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The Pick Operating System that I worked on back in the early 1990s was mostly floppy based. A client had sent us some of their data so I could test a new report before sending it to them. I inserted the floppy disk, without really looking what I was doing and got a read error. No worries I thought, I'll eject the disk and try it on anther machine. Back then, you could often read a disk on a different machine - something to do with floppy drive head alignment. I was very mystified when no disk popped out.

I had a neighbour who was involved in drugs trials on farms, and the company was very keen on collecting data, so they gave each farmer a computer, screen, and floppy disk drive. The farmers were a bit slow on this new technology stuff, but they persevered (as they were being paid for it). After a few weeks there were complaints that they could not get the floppy disks into the drives. My neighour went out to investigate and found the farmer in his barn, with his cows, and his computer in pride of place in the middle of the barn.

What head office had not realised was that a farm is a dirty place. You get down bales of straw for bedding- and get covered in straw dust, the hay (for food) has lots of seeds and dust in it. (There is a disease called farmer's lung from breathing all the dust in) The back end of a cow is fluid, right next to a cow's tail which can flick it 6 feet away.

The computer was there, caked in dung, straw and hay. You had to break off lumps of it to get to the floppy drive. The inside of the drive was solid with cow pats!

All those computers had to be thrown away, and the farmers were told to put the new ones inside the house, in the office!

I feel like I should defend farmers a little at this point, yes some old boys are slow on taking on new tech, but for the most part a farmer will use any tool that comes to hand to make their work easier/quicker. I worked for a 70 year old farmer back in 1998 who had a fully computerised feeding system for his dairy herd that used RFID tags on the cows necks to know who was who and feed them accordingly. He also had a dairy parlour (milking room) based on a very old design, that had been 'updated' from time to time so it worked fine, but after 40 years in use he did not see the point updating something that was fit for purpose. Farmers may appear behind the times, but more often its a case of if it works...

My philosophy as well. I will not hesitate to upgrade my desktop when I can see a clear performance benefit, but I'll be damned if I go buy a new phone simply because it's the new model.

When we bought our house back in 2017 I replaced all the light bulbs with LEDs (or got the electrician to do it for the kitchen, where the stuff was not so easy because specific model of lamps). That was a clear benefit and an economy in the long run, so I did not hesitate. I'm not going to go buy some stupid IoT connected shite now to put a buggy app on my phone just so I can control the lamp from a screen. I have legs, I can get to the switch.

> Farmers may appear behind the times, but more often its a case of if it works...

I think it's more the case that if you don't need it, why learn it?

My mother used to be quite blase about her inability to use these newfangled computer things, long even before the interwebs were a thing. And then she discovered Ebay.

These days, she has a higher Ebay rating than me, and has become pretty skilled at taking photos, editing and uploading them, etc. She also plays folk music; with lockdown, both my mother and her musical acquaintances (who are mostly in the same age demographics) have learned how to do video conferencing, etc.

Similarly, my Dad had no real use for such things. But these days, it's all about his smartphone; he uses it for emails, prints receipts from it (once I'd set up the &£$*£*"*% printer, anyhow), uses Google Earth to review and price up jobs, takes photos to show that the work's been done, etc.

So yeah: if it ain't broke, you ain't going to fix it until/unless there's significant benefit from doing so...

This type of error will never ever come to an end. Users will be able to put square connectors into round holes. They will be able to bend, remove or alter to fit anything in an unsuitable hole or socket. Users try to wipe the screen with fingers to remove content ("modern" users do not know typpex anymore). Users use force where none is required. Users do not read. Users do not think. Need one go on?

Lets just give it up. Murphy cannot be beat. Evolution is not to prefer the best but to preserve a balance. For any dumbed down system you will meet a user who is dumber than the system allows. It is inevitable. It is a force of nature. Any advance will be met with an equal and opposite increase in stupidity.

Simplifies to:

make something 'idiot-proof' and nature breeds a better idiot.

Evolution in action.....

Back in the 1990s the Macintosh II range was great for floppy disk loss. They came with one floppy drive, but there was a little blanking plate over a slot where you could install a second. This blanking plate was really easy to push out, so students at the uni where I was the Mac support guy would do so ... and the next person would insert their floppy disk and hear it drop into the guts of the Mac.

