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Death to the 3.5" Floppy?
BawbBitchen writes "PC World in NZ is running this story
about PC makers struggling to try to kill the floppy as a standard PC part.
Gateway has started to take $10 off the price of a PC if you order the PC
without the floppy. Hum, well my Mac does not have a floppy and I do not
miss it & my Linux Server has one that I have never used. Does anyone out there still use their floppy?"
I use them to back up my 5.25" inch diskettes.
Maybe I'm the only one left, but I find my floppy drive real handy for booting the computer still; particularly for installing operating systems...
This is particularly true since I still have to boot off a floppy to install Linux (something about autoboot and my scsi CD-ROM)...
What is your Slash Rating?
I do.
The noise!
The fury!
The whining!
It'll never sell, they said. What will people do without their floppy drive!
Hell, I hardly even use the Zip drive on my G4 for anything anymore.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
how else would i install openbsd? it takes too long for the cd's i bought to get here.
i'd rather see a replacement to the floppy (that's bootable!). how about compact flash slots?
All of my systems still have floppy drives. I'll go without using them for months at a time, however. My server's floppy drive has not been used in about a year. My primary workstation's floppy was last used three days ago, but I was only moving a small file around the sneaker net.
At work almost no one uses them anymore. I could probably remove them all and only three people would notice.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
The 20 second delay really sucks.
I use my floppy disks to hold all my mp3's! Then I play them in the car. I can store the first 300 milliseconds of each song!
my warezed copy of win98 doesn't like to boot properly from cd, so i use boot disks.
When sometimes I have to start up a f..d up Winbloze with a Win98 startup disk (with CD Rom support :) for eventually reinstall it :)
Does anyone out there still use their floppy?"
Yes. Whenever a network goes down it is still a great way to transfer a file between two PCs
yeah, pc makers might be trying to get rid of them, but what about software companies? how many of us still have software on floppies that is irreplaceable? and how many of us still have windows 95/98 recovery disks etc. don't most linux installations still recommend creating a root disk etc? until software ocmpanies no longer make software available on floppies and all of mine break, all my pcs will still have a floppy drive -nrs-
havent used one in about 4 years. trash em.
Floppies can die for all I care...
join the CD-R revolution!
Is there a better removable RW medium for a GPG keyring?
They're cheap as pins, practically, and after all, they do hold 1.44 MB formatted; and most of the stuff that I need to carry around with me will fit on that.
I still use my floppy and many people still have their Sony cameras (and I'm sure other devices) that use ONLY the 3.5" floppy.
This article almost seems like a troll since and industry standard has not been widely accepted to use as a replacement. ZIP and LS-100 have had a limited success. Not everyone has internet access yet either.
Speaking of ZIP and LS-100, has anyone ever booted to one of these devices? I'm sure the LS-100 wouldn't be much of a problem...
I'd have absolutely no trouble with the death of the floppy, as long as a sane standard came to replace it.
3.5" MO drives are an excellent idea, the media costs a bit, but if everyone had it, the price would drop some.
MO just makes sense ^_^
--- Do you believe in the day?
I need to do a BIOS update, so I download the new bios to a floppy, put it in the drive and boot the machine.
Out of the hundreds of floppies that I have gone through, I have only had a few go bad, unlike CD's which I have had several turn into coasters while writing, and almost the same amount get scratched.
Xaotik Designs
Floppies aren't evil. They are rarly in use, but then again; the cpu isn't either. You don't see PC makers trying to kill them off.
Look a monkey!
I used mine last night at a lan party. Had to re-install Windows, went to install the drivers for my nic, realized the disk was at home, had someone download them and put it on a floppy. Not really worth wasting a cd for a 500k .zip is it? Of course, Winzip is almost 1.44 megs exactly, so I had to use the disk twice.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
It definitely shouldn't be a standard part. But
I would like to see a new low cost read/write
standard emerge - and a Real standard, not
something proprietary like Zip.
ever since CDR media has dropped to less than a buck a disk, there has been little need of a floppy disk that cost 4 or 5 times as much.
then there's the fact that everything is networked now. I can just keep all of my files on my ftp and retrieve them from anywhere, just like everyone else
Floppy disks? haven't even touched one (and i'm not overexagerrating) in over a year and a half
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
I using mine as an apache web server.
/. article :-)
I would post the link but I really think it deserves its own
Booting off a cd isn't as easy as it seems. Some mobo's just don't like it or freeze allot. Seems floppies are surviving basically off this alone. I can't think of any other use for them honestly. For moving small files I like those usb keychain drives. I think its safe to say flash killed the floppy, not cdr, cdrw like many think. Flash is the small portable memory of choice. If only there were only 1 standard and not 5 or 6 of the damn things ;)
I use my floppy drives to boot off of regularly, to rescue systems and work around screwed up lilo installs. I also use them to load drivers (such as RAID which Redhat seems to forever have trouble with) when I install Linux on my machines. That's it though, I don't remember the last time I used a floppy for something after boot or install.
Since I bought my USB Thumbdrive I haven't used a floppy in months.
If you've got a Zip drive, the 3.5" floppy drive is close to worthless. Except for Emergency disks.
I use them for kickstarting several different machines.
I don't have a floppy drive, but i have needed it at time. Everytime there is a project, or assignment due have some time to work on it at home and in school, and we are supposed to use floppy disks for the transport (i just ftp it). But i have gotten points taken off b/c i didn't have a backup!
Carpe meam simiam!
I don't really use any removeable media anymore (with the exception of cd's, but only for installing software).
Everywhere I go has an internet connection, so I simply scp/ftp my files around whenever and wherever I need them.
This is really convenient, since I no longer lose important documents to bad floppies, or bad lab floppy drives (people are such slobs! Food + floppy drive == bad!).
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
I use floppies to transfer small samples to my Kurzweil K2600XS. Fortunately, my new laptop came with an external USB floppy drive, so I'm covered for a while.
For those of us on the bleeding edge of hardware build-it-yourselfs, performing a BIOS upgrade without a floppy is difficult. It's almost impossible if you don't have a Windows operating system. Currently the process to upgrade my Linux box's BIOS includes obtaining access to a Win 98 box or earlier, making a bootable floppy, extracting the BIOS update executables, making an image of the disc and then burning an El Torrito bootable CD that will be compatible with my Linux CD-ROM. That's too much work!
If manufacturers really want to get ride of the floppy, they need to work with BIOS makers.
Murphy's law of floppy drives-
Once you get rid of your floppy drive, within three days you will have dire need of it.
and have never needed it. I saved over $1000.00 by not getting one.
Not that I wouldn't want to rid myself of it, but for some reason, my Linux box will not boot to the CD-ROM drive at all. This is no matter what the BIOS or SCSI BIOS settings are (really). So, the only way to boot to a CD (say, a new Redhat ISO) is to use a boot floppy.
Strangely, my XP box has a floppy drive that hasn't ever been used. I haven't found a need since CD-Rs are so cheap (for floppy-like usage, the cheap spindles are great).
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
I have 2 floppy drives in my Novell server..
1 5 1/4" that is just there to fill a hole on the case and a 3 1/2 I only used when i built the box 4 years ago.
Around work we use floppy disks all the time for booting new boxes to the imaging network.
Some CD burning software (Roxio) requires a "Bootable Floppy" to make bootable CD's
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
CD burners are extremely cheap, but until I can get one for $20 that works everywhere, floppies should probably stay on something as diverse as PC's.
(Apples and Sun machines can do without as their OS/hardware is not diverse)
Does anyone out there still use their floppy?
Are you seriously asking Slashdot readers this?
These comments and opinions are mine and mine alone, although they shouldn't be.
not on a regular basis, however, a floppy is useful for the quick transfer of small text/html files and it also is useful to have the LILO bootloader on a disk. Of course, I could see that a floppy drive is not useful for the average person.
The only uses I've gotten out of them for a long while have been boot disks and flashing the bios. However, if you have a fairly new system, odds are that it can boot off a cdrom and install the OS from there and now you can even flash your BIOS from your OS. Unless you have a digital camera that uses one I see no real reason for them anymore.
Now-a-days if I need something, it usually is larger than 1.44MB (even zipped up). What I usually do is upload it to some website I can get to so I can just d/l it when I get to my destination, or, I burn it onto a CD. Heck, most of the time you can get 50 32x CDs for $20 with a $20 rebate from CompUSA. Rewriteables might be a little bit more, but with Drag'n'Drop CD software out there, they are the new floppy.
I'd like to see the serial port, parallel port, PS/2 mouse & keyboard port all go away.
Firewire and USB can replace that and more. IDE and SCSI could also go away and be replaced by a Firewire or USB 2.0 bus.
Worst comes to worst, use and adaptor for the USB port to make that must-have serial/parallel device work.
For an interim, an IDE superfloppy, like the LS-120 is a nice way to wean off.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I would be VERY happy if they would replace the floppy with a compact flash receptical.
:)
Same idea as floppy... Probably same lifespan...
Easy.. small.. not as fragile (in my experience)
Yes.. compact flash should be the replacement.
(and how about booting off of USB 2.0 hard drives and cdroms)
The floppy is still a good cheap way to backup small important data files. Quicken, WordPerfect, Encryption Keys, etc etc...
Its too damned cheap to kill.... 15 bucks for a drive, (if it dies) and ultra cheap meadeum...
http://www.englishfirst.org
Come on, floppy's are too convenient to get rid of. All of my programming classes at school require submission of printed off source and a floppy with the code and executable.
What about boot disks, quickly moving a doc to another PC, etc.?
People are going to argue that with networks and email you don't need to physically move files any more, but not all systems are online or networked.
For the small expense, floppy drives are extremely useful still.
It's my preference in a dual-boot sitation.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
I find that 2 floppy disks work great for installing Debian over the 'net.
~.Evanrude
And I have a linux boot floppy that I sometimes use. Frankly the slackware rescue CD sees more action.
It's all moot anyway since I'm like in 0.01% of the population, and I'll have trouble buying a floppy for my next computer and will start using CDROMs or DVD-ROMs to do the same stuff.
(Just make "cat bzImage > /dev/cd0" work and I'll be happy.) :-)
Until all of the disk utilities I have Images of are ported to a bootable CD-ROM AND all CD-ROM's read CD-R's the floppy will keep saving my ass. I don't see the death of the floppy until ALL Win9x based systems are phased out, even then it will take time to get used to. I tend to love my old school hardware utilities. :)
Hint to vendors: Provide tools that run under Linux, or provide bootable CD images PLEASE!
I decided to save $1200 a year by ditching cable tv and cable modem. Since I've got a cell phone and only get telemarketers on the landline, I got rid of the landline to save another $250 per year (ie, no I can't get free dialup). So when I needed to email a word document I've got at home to someone today, I put it on one of those magic floppies and brought it to work.
stipe42
About the only thing (that I know of) that commonly uses a floppy anymore is for BIOS updates. There are alot of motherboards that have floppy boot routines hard coded for just this reason.
An ounce of perception is worth a pound of obscure
when i was a kid at the lawyer's office w/ my mom during my parent's divorce, the secretary was putting files on these tiny little hard plastic disks. I hadn't seen anything like that available for my C64 (I was around 8 at the time) and wound up begging my mom to get me one for Xmas.
Now I spend my day ranting about how floppies need to go. Seriously, if it's that freaking small, just EMAIL IT TO YOURSELF PEOPLE!
The only thing I ever used a floppy for was for a startup disk back when I was using the win9x family. I think bootable CD-ROM's have really helped kick the floppy to the curb, as well as windows 2000/XP, using NTFS, which makes those boot floppies pretty much useless anyway, (unless of course you are smart and have your mp3 type data on a fat32 partition). I imagine a few bucks could be shaved off the price of PC's if we could finally get the floppy monkey off of our backs, as well as freeing up valuable motherboard space to put new features on.
-k
I still use flopppies on occasion. It is still an unfortunately common occurance that I screw up my boot sector and have to rawrite a boot image to fix things.
However, they aren't that neccesary for the most part. If I've got a CD-ROM, can't I boot a Linux Rescue disk? Yes. In fact, most of the uses of reccue floppies etc... have been eliminated by the rescue CD. Usually, RedHat's install disk has sufficient rescue gusto to get me up and running. Granted I run RedHat, but other distro's have the same feature. CD's are too cheap to not use, and for a file is small enough to justify the use of floppy instead of a CD-burn, I just email it, or SCP it. Even over a modem, a file that small is a quick upload.
Having a CDR/CDRW as STANDARD part of the system would make the floppy obsolete. Until then being able to make a up a quick and dirty boot disk for your OS of choice isn't something you can do without a floppy. So I for see the need for the tried and true, however ageing floppy.
I still have my 5-1/4" drive!
Seriosly though, for documents like most homework, the 3.5" still does the trick. 5.25", sadly is only useful for getting old games.
