I recently started watching The Sopranos on the advice of some friends. The episode I just watched featured a young mobster called Christopher who was attempting to write a screenplay about mob life – probably not a way to ensure a long life. The final scene showed him ejecting a floppy drive from his laptop and emptying his diskette container into a bin. That dates the show, eh?
Having a diskette drive in my laptop used to be essential. I worked in labs and OS deployment and busing able to make DOS bootable drives was a part of the job. Even if the standard OS was NT 4 or Windows 2000, I used to have my laptop dual boot with Windows 95/8 or even ME. I kept boxes of floppies just in case.
Looking back on that, things are so much easier now with boot USB sticks and WDS. I can’t imaginge going back to those days.
I still think that it’s a good idea to keep a USB floppy drive handy, but perhaps I’m being a little old school (old habits die hard)
I keep a box of floppies at home. Near impossible to buy them now.
We still have medical reports for rural health departments that have to be “mailed” in via floppy drive.
I also have two IBM (before Lenovo) servers that have to have the usb floppy to apply BIOS updates.
What is real difficult is to find a laptop with a DB9 serial port to connect to my older network devices (and some older medical equipment) for console connections.
those were the days, powerquest drive images, NT4 and on IBM token ring adapters made the network boot floppies more ‘interesting’