters
Sure you could just actually use your old floppy disks as coasters (and did I really need to say “old” there?) but who the hell still has floppy disks lying around? Plus you won’t want any condensation ruining your data and not letting you install disk 5 of Sim City 2000. Not to worry because these Floppy Disk Drink Coasters Floppy Disk Coasters are actually made of silicone but they look just like ye olde floppy disks of ‘yore. You can even use a sharpie to customize the labels. Just like your grandpa used to do.

buy now Floppy Disk Coasters

Floppy Disk Coasters


Apple Macintosh 128k prototype with 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy drive for sale on eBay

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Early Macintosh 128k prototype with 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy drive for sale on eBay
Apple's Macintosh took many forms over the years, from its initial concept by Jef Raskin as a $500 appliance that contained a built-in keyboard, printer and 5-inch display, to its ceremonious debut in 1984 with an inflated price that was five times this initial vision. For a period in the Mac's development, it was assumed that the computer would feature Apple's proprietary Twiggy 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, which also came as standard issue on the original Lisa. Just recently, an extremely rare prototype of the 128k Mac with a Twiggy drive has surfaced on eBay, but with an opening bid of $99,995, this antique is beyond what most of us could ever afford.

While the Twiggy disk could store an impressive 860KB of data, it was also notoriously unreliable -- so bad, in fact, that one engineer responsible for the drive remarked to Steve Jobs, "Take out your .45 and shoot the friggin' horse in the head." Ultimately, the company did just that, and the original Macintosh shipped with a 3.5-inch drive from Sony that could write only 400KB to its not-so-floppy disks. While this prototype will attract only the most affluent of bidders, the rest of us can enjoy the priceless photos of what might've been.

Gallery: Apple Macintosh 128k prototype with Twiggy floppy drive

Apple Macintosh 128k prototype with 5.25-inch Twiggy floppy drive for sale on eBay originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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