Best news is ...

Posted Oct 9, 2025 15:39 UTC (Thu) by knewt (subscriber, #32124)
In reply to: Best news is ... by nye
Parent article: Jumping into openSUSE Leap 16

> When was this? I remember floppies being very reliable, until sometime around the early 2000s when you still *occasionally* needed one (eg to get a disk controller driver during Windows installation), and discovering that new boxes of disks could easily be *50%* duds. Or maybe they'd have worked with a really high quality drive, but not the one I was using. It's like the quality control just dropped off a cliff as soon as they stopped being mass market items.

So this would have been 1998/99. I suspect they were all floppies purchased from a shop at the uni itself, and likely not the highest quality. The next year (actually a second 1st year, thanks to changing degree and restarting), I moved off-campus and honestly don't recall what the situation was like. And from 2000/01 onwards I had ADSL which made life so much easier. Well, 2001/02 was fun, I actually ran a wifi bridge between two houses in order to access the connection. We were sharing a single 512Kb/s (iirc) link between several houses from the start, but the house I was in that year we couldn't easily run cabling to :)