"Dust off those floppies" from Brian Aust.

Back in the 80's and early 90's, my mother used to work as a bookkeeper in an athletic club.  She's not a computer expert but, along with her normal duties, was responsible for the daily running and backup of their PC/AT system containing the club's membership records.   Back then they did backups on 5 1/4 floppies.  While not a super super reliable media solution, the failure rate on their disks was much higher than you would expect.  I lived in another city at the time and recommended they clean the drive and buy some high-quality media.  They did both and still continued to have a high failure rate.  Mom was working late one evening when the housekeeper came in and proceeded to tidy up the office.  At one point she moved over to the computer station, opened up the cabinet, and pulled out a box of floppy disks.  When Mom asked what she was doing she responded, "Oh, these little paper jackets make the best dustpans".  Yep, she would remove the disk, sweep dust into the jacket, dump out the dust and replace the disk. 

-Brian Aust


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