Well, I have a HP laptop, and it did not come with a floppy. The interestig part is when you want to flash your BIOS, the updater requires that it run off a floppy. Which, I may add, is the only time I've used a floppy drive so far. (Lets hear it for mini CD-RWs! Size of a floppy, but with ~200MB storage.)
-eak
Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Not Quite As Tall As I'd Like To Be.
If you've ever done helpdesk duty at any University, you've probably run into Joe Shmoe who comes running to you and asks you to help get his final report off this floppy which seems to be corrupt.
Even after having tons of space on the network drive and a cd-burner on the same computer people still use floppies. Dunno why.
People have often told me they back their data onto floppies. WHY? Floppies are probably the worst thing for backups given their failure rates.
Step in the right direction IMO.
We still use 'em up at my school where I work, to run antivirus programs (like when NIMDA hit....*shudders*) They're still used for anyone who has the older systems that: A) Don't have a network card (Or a very dependable one at that) B) Have an old, slow modem and don't have time to download 1 meg files all the time
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I use 100 meg zip disks for temporary strage and transport, and CD's for long term storage.
When dealing with source code, graphics, and documents, burning everything to CD to transport isn't often the most efficient method.
The problem is, ZIPs aren't standard, it's just my standard. But given a choice, I'll take a PC with not floppy but I gotta add an internal ZIP.
I have a floppy in both my systems; however I don't use them. With the alternative boot media available it is not a requirement anymore for me to have a floppy.
How many slashdot users out there would rather have that case space used for a smaller style HD? I don't know about anyone else but I would love to have more room for hard-disks...
... [Insert decent Sig]
I know these drives have had a few issues. But if the vendors truly want to kill the floppy, why not offer these drives at cost (or below?!), that way if people have huge archives of 3.5 diskettes they can still take advantage of them. But they also have the option of using the more viable 120MB disks.
If not that, then at least standardize on Zip drives, make them the default choice, and make Floppy drives optional until they are considered "phazed out".
-shadoi
I think it's rather strange what happened to floppies..
Back in '88 or thereabouts HD gave the old 720k disks 1.44 Mb,
and the later IBM PS/2 had 2.88 drives..
I was thinking that floppies were following, well not Moores law; but somethink like that.. yet here we are 10 years later and we've still got 1.44 Mb floppies.
Why? Isn't there any R&D going into floppies?
Is there some major bottleneck to the technology? - they worked around all kind of limits for IDE hard drives?
Enlightenment, please!
Yepper! I still user the floppy to bring systems back from the dead that others have killed. Sometimes I don't have a bootable CD to start the system and re-install the OS, so I have to have the floppy. I also will use it to move small amounts of data between site rather than waste a CD.
I realize that the cost of CDs is very low, but I can reuse the floppy without any special software, whereas burning a CD still requires software.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled moment of insanity...
Booting from floppy is incredibly useful for legacy purposes and for flashing BIOSes.
There are several pieces of older sampler (as in the musical instrument)-related software that read/write disc images, but only work under DOS.
Even though a lot of hardware can be flashed from Windows now, at least as much of it cannot. I was surprised when I put my latest PC together to discover that the CDROM drive, DVDROM drive, MB, and even my brand-new GeForce4 can only be flashed from DOS.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
revolution?? I'd say even CD-R is obsolete.
With writeable DVD's (this jungle of flavours) is becoming cheaper you may want to trash that CD-R too...
I bought an El Cheapo LG DVD-RAM, around $180 works great and you don't even need a "burner" application
I just format my DVD-RAM's to ext2 (since UDF has incorrect character coding in linux)
I'm a consultant and a lot on the way at customers sites. Customers often have very restrictive network environments. They will not allow me to logon to their networks with my laptop (I don't mean you need to be restrictive if you don't want me to connect).
The issue is that in a lot of situations I really need a floppy to get a 10k configuration file from my laptop on the customers network. Mind that most of the times they are using NT4 on their systems which doesn't have support for USB devices (mem sticks).
Even if they have win2000 they turn USB support off, most of the time. So for me the only possibility left is to get a floppy and copy it there. I could use email, if they just let me on the network or had ISDN/analog. Most of the times however they have digital phone networks, which I can not connect to.
Trip.
The site where: "I'm right, as long as you ignore the things that prove me wrong", became a valid method of debate.
Now instead of needing a special cable (usb or otherwise), special software, special drivers, or certain proprietary operating systems, all I need to be able to view the images is a machine with a floppy drive... so my NeXT cube or my new Dell, it doesn't matter. I can still see the pictures, email them, whatever.
When you have no cdrom drive in your crappy old server and want to install from isos, a floppy drive is handy. That's probably the only time I've used one in the last 3 years.
One of the main reasons my floppies havent all been packed away is the fact that aside from CDs, floppies are the only way to boot a system sometimes.
StickMan
www.rageagainst.net
I've been collecting floppies that students leave in the computer labs at the college where i work, and I've amassed about 450 of them. The best uses I've found are: taking the metal slide covers off and using them to cook hotdogs with sunlight, building towers (similar to building with cards), and spewed across my desk for the "geeky clutter" look.
I'm a cucumber
I haven't used a floppy drive in several years. Between the seriously low quality of floppy disks and drives these days,, the pathetic storage capacity, and the pathetic speed, they're pretty useless. Bootable CDRoms were the final nail in the floppy coffin. Good ridence, I say. I've removed the floppy drives from both my win2K box and my Linux server and haven't missed them one little bit.
I use my floppy all the time and when I rub it enough it becomes a hard disk.
occasionally college profs (even CS profs) require you to turn in a disk along with an assignment.
I see posts pointing to CDRs, but think about the cost associated with putting one meg of data on a 600 mb CD. Doesnt make sense. Also, CDs break/crack much more easily compared to the 3" floppy.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
It's nice to be able to pop a floppy in and reboot when you do something like misconfigure a kernel or (OOPS!) forget to edit /etc/lilo.conf after installing a correctly configured kernel.
utter rubbish
I think the floppy could die, but needs to be replaced with something like the LS-120. Too many of us out there still need floppies for nework drivers, boot disks, bios flashes, diag utilities that don't like mem managers and so on.
While CD's are cheap, it sure is a waste to only have 300k or so on something that can hold 650mb. Not to mention if I drop it on the floor, theres a good chance it will get scratched.
Yes, something needs to replace the floppy, it needs to be re-writable, same size as a floppy disk or a tad smaller and hold 2mb or better.
Mac's can get away with it since most of them are so proprietary that everything is the same so everything should work the same. PC's are like people, every one is a little different and they all have different needs
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
n/t
Last week, I had to troubleshoot a firewall problem at a customer's site..
:o)
:o)
The firewall itself is stuffed away in a closet, difficult to get to, with very little room... my options were to either use SSH via an existing computer on the LAN, or lug a monitor and keyboard up a couple of flights of stairs, find somewhere to plug in, and squat on the floor...
The only problem with the first option is that all of the machines are Windows, none have PuTTY, and there's no internet connection (which is why I'm there, after all
Luckily, I have a copy of PuTTY on a floppy disk.. easy to carry around, easy to use..
Without floppies, I would have spent 1/2 hour there, instead of 2 minutes..
(for those interested, the problem was the connection from the ISP
My home firewall uses one of the floppy-based firewall solutions, running off a $99 surplus office PC I originally bought for parts.
The CD-ROM and hard drive go unused.
So there! : )
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
there ain't nothing like a Tom's rescue disk to fix whatever may ail your system, sure you could blow it onto cdrom, but the system that fits in a shirt pocket....
In teh event of an actual emergency this space might provide useful information.
Besides booting, whether for installation or troubleshooting, I use floppies to hold the file database used by tripwire.
Further (slightly OT) one of the machines I use tripwire on has a file DB too big for the update function to work. I've been checking the report and then re-initializing the DB, since there isn't space for the backup of the DB on a floppy. What systems do other people use to handle this?
Just think of all those times you've needed to reinstall windows and needed to format your HDD and fdisk it (last time I looked you couldn't do that whilst the OS was running :)
:)
Also bios updates, still can't do this from windows or linux (well possibly in linux but no m/b manufacturers make the appropriate tools)
I regularly use my floppy with a modified Win98 EBD to get access to Fscked PC's and remove essential files before reinstalling.
Don't go on about using CDR's for that, I've tried, its not anywhere near as creating an EBD and modifying it for your own needs.
If Floppy drives were to be removed they would need to be replaced with another dirt cheap relatively reliable compact BOOTABLE medium, think about it, they've lasted this long for a reason!
I've replaced my floppies with internal (IDE) ZIP drives on almost all of my systems. They can fit into the same bay, but instead of booting a "rescue" disk they allow you to boot a fairly complete Linux installation with any modern BIOS. (Any that create a menu box when it sees multiple drives with "active" partitions would work.)
The main downsides are that some "artsy" cases only have a cutout large enough for a floppy, not a ZIP disk, and some tools really insist on using a floppy. That's why I'll usually keep the floppy drive around, but have it mounted internally. I rarely need to pop the case - less than once a year - so this isn't a burden.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
my kids use floppy disks to take work to and from school all the time. The school districts will be a long time before they will give students accounts that they can access both at home and school. And even longer before they will have enough CDRW drives to make CD's an alternative.
I honestly believe that the entire industry will attempt to kill off the floppy, but due to the fact that it is a PC staple, it will never go away. I will never dump mine.
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
My mac has NO floppydrive, and I am quite happy for it, but sad at the same because I miss the cheap and simple communication between two computers. I don't think PC manufacturers should phase out the floppy UNTIL they phase in a cheap wireless data protocol, like BLUETOOTH maybe, or making IR PORTS standard on PC TOWERS as well as laptops. Thats's my 3 and a half cents.
--"You are your own God"--
I've got an Imation SuperDisk drive in my desktop Athlon/WinXP box, and the VST SuperDisk expansion bay drive for my PowerBook (G3/Firewire) running MacOS X. (My Linux server actually has ordinary floppies, both 3.5" and *360k* 5.25", but that's a story for another day.) I use it from time to time. It's more useful than a plain floppy drive in that it can also deal with 100MB media, and it connects via IDE rather than a floppy controller, but it does function as a floppy drive.
I don't think I could do without it. Sometimes you've got to do something along the lines of copying your network drivers around, and it's much nicer to do that with full-fledged R/W media as opposed to burning a CDRW.
Floppys can go away, but if they do, they'd better be replaced by something like bootable USB thumb drives or bootable CF slots -- bootable media that's removable and genuinely R/W.
The other day I was looking at a case mod site (probably linked from /.) and noticed that none of the cases has floppy drives. I wondered how they might have managed but thinking about it I don't really use mine anymore. If I screw up Lilo or anything I just boot from my Slackware cd-rom (my drive isn't SCSI.)
I think I could genuinly do without it. Its a shame zip disks didn't take off like floppys though.
A few years ago a floppy drive would cost you $35-$40, depending if you insisted on TEAC or would settle for Mitsumi. Now you can get a CD-R for $40.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
My internet is through 56k dialup. I shuttle files between work and home on floppy. I don't have a network at home. I shuttle files between my G3 and the wife's PC until I can get one built. I shuttle files between my G3 and my PB 180 and will continue to do so because the PB 180 doesn't have ethernet. At least until this machine dies and I get broadband, I'll be using floppies.
Constitutionally Correct
I still havent found a better way to get that all import file from my laptop to another desktop pc while I am not at my home or my office.
I use them all the time to auto-install machines using Red Hat's kickstart.
Its still the only portable media that can easily (and cheaply) be written to and read that is available on all PCs.
Floppies will die when we can transfer files easily from one PC to another using another media.
For example: sometimes, to make a presentation using a standalone laptop, its easier to just copy the file to a floppy and put it in the laptop and use it.
The same applies if you are going to make a presentation at another location (and not taking your own laptop).
Its a good backup for these kind of situations also (since the network config may fail or something).
I use floppies about 3-5 times a year (not including linux boot floppies).
SG
Personally, I think CompactFlash cards are an ideal replacement for the floppy. Pricewatch shows an 8MB card going for $9, and I'm sure in volume you can get the 4MB cards for even less. They're re-writeable, albeit a limited number of times, but then, so is the floppy for all practical purposes.
It's solid state, no moving parts, relatively low power consumption compared to a floppy with the motor & head actuator. Also, it's 'compact' (literally), IMO, approaches the usable limit for storage miniaturization meant for humans. Much smaller than a CF card and it becomes more of a liability, prone to being lost.
CF is somewhat fast, using an ATA standard interface, allowing it to be plugged in to a standard ATA bus with the proper adapter. Also, some cards, notably those from Lexar Media contain built-in USB circuitry, allowing for a dual-purpose device (ATA / USB).
All we need now are the hot-swap capabilities for non-PCMCIA uses, i.e., a hot-swap ATA bus on the desktop. They work fine in laptops, and I have booted PCs from them.
