> Take note that all the examples mentioned relate to industries which are very conservative WRT implementing technology, and have an onerous approval process t

> Take note that all the examples mentioned relate to industries which are very conservative WRT implementing technology, and have an onerous approval process to get new tech in use; that's not evidence that floppies are somehow superior, but rather that the process for approving new tech. is sometimes too burdensome. My own personal experience with this follows: My last job as a sounding rocket telemetry engineer required me to use 3.5" floppies regularly, because the majority of the GSE in use for supporting launches was still running a program called TDPlus. TDPlus, which runs in DOS, is intended for the real-time monitoring of telemetry data. We had lunch-box style computers with the old-style 51 pin parallel port for "high speed" data (up to 10 Megabits/sec) interfacing with experimenter equipment, as well as GDP Space Systems bitsync/decom cards. The lunchbox computers were always breaking down. Floppies were subject to all the faults you mention and were always failing. I found a hoard of floppies in an old cabinet and spent a day or so seeing which ones I could still use, and then protected them like gold. All of this was still used because management claimed that "the right color of money doesn't exist for us to upgrade this". They had started to get a few newer units when I left...but depending on such horribly unreliable units for critical launch functions still boggles my mind. There's "too burdensome" and then there's out-right mismanagement. On the other hand, the floppies I used and the dot-matrix printouts of the data I monitored are neat souvenirs from that time in my life.