History Main / MagicFloppyDisk

* In ''SerialExperimentsLain'', when Lain [[spoiler:leaks the member list of the Knights of the Eastern Calculus onto the Wired, leaving them open for assassination by the Men in Black]], one man responds by filling a briefcase with papers and [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_disc Magneto-Optical discs]] and trying to flee.
* Carefully analyzed in ''GhostInTheShellStandAloneComplex'', where a minor character (a hacker) uses floppy disks. Thousands, because of all the data. It's mentioned that he was paranoid, and [[LampshadeHanging that it's ridiculous]]. But it did save the data from an attacking hacker who probably hadn't even seen a floppy drive in his life.
** In {{cyberspace}}, filesharing is shown by a DigitalAvatar of a floppy, which is fully acceptable because that small icon in your word processor that reads "Save" is a floppy disk as well.
* ''{{Patlabor}}'' had the operating systems for HumongousMecha stored on a single floppy. One factory producing said mecha stored its backups on ''thousands'' of them.

* In ''Anime/RebuildOfEvangelion'', the careful observer will notice a strange dissonance. Shinji has his cassette tape often, and at the same time Unit 05's OS is shown to use [[ShownTheirWork at least 250 terabytes of memory]]. The second film explained this by having the tape player originally belong to Gendo who is conceivably old enough to have used it but it's a bit of a stretch. Shinji keeps it as long as he has because it is one of, maybe, half a dozen items or ideas that mean [[JerkAss his father]] loves him. This may account for his never upgrading to anything newer.
** The Second Impact is a likely partial reason for the "old" technology. When the world is suffering from a major catastrophe and millions are dead, consumer electronics take a back seat to other priorities.
* In ''TransformersRobotsInDisguise'', the plans for the Global Spacebridge (a PortalNetwork the Autobots use to get to the action) are stored on what looks like a 1.44 MB floppy. Granted, it's apparently a [[ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale giant floppy]], but still. For additional hilarity, the disk is read, not by putting it in a drive, but by Scourge and Sky-Byte ''looking at it intently''.

* One story from ''Comicbook/TheTransformers'' had Optimus Prime's ''entire personality'' stored on one 5 ¼" disk!
** The ''[[TransformersFilmSeries Transformers]]'' film, however, averts this: when the security analyst sneaks data out of the military datacenter, she uses an SD card.

** ''TheRecruit'', released in 2003, also uses USB drives. However it also doesn't get things completely correct as it treats them like some super-technology that can be used to steal data from computers secured with no floppy disks or CD-ROM drives. OK they may not have been that common in use in 2003, but still you'd think the ''CIA'' would get an idea. Furthermore FridgeLogic kicks in when you realize that these supposedly super-secured computers aren't if they have [=USB=] ports (the U in which stands for "universal" i.e. works with lots of stuff) with no restrictions on them.
* The movies ''Film/{{Darkman}}'' and ''Film/TheNegotiator'' both feature data that would realistically take up dozens of floppy disks of the time (research data on an incredibly complex artificial skin, and dozens of recorded phone calls, respectively) on one MagicFloppyDisk and two, respectively.

* In ''StarTrekFirstContact'', Zefram Cochrane keeps his tunes of some kind of green plastic disc the size of a mini DVD. Given that he does not use any menus to select music, "Magic Carpet Ride" might be the only song on it. Long way to regress AfterTheEnd...
* One B-Movie from 2007 about invading alien spiders has one character give another character an USB drive. The receiving party asks in all seriousness what that thing even is.

* The first ''Series/RedDwarf'' novel, ''Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers'', has one aversion; all the information needed to recreate [[VirtualGhost a perfect simulation of yourself in a holographic body]] can be stored on a device "the size of a suppository", as Lister rather gloomily puts it. And yet he apparently buys his music on DAT tapes, whilst Rimmer is the proud owner of at least one James Last album[[note]]or a compilation of HammondOrgan music, depending on the edition[[/note]] on ''vinyl'', with no indication that he's a collector of rare antiquities or that this is otherwise unusual.
** Of course, Lister finds a DVD (or roughly equivalent) of ''TheFlintstones'' in the Cat city on the cargo decks.

