So… I made an iPhone dock using an old 3.5" disk case, the cardboard backing to a cheap hotel notepad, and part of a stress ball (to keep the cable in place).
Why? Because its been quiet for me at work. I’ve been able to work normal 8 hour days, and in some cases, not quite been able to fill them. I’ve delivered a few major projects all at once. One or two other things I have are pending feedback and external updates. And starting January, I’ll be busy on a couple new big initiatives. So right now, I’m kinda riding the bench. But there’s only so much industry news, case study, and training you can do before boredom sets in.
So I made an iPhone dock. Because science.
Good luck everyone else.
Uhm, what’s a 3.5″ disk case? It looks cool, but, and I hesitate to ask, what did you have that was 3.5′ and stored in a box?
A billion years ago, computers were predominantly stationary devices anchored to desks in enormous boxes called ‘towers’. Some people colloquially called these ‘CPU’s, but they were wrong. This was an age of a nascent internet, where data flow was much slower, pixelated things weren’t ironically and nostalgically cool, they just were the things we had, and we didn’t know any better. There were fewer places to loudly and anonymously tell people they were wrong. It was a backwards time.
The massive tower computers contained few methods to transfer data. USB drives didn’t exist. What did exist were disk drives. These were slots within the tower 3.5″ in width to accommodate a conveniently sized disk that contained a whopping 1.44 MB of data, as you can see from the above archive photo. That data could be anything from drivers from your new space aged mouse, or 1/14th of the new Zork game you just bought. All you needed was patience and more patience and lots of literal and physical disk space, and the world was your pixelated oyster.
It should be noted, the predessor for these 3.5″ disks were 5.25″ ‘floppy’ disks, so named because they were comically thin, and could flex quite easily, making it hilariously simple to break the disk and lose your term paper just by hefting it too quickly. Some people later used the same ‘Floppy Disk’ term for 3.5″ disks, but those people were also wrong. The 3.5″ disks are not floppy.
For reasons I cannot fathom, the computer industry as moved away from the architecture and spacious 1.44MB limitations of the 3.5″ disks, and on to the pretentiously large terabyte thumb drives with their unnecessarily fast USB connections.
Additionally, for other reasons I also cannot fathom, my company still has a few machines that use these disks, have these drives, and are within my reach.
This was an empty disk case that I repurposed. Because we should honor the golden age of technology. When things were simpler. And we had only 3.5″ of data at a time.
I love everything about this.
Especially “pretentiously large terabyte thumb drives with their unnecessarily fast USB connections”.
Kids these days… smh
Some people later used the same ‘Floppy Disk’ term for 3.5″ disks, but
those people were also wrong. The 3.5″ disks are not floppy.
Yes, they are, inside the cases, just like the 5.25″ were even floppier inside theirs, as was the 8″ before that. A Hard Disk is something else entirely – that’s why we refer to the Hard Disk Drive inside our computer. Floppy Disk is, in fact, the correct name for a 3.5″.
