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Please let floppy disks die already. It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology. Hugely unreliable, fragile, offering a ridiculously small storage space.
by cynicalsecurity 7mo ago
Please let floppy disks die already. It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology. Hugely unreliable, fragile, offering a ridiculously small storage space. The only benefit it provided was ability to write data before flash drives and internet become widely available. Let it rest in pieces.
- forinti 7mo agoI used them a lot in the 80s and 90s and I don't ever recall losing data. Over the course of time, they will degrade, but I'm pretty sure a disk can last ten years. The last 5.25" floppies I managed to read had about 30 years. They were kept in thick plastic sleeves sold by Acornsoft.
- 7bit 7mo ago> It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology. They seem tiny now, but floppies were huge back then because they gave regular people a simple way to save and move files. Writing them off today ignores how much they pushed personal computing forward.
- forinti 7mo agoThe only thing cheaper were cassette tapes. Those were indeed unreliable, awfully slow, and couldn't store much data (but you probably already had a cassette player, so it was dirt cheap).