* The ''MysteryScienceTheater3000''-featured movie ''TimeChasers'', where, as Crow puts it, "eight 5¼-inch floppies hold the keys to time travel".

* Justified in ''NedsDeclassifiedSchoolSurvivalGuide''; the school pictures being taken on film were a PlotPoint when [[strike:Urkel]] Cookie planned to hack the camera to upload a better picture of himself.

* Likewise, the severely [[ZeeRust Zeerusted]] ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' uses "tapes" that look very much like 3½ floppies--which hadn't actually been invented at the time of the show.
** By ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'', the Cardassians at least were using Isolinear Rods, which looked at least passingly like thumb drives (or whatever equivalent would actually blend in with the TNG-era ''[[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Star Trek]]'' visual style).

* The limited disk space was spoofed in some Sierra adventure games - self-spoof, actually, as many of their games in their golden age fit on well over half a dozen floppies. Most spoofing of all was ''VideoGame/SpaceQuest IV'' (1991); the plot was based upon a future civilization finding the ''VideoGame/LeisureSuitLarry IV'' missing floppies (itself another in-joke), and attempting to play them on their MasterComputer, with disastrous results. In another scene, the protagonist can go in a future game shop, and find a copy of ''[[VideoGame/KingsQuest King's Quest]] 48'', which boasted a 12GB size. (There was once upon a time a review that criticized ''King's Quest VI'' (1992) for using too much disk space. It required... 20MB) Finally, the very end required the player to download an entire personality on a 3½" floppy disk (pictured above) that had lots of other stuff on it too.
** Some of that "other stuff" includes a ''copy of the game itself''. If you try to delete it, the game will quit without warning.

* ''Franchise/ResidentEvil'', being made in Japan mid-TheNineties, uses the much, much cooler-looking than floppies [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_disc MO disc]], which still have the same basic recognizable shape.
** In the GameCube remake, these MO discs were inserted into ''customized {{GameCube}}s''.
** In the first two ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'' games, the player character is given an MO disk to carry.

* [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] in ''WebAnimation/HomestarRunner'', where Strong Bad actually prefers older computers, so he does use floppies, although he thinks the 3½" ones are hard disks. He's expressed a preference for the "big, floppy" kind (5¼ inchers), but he is upset that he needs to ''fold them up'' to get them in the new computers.
** A typical email EasterEgg is the title of an old, often obscure game featuring prominently on the floppy disk storage box next to Strong Bad's computer. Curiously, some of them (such as ''Relentless'', American name for ''LittleBigAdventure'') were never released on floppy disks. (Considering Strong Bad's character, the world he lives in and that all of these disks have handwritten labels, it might just be that he's playing pirated copies.) Others filled multiple diskettes, but there's no sign on the disk shown that it's part of a set - a more literal case of MagicFloppyDisk.

* Played with in ArbyNTheChief during one episode in which the Chief attempts to download 900 Gigabytes of porn. When called out on this, he responds with one of the show's many [[CrowningMomentOfFunny Crowning Moments of Funny]]: "dun worries. i has 2 floppeh disks!"

* The problems of format obsolescence are [[LampshadeHanging lampshaded]] in [[http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/dino-untitled.png this fan]] [[Webcomic/DinosaurComics Dinosaur Comic]].

* In the ''WesternAnimation/{{Freakazoid}}'' episode "Dexter's Date", The Lobe makes a bootleg copy of all television programming onto a single VHS tape.
** If he only taped the original content at the time, he'd be barely half filled. [[http://www.instantrimshot.com Bah dum tish.]]
* In the ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' episode "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", Bender [[BrainUploading has his entire mind copied onto a floppy disk]] (for some reason the episode's antagonist thought that it would be easier to get rid of Bender by losing a copy of his memory rather than deleting it outright).
** This was {{Lampshaded}} in the episode's {{DVD commentary}}.
** There's also the episode where Bender, a sapient robot 1000 years in the future, gathers incriminating evidence against Nixon with a cassette tape. It's clear that they're doing this for laughs.

