Many years ago a friend of mine worked for a company that supplied software (as did many others) on this fantastic media of the day called the floppy disk.
For your information, these discs came in various formats:-
Single sided 8 sector a whopping 160kb capacity
Single sided 9 sector with a massive 180kb capacity
Double sided capable of storing 360kb and finally HD or High Density with a super duper capacity of 1.2mb.
For those of you too young to remember, these disks where thin sheets of magnetic media located in a flexible sleeve with a metal hub in the centre that allowed the disc to rotate.
It was extremely important that these disks were looked after and kept away from magnetic fields and power sources.
Now one day a request came in for a new disk which was sent out to their customer post haste. Remember those where the days we had two yes two deliveries a day. And at Christmas the Post Office even delivered on a Sunday. Anyway I digress.
About 2 days later my friend gets a call from the customer to say that the disk no longer worked so could they please send a replacement.
Now after about the 6th request for a replacement disk, curiosity got the better of them, so the supplier decided to dispatch an engineer to hand deliver the latest replacement to the customer, thus taking the opportunity to see what was going on. Maybe it was a rogue batch of disks that had faulty magnetic coatings. He needed to find out.
He arrived on site, asked for the lady in question (The one who had requested all this disks) and was promptly shown to her desk.
There it was a brand new sparkly Microvitec Cub monitor in a nice beige coloured metal case. (For some reason most computers in those days came in beige), and guess what he saw neatly attached to the side of the monitor by memo magnets, most of the offices supply of 5.25″ floppy disks.
He handed the lady the new disk, quietly whispered to her about the cause of the failures, turned and left.
Strangely they never had another request for a replacement disk from this customer again.
