Line #28 Main/MagicFloppyDisk


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4	-> ''"Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size."''
5	--> -- [[EvilOverlordList The Evil Overlord List, #99]]
6
7	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.
8
9	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? Most newer machines do not even ''have'' built-in floppy drives. However, it's still used, because even the oldest and most computer illiterate viewer [[SmallReferencePools at least knows what a floppy disk looks like]].
10
11	Sometimes the disks used in The Future will at least have a higher memory capacity -- the writers took Moore's Law into account, they just didn't predict that the storage device itself would fundamentally change.
12
13	Most commonly averted in any show aimed at children born roughly after Zip drives (also a no-show on TV) were invented.
14
15	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, ''Anime/NeonGenesisEvangelion'' (and the subsequent series of movie remakes) seems to suggest that DAT cassettes would be popular for portable audio in 2015 again (when it never really took off to begin with).
16
17	You might think this trope would also apply to audio media, but [=CD=]s [[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.
18
19	Compare with TropeBreaker. See TechnologyMarchesOn if the item seems outdated now, but was state-of-the-art when the work was made. May lead to younger audiences [[WhatAreRecords wondering what the hell those funny-looking [=CD-ROMs=] are]].
20
21	----
22	!!Examples:
23	[[foldercontrol]]
24
25	[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
26	* In ''Anime/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.
27	* Carefully analyzed in ''Anime/GhostInTheShellStandAloneComplex'', where a minor character (a hacker) uses thousands of floppy disks to store all the data. He was so paranoid that it's mentioned just [[LampshadeHanging just how ridiculous]] the concept was. However, 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.
28	* ''Franchise/{{Patlabor}}'' had the operating systems for HumongousMecha stored on a single floppy. One factory producing said mecha stored its backups on ''thousands'' of them.
29	* 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]]The classic 80-minute 292kbps [=MiniDisc=] has a capacity of about 171[=MiB=]. This only applies if you interpret that as "[=MiniDisc=]" and not "Mini disk".[[/note]]
30	* 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. Similarly, Asuka is sometimes shown playing games on a Creator/{{Bandai}} Platform/WonderSwan, a handheld console that was discontinued in 2003 in the real world.
31	* In ''Anime/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''.
32	* In ''Anime/MobileSuitGundamWing'', the ZERO System is stored on...a floppy disk (or a series of floppies). Not even a ZIP disk, a ''floppy'' disk.
33	[[/folder]]
34
35	[[folder:Comic Books]]
36	* ''ComicBook/TheTransformersMarvel'': One story had Optimus Prime's ''entire personality'', along with his millions of years worth of lived memories, stored on one 5 ¼" disk!
37	[[/folder]]
38
39	[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
40	* ''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 (which hit mass market in late 2000, along with generic "mass storage" drivers), this film was premiered in 2007 ''and it's one of the first films that used them.''
41	** 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 external 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...
42	* ''Film/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.
43	* ''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 Magic Floppy Disk and two, respectively.
44	* Used in ''Film/{{Timelock}}'', where a 3½'' floppy is revealed to power the entire ship. Of course, the movie also displays starships with [=CRT=]s and wireframe graphics, so...
45	* In ''Film/{{S1m0ne}}'' you have software advanced enough to reproduce a fully computer generated actress but the producer still uses a floppy.
46	* In ''Film/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 (or it's a mixtape). Long way to regress AfterTheEnd...
47	* One B-Movie from 2007 about invading alien spiders has one character give another character a USB drive. The receiving party asks in all seriousness what that thing even is.
48	* A variant occurs in ''Film/CaptainAmericaTheWinterSoldier'', where [[spoiler: Nazi EvilGenius Arnim Zola, one of the bad guys from the first movie, is revealed to have had his [[BrainUpload consciousness uploaded to a computer]]]]...a 1970's computer. While the requisite storage capacity is at least somewhat justified by the computer having [[ComputerEqualsTapeDrive loads and loads of tape drives]], processing power and speed is another matter; it's highly unlikely that a computer of that vintage would be fast enough to emulate a human brain, which we can't do even with modern computers. Also, tape has notoriously slow access times, which would make quick thinking all the more difficult.
49	* ''Film/FaceOff'' has Shawn Archer reading a data file that BigBad Castor Troy has stored on a Zip disk. Not only that, his computer conveniently has a built-in Zip drive.
