Everyone should have a few floppies, if only to play the "When I were a lad" game with your grandkids etc. a few years down the line - or for real fogey-cred show them something TRULY weird like an 8" floppy or a laserdisc...
But the last time I used one in anger was nearly a year ago, when I wanted to give my nephew a couple of small utilities - and found, when I got to his computer, that it didn't have a drive.
I won't mourn them, I've lost way too much data to them.
The last time I used a floppy for anything serious was ...
... last month, or maybe the month before, when I copied the "tomsrtbt" image to one to use as a rescue-boot floppy to cope with a system that had gotten munged. I still find them useful for things like that (and I may wind up running "floppyfw" at some point as well), even if other folks' computers lack of floppy drives makes them less useful for slipping small files into my pocket for transport. (Hey, the closest thing to a USB thumbdrive that I have is my PDA, it seems wasteful to burn a CD containing only about a megabyte of data (and I've had fewer seird glitches trying to write floppies than trying to burn CDs), and sometimes it's better to be able to hand someone a diskette than to jot down a URL. *shrug* But I cope, using CDs and the temp directory of my web space for the things that I would otherwise use a floppy or an itty bitty thumbdrive for.)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 21:48 (UTC)But the last time I used one in anger was nearly a year ago, when I wanted to give my nephew a couple of small utilities - and found, when I got to his computer, that it didn't have a drive.
I won't mourn them, I've lost way too much data to them.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-30 23:36 (UTC)... last month, or maybe the month before, when I copied the "tomsrtbt" image to one to use as a rescue-boot floppy to cope with a system that had gotten munged. I still find them useful for things like that (and I may wind up running "floppyfw" at some point as well), even if other folks' computers lack of floppy drives makes them less useful for slipping small files into my pocket for transport. (Hey, the closest thing to a USB thumbdrive that I have is my PDA, it seems wasteful to burn a CD containing only about a megabyte of data (and I've had fewer seird glitches trying to write floppies than trying to burn CDs), and sometimes it's better to be able to hand someone a diskette than to jot down a URL. *shrug* But I cope, using CDs and the temp directory of my web space for the things that I would otherwise use a floppy or an itty bitty thumbdrive for.)