oh man, this brings back some memories. In the early-mid 90s I worked at a mom-n-pop computer repair store and LapLink at some point became sort of a standard tool for all sorts of system setup and configuration stuff.<p>Keep in mind that other data transfer options were generally disks of some sort that held less than 1.5MB of data and were very slow to write/read. It wasn't too important at the beginning as most systems with hard drives were generally only a few MB anyways.<p>But storage moves fast and software bloats quick and it wasn't too long before we were shuffling a couple dozen disks worth of stuff onto new system builds or worse, between systems as people migrated. Optical wasn't really an option for lots of reasons, most notably very expensive and at the time generally SCSI and tended to be exotic WORM drives. Almost nobody in the consume market had SCSI in the IBM-PC compatibles, and the disks were $30-40 each if you managed to write one successfully.<p>LapLink filled the gap for a couple of years instead. Connect the cable, boot to a couple of prepared floppies and start transferring. Really quite reliable even if it was slow.<p>Eventually it became so slow, and we realized "hey we work in a shop where we can take the hardware apart anyways" and just started mounting the harddrives with the data to transfer from into the system with the new volume and using xcopy or eventually a clone tool.<p>I think even that finally fell out of favor once rewritable IDE CDs became common, plus zip/jazz etc. drives, and eventually windows started shipping with a network stack, but I was long out of that business by then.