By Sean Fahey True story: Older users of computers will recall the 5.25 floppy disk. It’s a 5.25 inch diameter, super thin disk that spun while enclosed in a square PVC jacket. They bend easily (unlike their rigid 3.5 disk successors) and are sensitive to magnetic fields, dust, punctures, fingerprints. Basically anything touching the surface of the disk could damage the data stored on it.
In my early years as an IT professional, the agency I worked for had several computers that used these disks. Even though the computers had hard drives, we needed floppy drives for software installations, backups and file sharing — we didn’t have a network yet.
As the Office Specialist, one of my jobs was to help the staff take some of their raw reports and massage them for output to the shared laser printer. My coworkers would drop their disks off and I’d do my thing. Unfortunately, “my thing” frequently switched from report formatting to data recovery, because:
Diskette delivered with printing instructions stapled to the disk.
Diskette delivered folded in half and stuffed in envelope crammed under my door.
Diskette left on door with a refrigerator-type magnet. Derezzed. Or mounted to my office door’s message corkboard with a pushpin. It didn’t take me long to get rid that thing.
…and my favorite, diskette delivered contaminated by cookie and potato chip crumbs or fingerprints all over the media.
At $25-$35 for a box of 10, they weren’t exactly cheap.