Once I actually had the real problem of real 3.5" floppies failing in short order. In the mid 2000's I was working at a well site in tropical Uganda. My "office" was 500m from the well site itself and I had to transfer data between the two locations twice a day.

In the time it took to walk the distance between the 2 air conditioned locations, the disks would fail about half the time. I ended up making several disk copies in the hopes that one might survive the journey. I guess, heat & humidity were the culprits.

Air conditioning is a nightmare. Take a computer from an air conditioned room and plug it in somewhere warm and kaboom - condensation all over the inside. I had a friend who worked as a fork lift driver in a massive cold store -40 in there. Met him in the pub after work one muggy summers evening and I asked him if he's run cos his face was sweaty. Turned out to be condensation!

Many moons gone...

Got into my company car on a hot summer's day at around 40 degrees. Fished out my HP PDA to check something while operating the starter. I needed the car running to cool off as it was bloody hot in there.

The climate control agreed that it was indeed "bloody hot" and went into "everything and the kitchen sink" mode. The freezing cold gale hit the screen of the PDA in my hand and the LCD matrix disintegrated like a shattered mirror.

I tried that "eBay" thing I'd heard about and was delighted to find that I could get a whole new screen assembly from Hong Kong for about a tenner.

Back in the 80's I had to support an academic library. No networking or anything like that.

A medical literature database was distributed on CDROMs, Doctors loaded CD after CD until they got what they wanted, which was stored on 5" floppies.

You guessed it. And the CDs were very expensive - thousands of dollars a set.. In a floppy drive they dropped into the drive, and more than once had to sacrifice a floppy drive to get the CD out.

I stopped it by labelling the drives "Round Shiny Things" and "Square Black Things". Until a senior academic tore the labels off, ranting about "treating academic staff as morons". Five mins later he had a CDROM in the floppy drive.

Dr Father Ted.

... rather more "Dr Father Jack Hackett", perhaps? :-)

Ted, is that you?

I actually meant Dr Father Dougal!

I still have boxes of original Amiga software that came on floppy in my spare room, surprisingly quite a lot of it still worked when i last fired up my A1200 a few years ago. As even back when they were new floppies could work fine one day and then bork the next.

A common problem with the 5.25 discs was users attaching labels to them with a stapler.

And then storing them on the side of the filing cabinet, held there by a magnet.

Early in my career, I had one new user who ,when given a 5.25 floppy, assumed the cover was removable, given it had a sticker on it. A pair of heavy duty scissors to snip across one corner, to allow a good finger in, and tear it apart - literally.

It worked on the machine it came from. But not a tweet on mine. Back and forth between the two machines. Mine could read and write stuff fine. Eventually someone pointed out the floppy had a little hole in it near the centre hole - turned out there was such a thing as hard-sectored floppies indexed by the hole and an LED.

Had the same with a CDROM. The user called me to say the CDROM wasn't 'going in'.

I was a bit confused - the machine the user was talking about didn't have a CDROM drive. So I went to have a look and saw he was trying to push it in between the front blanking plates! This was in the days when some systems had CDROM drives behind a small opening as opposed to a tray, and he'd assumed the gap was where the drive was.

I had a similar experience with 5.25" floppies. In this case we were sending software from our London head office to a branch office in Scotland.

Many discs were sent, all of which were reported as failing.

Somebody was eventually flown up to Scotland with a new disc. It was handed over to the user, who promptly grabbed a pair of scissors and cut off the square surround - leaving them with something that was indeed floppy and disc shaped, but completely useless.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

NO WAY!

25 years ago, marketing decreed our software must be copy protected to prevent piracy.

Never mind that the software controlled a microscope made by the company. A very expensive dongle.

Anyway. Copy protection software was selected and used. And an update was sent to Australia.

The software would not work. Backwards and forwards our rep went from one side of the country to the other. (4.5 hour flight)

On the 3rd time, it became apparent that the client PC had a "floptical" drive, combination 3.5" mag floppy/ RW optical drive.

The first time I saw the word, I just thought the rep meant "floppy", I'd never heard of a "floptical".

It soon became apparent the floptical drive was incompatible with the copy protection magic.

I think we ditched it soon after.

Which is why a small amount of basic training is often a good idea!

"Please do this, for these reasons" is all it takes to avert problems, but it's so frequently left out. You know what they say about assumption...