I think this is far superior to any other type of medium because it's a somewhat open standard, and the capacity isn't fixed or locked in by the interface. You can plug a 1GB microdrive into the same Type II slot that will hold a 4MB solid state card. If desktops came equipped with these, you'd be able to take advantage of improvements in capacity. I think we'll see 2GB solid state CF in the next 18 months. In five years? Imagine if you could use your old floppy drive to read a 500MB disk that was the same form factor and used the same interface, etc...
I like them for digital cameras. Sure you could use any of the other media to store a lot more pics, but floppies are cheap and don't require any hardware that most people don't already have (card readers).
I am determined to never let floppies die. I even put an old 5 1/4" drive in my computer. Live on!
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
I have an IBM R30 laptop and sometimes i REALLY miss having a floppy drive.
Can't imagine why they didn't ship one with it.
Although one can buy a floppydrive for the ultrabay2k, it SHOULD be standard!
What are the alternatives when a network is not readily available?
Zip disks? Media too expensive, not common enough (networking effect).
CDR's? Too slow on many machines to set up, not common enough, and may waste a disk if the machine does not have re-write abilities.
Flash cards? Not common enough.
Table-ized A.I.
The only reason to really have a floppy drive anymore, for me, is when I want to play around with the Menuet OS, which is designed to fit onto a floppy.
Sayeth the website:
"Menuet is a fully 32 bit assembly written, graphical OS for asm
programming, distributed under General Public License.
- Graphical UI with 16 M colours up to 1280x1024
- Pre-emptive multitasking, multithreading
- Ide: editor/compiler for applications and _kernel_
- application and kernel sources included (GPL)
- Ethernet; tftp (& music stream)
- Free-form application windows
- Hard real-time data fetch
- All this in a single floppy !
Since Menuet fits to a single floppy, you only need one blank 1.44 M diskette.
Your hard disks are not affected in any way. Assembly programmers unite!
Well to be honest I have had to actualy use a flopy disk the other day. Dam took me 1/2 a hr to find one. And another hr to find one that was actualy working. But I have a very good reason, it was on a old 486 server running ms Dos. Don't ask, they have it it works.
But on my Pc's at home I do have floppy disks but I don't even think they work as I have not tried in over 2 years. since CD-RW drives hit, I have had no use of flopy disks, and have even found that flopy disks are more expensive then buying cdr's.
I'll advocate getting rid of floppy drives when, instead of simply crying for the removal of a standard, they come up with a replacement.
Compact flash is probably the closest thing, but it's very expensive for media.
CDs are out of the question. CD-RW drives are expensive, and you need complex drivers in order to write to it. Writing to it randomly (like it was a hard drive or, hey, a floppy drive) is even worse.
CD-R media is cheap, but CD-RW media is not.
So. Get them to sell compact flash at less of a premium (say, either make 64M cost ten bucks or something), or sell 10M versions for a few bucks.
Whatever media they decide on, the consumer should have no qualms about just giving away some media. If they can't do that, it's not a replacement for a floppy.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
CD-RW drives are starting to conform to a new standard that will ease the transition to a floppy-less environment. The standard is called Mt. Rainer. It enables native OS support for file writing and deleting, and lets you write to a CDRW within a minute of inserting it using on-the-fly formatting. It also writes in 2K or 4K blocks instead of 64K that drives today use.
Here's a great article if you want to read more.
"Does anyone out there still use their floppy?"
How dare you ask a bunch of Geeks that... What do you think?!? We don't have a social lif....uh, nevermind. carry on
I still use floppies for a few things. They come in handy for creating boot disks for non CDROM booting BIOS's. They are also the standard for source code turn in at a lot of colleges.
... it just takes all the major hardware vendors to agree on the replcement (ZipDisks? MiniCDR-W? Minidisk? Small Drives? etc ...)
Floppies do need to be replaced with a disk with larger capacity
Lets see, $100 USB drive? Hmmmm let me think..
Uhhh NO!
http://www.englishfirst.org
I do PC repair, so of course I need to move drivers from the net-connected PC in the shop to various random PCs in for repair. Much simpler to sneakernet a floppy (although I work barefoot :-) than configuring a LAN connection.
Most video and sound boards need a CD these days, but a floppy is still the easiest way to do a clean boot, load LAN drivers, etc. Also the simplest way to move documents between PCs at multiple locations. "Pendrives" and the like aren't supported across as many platforms as the boring old floppy.
It's important, though, that external drives remain available, so that old media can be read when necessary.
After the floppy died in my last computer (~2 years ago) I never bothered to buy a new one. Once in a while I thought that I might need one, but figured a quick way around it. Also saves from having to make bootdisks for idiots on my floor that use win98 and like to toy with the registry...
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
I just got done setting up a couple of laptops recently: a Toshiba 2100 CDT and a Dell Inspiron 5000e. I needed my floppy for both, and here's why:
.so files. Of course, as long as I had PCMCIA down on the inspiron I also didn't have network access and hense the need for the floppy.
On the Toshiba, only one distro out of the three I tried (plus BSD) would boot from the CD rom. (You go Slackware), the other three that would not were RedHat, Mandrake and Suse. BSD wouldn't boot either.
On top of that, I was forced to move the PCMCIA core from my home desktop to my both of the laptops and rebuild because of the following problems: On all distros on the Toshiba except for Slackware the kernel was enabled with the PCMCIA code but it had the 32 bit CardBus support enabled, which locks up the kernel on 16 bit only CardBus cards. I had to boot the kernel in rescue mode and disable the automatic loading of the PCMCIA module. Once that was disabled I was, of course, without networking. I had one of two options: burn a cd for the 1.2 MB PCMCIA source or copy it to a floppy. A floppy it was.
On the Dell, RedHat was assuming my Dell 1150 card was a PRISM2 card, when in fact it was an Orinoco and would not work with the wvlan_cs drivers. I had to manually force the PCMCIA core to rebuild the orinoco_cs (and hermes and orinoco as well btw)
Without the floppy I can almost bet I'll be getting a nullmodem going on my older machines, wasting CDs or doing some other backflips.
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
128 MB compact flash card: about $85, $0.66/MB
10 pack of Fuji floppy disks from Best Buy (.com, no less): $4.99, $0.35/MB
Now, consider the fact that nobody actually pays for 3.5" floppies anymore. Bang for buck is clearly with the floppy disk.
--
i still use the floppy for the net installation
of FreeBSD. two floppies are all it takes.
Rami
A single floppy linux boot disk is quite handy, if you want to get at a disk without booting the native filesystem.... If you put grub on a floppy, you can use grub to dual boot multiple disks of that *other* operating system, without having to put grub on either one.
--- I would prefer a prehensile tail....
I've got diskettes in three sizes ready to go - 3.5", 5.25" and 8" (ok, the 8 contains a System360 library so it isn't useful).
Just recently found a stash of 5.25" (1.2MB) and unfortunately both drives are DOS (Dead On Salvage). Found the old bulk eraser and put them in the can.
Still have a couple 5.25" 360-/180-KB (!) drives from original IBM PC/XT (as well as a working XT). Gotta dust that puppy off and jack it into the CGA monitor. I wonder if I can still find a 9 pin ribbon for this silly printer that came with the XT...
Now I only use the 3.5 for MS Money backups (yea, yea, MS suxors, etc)...
I wonder if people having no use of their floppy drives can be in any way corollated with AOL not inunandating us with free writable media.
AOL floppies were so usefull in the day of multi floppy debian installs (to get base up and running, then network to get the rest, even ppp was sufficiant). now one just has to jidgo down a cd image and burn it.
Until there's a single standard for packet writing to CD-Rs (not RWs) and almost all machines have a CD writer one (yes, I'm aware that most new machines come with one, but many older machines do not) AND they are easy enough for grandma to use, floppys will remain a part of our computing existence. I recently purchased a box of 25 blank floppys, the first time in years that I've bought them, mostly for use as emergency repair disks for a new Win 2K network installation (Red Hat on the server, of course :) I love CD-Rs - not so much CD-RWs - but floppys still have a place.
-Sam
I use them on old systems, which can't boot from a CD.
I haven't used my floppy drive for 2 years, until i got a virus (damn you bastard kazaa user) and then i needed them for rescue disks. But ther than that with bootable cd roms and other devices the Floppy is dead for me. I've just startign using sony (or wanna be sony cuz they is cheaper) memsticks to tansfer files between computers during the rare times my network is down, or whenmy roomate keys up the 2.4Ghz phoen and knocks out my wi-fi. too bad you can't boot off a memstick....
Don't go cheap just to save 10 bucks.
Most people don't use floppies but when you do it is because you have to.
For example your mom's win98 box has crashed and an emergency boot floppy might help.
AND YES MY ASSEMBLY HOMEWORK IS LATE!
I still use the one on my Amiga 1000, as it has no other means of booting, and my A590 still needs a hair-dryer to wake up (time to repair something?).
Ordo Militum Unix.
My floppy died a couple years ago after an unfortunate incident involving my 2 year old son and his recent discovery of coins. The next week my VCR also suffered the same fate.
I thought I had lost a CD-drive after he discovered CDs and a slight opening above the closed CD tray that allowed him to cram 3 CDs into the top of the drive. Later on he discoved a small opening above a drive bay cover and managed to get about a dozen CDs into the inside of my case before he was caught.
Installing windows when using a SCSI/IDE RAID/Misc Mass storage device that isn't supported out of the box requires a mfg driver floppy during install...and if you want said device to be your boot device, there is no way of putting this off...
~Adam
SPAM
Norton Ghost practically revolves around a bootable floppy. If you manage large numbers of computers on Windows, ghost is a must.
If there were a reliable, easy to write/re-write alternative available on all PC's, the floppy could be killed. It has unfortunately become our lowest common denominator for bootable media. We aren't likely to see the last of it for some time.
Having a CDR/CDRW as STANDARD part of the system would make the floppy obsolete. Until then being able to make a up a quick and dirty boot disk for your OS of choice isn't something you can do without a floppy. So I for see the need for the tried and true, however ageing floppy sticking around for quite a while.
It's also very useful to keep a boot disk with some basic recovery tools on it for those occasions when my wife does a FORMAT C:, or we have a hard drive go bad, or other similar situation. (She's only done that once, but it makes a good story. Good thing there's UNFORMAT.)
And the brethren went away edified.
Seems really brain-damaged, though. Who really wants to write and maintain stupid 16-bit code nowadays, and then have to depend on the user to track down a bootable disk to actually run your code. Hardly seems like rocket science to write linux userspace code to do the same job and then they'd be able to give away bootable floppies that run their code automatically.
314-15-9265
As mainly a mac user, i built myself a pc about 6 months ago. I got everything together, did the whole assembly, and my PC was complete. Except for the fact that I simply forgot to put a floppy drive in. It just never occured to me. It wasn't until i wanted to install BeOS that I realized i had possibly left something out. Eh, oh well.
Nothing from nowhere I'm no one at all
Does anyone out there still use their floppy?
I use my floppy every night(ok, once a week) and my woman likes it like that.
The day men stop using their floppy, is the day the world will end (Well I guess you can still impregenate a woman through artificial means).
Us geeks use our floppies, HAH!! We can hardly get a date let alone a chance to break out the ol' "floppy."
"I would rather have your time than your money" --Henry Rollins Jan 14 2003 on the topic on internet file trading
This would be more useful if everyone had one, and I would certainly grin holding a floppy with 32 megs of stuff on it. ;)
Floppy drives are still useful to me not to transport documents, but to boot off of. About a month ago, I decided to put Slackware 8.1 on an old P166, and guess what - I had to make boot disks (6 of them).
Then a few days ago I decided to put Slackware 8.1 on a two-year-old Dell (PIII 800). Surprise surprise, it wouldn't boot off the CD, even though it booted off every other bootable CD I tried. So, again the floppy drive was useful.
Also, I've used a boot disk to do an automated installation of Windows XP (with an answer file).
Booting off of a rewritable CD would probably be just as easy (if not easier) and much faster and reliable than floppy disks, but I have not found a way to easily do so. For instance, when trying to get my Dell to work, I spent an hour trying to get the computer to load the six boot/root disks for Slackware with no success. If someone can figure that out, I'd be floppy free...
My TRS-80 Model II (look that one up, kids) has an 8 inch floppy - 500K of raw bit-storing power. It laughs at your measly cassette tape storage system!
Eric
*** Visicalc Rocks! ***
My school uses floppies extensively. I'd wager that most others do too. They still issue 3.5" disks at the start of Freshman computers at my school.
...is portable, ...takes nothing to install and maintain (thereby easing admministrative headaches), ...is reliable, ...is removable, ...is CHEAP, ...and allows students the ability to take files back and forth from home?
When you have a small computer lab, you can't really save stuff to the hard drive (lest you share it) and then, you REALLY can't carry it anywhere. That, and many schools protect against hard drive access (for 'security' reasons).
