Oh so long ago.......
Picture the early 1980's with PC's in their infancy. The time around 1983.
My partner and I had a business where we wrote programs in basic and ran them on HP CPM machines with dual 5.25" floppy drives. Our most popular program was an Accounting system that covered all the good stuff - GL, AP, AR, Bank and the extended version included Inventory. This was no mean feat in those days running off floppy disks - one for the program files and one for the data files.
To insure reliability, we had a procedure that allowed the user to back up the data files to a duplicate disk. We then had duplicate disks for each day of the work week and doubled this up for a two week period. In addition, there was one monthly disk for each month of the year. Not a bad backup schedule/routine for those days.
Now as you can imagine, the disks were quite costly and were sold in packs of 10. Usually involved an initial sale of some 30 to 40 disks on a new install. All disks had to be formatted before they could be used for the first time. On one particular sale, the day after a new install we received a call from the user to say that all the disks that we had supplied were non-functional. They did not work even though they had all formatted OK.
Now it was true that the quality could be a bit iffy, but we always supplied brand name product that reduced this problem to negligible. So out we went to investigate. Sure enough all 40 disks had been removed and unpackaged and had supposedly been formatted. Little sticky labels were supplied in the boxes which were used to identify the disk contents. Each disk had its description label written on and and applied to the disk. BUT just to make sure the labels did not fall off, each one was firmly affixed to the disk with FOUR staples!!!!!
Sometimes, I long for those days again. Life was so much simpler. Sigh.