50	[[/folder]]
51
52	[[folder:Literature]]
53	* Done intentionally in the 2007 novel ''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. This also serves as a minor plot point, with Clay having to borrow a Walkman from one of his friends in order to listen to the tapes. This makes a bit less sense in the 2017 Netflix adaptation, since anyone who is the protagonist's age in 2017 (who would have been born in 2000-2001) probably would have even less of a memory of tapes than someone their age in 2007 (who would have been born in 1990-1991).
54	* 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 ''WesternAnimation/TheFlintstones'' in the Cat city on the cargo decks.
55	* The BradThor novel ''Full Black'' involves a character receiving a flash drive with significantly more than the 128 GB of data storage available on commercially available USB flash drives. There was a handwave regarding advanced protein data storage.
56	** [[TechnologyMarchesOn As of 2018]], 128G+ flash sticks are somewhat expensive, but definitely commercially available.
57	* At one point in Literature/{{Skyway}} trilogy by John [=DeChancie=] (basically, about {{Space Trucker}}s) the protagonists receive a floppy disk with a map of interstellar PortalNetwork, which is obviously too big to fit on a floppy. Justified by the disk being a device made by SufficientlyAdvancedAliens (possibly humans from far future) in a way [[AFormYouAreComfortableWith to make it easier to interface with human computers]]. Most of human technology in the novels isn't far beyond 1980s, save for Earth-Pluto passenger transports and [[ETGaveUsWiFi licensed alien technology]] used to manufacture wheels of the trucks that drive through [[PortalDoor portals]].
58	[[/folder]]
59
60	[[folder:Live Action TV]]
61	* Ms. Calendar's spell and Maggie Walsh's data are on one in ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer''.
62	* Some TV dramas are more current: several ''Franchise/LawAndOrder'' episodes have featured secret data - mostly voyeuristic camera footage on ''SVU'' - on memory cards and USB drives.
63	* The ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000''-featured movie ''Film/TimeChasers'', where, as Crow puts it, "eight 5¼-inch floppies hold the keys to time travel".
64	* Short-lived time-travel series ''Series/TimeTrax'' featured a man from the 2190s using what looked like laserdiscs.
65	* Justified in ''Series/NedsDeclassifiedSchoolSurvivalGuide''; the school pictures being taken on film were a PlotPoint when Cookie planned to hack the camera to upload a better picture of himself.
66	* In ''Series/RedDwarf'', a sci-fi comedy show taking place on a futuristic mining vessel, people still use videocassettes...except they're triangular. It is explained in the 2009 Easter special that [=DVDs=] have become outdated by videos, since videos have one precious advantage--you can put them back in the box with minimal risk of breaking them. Plus they're bigger, and thus harder to lose. In "Bodyswap" we see Lister's mind being downloaded onto a Microcassette (the sort used in voicemail systems) though this is PlayedForLaughs. In "The Prommised Land" it turns out Holly, the AI that controls the entire ship, has a back-up comprising a ''really big'' floppy disk. As in, it takes two people to lift it.
67	* 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).
68	* Averted in ''Series/{{Dollhouse}}'' where entire brainscans of humans were loaded onto a hot-swappable 3.5" hard disk drive, of indeterminate capacity. Given the near-future timeframe of the show, these could plausibly hold many terabytes of information.
69	* Inverted on ''Series/{{Leverage}}'', where TheCracker Hardison is able to break into almost any modern computer system [[HollywoodHacking 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 precisely ''because'' it's so unsophisticated.
70	[[/folder]]
71
72	[[folder:Video Games]]
73	* The limited disk space was spoofed in some Creator/{{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/SpaceQuestIVRogerWilcoAndTheTimeRippers'' (1991); the plot was based upon a future civilization finding the missing ''VideoGame/LeisureSuitLarry IV'' floppies (another Sierra 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 [[RidiculousFutureSequelisation 48]]'', which boasted a 12GB size (at a time when 20''MB'' was considered too much disk space, seen in a review of the next year's ''VideoGame/KingsQuestVIHeirTodayGoneTomorrow''). 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 game called "Stunt Flyer" and a "Brain Tools" program. Incidentally, the main supercomputer seen before has Space Quest IV installed, and deleting that promptly closes the real thing that you're playing.
74	* In the old Sega Master System game ''Zillion'', the player must navigate a futuristic underground labyrinthine 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.
