I needed to include a few scope pics in a document.
My lab scope, a vintage LeCroy*, has a floppy drive.
None of my currently operational computers has a floppy drive.
And so I bought myself a USB floppy drive, and plugged it into my Linux workstation, and I took a fresh (well, NOS) floppy out of the closet, and fed it to the scope, and pushed the Screen Dump button, and the scope made file-writing noises. After taking several screen dumps of various captures, I ejected the floppy, popped it into the USB drive, and all was well: I got the "new medium detected" popup; opening the disk in the file manager allowed me to copy the files; and in general things went as they should.
Today, I needed another scope picture. The floppy from a couple of days ago was still in the scope. I pushed the Screen Dump button.
Disk read error.
Okaaaay... so find the floppy formatting utility.
Nope. No can format.
Pop the disk in the USB drive. Can't read; can't format.
Try a nice fresh disk. The scope likes this one, and happily writes files to it. The USB drive? Well, the system log shows "Incompatible medium installed."
Grrrrr....
I hope the floppy didn't become cursed by prolonged exposure to the scope. I remember a day of dealing with cursed floppies, back around 2000: a disk stopped working when moved between desk and lab computers, and, if memory serves, I ended up replacing both computers' floppy drives, twice each, to get them working again. Because, somehow, the drives were destroying each other via removable media. (This is a known problem with removable hard disks - a crashed head gouges the platter, and the gouged platter will crash the head of the next drive it's put in - but it ain't supposed to happen with floppies!)
This is almost as much fun as the Really Old Days, when there was this 8" floppy drive, see, and it had to be aligned just so with respect to Earth's magnetic field, or it wouldn't read properly....
* The nameplate hasn't changed to "Teledyne."
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