So what common standard...
Our friend, the good old 3.5" floppy disk.
On a related note, a friend and coworker of mine still doesn't have ANY Internet access at home. His main recourse for file transfer to and from school, and even work? The good old floppy.
True, he's a little envious that I upload/download/network around all my files (of very large sizes), or if I need to, throw them on my PDA or MP3 player.
But damn if I don't love the simplicity of good old floppies.
Barak Michener
Tom's root and boot disk on a single floppy has been extreemly useful during hardware failures.
Oooh yay, a backup that may or may not be viable 2 days later when you try to restore from it. Are you serious? You actually trust those things with your data? Sheesh, I wouldn't trust a floppy disk to keep a ring off my coffee table...
The followin are the reasons to have a floppy drive: 1) You are a geek and you know how to flash the bios. 2)you like the sound of a spining floppy. 3)you like the thrill and the excitement when you try to access your floppy and you get the message "abort, retry, ignore" 4) You have no idea what a cd-rw is..or too poor to buy one..
> Does anyone out there still use their floppy?
Crappy Windows 2000 still requires me to load my RAID driver from floppy when I load my OS. It is the ONLY thing I use my floppy for anymore. I wanted to get rid of it, but Microsoft seems to be living in the past.
...both have floppy drives. The PC's floppy drive hasn't been used in at LEAST a year, and the Mac's floppy drive (It's a old Mac) has NEVER been used. It may not even work. I don't know, and I don't care.
If I ever need to transfer files, I have email, netatalk, and ssh/scp. The floppy disk can rot in hell. Or my closet. Whatever.
SIGFEH
As has been said before, real security comes from when your access to something comes from two of the three:
1. Something you know
2. Something you have
3. Something you are
For example, passwords can be brute forced relatively easy, but if your password has to be accompanied by a retina scan, then your password protected data is significantly more secure.
By the same token, if you have a password, but your PGP key is on your HDD, then your data is only as secure as your password to someone who has your PC. If, however, you keep your PGP on an external disk of some kind, then you go quite a bit further towards making your data secure to someone who has stolen or confiscated your PC. A floppy is pretty good for this purpose for the following reasons:
It's fairly portable. You can reasonably carry a floppy disk in your wallet and pull it out when you need it without fear of destroying it.
It's small enough and durable enough to manipulate. You can hide a floppy in a safe deposit box or ship it overseas if need be.
Despite it's relative durability, it's also easily destroyed. CD's need to be dissolved in acid to be truly unrecoverable and Zip disks are relatively difficult to break into. Floppies, on the other hand, can be broken into and once you've eaten the plastic disk, you're data is forever encrypted.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I discovered that one of the machines here wouldn't boot from the Slackware 8.1 CD, so for the first time in a long time it was out with the floppies. For ten dollars it's worth having that chance.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I still use floppys because they are a great way to transfer small files like logs and so fourth. It's still far too wastfull to transfer such small files using CDR(W)s and zip disks. Only when I have a large number of files or large tar balls will I use anything else. Who cares if I don't use it that often, I will always have a 3.5" floppy in all of the machines I build and or use..
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
...for cloning of systems.
and my DOS-based router.
Sony's Mavica FD series is called so because it uses a Floppy Drive for media storage. Now they have a CD series, but the truth is I can buy floppy disks almost anywhere. The same can't be said for sony memory cards or mini-CDs.
The problem with getting rid of floppy drives is that you have to hunt down every possible use for them from boot disks to driver disks to emergency pocket storage to cameras to everything else and find a common solution to all of them.
Yes, some hardware can boot properly off of CD. Now make sure every piece of hardware available has drivers on CD and pray to whatever god you worship that the RIAA and/or Microsoft doesn't start to lobby to have the standards for CD drives radically changed to make it more "secure".
Yes, it's time for the floppy drive to go, but it was also time for the tape deck to go over a decade ago and they're still being sold today.
No Zen is good zen
One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason-but one cannot have both.
I do apologize for getting off-subject, but this reply is about the Signature of the post to which I am replying. (I think I confused myself with that phrase...) The acceptance of reason and the subsequent logical rejection of faith does not lead neccessarily to a loss of love, sanity, fulfillment, or joy in one's life. Sorry to break the news so abruptly.
Have fun, MadDad32
I use mine to boot my netbsd box when the h/d fails, to lazy to replace it ;\
If there were a standard replacement device that everybody could agree upon, then there would be no need to keep floppies around. With the expanse of digital cameras, I could see compact flash drives becoming the next big thing and that also takes away the limitations to the size of a disk. The only problem is that the disks are too expensive to have a lot of and leave lying around. Though it seems that CDs are taking over that function.
The one place where floppies win are on reckless backups. I use the floppy in my machine at work to carelessly dump all of my source code at every checkpoint. It is fast and easy and my data can go home in my back pocket at the end of the day.
What we really need is not to get rid of the floppy, but to re-engineer it. We need a disk of the exact same nature (maybe make it 4" to tell it apart) with a much higher data density. Make a floppy that holds 100MB and you've got something. I know that the tech such as zipdisks was a miserable failure, but that is mostly due to the cost of each disk. Though one must remember that 8" floppies were $5 a piece 30 years ago (when $5 was significant) and look where they led.
1) You are a geek and you know how to flash the bios.
2)you like the sound of a spining floppy.
3)you like the thrill and the excitement when you try to access your floppy and you get the message "abort, retry, ignore"
4) You have no idea what a cd-rw is..or too poor to buy one..
of course, they were placecards at a party i threw.
I built my newest computer without a floppy, and it saved me enough room to put a 12th fan in the front of my tower, bringing the total to 104.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
Some light reading: Alternatives To The Floppy Disk?
Of course I still use my floppy. Partition Magic boot disks have been my only hope when I want to wipe linux off of my drive after thinking I wanted it, trying it, and regretting it. And mod me however you want, this isn't a flame or troll, merely the truth. Fdisk doesn't read linux partitions.
After all of this your kid still has access to a PC and/or isn't more interested in the health and wellbeing of his butt than your pc?
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Although rarely, when doing tech support, a floppy can be invaluable. I remember one case where I was wiping a bunch of hard drives from systems before they went to Portland Public Schools. I made a boot disk that formatted so that all I had to do was plug in the box, wait about a minute, pull it out and go to the next one.
Also I've had cases were I needed to use a floppy with a tool that M$ had on their site to repair the registry of several machines. It wasn't that they couldn't boot, but that when they tried to reach windows the machine would hang.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
You can't boot from a CD if you're going to run an operating-system-less utility to flash your DVD drive. You're really going to need a floppy for that.
You can take our Floppies, but you'll never take our FREEDOM!
Actually I still use one for the 'fore said tasks and use them fairly often.
First, it's a great transfer mechanism for "small" files (e.g., most documents), because it IS so widely available. Most other media don't interchange well BECAUSE not everyone else has one. Not every machine has a working Internet connection - they don't have a connector, it's broken, you can't plug in right now, or they're forbidden (!). I often use 3.5" floppies to exchange files with a laptop... there are other ways, but this one's quick. And if someone says they'll email or post the file, I'm at their mercy... but if they hand me the data on a floppy, I now really have it. Many machines ONLY provide data on 3.5" floppies (e.g., some synthesizers and lab data recorders); if you want to get their data, you need a floppy.
Backup for critical files, esp. from laptops. If you're using a borrowed laptop, perhaps you don't care about anything except 1-3 documents - a floppy backs them up very nicely.
They're wonderful for keys (e.g., PGP keyrings). Yeah, smartcards could be nice, but not every machine has a smartcard connector or its software... but the 3.5" disk is ubiquitous.
Floppies are cheap, and one of the very few ubiquitous standard ways of exchanging data. They're quite cheap, too. It sounds like customers have already decided they don't want to give them up; why should manufacturers force them to?
It'd be easier if there were a nonproprietary standard alternative, but there really isn't one. Iomega isn't even compatible with itself, and it's quite proprietary. Physical media has some advantages over the internet as a media, and both will continue. Before scrapping the floppy, let's see a nonproprietary alternative!
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
At the office, we use floppy disks a whole lot because we never have enough CDs to burn. This is because my employer says that rewritable CDs are too expensive. :-) We try to explain that they are cheaper sincethey are re-usable, but they just never get it.
... because I needed the space for another HDD. Anyway, who uses floppies lives in the face of danger (my cellphone *loves* to erase them)
Jerry Pournelle always set that he never thought his data was safe until it was an 8 inch floppy.
BTW, you need to see an 8 incher to know why they were called floppy.
3.5" diskettes ARE NOT FLOPPY.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Perhaps some other career programmers here can relate to this.
I use floppies when I want to bring some of my source code home with me from work, and I don't want to answer the questions posed by the sysadmins about why I'm trying to send certain things through the firewall. My company claims ownership of anything I write, but I'd like to keep portions of it for future reference should I ever change jobs.
They are very strict about such things were I work, so I find it easier to bring things that I've written like useful functions and such home on floppies.
That is more or less the only use I have left for them, but I'm glad they're available for it.
Tcl my Pico! There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Maybe we're 'tards here at work but I still have 3 floppy disks that I use.
2 of them are install disks for Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 that I use for NFS installations. For some reason I can't just tell the BIOS to install over the network via NFS. No space in my bios for DNS server information or IP addresses. haha.
The other one is memtest.x86 which you plunk in and boot right into a memory tester.
Other than that I also have a Mac floppy disk that I keep in my Macintosh 512K (Yes, Kilobytes) computer. No keyboard, no mouse, just a floppy that boots and after 1 minute times out to an AfterDark screensaver with a clock on it. Both the cheapest and coolest clock I've ever bought. It was $2 at a swap meet.
Keine eier
> (Just make "cat bzImage > /dev/cd0" work and I'll be happy.) :-)
dont use cat, use dd.
dd if=bzImage of=/dev/cd0
I keep my tripwire database on a floppy. It's much easier to flip the read-only tab than to burn it on a CDRW every time I update it.
I am the very model of a modern major general!
I don't think the question is who still uses floppies, it's why do we still use floppys. I had a 286 with a 3.5 floppy. How come ZIP disks never caught on? Didn't some company (Imation?) come up with a 3.5 disk that held 100MB? Look how much hard drives, CPUs and memory has changed since the era of the 286 yet the floppy stayed the same. How come someone couldn't come up with a drive that would handle 1.44MB disk as well as a 10 or 50 or 100MB 3.5 disk? You would think something would have replaced the floppy disk in twenty years time.
and sucessfuly installed W2K without it. But, when I went to install 98 so I could play games I had to put one it. I think I had to actualy go out a pay 20 bucks for the darn thing!
One problem with this. I know for a fact that many drives will support overriding the default "hardware" selection on a 3.5 inch floppy for it's "read-only" atributes. I have had a program in the past that had as one of its specific design criteria that it could overwite _ANY_ disk put into the drive to completely erase any and all information on the disk, a complete wipe with the associated overwriting 20 or so times with random 1's and 0's ...
In school these things are invaluable. You can work on papers and assignments in the computer lab and then go somewhere else and work. As it is, some of the computers don't have network accounts so transfering with a network is not possible.
From my experience, you *must* have a floppy
:)
capable of booting DOS when a Windoze box
takes a dump and doesn't revive itself.
I always carry a modified Win* emergency
boot disk in the briefcase.
Unfortunately, I don't currently have one
for my Mandrake or FreeBSD boxes. But then
again they haven't trashed themselves enough
to require a floppy to restart
Terry
"Hell No, We Won't Go!..."
www.coyotelinux.com
It's an idea use for older hardware. LRP was a bit beyond me, and Freesco doesn't support xDSL without some tweaking. It's still an awesome, versitile solution. Best of all, it's the most secure distro out there. If i don't want a change made to NVRAM, i just click the write-protect tab.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I have 9 computers at home, but only 1 floppy drive. On my main machines that I use all the time I never need them, so they are usually on the systems that are in the middle of reformatting, or troubleshooting. I don't need it but sometimes my gf brings home a floppy disk and tell me "I need this printed", and it takes me around 15 minutes to get the floppy drive on a system that is connected to my network.
For updating BIOS it was the same way until I finally bit the bullet and made a bootable CD with an image of the Win98 startup disk. Every other floppy disk that I've ever used (usually older drivers for network cards, etc) I've copied onto a networked directory and seperate CD, so things have been much more convenient since then.
What they need to do is have a CD-RW standard on the system, and make copying to CD-RWs as easy as copying to a floppy. Then we can really get rid of those for good. The fact that you need to "burn" using a seperate program is probably what throws off most of the masses.
I wonder how many years it'll take for there to be an article about CD-ROMs not being included in the systems because they are legacy....
