Comment by mcny
1 day ago
Everyone I talk to remembers it differently than I do but I absolutely hated floppies. Probably because I used them even as late as 2003 but I remember floppies as very unreliable with CRC-32 or whatever that could happen every time inserted it into the computer.
My use case? Sneaker net -- copying documents between my computer at home and the computer at an Internet cafe. I would ride my bicycle to the cyber cafe, download these PDF or plain text and read them on my computer at home. Kind of scary how little I actually remember but that's a different topic.
I used floppies as late as 2010 when I was in high school (we had a very old Windows 95 PC at home with no support for USB, and no Internet access). Luckily, the school computers were also old and still had floppy drives, so I could type up my homework at home and print it out in the school library. I used Wordpad, if I remember correctly.
But yes, they were very unreliable. I used to copy the files onto two disks because it was very common for one to not work.
> but I remember floppies as very unreliable
Well... floppies were pretty reliable enough if you cared for them.
Meaning for those sitting on your desk or in the cabinet you bought those fancy boxes with a translucent matte covers (and keylocks, of course).
And for those you got with yourself and actually cared about the data on them to reach the destination - you didn't stay around the high energy/high voltage machinery (like a trolleybus or the engine compartment on a motorized railcars)... or just used a 5th grade knowledge and used any tin box of succinct size for your usage.