I wrote about this a few years ago on my blog when I re-fitted my old Commodore Amiga with a floppy drive after years of using SD-card floppy emulators:
http://www.markround.com/blog/2019/12/30/back-to-the-floppy/There really was something special about labelling the disks, the deliberate act of sorting through your collection and selecting one... To me, it feels much like picking out a vinyl record to enjoy rather than having everything "on tap" with Spotify. And then there's the scene it generated which reminds me of the tape trading days of the 80s:
"...Later on, when I eventually got involved in The Scene, floppies brought us together in a way I think is now sadly long-gone. Because we traded disks with each other - and groups typically had members whose sole “job” in the group was as a “trader” or “swapper” - we also wrote to each other. As a particularly awkward teenager (with a bunch of the usual teen issues and a healthy side-order of angst), some of the closest friendships I formed during those years were with the other members of my group. Alongside the floppy disks we’d write long, rambling letters to each other full of everything and nothing. We’d fill our envelopes to each other with “Jiffy Junk” - little trinkets we’d collect and swap: Kinder surprise toys, trading cards and the occasional mix-tape... Even though I think I only ever met one of the guys from my group in person, I still think about them often to this day and wonder what they’re all doing now.
As the Amiga scene gradually died and the BBS (and later, the Internet and FTP sites) became the primary means of obtaining software I think a lot of those friendships were broken. Even though The Scene is still a very close-knit community, I’d be interested to know whether those same bonds exist today when most communication is probably electronic in nature..."
