A small anecdote. We needed to reboot our 11/780. We couldn't find the boot floppy for the LSI-11. An operator found one folded up in a drawer. We un-folded it, tried to "iron out" the creases with our hands, put it in..

the vax booted.

TL;DR those 8" floppies were really well designed. Like DECTAPE, there was a lot of block repeats.

DECTAPE (pdp11 and Dec-10 era) was good. The 11/750s used a small front console tape cassette of some sort which I never liked. I think by that stage the preboot LSI-11 had been miniaturised into something on a board in the main chassis. on the 11/780 it was literally a wart on the inside of one of the front doors, down low with the floppy slot pointing upwards.