* An episode of GarfieldAndFriends lampshades this trope. When Jon's record player is destroyed by Garfield and Odie, everyone he meets while searching for a replacement immediately assumes he's looking for compact discs. When he finally finds one, it's from an elderly antiques shop owner, who comments that they'd used records when he was a boy.
** Inverted because the episode was made in the early 1990s, when [=CD=]s were just coming into vogue.

* Of course, a lot of older machines automatically booted from the floppy drive, allowing you to bypass the OS and many safeguards - which allowed you to do many things that are rather good, and other things that aren't so much. Now that (a) floppy drives aren't installed in modern computers and (b) the setup is different so you'll actually have to change the boot-up sequence to start from the floppy, it doesn't work so much.
** Early DOS computers without hard drives ''had to'' be booted with a floppy that contained the entire OS. The genuine IBM PC would boot into a ROM-resident BASIC interpreter if the floppy was not present. Most clones didn't have this feature, rendering them useless without the magic disk.
* The U.S. government still uses floppy disks for some internal functions as of 2011, as well as at least a few inter-departmental reporting requirements. This is mostly due to how TechnologyMarchesOn ''very slowly'' in government, but there are at least some reasons to continue using them, such as compatibility - any computer with a disk drive for a 1.44-MB floppy disk can read and write to any floppy disk, but computers' abilities to write to [=CD=]s and [=DVD=]s still vary widely. In addition, if all you want to store or transfer is a few dozen text documents, the capacity of a single floppy is plenty.
** Also prevents someone from walking out with the entire government database à la Chelsea Manning.

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Not only that, but such older technology that appears will inevitably be jacked to the gills and capable of things it can't/couldn't do in real life. The [[PlayfulHacker Hacker]]/[[TheCracker cracker]] character of a show usually has them, if only because they tend to be a fan of SchizoTech, which makes them look more out of place. If he's such a world-class computer expert, why is he using technology that's now over two decades old? Many newer machines do not even ''have'' built-in floppy drives. However, it's still used, because [[ViewersAreMorons even the oldest and most computer illiterate viewer]] [[SmallReferencePools at least knows what a floppy disk looks like]].

* ''VideoGameJourneyToSilius'' has floppy disks in the future, too.

** In the first two VideoGame/MetalGearSolid games, the player character is given an MO disk to carry.
* ''JourneyToSilius'' has floppy disks in the future, too.

Aside from intentionally hi-tech looking machinery, the production teams for shows tend to use old items as props. Despite the high availability and low cost of removable drives, USB pen drives, and burnable [=CDs=], [=DVDs=], and Blu-Ray discs, the old standard 1.44MB plastic floppy disk seems to turn up a lot, especially in the hands of someone who would be very unlikely to use one.

You might think this trope would also apply to audio media, but [=CDs=] [[WhatAreRecords replaced vinyl and even cassette tapes almost immediately]] in TV shows. Which is extra-strange, because it took well over a decade for them to catch on in RealLife. Vinyl still occasionally makes an appearance, justified by the fact it is still the format of choice for audiophiles and professional club [=DJs=]. On the other hand, mp3 players are still catching up.

** Inverted because the episode was made in the early 1990s, when CDs were just coming into vogue.

* The U.S. government still uses floppy disks for some internal functions as of 2011, as well as at least a few inter-departmental reporting requirements. This is mostly due to how TechnologyMarchesOn ''very slowly'' in government, but there are at least some reasons to continue using them, such as compatibility - any computer with a disk drive for a 1.44-MB floppy disk can read and write to any floppy disk, but computers' abilities to write to [=CDs=] and [=DVDs=] still vary widely. In addition, if all you want to store or transfer is a few dozen text documents, the capacity of a single floppy is plenty.

[[quoteright:300:[[SpaceQuest http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/floppy-backup.jpg]]]]

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* Because of the ''ComicBook/ArchieComics'' habit of reprinting older stories to fill new digests, it's not at all uncommon to see a reel-to-reel in [[TeenGenius Dilton's]] lab or kids listening to music on Walkmans.

