The Floppy Quest

At their peak in the 90s, over 5 billion floppy disks were sold per year. Now, they are relegated to e-waste, only used by hobbyists and industry that hasn't moved on.Do you remember what happened to your old floppy disks? Did you leave them in your parent's basement, give them to a friend, or throw them in the trash?Do you remember what was on your old floppy disks? Was it pirated music, video games, family photos, school assignments, or even viruses?There was over a million gigabytes of data stored on floppies. How much of that data still exists? Most of it is gone, destroyed by humans or the passage time. As a storage media, the floppy disk is volatile. All disks in existence are older than 20 years. Data has been lost, and is unrecoverable.The Floppy Quest exists to explore what has been forgotten. Salvaged from thrift stores, basements, the garbage, and Ebay, this project will explore and archive a fraction of what is stored on this antiquated storage media.I hope you enjoy your stay.-Syne

Hello! Thank you for visiting my epic and professional website. I'm Syne, but everyone IRL just calls me Damien. I'm a IT dweeb and a late-stage zoomer. I started this project after buying a box of floppy disks at a flea market in 2019. I bought another box off Ebay that year, then my third box in mid 2022. Now I buy them when I can.My first computer was a bright pink Toshiba laptop, which ran Windows Vista. By the time I was old enough to be sentient, floppy disks were a thing of the past. All the cool 'educational' games came on CD/DVD. I don't have it now, but my first floppy disk was an AOL disk I found at my grandfathers when I was still in elementary school. I stole it (lol) and put it on a shelf with all the other cool little knickknacks I had. Over the next few years I got a few more, and I never really understood why they fascinated me so much. I never knew how to get the data off of them, so I just imagined what might be on them.I've also started collecting old laptops. Mainly XP-era and earlier Toshiba Sattelites, but also anything that peaks my interest. You can check out my collection and any videos I've made about them at the link below.

I've chosen to split the collections up in a few ways. All downloadable drivers and programs have been given their own section, regardless of what batch they came from. Everything else has been grouped by batch. The disks got a little mixed up, so there's also a Misc section. Enjoy!