Sometimes I need to carry a few files (e.g. draft documents) from place to place, where Internet connectivity isn't available for the transfer. A floppy fits in my shirt pocket; a CDR doesn't and of course isn't reusable either. I agree that a 1.44Mb medium is pretty close to useless but until we have a better replacement my floppy drives will stay.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
My Take: I've been using USB floppy drives. Well, A USB floppy. I use floppy drives about every six months, sometimes for transferring net drivers (Windows; I've never had to do that for Linux or FreeBSD, oddly) and sometimes for installing an OS via FTP (Linux and FreeBSD; I've never been able to do that for Windows, oddly). Having just one saves space in the system and time and money and...I definitely prefer it. Plug it in, use it, unplug it, store it for the next system.
We'll be getting a USB CD-ROM soon, too, and most of our new boxes won't have either inside, just a harddrive (I also don't use CDs very often).
---Bruce
There was this frog once, taught me everything I knew. I've learned this since: never listen to frogs that speak.
Whoot, all that spam about penis enlargements must have worked!! Oh, wait........
...Installing slackware on 486s...
and I plan on using one to put NetBSD on a Mac SE/30. Why? Hmmm I don't know yet...
BTW, you need to see an 8 incher to know why they were called floppy
too easy...
In all my systems (I put together my own), I have been putting in LS-120 drives instead of straight floppy drives. That way I can still boot floppies on the rare instance I need to, and I have a removable media drive that isn't completely useless the rest of the time.
The only problem is that I can't really use it to install OS's, as there's usually a mid-stage (between BIOS access and fully installed OS access) where they expect to see something on the motherboard's floppy connector rather than an ATA drive. With OS's on CD's these days, that isn't a big problem.
I don't think I'd accept a system that had no kind of writeable removable-media access at all. But a CD-ROM burner would probably be sufficient for most uses. If not that, then it should at least have a ZIP or LS-120 drive.
Floppy disk drives are a ubiquitous piece of hardware for PCs. You might as well try to be rid of power supplies and processors. What's the cause of this travesty of being stuck with a dead, antique piece of hardware? The PC, trapped with proprietary, unworkable BIOSes have no mechanism to replace the functionality of floppy disks, and to do so would require a great deal of architectural overhaul.
Sun, Apple, etc. and other non-PC boxen have more advanced solutions for booting the machine and working with it before any boot code is even touched (ie: Sun OpenPROM lets you boot from any source you want, including network sources with trivial ease). Furthermore, you cannot even update the BIOS contents on PCs without booting into a realmode OS and running code from there. Who here is going to burn a bootable CD-ROM that loads DOS and stores a few Kb worth of BIOS image? (This method would also disallow you to backup your exiting BIOS.)
Yes, floppies are old, annoying, and outright stupid. Sadly, because of horrible design, we are dependent on them for as long as we use x86 PCs. Now, why do we need to be using x86 PCs when better architectures exist?
Why bother.
CD-RW won't replace the floppy until it is unecessary to use a 3rd party utility to write and delete from it.
Maybe it's changed in Windows XP or MacOS X. But for Windows 2000 and Redhat Linux 7.2 I have to install and run a separate program and laboriously pick out which files I want to burn and finally say "go".
I don't care if it's the OS writer's fault, the BIOS writer's fault, or whose fault it is. It's ludicrous that I can't simply type "copy foo.txt d:" the way I can type "copy foo.txt a:"! CD-RW drives have been out for years, get your shit together people.
I've been trying to convert my company over to strictly CD-RW since we've had several disastors where the only copy of important data was on a floppy. (I know, I know, but users are users.) It's been completely unsuccesful because the burning programs aren't integrated with the OS the way floppy drivers are. Don't get me started on the burning program's horrible interfaces if you have anything else you want to do today.
Until I can pop in my cd-rw, click-and-drag my files onto it, and pop it out to be used anywhere a cd can be -- without having to go through a 3rd program -- I and everyone else will still have a use for floppies.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
DiskOnKey is a small, keychain-sized device that works like a portable USB disc drive; comes in 8, 16, 32, 64... 512 MB flavours. Completely plug and play in Windows 98b + There are other companies that make devices that are virtually identical. The nice thing about DOK is that it comes with its own security device, password protected in its tiny little flash BIOS. This device *should* replace the floppy disc, if for no other reason than it's very convenient and very cool...
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
the funny little machines that Court Reporters use have floppy disks in them. They also make "ascii disks" to give to the Lawyers. Yes you could burn a 45k ascii file on to a cdrom but it is a lot faster to just copy them to a floppy.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
As long as floppys are used for boot devices we cant get rid of them. Bootable CD's are great.. but many bios dont have them. And when you have an old machine that needs to boot off of floppy, where are
you going to make said bootable floppy. Yes I have been stuck up sh*t creek whithout a paddle.. a room full of computers.. and only one with a floppy that can only boot from a floppy. Yanking a HD just becouse you cant format a floppy to be bootable suckx my nutz.
I use it as a "sneakernet" firewall in front of my secure machine.
...2.5" CD-RW's that I bought at CompUSA. They hold about 180megs or so. One of my coworkers made a Redhat recovery CD thingy on a bunch of the CD-R versions of those disks.
p roduct_code=288608
Here's CompUSA.com's item # on them to those who are interested: http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?
I haven't needed a floppy in ages. Windows 2000 seems to have mostly evolved away from it. Now all I needta be able to do is flash my Bios from a CD....
What a half-assed attempt on Gateway's part. Ooooohhhh, 10 bucks of on a thousand dollar purchase. Hmmm, money market, college fund for th kids, what to do with the money.
Do what apple did. Quit putting it in the machine. I don't see that platform suffering. i386 hardware makers and buyers insist on support for old outdated shit. I don't understand the attraction of people to cheap commodity hardware that is two grades above shit.
Get rid of the floppy, it is useless - tits on a boar.
to read the floppy disks the digital camera here at work writes... Yes, there are other choices for camera memory, but PCMCIA cards cost a lot more, and then it's harder to transfer the jpegs to the computer.
Floppies rock, I still use them allot for various reasons, like transfering pornogra... uh, files between college and home, (mainly because the proxy isn't very FTP friendly and I really can't be bothered to make a PHP-FTP client) to boot bootdisks, to temp. store small files in case a part of your network goes tits up, tiny linux distros for firewalling/routing/(S)NAT and for transfering files with/to an ancient computer. (It's not like my 486 with MSDOS can be hooked on the network untill I get more mem for it and find my lovely Slackware CD again)
Even though I I agree that there is lots of better stuff around these days. LS-120 are too slow though, but I'm thinking of Zip-drives, which genuinely rock. Try cramming 250mb over a FTP connetion. It's highly unamusing unless both people got a T1 connection.
Now, I don't expect my college to change anytime soon unless MS buys out Iomega, (Long story involving people from my college rimming Mr. Gates.) but Zip drives would be ideal. They can store pretty much anything medium-sized, like PDF files for learning stuff occasionally, graphic files for the artistic people in the photography department, CAD/CAM templates/projects for the guys in the engineering departments, source codes and programs for the programming department, large documents/essays which pretty much everyone has and essentially just a hell of allot more then a normal floppy. So many uses already for just ONE college...
Hate me!
As an IT Professional (someone that has to do creative problem solving on computer systems) I feel that the floppy drive is an absolute must have for fixing major problems on desktop systems. From my linux floppy that lets me hack into and modify NTFS hive files to reset admin passwords to the lowly Win 95 bootdisk with cd support I still use them all on at least a weekly basis. Yes I know much of this can be done with bootable CD's but if I need to customize the bootable CD I have to do it at a functioning system that contains a CD burner and I still need to supply the boot files. If I have a bootable floppy, I can boot off of the floppy, modify the necessary boot files directly at the broken machine and away we go. Long live the floppy!
I think my college is not the only one that uses them for turning in assignments. Also, since we can't save stuff to the hard drive, we have to use them to back up the programs also.
We work on the assignment in class. After classes, I may go to the labs and work there. Around 1am you get tired of other students, so you go back to the dorm and work there. Emailing all those times is a pain in the ass. Most notably when I go to the coffee shops with my laptop, want to code, and there no wireless. Sure, I have it on my computer, and could wait 'til I get a connection to email it, but why not just use a nicely colored, translucent floppy?
Makes it much easier to copy homework also, as people always leave their homework, on floppies, laying around the labs.
Of course, we could use CVS, but why when the project is just for one wekk or so?
By the way, I feel bad for all the fuck earlier, sorry.
I used them last night, in fact. I had fudged up Windows 2000 (my default opsys, and be quiet, I need Photoshop) and had to attempt to repair it by loading a kernel using the installation CD.
To install Windows 2000/NT/XP on a machine that utilizes a RAID or SCSI card that is not on the default list (there a a few, but not enough) you must have a floppy drive. Unfortunately you cannot specify the drive to search from to "Add Additional Devices" drivers, you MUST use the floppy drive. You also need one diskette per driver, or rewrite the .inf file to have multiple driver choices on one diskette.
This was a minor issue, since I have the two disks in the case with Win2000. But, if I recall correctly, I needed floppy disks to do the same thing installing Redhat Linux 7.3. Unfortunately my RAID card isn't on the list, and I am having troubles hacking a driver to work so I'm not sure what happens after the prompt. (I just reset the comp) =]
What do you use to backup your album sized hard disks? ;)
~S
The latest version of Norton Ghost makes a boot floppy that you use so you can ghost your hard drive...alas, my laptop lacks one and I haven't been able to.
:)
I'm sure there's some way to do it, but if I wanted to jump thru hoops I would be using Linux
The folks who say it's useful for booting are acting as if someone's trying to ban floppy drives. The point isn't that they're not useful in older machines, but I think it's true to say they're not needed in new machines any longer. Any new machine should be able to boot from its CD-ROM. Besides, there are enough floppy drives in circulation to recycle without making more of them.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
An actual situation. I needed a nic driver on a system. Without it, no net access. The only way to get the driver onto the box was via floppy. There are alternate methods, e.g. serial port, zip drive, etc., but nothing beats the ease and convenience of a floppy drive. I'd rather spend the $10 for a floppy drive than have to hassle with the other methods.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Unfortunately I had to use my floppy today because Symantec ghost will only creat a network boot floppy, and my attempt to turn their floppy image and make a bootable ghost CD-Rom burn for whatever reason created a few frisbees, so I went back to the good 'ol floppy boot.
Heh. A friend of mine useta say: "I have a 5.25 floppy.. and a 12 inch hard drive!"
Although half the surprise of this comment came from his 'proudly' owning a Packard Bell...
I wouldn't have any complaints about losing the floppy as long as manufacturers included a bootable CD, and the system was also bootable from a USB based floppy drive.
Almost all new machines have USB ports on them. That would give me a nice portable solution in case of emergencies.
I did need my floppy recently. I don't have a CD-RW drive on my laptop and a friend needed a modem driver so he could get on the internet.
I used a floppy to transfer the driver from me to him after I downloaded it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I've got two big problems with floppies:
//c!) without a hitch. But 3.5" 1.44MB disks are notoriously error-prone. Why didn't anyone employ an error-correction protocol when writing to floppies? Maintain backwards compatibility by writing the EC data to the "extended" tracks outside the 80-track (do I have that right?) spec.
1. Speed. Why are these still SO SLOW?! Sony has put accelerated floppy drives in their Mavica cameras. Is such a drive available for the PC?
2. Reliability. Just yesterday I successfully transferred data from 18-year old 5.25" 140k disks (Apple
I have more use for a floppy then I do a modem.
I never saw any toddler proof cases available on ThinkGeek. Anyways, he's 4 now anyways so he knows how to use it (at least better than most people I provide tech support for).
You don't know how many people use floppies to hold term papers and the such. My sister has a floppy where she has all her papers since she started college(3 years ago). I once had to use the computer lab in the humaninties building at my University, and everyone was using a floppy. All the computers have zip drives, but no one uses it. My history major roommate, still has those floppy wallets where he keeps his research. These people don't own a real computer, they have no idea you can save on anything but a hard drive and their floppies. I think that until these people change, floppies will live forever.
I used red hat's floppy image for net installation recently. My gateway/firewall/sshd/etc. server has no CD drive of any sort, as it doesn't need it. Less is better.
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum
Uh, yes they are. Floppies are designed such because of the floppy medium inside the hard plastic shell. Back in the day floppies were so inside and out (floppy medium, floppy shell). Like most old-school geeks I saved considerable sums by turning my single-sided double-density 5 1/4" floppies into double-sided with the simple employment of a hole puncher.
There are still hardware companies out there that put their drivers on 3.5" floppies. I am sure 3.5" will fade out but they are still needed on the rare occasion.
