[HelixEndeavor]

lol to the guy accusing floppy disks of being "plastic waste." As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were.

On a more serious note, wouldn't most of these machines be well served by floppy disk emulators? Or is the barrier to entry there the modicum of technical know-how needed to interface with those properly.

[Hackbraten]

> As if SSDs encased in 90% hollow plastic/metal, or USB drives encased in varying amounts of unnecessary plastic are somehow less "wasteful" than floppy disks were.

For floppy-sized pieces of data, a typical SSD will afford you literally several billions of write cycles [0] until the media fails.

In comparison, a floppy disk manufactured in the 00s is going to fail after five write cycles. I can see how one would call that plastic waste.

[0]: assuming SSD write lifetimes in the ballpark of single-digits PBW (petabytes written), which is a realistic value in 2023.