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Unpopular opinion: the 1.44 MB floppy limit saved my butt last month and I think we lost something when we ditched it
I fix industrial control panels for a living, and last month a plastic extruder in a shop outside Allentown went brain dead on me. The machine ran on a 1994 controller that boots off a single 1.44 MB floppy, and the owner had no backup, zero, zilch, he kept the only copy taped inside the cabinet door. I pulled the disk, read it on a USB drive I keep in my van for exactly this kind of job, and cloned it in about 90 seconds. If that setup had used a modern SD card or a cloud license, I would have been stuck waiting on a vendor for three days while eight guys stood around doing nothing. Now here is the fight I want to have: some of you will say old storage limits force smart habits, and some will say they are just a ticking bomb waiting to strand you. I have cloned that same disk onto 12 spare floppies and a zip file, so I am covered either way. What is the oldest single piece of media you have had to resurrect to keep a machine running, and did it hold up or bite you?
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richard_hall1d ago
Is waiting three days really that big a deal though? Sounds like a slow Tuesday in industrial work, and nobody's life was on the line here.
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