Yesterday I needed to install drivers for a NIC in my home backup server. I’d pulled out the NIC I had been using and gave it away to somebody; naturally, I found the one I kept had never been properly set up. Of course.

The vendors’ drivers were easy enough to find, but without a working NIC, how was I going to get them over to the server? Why, in this age of ubiquitous optical media, you burn a CD. Except that I didn’t want to. Even at a price of around 25¢ per CD-R, the thought of permanently dedicating a 700MB disc to store a mere 15 kilobytes of data bothered me. I found a couple of CD-RW discs at the bottom of a desk drawer, but they were too scratched up to be of any use. Still, my obsession with data storage efficiency prevented me from touching the spindle of pristine CDs in my den closet.

I was pretty irritated at this point, both because I’d given away the wrong freaking NIC, and because I was deliberately preventing myself from solving the problem.

Suddenly I remembered that both my gaming PC and the backup server still have 1.44MB floppy drives. Yes, I know, it’s sort of stupid to hang on to those obsolete devices, but I just can’t bring myself to part with them. I think I last used one sometime in 1999. One of them is at least fifteen years old. But… I still have about a dozen diskettes, and the drives still work. Floppies are rewriteable and fast (remember, we’re only talking about 15kB of data here; it would take longer for a burner to write the data, close the session, and verify the burn, than it takes a floppy drive to just copy the files to a diskette), so I transferred the files via the good ol’ sneakernet. My sever NIC is functional, my obsession with efficiency fed, and life is good.

Except that now I feel really, really old.