** In {{cyberspace}}, filesharing is shown by a DigitalAvatar of a floppy, though.

** Less an oddity and more a result of cultural inertia. The ubiquity of the floppy meant that it once did mean 'save' (to a floppy which you kept on your desktop). However, [[TheArtifact while the floppy fell out of use, the imagery stayed because it meant something conceptually]]. Most people probably couldn't tell you what the icon actually -is- nowadays even though they intuitively know that it means "save".

* Done intentionally in ''Literature/ThirteenReasonsWhy'' by Jay Asher. He says in a question and answer in the back of the book that he made Hannah record her suicide notes on a tape specifically to avoid [[TechnologyMarchesOn technology marching on]] and thus making an UnintentionalPeriodPiece. Tapes are outdated, but not so outdated that people wouldn't know what they are.

* The infamous scene in {{William Gibson}}'s classic CyberPunk novel ''{{Neuromancer}}'' where Case tries to call "his buyer for '''three megabytes''' of hot RAM."

** Also prevents someone from walking out with the entire government database à la Bradley Manning.

** Less an oddity and more a result of cultural inertia. The ubiquity of the floppy meant that it once did mean 'save' (to a floppy which you kept on your desktop). However, while the floppy fell out of use, the imagery stayed because it meant something conceptually. Most people probably couldn't tell you what the icon actually -is- nowadays even though they intuitively know that it means "save".

** Early DOS computers ''without hard drives'' had to be booted with a floppy that contained the entire OS. The genuine IBM PC would boot into a ROM-resident BASIC interpreter if the floppy was not present. Most clones didn't have this feature, rendering them useless without the magic disk.

** By ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'', the Cardassians at least were usnig Isolinear Rods, which looked at least passingly like thumb drives (or whatever equivalent would actually blend in with the TNG-era ''[[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Star Trek]]'' visual style).

* Some TV dramas are more current: several ''LawAndOrder'' episodes have featured secret data - mostly voyeuristic camera footage on ''SVU'' - on memory cards and USB drives.

* ''{{Planetes}}'', supposedly set in 2075, has people still using floppy disks.
** Perhaps sort of almost maybe partially justified in that the show makes a point about the fact that the division the main characters work in has basically no budget at all. But not really.
** The rest of the show has all kinds of plausible high-tech computer stuff, so the "floppy disks" are maybe just futuristic mini-discs. Or some kind of [[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flash-Memory-2GB-USB-DRIVE/dp/B001AEDLYW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262567419&sr=1-2 portable SSD.]]

** True, but the disks are clearly "digital disks", cases with small CD-like innards, which never really panned out, not ordinary floppies.

* Another exception: ''Film/LiveFreeOrDieHard'', [[MarketBasedTitle known abroad as]] ''Die Hard 4.0'', has USB thumb drives. Just to make yourself an idea of how long it took Hollywood to adopt these devices, this film was premiered in 2007 ''and it's one of the first films that used them.''

** {{Collateral}}, from 2004, features a thumb drive fairly prominently, and realistically.
** The bad guy in ''CopOut'' keeps his contact list on a flash drive hidden inside a crucifix. Which, oddly enough, appears to have a microUSB port rather than full-size.

** Given the right sort of codec (e.g. Speex), intelligible (if low-quality) speech can be recorded at a data rate of 4 kbps, while the "full rate" for a GSM telephone call is 13 kbps. If you take two 3½" 2880 kB (DS/ED; not so common as the regular DS/HD 1440 kB floppy, but not unheard-of) floppies and do the math, at those bitrates you can fit, respectively, 3 hours 12 minutes and approximately one hour of speech. Taking "dozens" to mean two dozen, that's an average call length of 8 minutes or about 2 and a half minutes. These are not unreasonable numbers.
*** I've done the math and I come up with about 30 minutes on the ED disk at 13kbps. However, that's for ''raw'' data. Using any kind of compression at all will boost that significantly.

