Floppy

Start your story with a character finding a retro piece of tech they don't recognize

What is it? “That's the $64 question.” Can't be one of those old flash drives 'cause it's too flat and wouldn't fit into the side of a computer. Had some geeks from BB look at it and even they didn't know what the fuck it was. Man. Some people get lots of dough for old shit on the internet like old comic books or baseball cards. They put this shit all online now and you gotta pay a subsription if you wanna see 'em and see 'em move. Then, one of the losers said it must be an A Drive and they had this retro A drive they got at a yard sale a billion years ago. So, they went home, got the retro piece of shit but this thing was too wide and thin to fit it in and we thought if we bent it, it might break along with any valuable data on it. So, we posted it on an app and asked if anyone knew what the fuck it was. The answers were psycho. Shit like maybe this is an apport from an alien life force trying to communicate in their style. Maybe it was an old fashioned frisbee. Frisbees were round, not square, moron.  

We took it to some old farts, but they didn't know what the fuck it was for either. No one did. So, we went to ask historians, anthropologists, and a lot of other losers at Universities. One guy said it might have been the outside cover for a peeping hole where naked women were. Why would a peeping hold bend though?  

Another guy said it might have been a covering for a woman's pussy so she could keep her virginity. Makes no sense. This thing is only a little thicker than paper. Morons. Then, one of the morons said he knew exactly what it was and had been studying it for years. So, duh, we asked him what the fuck it was. Then, he said when computers first came out, trillions and trillions of years ago, one of the first computers was an Atari. None of us motherfuckers ever heard of no such thing. So, we did what any normal motherfucker would do when he don't know what some old damn thing is after asking losers; we went to Youtube. Man, when we went on Youtube and looked up Atari, it showed this old looking black box, with weird cartridges going into it, but we showed this old fart this and showed him the weird square thing and told him they were two different shapes, idiot.  

“No, no, no. See, that's the Atari 8300, this disk isn't for that, it was for word documents on the Atari 4500. Think of it like Word.” Ain't none of us never heard of no Word before. So, he explained people would write things on their Atari. Things like letters.” Man, ain't none of us motherfuckers ain't never heard of no letters except, A, B, and Cs.  “No, no, no, not those kinds of letters, letters like Dear So and So, How are you? And then you'd tell them about everything happening in your life and they'd tell you what was going on in their lives.” Like texts? You mean people would write texts and send it off. How the fuck'd even get there without no wifi? “Well, they had something back then called The United States Postal Service. See, people would drive in white cars and deliver mail with paid stamps. There were no texts, e-mails, or anything and people would sometimes save what they'd written on this floppy disks.” So, how the fuck do we find out what's on this here snail mail Atari floppy disk? “Well, you could see if anyone's selling an Atari on the web. You could go to antique shows or garage sales, maybe. But, your best bet would be to find someone majoring in retro tech and ask them for connections. I only know what this is because my great grandparents owned one and let me play with it, showing me how it worked. But, I can give you some numbers and room numbers to knock on. You'll find your answers. By the way, start by looking up Atari 4500 on that Youtube thing you were talking about.” So we did. And, swear to God, the video had the same motherfucking weird disk we held in our hands and people were opening weird word files with blue backgrounds and no autocorrect. Then, the guy on the video printed it out on this weird paper with things on the side with holes they tore out afterwards. Weird. The reader probably doesn't know what the fuck I'm talking about so look up Atari Printer on Youtube.  

“Where did you even find this thing? Do you have the Atari that goes with it? Is it for sale?” Those thoughts ain't even occurred to us. “How much would you want for it? Is it yours?” I looked at it and it looked fresh, wasn't torn or broken or nothing, but as for where I got it. See, y'all gonna laugh when you hear this shit. I sometimes go to the library to read some cool shit and when I borrowed a dumb book, I be reading it and this weird thing pop out one of the pages and I didn't know what the fuck it was. I asked the librarian if I could keep it and she shrugged and said, “Sure”. Then, me and my friends try to figure out what the fuck it is and our mommas and poppas ain't got no idea, but said to ask around. Somebody's gotta know what the fuck this is, right? So, that's what we did. He took us to this young loser's lab and he asked if he could examine it, so we say as long as he don't break it and we get it back afterwards, sure. Why the fuck not? So, he takes out his new phone and puts an adaptor into it and brings out this thing and inserts the floppy disk and it just be the random letters pushed down like some dumb kid or cat be pouncing on whatever they used to use for alphabets. He offers to buy it from us and we's talk it over and what the fuck we gonna do with a disk with random letters we can't even open on our cells? So, we sell it to him and split the dough. God only knows what he's gonna do with a stoneage disk with random letters and we don't give a shit. We just wanted to know what the fuck it was for and we found out and got paid. Damn.