Back in the 16-bit days, the only form of portable media (in fact, pretty much the old media for the Atari ST and Amiga) was ye olde 3.5" floppy disc. And as impoverished teenagers and students, we tended to use the cheapest of the cheap. Magazine coverdisks were one source - I can recall people selling bin-liners full of these at markets and car-boot sales - but if you were feeling flush, you'd fork out the cash for a box of no-name disks from some far-eastern company you'd never heard of before [*].
Needless to say, quality control was an issue; aside from the usual plethora of read/writing issues, you'd often get issues with the protective plate not sliding open, or the disk failing to spin correctly inside it's sleeve. The best one I ever saw was when a friend enthusiastically hit the eject button on his Amiga, causing the disk to shoot out at a higher speed than normal; said disk literally disintegrated in flight, like an armour-piercing SABOT round...
[*] Much the same happened with the earlier 8-bit machines (magazine cover-tapes and no-name C90s - generally, the quality of the no-name cassettes was so low you could barely record audio on them, never mind the squeaks and squeals of a computer program. And then there were the budget VHS tapes as well; good luck watching anything you'd recorded on these, especially if you'd optimistically gone for LP recording; twice the duration and a quarter of the quality! Admittedly, budget CDs and DVDs were just as bad; there's nothing quite like picking up an old backup to find the aluminium peeling off...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
