Title: Floppy Disk Mega Pack
Classification: Library of Tomes
Date obtained: March 27th, 2024

Description: now here's an interesting one. you see, my dad works in an environment where he meets a lot of people, and sometimes people just give him stuff. it could be homemade food, an AV reciever, once he even brought home a bike, and these are no different. i believe what the story was was that someone was going to throw them all away, and my dad had to stop them since that kinda stuff isn't allowed to go in the trash. they asked, "what, do you want them?" and now here we are. he brought them home and said i could have them, and you know i couldn't deny an offer like that. there was just ooooone tiny issue. i didn't exactly have a floppy drive at the time. i ended up ordering one online, and soon enough it came in. i gotta say, as someone who didn't grow up in an era where floppy disks were too common, i REALLY like the feel of these things. there's something so satisfying about the little clicks that they make when you put them into the drive, and the clunks that happen when you eject them. i guess i'll come clean, old PC hardware isn't really my forte. ask me how to fix an N64 with a broken cartridge slot, that's no problem, just yank out some of the ground pins and shove em where the broken pins were. ask me how to mount something in DOS and i'll come back to you with several lascerations. but that's besides the point, after all this time what was actually on these things?

well... it was kind of a mixed bag. there was an incomplete set of install disks for Microsoft Office 95, a few install disks for some Texas Instruments programs, a homemade McAfee Antivirus disk dating to 11/12/96, an uninstaller for Windows NT, something labelled "NU 95," another thing labelled "BIGRED NEW", which... i don't know if i want to know what that is. there was a complete set of NetWare Novell Certification Assessment Test disks, but... i don't really know what that is. maybe i'll need to research that. there was something called the Quarterdeck expanded memory manager 386, which seems to be something you'd use to manager your files directly through DOS, since File Explorer isn't an option. the most unfortunate part about all of these though was that i couldn't really get any of the contents to open on my Windows 10 computer. i know, i know, using Windows is satan and i really should be running Linux. listen, i totally would but for my entire life ive always used Windows (i was born into it, this wasn't my choice) and migrating all of my muscle memory, knowledge, creative projects and programs over to a completely new thing i've never used before is just... not in the cards for me and my current situation. (i did try out PopOS last year though and i will say it was quite nice) but all of that is off topic. some might just say "why not use a virtual machine?" and that is a great idea! unfortunately, i can't seem to figure out how to get VMWare to read directly from my floppy drive, it won't detect the hardware. i could probably just mount a virtual image of all of them and do things that way, but that doesn't seem nearly as interesting, nor is it in the spirit of what i wanted to do. so for now, i'm putting this whole exploration on hold. perhaps one day when i get these guys loaded onto something, i can potentially make a followup entry and tell you folks all about it. but for now, i guess we'll just have to wait and see.