75	* ''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 Platform/NintendoGameCube remake, these MO discs were inserted into ''customized Game Cubes''.
76	* In the first two ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid'' games, the player character is given an MO disk to carry.
77	* ''VideoGame/JourneyToSilius'' has floppy disks in the future, too.
78	* ''Manga/{{Strider}}'' on the NES has video calls, or at least audio transcriptions, being recorded on 5¼ floppies.
79	* ''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.
80	* {{Invoked}} in ''VideoGame/DeusExMankindDivided''. There's a side-mission where you have to recover a floppy drive and a reader, but in-universe descriptions and emails state it's actually quite of a retro technology that has grown in popularity since their advantage of secrecy due to the rarity of working drive readers. [[spoiler:The side mission reveals the floppy drive has the memory of AI Eliza Cassan.]]
81	[[/folder]]
82
83	[[folder:Web Original]]
84	* {{Justified\|Trope}} 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 ''VideoGame/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.
85	* The Website/SCPFoundation literally has [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-335 150 Magic Floppy Disks]] that contain ''the entire internet''. Only the first twelve [[TheInternetIsForPorn contain pornography]], though, which shows something of an unusual optimism on the part of the writer.
86	* Played with in ''WebVideo/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!"
87	[[/folder]]
88
89	[[folder:Webcomics]]
90	* The problems of format obsolescence are {{lampshade\|Hanging}}d in [[http://www.qwantz.com/fanart/dino-untitled.png this fan]] Webcomic/{{Dinosaur Comic\|s}}.
91	* Justified, then immediately inverted, in ''Webcomic/CommanderKitty''. The crew is surprised to see massive server farms in Zenith's base, but figure that it's pretty logical, considering that's housing the data for [[spoiler:the minds of about half of all the galaxy's inhabitants]]. They aren't prepared when [[spoiler:they open up, revealing themselves to contain the physical ''bodies'' of those inhabitants--the minds are stored on a single hard drive.]]
92	[[/folder]]
93
94	[[folder:Western Animation]]
95	* 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.]]
96	* 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 {{lampshade\|Hanging}}d in the episode's DVDCommentary. 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.
97	--> '''Bender:''' Not so fast, Nixon! Are you familiar with ''audio tape''?! ''[rewinding sounds]''
98	--> '''Nixon:''' [[OhCrap Uh-oh.]] I don’t like where this is heading.
99	* An episode of ''WesternAnimation/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.
100	* In the "Awakening" series of episodes of ''WesternAnimation/{{Gargoyles}}'', important high-tech information regarding cybernetic technology is stored on floppies. Hilariously, the 2023 NECA figure for David Xanatos comes with a floppy disk in tribute to this, although its design is more rounded like a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive Zip disk]], which would make more sense.
101	[[/folder]]
102
103	[[folder:Real Life]]
104	* The "Save" icon on most computer programs depicts a 3½" floppy disc. 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".
105	** Naturally enough, given their "by geeks for geeks" design philosophy, Linux icon themes lead the way in averting this with either a hard drive or an even more anachronistic picture involving a filing cabinet with an open drawer... which still looks like a floppy disk unless you examine it very closely indeed, possibly intentionally.
106	** Likewise, video editing programs will usually have a film projector or a reel of film as their icons, when these fell out of common use outside movie theaters once the VCR was invented (and even then, film stock would be reduced to a niche medium among filmmakers following the rise of digital cinema in the late 2000s).
107	* 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.
108	** 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 — [[TechnologyMarchesOn say, 10 or 20]] ''[[TechnologyMarchesOn mega]]''[[TechnologyMarchesOn 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 Mac 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.
109	** To this day, Windows computers label their internal hard drives as the "C" drive, because "A" and "B" are reserved for floppy drives.
110	* Averted with certain industrial and scientific establishments, where even though floppy disks are still used for some equipment, they are not generally "special", but rather the equipment used is just that old.
111	* 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.
112	* Somewhat justified in that it's possible to save more than 1.45MB of data on a floppy by using special formats. Some non-standard formats can be read by any DOS-based machine while others require a program to be installed "in the background" to correctly read and write to them. Using such specialist formats, almost 1.8MB can be stored on a floppy disk.
113	* Late MS-DOS and early Windows versions had the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DriveSpace DriveSpace]] utility, that compressed disk data and could be used in floppy disks too.
114	[[/folder]]

Context Main / MagicFloppyDisk