That awkward transition period away from floppies happened while I was in high school. I remember what a nightmare it was until things finally standardized on the USB flash drive, and then soon after, on nothing physical at all (i.e. file transfer over Internet).
I remember zip disks being around. The disks were too expensive and the drives, especially so. I used a disk or two at school but never bought one for myself. We had a server at school we could upload/download files to (or just log into directly) so there was never much point.
I also remember CD-RWs being terribly unreliable, and sufficiently costlier than a one-use CD-R that basically no one ever used them. I certainly didn't. What a mess of thrown-away plastic all those CD-Rs were (and remember how if you used the computer for anything else while it was burning and it ran out of buffer the CD-R was ruined?). It certainly felt like a regression from the earlier days of rewritable disks.
I remember zip disks being around. The disks were too expensive and the drives, especially so. I used a disk or two at school but never bought one for myself. We had a server at school we could upload/download files to (or just log into directly) so there was never much point.
I also remember CD-RWs being terribly unreliable, and sufficiently costlier than a one-use CD-R that basically no one ever used them. I certainly didn't. What a mess of thrown-away plastic all those CD-Rs were (and remember how if you used the computer for anything else while it was burning and it ran out of buffer the CD-R was ruined?). It certainly felt like a regression from the earlier days of rewritable disks.