As an example, I was messing around with some bus speed settings in the BIOS on my Supermicro P6DGU (dual proc, GX-chipset mobo) and the system refused to boot up. The BIOS can be emergency-flashed by holding down a pre-defined keyboard key. First problem was my USB Keyboard/Mouse. The BIOS would not go into auto-repair mode so I had to swap with an old PS/2 keyboard. THen, the ROM image had to renamed to something specific such that the system could grab it, but it all had to be done off my 3.5" boot floppy. Tell me, is there a replacement for it? No there isn't. I don't have CD-Burners on every machine here, nor do I have zip drives on every machine so it would be rather difficult to recover my system without the 3.5" drive. Give me a fast/universal replacement for the 3.5" floppy and I'll take it. Until then, I don't think it can be killed off.
The only use I know of for the common floppy is taking an assignment to school so I can finish it. ;) I'd rather take up a little space on a floppy than was a whole CD-R for a very small document.
the toothpaste is frozen
I don't know what kind of presentations he's giving, but the author of the original article thinks floppies are useless for Powerpoint? That is ALL I use floppies for these days. My 20-minute technical chemistry talks are only 300kb, max.
I only use my floppy drives & install the drivers for my raid & scsi cards on the Win2k... Thats it.
I have two different machines. A PII (laptop) and an AMD 133 tower running Linux. The AMD bios does not support cd-rom boot, so to install Linux, I have to use a boot floppy. I use my laptop floppy for making the boot floppies. I mostly use Zip drives more. Acutally, if you want to know what I use, it all network. To transfer my files, I use a network if present. I have used other floppies for changing a admin password at my school so I can do some administrative stuff. I enjoy the floppy drive, but I don't use it that often. I would just have to find another way to use some utilities that can fit on a floppy.
This page is full of anecdotes of stupid things people did with their floppy drives.
I think I will always maintian a floppy to run FloppyFW or BBI Agent (bbiagent.com). No Hard Drive = No Problem.
I'm sure it could be replaced with static RAM but, that won't be a cheap viable standard for years...
L053R
Like most others, I don't use the floppy except for installing network card drivers or doing BIOS upgrades. I wouldn't mind if it went - as long as I get a reasonable rewritable alternative. If ZIP or LS-120 drives and media were reasonably priced, I'd be plenty happy. The idea somebody had about compact flash cards was a good one. Whatever the media, the BIOS must be able to boot from it.
Killing other things like PS/2 keyboard/mouse connectors isn't so bad; I would like to see a USB keyboard with a 1-port USB hub in it for the mouse. Actually, make that more than 1 port, then I can plug in a USB to serial adaptor for my palmtop. Then I can get rid of any serial/parallel ports I don't need. All in all I get at least 3 IRQs freed up.
Actually, having said that, I must say that a PS/2 mouse is more responsive than a USB one - at least on my system. I don't know if that's a software or a hardware problem though.
-- Steve
Olympus issued a press release about their new xD-Picture Card. Will be offered with capacities of up to 256MB this year, and 2 GB the next. It's only the size of a postage stamp and has adaptors for PC Cards and Compact Flash.
Which is great, assuming you don't swallow the expensive little bugger. Or need to write on it.
While I agree that relatively high-capacity solid-state flash media is the obvious choice to replace the venerable floppy (and the unreliable Zip), I have to take issue with A) The price and B) The physical size.
Firstly, floppies were great because you could just give them to people. Didn't need a computer with you or anything. Email has replaced floppies most of the really obvious matters, but the need for such media does come up every now and then, and burning CDs is a pain (not to mention non-reusable, another floppy advantage). But if they aren't dirt cheap, you're not going to be giving them away.
Secondly, these little cards are getting too damn small. Anything smaller than a stick of gum has no room to write on or read off, can't be held well with just your fingers, and is just begging to be lost. (From a design point of view, I think Sony's memory stick is superior to the alternatives). Olympus has been using the wafer-thin smartmedia cards for a while, and they have a marked tendency to break. Wonder how this new one will be .
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
"Does anyone out there still use their floppy?"
I know I do. Its great for boot disks, simple transfer of small files like, word documents, Powerpoint presentations, retro-games, and pix with out the sometimes annoying networking process or uploading. Above all they are cheap, reliable and plentiful. Floppies maybe an outdated technology but it still has its uses. Maybe it is time for a new method, but it has to have the above listed advantages of 3.5 diskettes. I think a larger holding space is in order, just without a bigger price tag.
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
I just built a computer about a month ago, I bought some of the hardware at a local computer shop and I had everything I needed when i saw a floppy drive on a shelf behind the counter. I got one (it was only $8) but I still havn't used it. Although I was at TPL and I seemed to notice quite a few people asking around for floppy disks.
Does anyone out there still use their floppy?
;)
Not as often as I'd like.
Uhmm...I sure use that floppy at least once a day...don't tell me you don't! :p
That gaping slot on the front of my case seems to have 2 uses: collecting dust, and teasing me into trying to put a zip disk in. Then it shouts "ha got you again." while I put the zip disk into the correct slot. At least thats what I hear in my head.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
There is another model of Mavica which uses MiniCDs (8 cm) to store the photos. One MiniCD can store up to 200 Mbytes (more than 100 floppies, indeed) and its size is similar to one floppy. The price is about one dollar each if they are CD-R and less than ten dollars (don't know exactly how much) the CR-RW version (and I think the camera comes with one CDRW).
You can take many more pictures and use higher resolutions without changing the disc... And you can read them in almost every CDROM unit.
You can also use those discs to store MP3 music and play it in one of the many MiniCD MP3 players available...
--
ACid
Discipline is so outdated. It's all about freedom to destroy.
Aside from booting, I can't count the number of times I've need a quick and dirty means of file transfer like the floppy. ...And grumbled the same number of times I couldn't because of the newer iMacs. Don't get me wrong, though. I also can't count the number of times I've desperately needed at least one more meg of space on the damn things. Winzip was a great emergency core utility... Until it's setup hit 1.8 MBs. It really does need to be put out to pasture, but the only thing I see matching the cost and standardization of a floppy is... Dirt.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I use boot disks all the time for hard drive partitioning, formating, boot utilities, and drive copying...
The common user might not use it anymore, but alot of techs do.
Its the best diagnostic utility you could have.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Does anyone out there still use their floppy? :)
Have you ever heard of muLinux?
I can spare my harddisk, not my floppy
What do you people use to transfer files between one computer and another?
I use it off and on, and it's not going to change any time soon. First I'll just gloss over all my old computers running Linux that either lack a CD or can't boot from it without a floppy (this is not going to be an issue for grandpa, grandma, and aunt tillie who just want to go by a PC for e-mail).
First and formost, I hate the floppy drive with a pashion. It's not that it's so bad, it's just been around for so long, you'd think they'd find a way to make it write a full disk in under a minute or two. Have you ever written disk images? God it takes a long time. They are (for many people) a pointless expense on their computers. Now that the internet is so prevalent, many people give things to other people as e-mail attachments or on CD-Rs because they are so common. And of course, even though you can usually go to a local computer store and buy 100 unformatted cheapo floppies for $1 (what a deal that would have been 5 years ago, huh?) they just aren't worth it. My laptop has a builtin CD-RW/DVD drive. I have a floppy and a battery that I can put in the removeable drive slot (3 spindle, woot). I have had the floppy in there 5 times in the year I've owned it.
So why won't I be ditching all my floppy drives soon? First, I have a large investment in old software. I still play X-Wing and some other things. But the main reason is that so many things still come on floppies. If you buy hardware, you often still get a floppy with software. My EEPROM programmer that I bought 2 months ago came this way. Many things still come with floppies, because they are a lowest common denominator. Now you'll never find Warcraft III on floppies in a store, but for little tiny things, they're still good. And they do make one hell of a boot disk.
What has replaced the floppy? Well, there have been some attempts. I think that MiniDiscs might have had a chance if they were pushed. CD-R is replacing it, sorta, but it's still too expensive compared to the $10 floppy drive. And it's only recently that CD-R(W)s become common and cheap. DataPlay discs might have had a chance, but they still haven't arrived, and have missed their window of opportunity (IMHO). There were also HiFDs which seemed nice, but they were expensive and didn't get far.
Zip drives have come the closest, but they were not in enough PCs. That and a 100 meg disk is still quite expensive (compared to a CD-R). If Iomega had made a deal with most of the major manufactures selling the drives at cost to the consumer or even below, then they could have made a ton of money on disks. Now Zip is disapearing because CD-R(W) drives are cheap and they media holds more, and is more common, and is cheaper.
So what will replace the floppy? I think that it's CD-RWs. This hasn't happened yet because (among other things) you need special software (like DirectCD) to use it like a floppy drive. So it's not easily readable. Also, while you can boot off a CD-RW, you can't write to it like you can with a floppy. CD-RW prices are dropping, so it's becomming viable. The true thing that will do it though is the new Mt. Ranier initive that many manfacturers are shipping drives for now. These have firware that handles all of the details for you, like how a floppy drive doesn't need software to tell it how to write a sector to the disk, it just knows. THIS is what will make them common.
This is all opinion, blah blah blah, but I predict the floppy won't dissapear for a while now. But it is initives like this that lead to it's death. One manufacturer can't do it alone (case in point: Apple), but if most of the major manufacturers do it together, then they have a good chance.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The only thing i have that i seen that would truly replace floppies are the 'memory cards' or flash-based USB Mass Storage devices, but there really needs to be a method to boot off these things.
Imagine, your next linux distro comes with a cute little 'tux' figure with a USB connector poking out his ass.
Plug this in to your machine, and reboot, the little LEDs in tux's eyes flash to indicate activity, and the installer runs (Tux has 8-256MB of flash on board, giving you all the modules to support your hardware, along with everything you need to rescue/recover/setup your new Linux box.
My 8MB USB key has saved me several times, since it allows me to transfer files from Windows to my Mac to my Linux boxes without the need for a network or any common hardware (except working USB) among them. The drivers are supported by the Linux kernel, WinME/2K/XP and OS X natively, so no drivers to load.
These things are still a little expensive (my 8MB cost me $NZ100 about a year ago), but i imagine these devices would be dirt-cheap in volume.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I wish I could git rid of my floppy.... My professors want us students to turn in assignments. Are there any alternatives to handing in assignments besides via floppy and email?
This is my signature.
BIOS updates
HD repairs
isntalling NIC drivers
making bootable CD's
I've had the exact opposite experience. I find tons of bad floppies in ostensibly new packs. However, I can't remember the last time I burned a coaster (thanks, Plextor!). BTW, you can prevent those CDs from getting scratched to hell an back with the simple expedient of using a CD case to protect them. You can't just toss them around - they're sensitive.
I use a floppy-based LEAF Bering distro for my firewall on my DSL line at home. No hard drive on that old box since it died. The system boots from the floppy, which isn't mounted at run time, so I just press power or toggle the reset button to shut down/start up. If I ever get hacked, hey, a clean, fresh system is only a reboot away.
I also use a floppy to boot slackware whenever I've downloaded the latest distro to a partition and want to try it out. I don't have a cdrom burner, so a floppy is the only way to go.
Another use for floppies. If you try to boot with a CD (RH or Win2K), XP and your computer will just ignore it and boot straight into Windows.
To remove XP, you got to fdisk the drive with a floppy.
Ever want to connect your sleek new laptop to your cellphone modem?
10 to 1 your cellphone cable is Serial (RS232) but your new Laptop doesn't come with a serial port. My 2 SOny's and my new Toshiba only offer USB.
Who is using a serial cable to connect their 240 Watt Power Tower to a 2 oz. Cellphone?
Oh blah blah blah... Everybody is mentioned how you can override this with a bunch of custom assembler code.
:)
To hell with that, I'll just stick a piece of tape on your floppy and write on it all I want! Used to do this all the time to those AOL floppies.
But yes, that tab is useful for preventing accidental writing.
FreeBSD version is released (mutter 2 disks, mutter)
My friend who is a huge pain in my ass doesn't even put floppy drives in anymore..
At this point I think I include them only because I'm programmed like a lemming to put them in as part of the process...
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
Like most old-school geeks I saved considerable sums by turning my single-sided double-density 5 1/4" floppies into double-sided with the simple employment of a hole puncher.
:o)
Ahh.. those were the days...
I remember when the C1581 came out (that was the 3.5" floppy for the C64..) and one of my (not too bright) friends figured he could use the same trick..
It took me almost an hour to remove the 3.5" disk he had jammed upside down inside the mechanism... but the drive still worked afterwards
He was pretty shocked when I explained that the 3.5" disks were already double-sided (two r/w heads)
This is what you call a floppy disk? But it's square. It's not floppy either, it's stiff! Ah hell, no ones going to get this movie reference. :\
Remember slashdot when the iMac first came out? ...
:)
... What will people do without their floppy drive!
Better than you.
You misrepresent the issue. The problem was not the floppy, the problem was no removable writable media. The floppy was merely the most common and inexpensive of such media. If Apple had included a zip or a CD-RW as they do today there would not have been much controversy. The controversy was all about Apple's assertion that all you need is ethernet. Note that Apple eventually backed away from this rediculous assertion and provided removable media, CD-RW.
