Editor's note: Michael! Game disks were worth triple their weight in gold! How could you lose or damage them? Hell, I even threatened to make my brother wear gloves whenever he wanted to play games on our Apple IIGS. Did any of you have trouble keeping track of floppy disks? -Jason

When I was a kid, I lost stuff, from toys to homework to money from my uncle. I had a knack for misplacing things. I remember getting a lot of grief from my parents about my problem, and I've made considerable strides since.

But there was one item, more than anything else, that would throw a wrench into the works if I lost it -- which I did multiple times.

Back in the early to mid-1980s, I got my first computer. My dad had different computers that I'd tinkered with over the years, but this PC was mine. It was a Tandy 1000. That Radio Shack-exclusive beauty came with a bona fide 5.25-inch disk drive, 128k of RAM, and a glamorous 14-inch VGA monitor. It didn't have a mouse. Aside from my Atari 2600, this was my gaming rig.

My gaming library consisted of some games that I had found at the local Radio Shack that were, if I remember correctly, Tandy 1000 exclusives. Up to this point I didn’t realize that my computer was IBM compatible and was just buying games from the Tandy's limited selection. To start these games, you merely needed to throw the disk in the drive, and it would boot right into the game.

After exhausting my library with countless hours of playtime, I learned that I could play the IBM compatible games that I’d been drooling over at the local Babbage’s. The lightbulb came on -- I’d hit gaming utopia. My only limits were my allowance and my dependence on transportation to get to the store.

But through all this, I was still losing stuff.

This leads me back to my opener. These new games all required the almighty MS-DOS disk to boot up. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to back up the most important, the most crucial -- nay, the most sacred -- component that would lead me to my PC Promised Land.

These 5.25-inch disks weren't the most invulnerable things on the planet, especially in the greasy fingers of a snacking juvenile. If you smudged the little areas of the exposed disk, the data could go "poof." If another sibling or a friend tore off the label on that disk, it could be mistaken for a blank and copied over. If you had to travel, say, to your father's house, lugging the computer and all of its components (games, keyboard, etc.), you could potentially misplace that disk.

Sometimes, I think that floppy disks had a mind to just get up and walk away on their own.

All of these things contributed to the deflation of a young boy's morale whenever I tried to load a game, only to realize that I couldn't find the DOS disk or that the disk was bad. I'd then have to go play BC's Quest for Tires for the nine-millionth time. I had to convince some poor guy at Radio Shack to make me a copy of their store version. I was quite successful at this and would “work” these guys with any tactic that I could think of. It was usually more difficult to convince my mom or dad to take me to the store.

Or I’d ask to visit a friend who also had a computer, and while there, nonchalantly mention, “I need a copy of that MS-DOS disk. It’s funny; I didn’t know you had one. Mind if I copy it? Oddly enough, I happen to have some floppies in my backpack….”

It’s funny how you remember this stuff, and even though I was heartbroken every time I lost or destroyed the disk, I look back on these days so fondly. And yes, now that I look back, even then PC gaming was a pain in the ass.