History Main / MagicFloppyDisk

* Played with in ''Machinima/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 funny moments: "dun worries. i has 2 floppeh disks!"

--> '''Nixon:''' ...{{Oh crap}}.

* One story from ''Comicbook/TheTransformers'' had Optimus Prime's ''entire personality'', along with his millions of years worth of lived memories, stored on one 5 ¼" disk!

** Ditto for early Macs, as in the [[TheEighties early 80es]], when both first appeared, hard drives were considered a rare and expensive upgrade, costing thousands and used only by the dedicated professionals who needed to store and process huge amounts of information — [[TechMarchesOn say, 10 or 20]] ''[[TechMarchesOn mega]]''[[TechMarchesOn bytes]]. Most people made do with floppies even at the workplace, and for the home computers floppy drives were in the same league that the [=HDDs=] were for the workplace machines. Up until the Macintosh II and Macintosh SE that introduced internal HDD bays, the only way to avoid booting from the floppy (that must've contained the system image, so the space for everything else was quite limited, given that first Mas floppies only held 400K) was to use the clumsy and slow[[note]]especially before the Mac Plus introducing a SCSI port[[/note]] external HDD — or buy an expensive Macintosh XL workstation, which was more of a Lisa anyway.

%% Please do not replace or remove without starting a new thread.

[[quoteright:300:[[VideoGame/SpaceQuest https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/floppy-backup.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:300:It's a floppy disk. But instead of data, it contains the mind of a villain! Because it's the '''future!''']]

* One story from ''Comicbook/TheTransformers'' had Optimus Prime's ''entire personality'', along with his millions of years worth of lived memories, stored on one 5 ¼" disk! ''Film/{{Transformers}}'', however, averts this: when the security analyst sneaks data out of the military datacenter, she uses an SD card.

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 [=CD=]s, [=DVD=]s, and Blu-Ray discs, the old standard 1.44MB[[note]]This number itself a misnomer: The disk stores 1440*1024 bytes, which is 1.47MB or 1.41[=MiB=][[/note]] plastic floppy disk seems to turn up a lot, especially in the hands of someone who would be very unlikely to use one.

* ''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.''

* 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. [[note]] This only applies if you interpret that as "[=MiniDisc=]" and not "Mini disk".[[/note]]

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 [=CD=]s, [=DVD=]s, 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.

* ''VideoGame/{{Strider}}'' on the NES has video calls, or at least audio transcriptions, being recorded on 5¼ floppies.

* Played with in ''Machinima/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 [[SugarWiki/FunnyMoments Crowning Moments of Funny]]: "dun worries. i has 2 floppeh disks!"

* Averted with Eye clinics, where even though floppy disks are still used for some equipment, they are not generally "special", but rather the equipment used is ''that'' old.

** Ditto for early Macs, as in the [[TheEighties early 80es]], when both first appeared, hard drives were considered a rare and expensive upgrade, costing thousands and used only by the dedicated professionals who needed to store and process huge amounts of information — [[TechMarchesOn say, 10 or 20]] ''[[TechMarchesOn mega]]''[[TechMarchesOn bytes]]. Most people made do with floppies even at the workplace, and for the home computers floppy drives were in the same league that the [=HDDs=] were for the workplace machines. Up until the Macintosh II and Macintosh SE that introduced internal HDD bays, the only way to avoid booting from the floppy (that must've contained the system image, so the space for everything else was quite limited, given that first Mas floppies only held 400K) was to use the clumsy and slow[[note]]especially before the Mac Plus introducing a SCSI port[[/note]] external HDD — or buy an expensive Macintosh XL workstation, which was more of a Lisa anyway.

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

** Ditto for early Macs, as in the [[TheEighties early 80es]], when both first appeared, hard drives were considered a rare and expensive upgrade, costing thousands and used only bu the dedicated professionals who needed to store and process huge amounts of information — [[TechMarchesOn say, 10 or 20 ''mega''bytes]]. Most people made do with floppies even at the workplace, and for the home computers floppy drives were in the same league that the [=HDDs=] were for the workplace machines. Up until the Macintosh II and Macintosh SE that introduced internal HDD bays, the only way to avoid booting from the floppy (that must've contained the system image, so the space for everything else was quite limited, given that first Mas floppies only held 400K) was to use the clumsy and slow (especially before the Mac Plus that introduced a SCSI port) external HDD — or buy an expensive Macintosh XL workctation, which was more of a Lisa anyway.

* Played with in ''Machinima/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!"

* Played with on ''Series/{{Leverage}}'', where TheCracker Hardison is able to break into almost any modern computer system [[HollywoodHacker effortlessly]]. At least once, though, the computer the team needs to break into is a 1970s dinosaur. It's too old for him to be familiar with, too simple to have any backdoors, and too primitive for his cracking software to interface with. The fifty-dollar hunk of junk is ironically far more secure than a million-dollar supercomputer.

* The "Save" icon on most computer programs depicts a 3½" floppy disc (an oddity to begin with, as most icons use some kind of desktop metaphor, like paper, pencils, folders, etc).
** 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".
*** [[http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/13224.aspx And yes, they actually can't.]]

* 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.

** Of course, it also has the Big Bad downloading the entire contents of an immense server farm (which took up several rooms and required an immense cooling system) onto an externak hard drive, so it's not so much averting this trope as updating it to slightly less obsolete technology. Though you do wonder why the government didn't just use an external hard drive instead of the server farm in the first place...

* ''VideoGame/DarkFall Lights Out'', having TimeTravel as part of its gameplay, almost starts off with a floppy disk mysteriously turning up in 1912, which can be read on a laptop in 2004. Later, it turns out that an UnderwaterBase in [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture 2090 AD]] contains DVDs, floppy disks, and even MP3 players.