Apple floats cover stories to the faithful to gloss over shortcomings. The all you need is ethernet crud was cover for iMacs with CD-RW being too expensive at the time. All those dual CPUs a couple of years ago were cover for embarassing processor speeds. Etc...
Don't get me wrong. I like Apple products. I have owned my share of Macs and I will purchase more in the future. But I will believe little of the PR bull that comes out of Apple Computer Inc. and Steve Jobs.
I use my bright yellow and red 3.5"'s to steal classified information and seventy gigabyte executables from government institutions.
LV
Woot w00t w007.
--ya, I use mine. Probably next I will grab my bookmarks to a floppy, Then ONCE AGAIN re-install some "secure linux" distroBUTION, since I got owned again despite default "high seekrit security" installation.
Also use them on the older boxes I rebuild, great for sneaker net transfer of small but important programs, notably, ftp progs. If ya got ftp, and can get on the net, you can go get everything else. I'm still living po', don't have a cd writer yet, so floppy is it for saving anything.
Those of us who use music equipment from the 80's need 3.5" floppys to transfer data to the and from the equipment. I have an Akai S-950 sampler that I backup the disks to my hard drive. I also transfer samples I got off the Internet or process on my computer to the S-950 with the floppy.
Granted, if my computer didn't have a floppy drive I could add one. But if it didn't have a floppy controller I'd be screwed. The software to transfer data to and from the Akai formatted disks ONLY works in DOS, so that rules out using USB drives.
---
Geoffrey
Project AKO - http://ako.sf.net
I have used about 10 disks within the last three days or so while setting up router boxes, creating OS installer bootdisks etc.
I still use the floppy for this kinda thing, and what if you want to transfer a small file to a friend's PC? You gonna burn a 650mb CD just for a 650kb file?
You were expecting a sig?
My 3.5'' floppy still works.
:)
Does anyone out there still use their floppys?
Yes, ask my girlfriend
It's really unbelievable floppies haven't changed in the past 20 YEARS. Everything else has gotten smaller and more efficient. What's up with the floppy? Same size, same capacity. They should be the size of a postage stamp and hold 1.44 GIGABYTES by now! It's like the Government is responsible for them ;). I really can't understand why they're still around with no suitable replacement. IS IT REALLY THAT DIFFICULT???
Zip drives seemed to offer promise, but I think Imation really dropped the ball there.
It is about time that 3.5" dirves go,I have finally used up all those reformated AOL floppies that I got in the 90's.
Still the number 1 backup device for a lot of applications out there. Not everyone has 10 gig of data to save.
Bad User. No biscuit!
these seem to be the alternative. they offer read/write protection. USB is widely accepted by the industry, memory sticks are cheap to produce. Interchange between different OSs seems to be fairly easy and is, to my knowledge (I tried it) partially implemented (Win/OSX interchange is possible).
:)
Hope standard-BIOSes will support booting from memory sticks soon
Floppies were the method that the professor in one of my CS classes used for turning in code, along with a physical print-out. He even handed out the disks so all we needed to do was use them. Ya, sure he could have used email, but it was more personal this way.
Without motion all goes black.
That was, however, the last time.
Hey man, don't disc the floppy. I still know of companies that use the old 8 inch floppies. For those who don't remember them they only hold 64K and I still run old governement software that is based off the old 5 1/4 inch floppies that are only ~320K.
As the subject says.. I took the floppy drive out some time ago, as I needed the spare molex to power my LiveDrive.. I haven't needed one since then. My Windows XP and Linux CD's are all self booting.. and its pretty rare that anything useful even fits on 1.44MB anyway these days.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Yes.
I have not used a floppy disk in nearly 6 years -- I haven't had one in my computer since my 486 66 died. But on several occasions, I've wished I had one.
Most recently, I could have used one yesterday. I found myself on a state university campus with my mac laptop. The one wireless network doesn't allow open wireless, and don't "support" macintoshes so they wouldn't give me a wireless password. Their wired network is set to boot off a Novell network and won't give out ips unless the OS was downloaded from the server. Furthermore, the only mac they had was not networked.
The presentation I was about to give was stuck in that macintosh due to the archaic, bigotted network. I had to read from the opened laptop, with lights blaring down on the screen. I did not look poised and lost my place every time I scrolled.
What I wouldn't have given for a simple, archaic floppy drive...or even a slow, snail's pace serial card to null the file over to an nt box.
Floppies are good for one thing: last resort. They're airbags on the info highway.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I use my 3.5 floppy drive to backup ongoing text documents that are in the process of re-writes and editing. That way if the HD dies I will not have lost hundreds of hours of work.
I recently noticed that while linking up a new XP machine with my Win2k laptop via a crossover cable, that the XP home networking wizard 'required' the user to make a setup floppy that needed to be installed on all non-XP machines on the home LAN (not sure why).
My laptop doesn't have a floppy, but I was able to just fiddle with TCP/IP settings. Somehow I doubt that your average end user would be able to manage that though.
ummm this guy's post is NOT off topic! you asked if anyone still uses their floppy and he said HELL YEAH! I do too, by the way, it is still a good way to transfer very small files from one computer to another (because not ALL computers
have CD burners yet.)
Paul
Does nobody here run correctly setup intrusion detection anymore??
Ok, so go check out the program Tripwire, or any other app like it.
It makes multiple types of hashes for system files and directories (you tell it what in a config) and it saves these in a database.
This database should be saved on a floppy. Then you lock the floppy with the little tab and put it back in.
tripwire runs every 12 hours from cron and compares the database on the floppy with the realsystem.
if something pops up that you didnt change, you got hacked.
If its something you changed yourself, unlock the floppy disk with the little tab, put it back, update those files hashes and whatnot, then when its done saving, lock the floppy again.
If you DO get broken into, it is not possible to sneek it past you by installing a rootkit and simply updating tripwires database themselfs. They cant, without physical access to that floppy.
You could use NFS on one central fileserver, if you were 100% positive that machine would never be broken into. But can you be 100% sure?
Floppy drives are great for this. Disks are cheap if not free, drives are standard, and they are perfect hardware lockable media to protect the computer from itself.
On older versions of the security software "tripwire" the security database had to be on a
read-only floppy so that skript-kiddies who rootkitted the sever couldn't rewrite the file hashes.
The new versions use secret-key crypto, but we still have a few of these older installs in our
server room.
I used to have a 3.5" floppy, then I got a girlfriend. Now I have an 80 gig hard drive.
Nah, it was too soon when Steve did it at NeXT with the NeXT cube.
As for misreprenting the issue. This is 1998 we're talking about. CD-R maybe, CD-RW? Not on many of the PCs I saw. Hell, even today, what % is CD-RW?
That said, Apple were late to the party shipping CDRW in a machine, something Steve said on stage. You can pull him on all sorts of bullshit, but that's not one of them.
Arguably they were busy being early(ish) to the party with DVD as standard. Choice would have been nice though...
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Students often use floppies for easy transport (your average student doesn't understand FTP; hey, your average student can't even find his/her bunghole with both hands).
In programming classes, for example, profs typically require a hard-copy and a soft-copy of code, and e-mailing the soft-copy is not always convenient for the teaching assistants/markers. Especially when some dumbass students include the source in the body of the e-mail instead of as an attachment.
Read only access means that noone can swap your private key for another private key, or delete your keys, or
Dude, your secret is out! Now that They know about the switch, your secrets are no longer safe.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
AHumbleOpinion is insightful, not lordpixels stupid rant.
... a universally accepted, cross-platform, dirt-cheap, pocket-sized, rewritable storage medium? Beats me.
This should have been placed in the AskSlashdot section....
Although this is something that has been going on for a while (I think it was Gateway or IBM who first decided to offer a floppy less system) I have been without mine for about 4 years now and I have had to use a "temp" one for flashing my BIOS (no longer needed thank you Gigabyte) I haven't missed it yet. Floppy was a horrible media, which I was convinced that if you dropped a diskette I am sure that bits fell off.
Begone floppy and take the parallel port with you.
Amen..
my machine when it broke. ;D
Never replaced it though... Never needed it anyway...
\m/
I just used a bootable floppy to run FDISK and recover when the OS I just installed on my newe drive forgot to set an active bit. Without floppies, I would have been struggling to make a bootable CDROM - from my backup machine that has a floppy drive but no burner.
How do you expect me to make Linux install boot disks for my old non-CD-bootable computer...and no, there isn't a BIOS update, its just too old! Floppies are so cheap there is no reason not to have one as a just-in-case safety valve if you can't boot any other way. There are also several models of digital cameras that write directly to floppies...though I guess those would go out as well if floppies did.
You report, Slashdot decides
Prevueing you're poast ownly hellps iff ewe no how two spel inn teh furst plase
great story. those were the days.
I have a few alternate kernel images on 3.5" disks to boot from. Also I use 3.5" disks in my SNES copier to back up ROMs. But that's about it.
or some other higher-capacity drive.
How would you load an OS on a blank drive if system does not boot from CD? Not everyone has a second system to slave the drive into to copy the data. Furthermore, wouldn't that render thousands of "restore" disks useless that ship with new systems? Most operating systems give you the option of a recovery disk in the event of system failure, what would be the replacement? I don't think the lowly floppy is the culprit for PC makers losing money!
And the disk manufacturer would warn us not to do this, because it would mean the 'dust and dirt' on the disk sleeve would go back onto the disk, as the disk spun in the opposite direction. Of course, the useful life of the technology wasn't long enough to prove this 'dust and dirt' problem. /Dave
FPGA, Wireless, ASIC, Verilog, VHDL, HW, 10yr exp, Team Lead, Ottawa (More? Email above. slashdotusername=dgmartin98 )
Dang it all!
All the +5 comments mention crap like "Boot Disk" and "Bios Flashing". Well folks, if you need it for your old system, that's the way it is. Nobody is forcing you to *remove* *your* floppy drive.
In new systems, EVERYTHING, and I mean everything that can be done on a floppy can be done with a CDRW drive. You can create a bootable CD for when your hard drives can't boot or when your BIOS needs flashing. Mt. Rainer support also proposes to make using your CDRW like using a zip disk.
The disk is inside the plastic case... and it is floppy.
Floppy and CD-R media are both dirt cheap, but floppies are less hassle to write to. And 1.44MB is plenty of capacity for a wide class of data, like documents up to several hundred pages.
Other media like Zip, flash chips, etc. are so much more expensive than floppy or CD-R that they're unsuitable for most situations where you give someone the disc and don't expect to get it back. Floppies are the computer equivalent of blank typewriter paper. They're not up to every job, but when you can use them, they're hard to beat.
since I don't have the blanking plate for the mounting slot, it's nicer with it in. I use the one in my laptop for making net boot disks though.
1. It makes you look so knowledgeable to end-lusers when you miraculously get their system to boot by ejecting the non-system boot floppy that was left in their drive.
2. When you want to boot a mini-Linux kernel on your Windoze system to see what a real operating systems can do
3. How in the world would I restore my multiple zip disk backup that I did in the 80's when it was all the rage?
4. When you want to upgrade your systems BIOS and it requires a Floppy to do it.
5. What in the world would I do with the +1200 AOL floppy disks that I have collected?
6. Making duplicate boot floppy for my dufus co-worker who, if I gave him my original, I would never see it again?
7. Microsoft's certificate authority which tells you to use a Floppy disk to store the key on? (now that is just whack!)
8. You take away the ability to recover your forgotten admin password easily!
9. When you want to send a pron image to your buddy and don't want that snoopy sysadmin telling the boss.
10. When you HDD goes kablouie you can still recover with a boot floppy and FDISK
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Better yet does anyone still use Linux?
Oh. We're talking about disk drives? Uh, never mind.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I write my Quickn data out to a pair of floppies (duplicatied backup) at the end of each session. CD-RW would suck at that; the desired lifetime of the backup is only until I do the next backup, while CD-RW is forever.
Is "no" referring to you giving up on thinking?
I use them, but I'd rather use metric.
The 3.5's actually had a puncher too, but it was to make them high densities, back when a 3.5 high density was up to 4 bucks apiece.
~S
I get home, pop the CDR into my machine and it's blank... turns out she had her burning software set so only her computer could decipher the disk.
Right; there are several standards for CD-RWs. About all I've ever seen used for floppies (outside a Mac) was FAT compatible (includes VFAT) file systems. (Tom's root-boot disk is an exception, but it's not for file transfer.)
Are these people forgetting that there are quite a few companies out there that still use DOS bootdisks to boot to their NT/Novell/Lanman/BV networks. I've been creating network bootdisks for approximately six years now, and have yet to find a viable replacement for the floppy drive.
:-).
The current way we have been creating these multi-nic bootdisks would not allow us to create a bootable CD-ROM, being as they actually write to the floppy. From what I can remember about CD-ROMs, is that a standard CD-ROM is incapable of writing to a blank or partially written too CD...
