Re: The use and value of floppies today

[ak621@chebucto.ns.ca (Richard Bonner)]

Bible John wrote:
(Snip)
> on my ibook and desktop PC I almost never use anything but CD/DVD and 
> USB Flash. But on my old PC Laptop I only use floppies as it cant write 
> to anything but floppies. According to her the Court and legal industry 
> heavily uses floppies. 

> Just for curiosity what do you guys say? I post to a MSDOS and a Apple 
> II group because I think that you guys will understand, since you are 
> using old machines.

***   Not necessarily so. Yes, I do have some old 1990s 486s and Pentium
1s, but I also have newer, faster units. Even so, because DOS is so
efficient, I can get away with far fewer resources to do my work than
those running bloatware systems. I still use floppies on the newer
machines because they suit my purpose and are fast enough for me. If I
need faster, I use a USB flash drive. I don't do any major graphics or
media work on my old machines, so floppies are fine. The most that happens
are transfers of my webpages to them. Since I do that almost daily, a
single floppy easily suffices. 


> Like my old PC laptop cant write to anything but 
> floppies. But even this laptop is much newer than the machines that you 
> guys probably use. If all my computers were old, then I too would 
> probably buy 2 100 packs of floppies. I dumped my old Mac Performa 6360 
> last May and that machine used floppies. It could not write to CD's, and 
> I did not use USB flash. So it was either floppy, Zip or ORB. Since 
> floppies were the most universal, so I used them.

***   You might be able to put a writable CD-ROM into the old system and
use CD-ROAST if the floppies are too tedious.


> I wonder if any of you work in industries that use floppies heavily 
> these days. I wonder if they exist. I bet they do. When I was out of a 
> job in January of this year, the unemployment agency I frequented passed 
> out floppies to people, and none of the computers I used at the center 
> (some 30-40) had USB or could write CD's. So I only could use floppies.
>
> John

***   I imagine they passed out floppies because they are cheaper than
CD-ROMs and they are universally usable on all systems. 

   I frequent a photo lab nearby to use its scanner for my webpage work,
It only has floppy and CD drives. There is no way I want to write a few
images to CDs every time I scan because I never want to keep them once
they are on my hard drive, and I hate to have to throw out the CDs. I
employ floppies because they are reusable.

   Now if their system is upgraded to use a flash drive, I would skip the
floppies and use it, but it is presently unavailable.

Richard