Magic Key Floppy

[Silvina Spindler]

Aside from intentionally hi-tech looking machinery, the production teams for shows tend to use old items as props. Despite the high availability and low cost of removable drives, USB pen drives, and burnable CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray discs, the old standard 1.44MB plastic floppy disk seems to turn up a lot, especially in the hands of someone who would be very unlikely to use one.

Not only that, but such older technology that appears will inevitably be jacked to the gills and capable of things it can't/couldn't do in real life. The Hacker/cracker character of a show usually has them, if only because they tend to be a fan of Schizo Tech, which makes them look more out of place. If he's such a world-class computer expert, why is he using technology that's now over two decades old? Most newer machines do not even have built-in floppy drives. However, it's still used, because even the oldest and most computer illiterate viewer at least knows what a floppy disk looks like.

You might think this trope would also apply to audio media, but CDs replaced vinyl and even cassette tapes almost immediately in TV shows. Which is extra-strange, because it took well over a decade for them to catch on in Real Life. Vinyl still occasionally makes an appearance, justified by the fact it is still the format of choice for audiophiles and professional club DJs. On the other hand, mp3 players are still catching up.

Compare with Trope Breaker. See Technology Marches On if the item seems outdated now, but was state-of-the-art when the work was made. May lead to younger audiences wondering what the hell those funny-looking CD-ROMs are.

Anime and Manga

• In Serial Experiments Lain, when Lain leaks the member list of the Knights of the Eastern Calculus onto the Wired, leaving them open for assassination by the Men in Black, one man responds by filling a briefcase with papers and Magneto-Optical discs and trying to flee.
• Carefully analyzed in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, where a minor character (a hacker) uses thousands of floppy disks to store all the data. He was so paranoid that it's mentioned just just how ridiculous the concept was. However, it did save the data from an attacking hacker who probably hadn't even seen a floppy drive in his life. In cyberspace, filesharing is shown by a Digital Avatar of a floppy, which is fully acceptable because that small icon in your word processor that reads "Save" is a floppy disk as well.
• Patlabor had the operating systems for Humongous Mecha stored on a single floppy. One factory producing said mecha stored its backups on thousands of them.
• An episode of Sonic X has Rouge able to copy the entire database of a bio-lab/space colony onto a MiniDisc. For those unfamiliar, you just need to know that they're not big enough to fit that size database, and they were a flop in the IT field. note The classic 80-minute 292kbps MiniDisc has a capacity of about 171MiB. This only applies if you interpret that as "MiniDisc" and not "Mini disk".
• In Rebuild of Evangelion, the careful observer will notice a strange dissonance. Shinji has his cassette tape often, and at the same time Unit 05's OS is shown to use at least 250 terabytes of memory. The second film explained this by having the tape player originally belong to Gendo who is conceivably old enough to have used it but it's a bit of a stretch. Shinji keeps it as long as he has because it is one of, maybe, half a dozen items or ideas that mean his father loves him. This may account for his never upgrading to anything newer. The Second Impact is a likely partial reason for the "old" technology. When the world is suffering from a major catastrophe and millions are dead, consumer electronics take a back seat to other priorities. Similarly, Asuka is sometimes shown playing games on a Bandai WonderSwan, a handheld console that was discontinued in 2003 in the real world.
• In Transformers: Robots in Disguise, the plans for the Global Spacebridge (a Portal Network the Autobots use to get to the action) are stored on what looks like a 1.44 MB floppy. Granted, it's apparently a giant floppy, but still. For additional hilarity, the disk is read, not by putting it in a drive, but by Scourge and Sky-Byte looking at it intently.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, the ZERO System is stored on...a floppy disk (or a series of floppies). Not even a ZIP disk, a floppy disk.

