🚀 go-pugleaf

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.

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???