🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 26 May 1999, Michael Thibault wrote:

> In article <374DA167.E05FCE0B@sympatico.ca>, "Jacques E. Bouchard"
> <jebouchard@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> >>...It's ridiculous to
> >> claim you "need" something as antiquated as a floppy drive, really
> >> entirely ridiculous.
> >    Don't be so quick to dismiss the needs of others. Every document I write, I
> >archive on disquette after sending it to the company for which I write. I could
> >store much more than one document per diskette (or other medium), but in
> case the
> >medium goes bad then I only lose that one document. A diskette also makes the
> >document very portable (at least for now) and cheaper than a CD-R.
> Backups are a very good thing - can't argue with that, nor repeat it often
> enough. The problems with diskettes: they are slow; they are much less
> reliable, as media goes, than almost anything else; they are much more
> open to their environment; the drives that read them and write them are
> subject to wandering out of calibration, such that diskettes can be
> formatted, read, and written to in one drive - but not in another of the
> same type.

Diskettes were never meant for keeps.  Magnetic media has a tendancy of
losing it's information after time.  I think I remember seeing a study a
long time ago about 5 1/4 disks having a lifetime of about 15 years or
something like that (don't ask me to point it out, I don't remember where
I saw it).

> Far better would be to duplicate a file on the drive on which it was
> created (since media doesn't go bad in its entirety) or, better, to back
> it up on a second hard drive. The continued use of floppy disks simply
> perpetuates the use of floppies; if you use them, you need the drive, and
> having the drive, you use floppies, etc.... Weening people off of that
> particular medium is not going to happen as long as computers continue to
> come with them 'just in case'... It's a strange little cycle. But the time
> is well nigh for floppy drives to disappear entirely. I mean, I *could*
> have a 5.25" drive hooked up to one of my Macs, and I *could* add one to
> my friend's PC, but why???

It's not popular anymore.  More people have been moving towards Zips and
LS-120 disks (though I think I'd rather have a 5 1/4 or a standard 3 1/2
1.44 MB disk over those any day if I'm just moving ONE document).

**********************************************************************
                            Alexander Fong
                   ap_fong (at) alcor.concordia.ca
         Concordia University --- Montreal, Quebec, CANADA
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