Please let floppy disks die already. It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology. Hugely unreliable, fragile, offering a ridiculously small storage space. The only benefit it provided was ability to write data before flash drives and internet become widely available. Let it rest in pieces.
I used them a lot in the 80s and 90s and I don't ever recall losing data. Over the course of time, they will degrade, but I'm pretty sure a disk can last ten years.
The last 5.25" floppies I managed to read had about 30 years. They were kept in thick plastic sleeves sold by Acornsoft.
> It was an absolute embarrassment of a technology.
They seem tiny now, but floppies were huge back then because they gave regular people a simple way to save and move files. Writing them off today ignores how much they pushed personal computing forward.
The only thing cheaper were cassette tapes. Those were indeed unreliable, awfully slow, and couldn't store much data (but you probably already had a cassette player, so it was dirt cheap).
And 68% of American adults don't even know it [0]. Not to mention all the foreign slavery in the supply chain, or all the slavery we've directly enabled by 'toppling dictators' who wouldn't give us their shit.
Not contradicting the second part, but I want to emphasise that they are different things. Slavery (and capitalism) can be extremely inefficient and simultaneously wildly profitable.
My home assistant also waters my plants. She generally enjoys working in the garden.
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