Re:The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk
by shiroiushi on Thursday April 04, 2024 @05:16AM
(#39928157)
>It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form
Sorry, but this is BS. Floppies were supremely reliable, really to an amazing degree. That is, until sometime in the mid-1990s or later: at that point, the drives became cheaper and crappier, and the media quality went straight down the toilet. It was pretty sudden as I remember, and basically coincided with people moving to CD-Rs because floppies were no longer large enough for daily use.
Ask your older friends or relatives if they had a lot of trouble with floppies back in the Apple ][ era, when that was the only disk drive on a computer and people routinely booted their computer with the same boot disk every day; floppies were quite reliable in those days.
PS: Yeah, I had a SCSI Zip drive. It was an improvement over floppies that were notoriously unreliable and not very durable even in 3.5" form. 3.5" floppies were traded at school, but you'd never loan original media. In general, the first thing you'd do with pristine media of real product without copy protection was make a backup copy or 2 of it. Some programs would burn serial numbers into floppy media on first installation irreversibly, and sometimes (okay, often) original media would go bad.