(and by that I mean 3.5″)

I used to do Linux installs for a couple research labs in college. These labs weren’t the best funded in the world, so I did every install and upgrade manually. Ugh.

Multiple diskettes were usually involved, and because they were diskettes, they sometimes had a very high failure rate. This used to frustrate the heck out of me, until one day I got angry enough to rip one of the malfunctioning floppies with my bare hands in front of a stack of all the others. I believe I spent fifteen minutes doing this and reveling in it, it was so late and I was so frustrated. It’s not that hard, even the casing, and there’s actually a weird cottony filter inside the diskette which can be gleefully torn up by hand. The actual magnetic disk can’t be torn up, but it can be folded and stomped on.

After that incident, all my Linux installs via floppies went smoothly, until the day that Linux simply arrived on CDs (and now, DVDs).

Yay future.