I’m all for retro technology, but I can’t think of a single compelling reason to use a USB floppy drive over a USB pendrive. Good grief.
As an aside; I remember a while back in a previous job, on of my then-users rang us to order a new box of floppy disks. I asked, “er, why?” Long story short, she had some arcane piece of software which required backing up weekly and then backup data FTPing to some remote site somewhere. Back in the late Jurassic when this had been implemented, floppy disks had been the obvious solution to bridge the two processes.
Every week, she’d sit there feeding it floppy disks to run the backup, maybe ten disks’ worth. Then, she’d feed them back in, one at a time, whilst the FTP script ran and sucked all the data back off again. It took all afternoon, it was her Friday ritual.
Once I’d done boggling, I thought “there has to be a better way.” I rewrote all the scripts and changed the application settings so that it ran from the hard disk. The new process involved hitting ‘backup’ in the application, double-clicking a script to pre-process the data into the format that the FTP program expected, and then kicking off the transfer. The whole process took about two minutes.
Immensely proud, I rang her back to explain what I’d done. She fundementally couldn’t grasp that she didn’t need the disks any more, because someone had told her they were “important” back in 1927. Every time I explained a step she’d to follow, she replied “right, and do I put my disks in now?”
In the end I gave up, and told her to put a disk in. It never touched it of course, but she seemed happy that she was doing it “right” as long as the disks were involved.
People.