When I replaced the innards of my 2008 desktop circa 2015, the floppy drive still had the hard drive driver disk in it from when I first loaded the system.
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Fryâs is definitely a shell of its former self.
USB floppy drives are a thing - but there werenât any on site (that I could find, and knowing that I had a known-good machine only 10 minutes away, I didnât look that hard). 
I guess Iâm used to âdrive homeâ being 45 minutes if itâs a good day. My drive is my biggest work complaint, to be honest. Trying to get it under 30.
Itâd be a lot easier for my work to just go to a 24/7 Microcenter, Best Buy, etc.
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If weâd been in the same situation Iâd have done exactly that. Funnily enough though, I knew I had a USB floppy drive at home as well. 
Hey, I gots an USB stiffy drive in my drawer. Used less than 10 times.
Think itâll need to be treasured like something very, very rare
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I donât think Iâve ever seen a tech store that was open 24 hours. The closest I can think of would be a Walmart or Target, which it not reliable.
I live 9 miles from work, but a typical morning or evening commute doesnât take less than 20 minutes, frequently much more. One day a couple weeks ago, it took more than 45 minutes to get home after work. When it is that long, it puts me in a sour mood. OTOH, if I work late and donât leave until after, like, 10pm, I can sometimes make it home in 15 minutes.
I may be a little spoiled living in the DC metro. Thereâs a few that are 24/7 here. I was out in Arizona earlier this year and we did a late-night Fryâs trip, too.
Admittedly in days long past I got sent out to every Radio Shack in a 20 mile radius looking for the special power cables we needed for a move.
I have a shrine of âAncient technologyâ on my desk at work that includes a mini disk, a laptop from 2000, a usb floppy drive, what was an unopened box of floppies, a PDA, a mini disk, and my favorite thing a 3gb 3.5 inch hard drive that must be 5 lbs.
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If we had space (spoiler: we donât have space) Iâd like to set up a âgeek barâ with old but amusing tech on an isolated VLAN at some job. Throw some old iMacs, those 90s Sun desktops so many companies seem to have sitting around, maybe some old consoles.
Purely just as art and something to play with in downtime.
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Very nice those old HDDs are quite large by todayâs standards, arenât they!
I recently bought an MD Walkman that came with all its extras except the box, and 25 MDs (score!). Always wanted one of those.
A few years ago I got (in a job lot) an external SCSI enclosure that was surprisingly heavy⌠opened it up and found a Metropolis-branded, full-height, 5.25" 650MB SCSI hard drive. Itâs gotta weigh around 10kg (22lb). I called it âTall Paulâ and I still use it for backing up old Macs.
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I love SPARCstations. I have an Ultra 10 and two Ultra 5s (which I found out are exactly the same as the Ultra 10, just in a desktop case). I feel that one Ultra 5 is crying out for me to slap NeXTSTEP on it.
SCSI really start to shine when you have two (or more) SCSI HDDâs on the same cable (and sorted terminator issues out). It is for this reason that servers had SCSI RAID and not IDE RAID as IDE with more than one device is slower than SCSI.
It is the way data is written to disks, SCSI can have two or more active disks, while with IDE only one disk can be active at a time.
I avoided the âEarly Mac SCSIâ era for the most part, which is where I think it got ugly, probably due to a lot of devices in the ecosystem that were either repurposed for Macs (intended for server systems where it would be more locked down, I.E. Vendor A sells a SCSI drive for their dedicated system⌠Now people wanted to use it on Macs) or just suspect quality (Like today you shouldnât buy grade Z fiber transceivers).
Apple also changed their SCSI implementation a couple times. This didnât help.
Early SCSI on Macs got a ton of âaccumulated loreâ to getting termination right. When I ran a lab full of Macs with SCSI external drives and scanners issues were surprisingly rare: Usually once something was set up. it actually worked quite well.
I had a SCSI drive or two work was tossing in 99 or so, but realized it wasnât worth ti to add a whipping 5 gigs to my environment even then.
OldJob had a bunch that just seemed to get moved around. The UNIX team used to use them, butt hey were all gone by maybe 2005. Some devs held on to theirs forever and refused to give them up. I think one had a full-sized Sun tower that jsut took up cube space and wasnât even in use.
A favorite 90s tech from a design stance was the SGI boxes. They loved their textured paint for a while, which was pretty awesome, then there was the box one job got that looked like a neon blue art deco toaster.
Ah yeah, the Indy. The best looking desktop case around for the era, I will agree.
Is that an O2?
[rummages through Google Images]
Yes, itâs an O2. Lovely looking thing.
It reminds me of the Cobalt Qube 2 that I had for a little while in 2003.
I bought it to learn some Linux on, and then I discovered that it was an appliance and designed to use the web interface for all of its functions, so I sold it. Should have kept it, but I needed the money at the time.
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On my word⌠The memoriesâŚ
Iâd forgotten all about SGI boxes, the Cobalt, and all the goodness that were Sun SparcStationsâŚ
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I remember the O2 at the place that had one being curvier for some reason.
I worked for a place that had one that was probably the most powerful computer in the building: It worked as a RIP for a wide-format printer, so was pretty much never used âinteractively.â
I feel like a last gasp for a bunch of those companies was trying to get into imaging and publishing fields. It made sense, but obviously didnât really workâŚ
I guess the Qube is a sort of distant ancestor to todayâs NAS systems. I remember reading up on them when they were current, not that I had the money.
Hey, itâs Erwin from UserFriendly!
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The O2 is definitely from the era where computers were meant to look cool. I donât remember it being particularly large in person, but it definitely drew attention.
I had a Power Mac G4 rig at a later job that got similar attention, but that was more due to the translucent monitor getting oohed and ahhed over by everyone in the wing of the building.