* Avoided in ''{{Fringe}}'', episode ''No-Brainer'':
-->'''Olivia''': Astrid, can you check his hard drive? I had it transferred with some of his other effects.
-->'''Walter:''' Be sure to check his floppy disks as well.
-->'''Peter''': Floppy disks are a little outdated.
** Walter's mistake is justified, he had been in a mental institution since the floppy disk era.
*** Of course, Walter is a BunnyEarsLawyer to such a degree that he wouldn't have to have been. A part of his master plan to stop the Observers (in the final TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture season, no less) '''is on Betamax.'''

* Subverted in an episode of ''Series/TheSentinel'' of all places, a CopShow not generally known for its high tech gadgets. One episode shows a character using a ZIP drive, which were new at the time.
* Inverted by ''Series/BabylonFive'': Everybody uses memory crystals, gem-like devices approximately the size of a USB thumb drive, and which function identically. The show aired in the mid 1990's, back when USB itself was brand-spanking new and hadn't been universally adopted yet. Actual USB thumb drives wouldn't appear on the market until soon after the show ended.

** There's also the episode where Bender, a sapient robot 1000 years in the future, gathers incriminating evidence against Nixon with a cassette tape. It's clear that they're doing do this for laughs from anyone sharp enough to notice (that example being especially obvious since it was also a reference to what happened to the real Nixon).

** Not really this trope, but an episode featuring an X-ray flashlight showed Bender's CPU is a 6502-- the CPU used in the {{Apple II}}. (Possibly a shout-out to ''TheTerminator'', which apparently runs 6502 assembly code..)
** Kind of on the fringe of this trope but there are lots of CRT televisions to be found in the early years of the show. Not ''exactly'' dated technology in the early 2000s but it is the year 3000 we're discussing. These have slowly burnt away and given rise to flat-panel displays as the series rolled on.
* [[AvertedTrope Averted]] in ''WesternAnimation/CodeLyoko'' which uses mainly [=CDs=], and once a flash drive.

** Also prevents someone from walking out with the entire government database.

* The plans for the Global Spacebridge (a PortalNetwork the Autobots use to get to the action) are stored on what looks like a 1.44 MB floppy. Granted, it's apparently a [[ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale giant floppy]], but still. For additional hilarity, the disk is read, not by putting it in a drive, but by Scourge and Sky-Byte ''looking at it intently''.

* In the old Sega Master System game ''Zillion'', the player must navigate a futuristic underground labyrinthic base filled with alien enemies and attempt to access the main computer to activate the self-destruct sequence. While many modern-looking access cards are used to unlock doors, the access codes for the computer are scattered on 8 5¼inch floppy disks all around the base.

* An episode of ''Anime/SonicX'' has Rouge able to copy ''the entire database of a bio-lab/space colony'' onto a [=MiniDisc=]. For those unfamiliar, you just need to know that they're not big enough to fit that size database, and they were a flop in the IT field. [[hottip:*: This only applies if you interpret that as "[=MiniDisc=]" and not "Mini disk".]]

* The first ''Series/RedDwarf'' novel, ''Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers'', has one aversion; all the information needed to recreate [[VirtualGhost a perfect simulation of yourself in a holographic body]] can be stored on a device "the size of a suppository", as Lister rather gloomily puts it. And yet he apparently buys his music on DAT tapes, whilst Rimmer is the proud owner of at least one James Last album[[hottip:*:or a compilation of HammondOrgan music, depending on the edition]] on ''vinyl'', with no indication that he's a collector of rare antiquities or that this is otherwise unusual.

Aside from intentionally hi-tech looking machinery, the production teams for shows tend to use old items as props. Despite the high availability and low cost of removable drives, USB pen drives, and burnable [=CDs=], [=DVDs=], and Blu-Ray discs, the old standard 1.44MB plastic floppy disk seem to turn up a lot, especially in the hands of someone who would be very unlikely to use one.

* Short-lived time-travel series ''TimeTrax'' featured a man from the 2190s using what looked like laserdiscs.

Japan's love of technology usually means anime will feature whatever computer media is popular that year. That comes with its own problems, notably {{Zeerust}} -- for example, ''NeonGenesisEvangelion'' (''and'' the current series of movie remakes) seems to suggest that DAT cassettes will be popular for portable audio in 2015 again (when it never really took off to begin with).