A California winter evening where 6pm felt like 10pm had me looking through a big tub of old CD’s, DVD’s, and VHS’s, and realizing I had a handful of floppy disks and magically, a floppy disk adapter. One experience I am always up for is nostalgia that makes you cringe and also cry, and I found just that on this early December evening with cancelled plans and a few hours of ✨space✨.
The sounds a floppy disk inserted into a drive makes while it does its electric pulse decoding into bits is just so satisfying. Some 24 years ago, a very old computer (by today’s standards) made a magnet drag around and create some code inside this cute little square plastic case and in doing that, archived a snapshot of who I was + what I was thinking back then. What an archival treat.
I often feel like a caveman marveling at such technology but I do it a lot. Every three Instacart orders or so, I stop to remind myself that it’s actually insane to have groceries in an hour after pressing a few buttons on a hand sized computer. Just like the magical world of code and computers and the science that runs the entire modern world, I don’t claim to fully understand the technical specifics of how the read-write process of floppy disks works… I just know it’s all barely short of a miracle.
I wait with anticipatory pleasure to see what these time capsules have to offer, and think about how we don’t really have to wait for technology that much anymore, and how nostalgic it felt to be forced to wait for the disk drive name to pop up on the left side of my Finder pane. I recall many times that didn’t happen, regardless of the amount of times I pulled the USB in and out, and given my ignorance of all things computer-science, I was limited to tricks like restarting the computer and crossing my fingers. And that energy has gotten me quite far.
I really wish I got to learn the technical parts of all of this. But this little piece here today is not about regret.
I relished in sitting the extra minutes with the promise of finding something amusing, and a way to pass a couple hours this mildly lonely evening in a far too early dark.
Everything I found I remembered, but had long forgotten – a treasured feeling.
Poems of unrequited love to a platonic boy best friend (sigh)
Photos from the mall we used to frequent when we all lied to everyone’s parents that we were at each other’s house but instead met there,
Defunct AOL Instant Messenger “buddy list” files (amazing that I found these so important to save, several versions in fact)
A quote from Steve Jobs on misfits and rebels
Notes between me and my best friend at the time with max level cringe slang we used at the time
It wasn’t seamless and I think that was part of the fun – treasure hunting to see what files were corrupt vs. workable, and realizing a lot of the old .doc files wouldn’t open on my Mac. Shoutout to Microsoft 365 for squeezing $9.99 out of me for a one-month sign up, which handled some of these 2001 files easily. Incredible.
I sent a grainy photo of 5 of us high school girlies to my best friend, who laughed at the vintage quality of it but then reminded us how one of the girls pictured almost killed her mom in their garage while learning how to drive – she’d accidentally floored the gas pedal while trying to park, instead of putting her foot on the break. Her mom was critically injured, and our friend never came to school again.
Not all nostalgia is sweet.
The floppy disks were super temperamental and on a few occasions I felt that familiar late 90’s heart-drop feeling of losing all of your files when it wouldn’t read or it told me I didn’t eject properly. With undying elder millennial tech patience I carefully troubleshooted and landed the plane.
Some of you haven’t had your entire freshmen year of digital goods wipes from a faulty disk at 2 in the morning before a project was due, and it shows.
One disk actually got stuck in the adaptor because the metal piece was slightly bent, and similar to a rogue utensil in a drawer getting stuck because the handle is at an ill angle, it wouldn’t come out. I panicked initially, thinking I would render it useless and miss out on 3 more floppies of time capsule joy, but I quickly dipped into that 80’s kid “MacGyver” type survival instinct – grabbing some random resource nearby (in this case, tweezers) to quickly to get out of a pickle, which is exactly what I did to get the disk out. But not before the metal piece broke off entirely inside the adaptor, prompting more tweezering and violent shaking about… along with a small prayer that the current cloud hosting of 2025 that houses 100% of the last 10 years of my life will last forever, that all digital files will forever be accessible, and I won’t have to wrangle metal pieces to access it in 25 years from now. Amen.
I rescued my adaptor, not the floppy, and the already supposedly corrupt disk officially died. RIP 🪦. I wonder what was on you.
The photos, collages, and memories are all so perfectly Web 1.0 – saved jpg’s, doc’s, and txt files and I love that this era sits cleanly in my memory of the time. HTML hand-coded homepages and Yahoo directories (instead of search how we know it today, let alone ChatGPT obviously) and just the sense that the internet was a digital library to sit in and discover. It wasn’t that intimidating, it felt like it was all being built like a bunch of eager amateurs like myself and maybe a handful of trailblazer companies my dad talked about investing in at the dinner table.
Even the design choices I made in my .doc and early .ppt files reflected the design of the internet at the time, a reminder that everything influences… everything else. I was not online NEARLY as much then as I am now, and have a hard time remembering how I got any actual research done.
In any case, feeling that 90’s vibes + old high school projects flash up warmed up right up on a dark winter evening. Like ‘ah yes, this is where my manic obsession with perfectionism started’. ‘This is where my ill-formed ideas about relationships took root.’ It all makes sense.
The star of the time capsule was a 60 page magnum opus titled “Emily” (I’d not been subject to the world of clickbait quite yet, and it shows). I started writing it in late August – right before my sophomore year started – and 21 days before the world was upended by the September 11 attacks… a moment I had no idea how to actually understand or process at the time. My parents were on a flight to Europe on that same day, and my sister called me frantically asking for their flight number and I have a memory of not being that scared at all. Proof I had no idea what was actually happening.
In any case, Haley remains my die-hard #1 Archival Emily Content Fan and was thrilled about this find.
I was surprised by how much poetry + personal reflections I found… Period 2 English really pulled it out of us, I suppose.
I can’t believe how many things I freely wrote about that still feel so foundational today. I wrote with such righteousness and certainty. I suppose maturity is learning how much you don’t know, but the core confidence of a more immature version of oneself is amusing to witness. I see it in my 5 year old – she already thinks she knows everything (except for when she’s in tears over “knowing absolutely nothing”). Has life just continued to serve humble pie one slice after another for the past 24 years, changing that tone?
In any case, buckle up for quite a few screenshots from the time capsule archive…
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