I use floppies at least a couple times a week.
I do free work on old computers for friends, and the occassional paid job for a stranger. I don’t mean “old” as in “only a 1 Ghz processor and a 20 Gig harddrive”. I mean old as in, “still running windows 95 / 98, with at most a 1.5 Gig harddrive”.
Usually there is a CD drive on the computer, but I can never trust that it works properly. Moreover, I’ve yet to find a CD drive that could reliably read enough different types of burned CDs to make them useful. When I’m booting to DOS to check things out, a floppy almost always works best. I can almost always assume that someone has a working floppy drive on their computer.
Floppies are also, in my experience, more reliable. I’ve never wasted a floppy due to incorrect writing to it. That happens often with a CD. True, CDs aren’t particularly expensive, but why use a disposable media instead of a reusable one? I can recall only about 4 times that a floppy has gone bad on me. CDs get scratched all to hell if you look at them cross-eyed. An old Windows 95 CD of mine is nearly worthless because of its scratches, even though I’ve not abused it. Contrarily, my floppies for Windows 3.0 and DOS 5.0 still work like a charm.
The number of places where floppies are usefull are limited, and diminishing all the time. Still, I think they’ll be in use for at least 3 or 4 more years before they really start their mass extinction.
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giggles at broadband being “nearly ubiquitous”