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Comment by Seanambers | Hacker News Reader

I'd go as far as to say that 3.5" floppy's were much more widespread than for instance usb sticks are today and in numbers that has no comparable to this age(thankfully). The world basically ran on it until windows 95 came on a CDROM (also distributed on 13 floppys) and with it the multimedia age as they called it, but still it took a good decade before it was mostly CD/DVD's..

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Believe it or not, my win95 copy came with both 3.5 floppy disks and a cd. my computer that time had a cdrom but I tried to install it with floppy disks, and failed miserably around the thirties or something. At that time there was a joke why MS named it win95 not something else.

Are you sure you aren’t thinking about Office? The last version came on 55 floppies

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/tn-archiv...

Can confirm the OS did as well (win 95). It was a hard install on my notebook which lacked a cd drive. So many floppies.

Same here, floppies and failures!

I ended up taking the notebook (a Dell Latitude with 810MB of hard disk) to a friends where we managed to install from a network mounted CD via the parallel port IIRC.

I bought a version of Novell Unixware back in the early 1990s that had even more floppies, 63 of 'em, IIRC.

I tried to short-circuit that long-winded installation by putting the last 50 or so on to a QIC tape-cassette. Most of the time that worked, sometimes it didn't.

It definitely came packaged this way in Australia. I can confirm OP's story.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1995-Microsoft-Windows-Upgrade-for-...

I have not so great memories of constantly reinstalling windows via floppy.

Swapping disks getS old quick

If it was a retail copy of W95 with both the 3.5" disks and a CD-ROM, it also included a little receipt you could mail in to Microsoft so you could swap your 3.5" disks for 1.2 MB 5.25" ones. Just in case you were insane enough to try and install it on a machine only with 5.25" drives.

And people with 8" floppy drives were just out of luck.

I grew up in the CD era but I still had to use floppy disks for things like school assignments, because disks were far worse for that - burned once, disk lost. Rewritable disks were more expensive, failed like crazy and took a lot of time to burn anyway.

I remember that time as particularly annoying. It was a God send to see usb sticks become mainstream, and since everyone had mp3 players on them it meant that you were always carrying a USB stick with you (except for the poor souls that had ipods, who couldn't treat the storage as a folder for random files and had to use iTunes instead ).

You definitely could do that to my recollection, I remember doing so to ferry files around.

Here's an apple support doc showing how:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201544

This was not a viable option pre 6th gen.

It was if you ran ipodlinux instead of the stock OS!

I had forgotten about this, thanks for the reminder :)

From firsthand experience? I think my 2003 iPod w/ Dock Connector can still boot to Disk Mode.

While the average computer user may have had, say, 40 floppy disks, and today's users have maybe two USB sticks on average, the sheer number of users has probably risen enough to overcome that difference.

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