I'm a firm proponent of backing things up, now that I've lost a hard drive or two. I don't use floppies (except to create boot disks for Linux) but there always seems to be a few around - same with Zip disks. They were both so amazing, when they were originally introduced; So Small! Such Capacity! Boy, I'm getting old - waxing nostalgic for storage media.

The first 3.25" 1.44 MB floppy disk I ever saw belonged to Matt Carter, a kid I'd known in preschool (Montessori, near the train tracks just outside of the MSU campus) whose parents had an Apple IIe; in addition to the wonderous floppy there was a hard drive, and a color monitor -- it could play Defender! and it looked a lot like the actual arcade game. I considered Matt to be the luckiest guy on earth.

Matt and I went to school together all the way through high-school, and briefly played in a band together around 8th grade (on a side note, Matt and Chris Huston, along with my best friend Aaron Vanderpool, convinced me that the bass was just like the violin, but cooler. Uh, OK. I played bass for awhile, and it was never like the violin, and my level of cool remained at a consistent level. However, I did get to accompany the three of them -- each playing guitar -- on an excellent rendition of "Smoke on the Water" that brought the house down at the Hannah Middle School talent show. We played the song at the beginning and the end of the show.)