Literature

• Done intentionally in the 2007 novel 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher. He says in a question and answer in the back of the book that he made Hannah record her suicide notes on a tape specifically to avoid technology marching on and thus making an Unintentional Period Piece. Tapes are outdated, but not so outdated that people wouldn't know what they are. This also serves as a minor plot point, with Clay having to borrow a Walkman from one of his friends in order to listen to the tapes. This makes a bit less sense in the 2017 Netflix adaptation, since anyone who is the protagonist's age in 2017 (who would have been born in 2000-2001) probably would have even less of a memory of tapes than someone their age in 2007 (who would have been born in 1990-1991).
• The first Red Dwarf novel, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, has one aversion; all the information needed to recreate a perfect simulation of yourself in a holographic body can be stored on a device "the size of a suppository", as Lister rather gloomily puts it. And yet he apparently buys his music on DAT tapes, whilst Rimmer is the proud owner of at least one James Last albumnote or a compilation of Hammond Organ music, depending on the edition on vinyl, with no indication that he's a collector of rare antiquities or that this is otherwise unusual. Of course, Lister finds a DVD (or roughly equivalent) of The Flintstones in the Cat city on the cargo decks.
• The Brad Thor novel Full Black involves a character receiving a flash drive with significantly more than the 128 GB of data storage available on commercially available USB flash drives. There was a handwave regarding advanced protein data storage. As of 2018, 128G+ flash sticks are somewhat expensive, but definitely commercially available.
• At one point in Skyway trilogy by John DeChancie (basically, about Space Truckers) the protagonists receive a floppy disk with a map of interstellar Portal Network, which is obviously too big to fit on a floppy. Justified by the disk being a device made by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens (possibly humans from far future) in a way to make it easier to interface with human computers. Most of human technology in the novels isn't far beyond 1980s, save for Earth-Pluto passenger transports and licensed alien technology used to manufacture wheels of the trucks that drive through portals.

Video Games

• The limited disk space was spoofed in some Sierra adventure games - self-spoof, actually, as many of their games in their golden age fit on well over half a dozen floppies. Most spoofing of all was Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers (1991); the plot was based upon a future civilization finding the missing Leisure Suit Larry IV floppies (another Sierra in-joke), and attempting to play them on their Master Computer, with disastrous results. In another scene, the protagonist can go in a future game shop, and find a copy of King's Quest 48, which boasted a 12GB size (at a time when 20MB was considered too much disk space, seen in a review of the next year's King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow). Finally, the very end required the player to download an entire personality on a 3" floppy disk (pictured above) that had lots of other stuff on it too. Some of that "other stuff" includes a game called "Stunt Flyer" and a "Brain Tools" program. Incidentally, the main supercomputer seen before has Space Quest IV installed, and deleting that promptly closes the real thing that you're playing.
• In the old Sega Master System game Zillion, the player must navigate a futuristic underground labyrinthine base filled with alien enemies and attempt to access the main computer to activate the self-destruct sequence. While many modern-looking access cards are used to unlock doors, the access codes for the computer are scattered on 8 5inch floppy disks all around the base.
• Resident Evil, being made in Japan mid-'90s, uses the much, much cooler-looking than floppies MO disc, which still have the same basic recognizable shape. In the Nintendo GameCube remake, these MO discs were inserted into customized Game Cubes.
• In the first two Metal Gear Solid games, the player character is given an MO disk to carry.
• Journey to Silius has floppy disks in the future, too.
• Strider on the NES has video calls, or at least audio transcriptions, being recorded on 5 floppies.
• Dark Fall Lights Out, having Time Travel as part of its gameplay, almost starts off with a floppy disk mysteriously turning up in 1912, which can be read on a laptop in 2004. Later, it turns out that an Underwater Base in 2090 AD contains DVDs, floppy disks, and even MP3 players.
• Invoked in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. There's a side-mission where you have to recover a floppy drive and a reader, but in-universe descriptions and emails state it's actually quite of a retro technology that has grown in popularity since their advantage of secrecy due to the rarity of working drive readers. The side mission reveals the floppy drive has the memory of AI Eliza Cassan.

Web Original

• Justified in Homestar Runner, where Strong Bad actually prefers older computers, so he does use floppies, although he thinks the 3" ones are hard disks. He's expressed a preference for the "big, floppy" kind (5 inchers), but he is upset that he needs to fold them up to get them in the new computers. A typical email Easter Egg is the title of an old, often obscure game featuring prominently on the floppy disk storage box next to Strong Bad's computer. Curiously, some of them (such as Relentless, American name for Little Big Adventure) were never released on floppy disks. (Considering Strong Bad's character, the world he lives in and that all of these disks have handwritten labels, it might just be that he's playing pirated copies.) Others filled multiple diskettes, but there's no sign on the disk shown that it's part of a set - a more literal case.
• The SCP Foundation literally has 150 Magic Floppy Disks that contain the entire internet. Only the first twelve contain pornography, though, which shows something of an unusual optimism on the part of the writer.
• Played with in Arby 'n' the Chief during one episode in which the Chief attempts to download 900 Gigabytes of porn. When called out on this, he responds with one of the show's many funny moments: "dun worries. i has 2 floppeh disks!"

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