Before USB thumb drives, before the Cloud, if you didn’t want to blow the RAM of your word processor stuffing it with countless writing projects, you used a floppy disk.

No, not the true floppy disks from the 1980s, where they were what they sounded like: pliable, flat, square sized code containers less the size of a 45 r.p.m. record. I trust most of my readership to know what I mean, inclusive of a 45 m.p.h. record.

“Floppy” disks eventually became harder and smaller 3.5-inch plastic holders, able to store up to 1.44 megabytes of data on them. Back then, cutting edge tech, but laughable in comparison to the 1 to 4 gig thumb drives which preceded them and already hint at obsoletion. For a writer, being able to hold 19,000 to 77,000 pages of our craft on port key storage today has become a lifeline. A way to avoid system crashes from data overload. Even just to transfer pictures, videos and media off our motherboards and keep the gateway humming.

The annoyance to change, and I’ve always said it’s blatant strategy on the part of corporate manufacturers, is the profit through progress ethos forcing consumers into buying the “latest thing.” By default, sending the prior “thing” into archaism. VHS tapes to DVD to Blu Ray to 4K to streaming. Vinyl records to 8 tracks to cassette tapes to CDs to downloads and streaming. Atari 2600 to Intellivision to Colecovision to Sega to Nintendo to PlayStation and Xbox. You gotta pay to play, and you’re gonna. President Business says so, in Lego form and real-time. I’m still quietly Jonesing I have thousands of digital pictures, a decade’s worth, stashed on CD Rom and I keep a hard drive processor on-hand for access.

Rant over. I was going through a box marked “Office” from my past three moves, and I recall my now wife, TJ, mocking my novelty metal lock box featuring The Little Rascals on it. “What kind of silly lunch box is that?” she teased, suggesting I move on from it while were both downsizing for our first place together.

“Non-negotiable,” I simply told her, flipping open the lid overtop two stymied facades of Spanky and Buckwheat. When she saw the contents inside, she was both wowed and foiled to see a large collection of those 1.44 megabyte data holders, especially when I showed her what the contents were.

Another entire decade-plus of old short stories I’d written. As it turns out, countless of them. Poems, essays, even my debut, long out-of-print novel, Mentor, I’ve never really owned up to anymore due to the shady publisher. I had three separate disks holding the entire novel! I found band interviews, media reviews, the entire beginnings of my entry into the music business. “How are you even going to access all that?” TJ gamely tried me with. “No computer is designed for those anymore.”

There’s this thing I’m sure you’re all familiar with, an online market called Amazon. With the grin of an author reconnecting with a buried past, I ordered a portable USB-plug floppy disk reader from gadget peddlers, Chuanganzhuo. I’d had a similar device years ago, lost to the ether from another move, vanished with my handheld cassette recorder and an entire box of tapes holding hundreds of music and film industry personality interviews. I later used a digital recorder to conduct interviews. Would that I could retrieve those spindling nuggets of gold, sigh… I have some, but not all of the transcripts from those glorious chats with heavy music royalty and then-youngbloods, some of whom made it in the industry and others who faded into the same ether.

You can get this external USB reader for less than twenty bucks if you happen to have some of these disks with your long-hidden work on them. I had a total gas pulling up files of the damned while the reader ground and wheezed machina-speak at me, reminding me how primitive the early days of data storage were. Those nattering pops extracted stories I laughed at myself for writing. The naivete, the amateurishness, the desperation to be heard, no matter the cost. Some of it was so cringeworthy, some of it so explicit, those pieces had a right to be slapped into a digital cargo bay with a snug lock.

Yet, I found many pieces I’ve unearthed and tucked into the latest Word format for future rewrites and cleanups. I have so much more to rediscover, but I snickered in remembrance of back in the day when the disks would spout “exceeding maximum storage” messages at me and how little there is on those disks compared to my thumb drives holding my work. 3 floppies for a single novel, laughing out loud. Almost as ingratiating then as those blood-boiling bomb icons the old Apple MacIntosh processors used to pound in your face during system crashes–and those happened ad nauseum in Apple’s early days. I never bought another Mac again, despite my colleagues’ pressing me to get with the program, no pun intended.

All of that, of course, being obsolete.

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.