This brings back memories. I‘m 32 now and back in the day, we were trading GameBoy roms on floppies because there was nothing else we could use. Essentially we were using them like USB sticks.
(on a side note, I am one of my only friends who actually enjoys going to the computer history museum. I just wish I could interact with the old machines. I wish there was a "come learn a bit of cobol, fortran, or <<machine specific assembly>> and write a small program for our 1401" option available.)
The floppy drive itself was a regular old PC drive, 34-pin interface, just mounted in a machine on a long cable vs. inside the PC case.
Bigger, fancier duplicators have multiple drives and write in parallel, but due to the cheaper configuration of this single-drive duplicator, it was possible to use it like a tape library. Mostly this was for fun, I'm sure he had tape drives on which to save his backups!
I have symmetric gigabit, but my buddy in Fresno sure doesn't.