What Has Your Floppy Disk Done For You Lately
from the not-much dept
My laptop has a floppy drive that is sitting in my desk drawer. I used to bring it with me when I travelled, but one time I forgot it, and it didn't matter. I don't bring it anywhere any more. I can't even remember the last time I swapped out the CD-ROM drive to put the floppy drive in. I can't even remember where I keep the various flopy disks that I know I own. Without realizing it, I've gone well beyond the floppy drive - and it seems almost everyone else has give up on it as well. Only about 10% of computer users still store stuff on floppy disks. These days, there's almost no reason to use one. However, most computer companies (with the notable exception of Apple machines) still feel the need to include floppy drives on every computer sold. It's a sort of security blanket.
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I hate floppies, but...
So far I'd say that between 20-35% of people have purchased one or more of these drives (depending on what part of the company they are in, with the less technical people buying more drives).
It's kind of humorous when a vendor delivers a document to us on a floppy disk and we have to hunt around to find out who has the dept floppy drive. Luckily that doesn't happen very often.
I put a floppy drive in my latest home PC when I built it 1.5 years ago, and I used it to boot up the PC for the first time to install the OS, and I don't honestly remember using it since then... guess I wasted $12 :-)
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