On 10/1/19 2:56 PM, David Friedman wrote:
You're the perfect group of people to turn to for help with this. You get the idea. Send me your suggestions!
At least one of these has to have the shutter pulled off.
STORY TIME: I once worked for an autoglass place supporting the sales department. One salesman, who I'll call Wally because that was his name and it was perfect, really really liked the info the sales spreadsheets gave him, and the ability to edit contracts on the road, but he was hard on hardware. (This was 286 era, so I don't remember exactly what the sales guys' laptops were other than expensive.) I want to say the critters didn't even have hard drives, but maybe there was another reason they had to use floppies. In any event, I wrote Wally a batch script that would help him back up his floppies, and this helped cut down greatly on the number of times he needed rescued, but one day he called in frantic: "I have a contract on this floppy and I haven't backed it up yet and I PUT IT IN MY SHIRT POCKET and the metal thing is bent and I'm afraid if I put it in the drive it'll get stuck!"
Me: "Bring it in, I'll look at it."
In came Wally, in his white wingtips, clutching a diskette like it was a sick child. I looked at it, hmm'd, decided the shutter wasn't salvageable, yanked it off and handed the disk back to him. "Here, don't touch the mag surface, back it up to an intact one."
His eyes about bugged out of his head. "You can just DO that?! I was so worried!"
I wish I remembered his last name so I could look up what became of him. Dude probably founded a sales software company or something and retired wealthy. He was... well, not exactly a *fearless* early adopter, but he didn't let his ABSOLUTE TERROR OF SCREWING UP keep him from forging ahead (and occasionally screwing up).