It would be nice to see some thought go into this, before they decide to get rid of the almighty 3.5" floppy drive.
C'mon, you are removing the worlds first network adapter (before you realized there was such a thing as a network...) When a Concentrator was the guy watching for the light to blink out the last time so he can move the floppy to the next system quicker... ahh...
-Kelt
My intelligence insults itself.
In the computer lab at my high school the only way to save files you're working on is via a floppy drive. I would like to see floppies replaced with compact flash cards that connect to a computer via a front USB port. It would be more conveniant, durable, and allow for larger files. I'm tired of having my floppies split into peices.
>Hell, even today, what % is CD-RW?
I meant to say, what % of disks burned are CDRW. Obv. most drives sold can burn them now.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Punch-cards. Lots of punch-cards.
Michael Loves Me!
I never use floppy disks anymore, if I need to fix my linux machine, I just use my bootable cd
However, I find it scary the number of college girls (well, not just girls but mostly) who rely solely on a floppy disk to hold important work. When I used to work in the labs (Purdue) I would hear from some girl who had a damaged floppy that held a research paper or whatever. "But I worked for weeks on that paper, what do you mean it is gone?" Point is: the floppy is still very much alive, just probably less so by those who are computer savvy.
-Brett
This is an effort to make CD's usable as an 'optical floppy'. You need new drives to write them, but only new drivers to read them. Here's just one FAQ that fell out of Google.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The smart thing to do today is to just spend $35 for an external USB floppy, then just plug it in when you need it. You can move it around amongst a bunch of computers in a few seconds and you can feel proud that you bought the last floppy drive you'll ever need.
I'm all for this. PERSONALLY I don't use a floppy since my OS's cd's are bootable and I can get to a "dos" prompt if needed from there - HOWEVER I do see lots of people (mostly college kids) who come into Kinkos with there report done in word and want to print it out - and they bring in a FLOPPY - the smart ones bring in zip disks or jaz cartridges (I would include cd - but they ALWAYS need to make changes and save the file again) but for the ones who don't know anything about a computer other than that they needed to use one in order to pass there class there using floppies - and yes MOST slashdotters will no doubt say good riddance to the floppy I don't need it in my l33t h4x0r self compiled kernal linux box with my self-rolled dsl - but for the MAJORITY of people in THE REAL WORLD who don't care about the latest advances in the mapping of the human DNA structure or that macs come in prettier collors than most pc's - they still use floppies.
Ave Molech Setting
I would dearly love to see mini disks used to replace floppy's. I think you get around 320 mbs of data on one m/d, and you can rewrite to them thousands of times with no wear. There quick, and it would be so easy to do, plus there small and convienient. Is there anything to stop M/ds being used? If a proper drive was produced?
A 12 inch hard drive? There were "disk packs" that were that size, or thereabouts, for minicomputers. But actually, I think those were flexible media as well.
- Have a picture
I am happy to say I use 3.5" floppies almost every day. I have floppy, Zip, CD-R, CD-RW, and broadband.
Why? When you are saving/moving files that are under 1.4 meg there is nothing better. Zip disks are way too expensive (approx $10 USD each) and not every machine has them, same with CD-RWs. CD-R's are cheap and most machines have CD-ROM readers, but not everyone has a CD-R writer, and wasting over 650Meg of space is just so wrong.
When we have some other media/format that;
a) Costs less than $0.25 USD per media UNIT
b) Can be found in practically every computer on the planet. (even iMacs have USB floppies)
Then you might have something. Until then, I'll keep my floppies.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
There are many linux floppy only distros, or CD-Rom with floppy storage distros, that are VERY useful.
Linux Embedded Application Firewall (LEAF), which evolved from Linux Router Project (LRP) are floppy based firewalls. No hard-disk, no monitor, no keyboard, 2 Nics, 16Mb ram, and doorstop, ummm... actually I meant a 486, or even a 386. Some LEAF firewalls use a CD-Roms, but need the floppy for settings storage, or kernal bootstraping to run the CD drive on old hardware.
Knoppix is a full desktop linux distro, XMMS, OpenOffice and so much more. Knoppix has a powerful auto-configuration script that recognizes correctly many many sound, video and nic card correctly. But Knoppix sometimes needs configurations for difficult hardware, which are stored on a floppy.
-Nathaniel
Mac Refugee, Paper MCSE, Linux Wannabe
...I'll keep my floppy drive.
I use it all the time.
This is a ridiculous move by PC manufacturers.
Ask the users, and over 50% will say keep the floppy, their just being complacent for the sake of it.
Boycott all PC manufacturers, don't buy any PC's!
Why, no, not since I started reading Slashdot, anyway. ;-)
Hell, even today, what % is CD-RW?
UMM TRY 100%
Maybe a 3" CD would feel better, but anyhow, there's no software way to override a CD in a CD-ROM drive. You could pop it into your Mt. Rainier CD-R or CD-RW when you need to write.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I agree... although I have a 64MB and that's enough to backup source, take it home, and sync it up with my laptop... 2 ounces is still a lot lighter than 6 pounds. And yes, they are still too expensive
I think everyone's beaten this one to death... Floppies are the universal storage. Even die-hard network fans will agree that it's the most convenient way to flash a bios, netboot a machine without a bootrom or a bootp server, and/or fetch network card drivers.
I did that once to my ol' Amiga 2000, but by accident, a rather stupid thing to do, I'll admit. But, the damn thing still works to this day, and that happended almost 7 years ago!
What about the little people without a network, how do they boot, CDROM is not 100% always the best way or always possible.
The manufacturers "Dell, IBM, Gateway etc", are only interested in the big companies who buy by the thousand who have huge networks.
this post is a KARMA WHORE! MOD IT down IMMEDIATELY, thank you
I use my floppy drive everyday at work and at home. I have tons of little scripts (that I'm always tweaking) which rarely top 20k. I refuse to burn a whole freakin CD just to store less than a meg or two of data.
I'm freelance too so I'm constantly having to copy these scripts over to new systems at the latest workplace. You can't always count on being able to find a zip drive.
I guess I could put them on my webserver but you can't always count on having a Net connection either.
I have two little black floppies that I've carried around for almost a year and have served me quite well.
-James
"Stop your whining and bleed like a man"
I'm a system builder and a recent high school graduate and I'd have to say the biggest culprit stopping us from ditching the floppy disk altogether is schools first, and businesses who aren't "with-it" second. I got rid of the floppy drive in my system about 3 years ago but had to put it back in for "higher level" Computer Science IB courses (which are a total waste of time BTW) and even now that I'm going to the University of Calgary, the same place our beloved creator of Java graduated from, my courses need me to move my files via floppy disk.
Every single system I've built in the last 6 months, my customers needed floppy disks for school or for non-computer-oriented businesses. The problem is all because everyone relies on floppy disks, either to move files, or for booting off of.
We need better flash adaptors!! The only flash card adaptors I've seen in person are for Sony Memorysticks and require watch batteries. I think all the legacy-floppy problems would be solved if someone were to produce a universal flash adaptor that worked in a floppy drive, and accepted all of the common flash media types: memory stick, compact flash, smart media, MMC, and secure digital. Best yet, it would use a small generator driven by the floppy drive's motor instead of a watch battery. Eventually, certain flash memory types would be phased out, and all hardware would be oriented to accept a standard type of flash memory. Flash readers should be made available that plug directly into the ide-floppy cable. The closest I've seen to this is a internal universal USB flash reader, which doesn't solve the legacy issues because so many existing motherboard can't boot from a USB device.
Please excuse my lack of organization in the above post; I'm ferret-sitting right now and no matter what I do I can't seem to stop the little bugger from taking a crap on the carpet or digging on the carpet.
I have been building my PCs for the past seven years and for at least the last two I have not bothered to put in a floppy drive. The controller is disabled in the BIOS and I have not looked back.
I have used the Iomega Zip drive for a little while. But even 100 (or really 95MB) is too small. For temporary storage of small files, I am currently using a USB compact flash adapter and a 256MB card. This is OK for MP3s, small AVIs or MPGs. I will jump to a 512MB or 1GB card when the cost goes down some.
Of course, the best removable media is the CD-RW drive. For cost and ease of use it can not be beat. It does have a few drawbacks, however. Consider that the CD-RW disks are somewhat fragile and writing to a disk is at times CPU-intensive. But I feel that this is a minor issue.
My only irritation is when a hardware manufacturer encloses a floppy with the drivers. Aren't CDs cheaper to manufacture and produce? Of course I can simply go online to get the needed software, that usually solves the problem. Downloading drivers prior to putting in the new device is another good idea.
In summary, the floppy drive an outdated, undersized (1.44MB???) throw-back that should be eliminated from the modern PC.
my pc doesnt have a floppy drive - i wanted it that way. Yet i always seem to end up putting a floppy drive on it to install a new image of mandrake. I dont have a CD burner. What about using lilo or grub to boot off a floppy image that is on the hard drive? is that possible?
Every damn LAN card I've ever bought (and there have been many) has come with the drivers on floppy. The one time I can't download the drivers off the net to get my machine back up and running is the time the stupid drivers come on floppy.
For the love of god, why do the stupid manufacturers put lan drivers on floppy instead of CDrom??? It's 2002, if someone doesn't have access to a CDrom, yet does have a floppy in the machine, then they are rather sad.
I just removed my floppy drive a few weeks ago. I was gettin real annoyed, because everytime i accidentally clicked on my floppy drive, it would spend a whole minute chuggin, till it realised there was no floppy in it. Then, suddenly, it hit me; i hadnt actually used the damn thing for months. I had to make a Boot-CD first (just in case). But now everythings a lot better without my Floppy drive, althought the front of my comp does look a bit wierd...
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
Where I work, we use a lot of data files on hundreds of rack-mounted systems. Sometimes, one of the LAN cards in a system goes wonky, and the floppy is the only way to:
.gz file, but then *nix cannot gunzip it... but only once in a while, so it's a gamble).
- Get data off the machine (if less than 1.4MB)
- Load a DiskImage LAN boot (if it's a LAN software/driver issue) to re-image the system
Bootable CDs would be nice, but floppies are quicker, and most of our machines cannot contain CDs for space considerations. It's all LAN/Floppy. Of course, we have a rather unique situation.
At home, I don't use floppies that much anymore, and my ZIP use has also deteriorated once I got a fast CDRW. But I only use CDs for things I want to last a little longer. I have the same 5 zip disks I got with a multipack when I bought my external drive several years ago, and swap them for multiple systems at home and work. ZIP and floppies are copy and zoooom... CDs take a little longer, and you get a lot of duds over time. Once in a while, you get a file you can't burn for some reason, like a file with a long filename, or has some formatting issues (my CDRW at work can't copy some non-Windows files, it will copy a
So until CDs become fast pop,copy, and go... I will still rely on floppies and ZIPs.
99.9% of the time, no...but there are certain exceptions (like Symantec Ghost) that still make me use the @#$#@@ thing.....
I used my floppy drive twenty seconds ago to: Reboot a failed server, reboot a failed laptop, oh, and its the only storage space on my linux router.
I keep the driver for my raid card on floppy so when I can't boot for some reason (like LILO crapping out), I boot Linux from CD, switch to a console, load the driver module, and go back to the rescue boot on the CD.
I needed this to install an XP (game/wife) partition. Damn XP installer kept screwing up my boot block such that windows itself could not finish install after first reboot. Had to use LILO to fix boot block to enable XP install and had to use RAID driver on floppy to get into linux without the driver in the INITRD.
Mike
I actually used to have a few. The one's I had didn't work, but that didn't stop me from taking them apart. They contained a large I'm guessing 12" metal disk that held if I remember right about 3MB of data and they were highly susceptible to being bumped if they were actually operating.
~S
The last time I updated a driver on a Compaq, I used the floppy. I am not sure if this is still standard at Compaq, but a few months ago the updated drivers would only copy onto floppies, and then could be installed from the floppy.
:q!
Hmm I think I forgot the /innuendo tag.
Sure... get rid of the floppy. Next thing you know they'll want to take away my EMS memory expansion card.
I'm crazy for booting to a raid device, but hell, its built into my mother board.
There's absolutely no way to reinstall the OS without a floppy drive for the RAID drivers.
i still find floppies valuable in moving files from my laptop to my office pc and back. it's my personal laptop and, frankly, i don't want it attached to the network here. this place is a virus waiting to happen.
when they pry it from my cold dead fingers! 1.4M forever!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
- El riesgo siempre vive - Private J. Vasquez
i know i'm just a weirdo who isn't willing/capable of buying up the latest hardware, but i use 3.5" floppies daily. i'm using tomsrtbt now to throw linux on a 486 laptop. before you moan "get a real laptop or a Zaurus or something!", re-read my first paragraph. it'd be useful for email and remote *anything* with the purchase of a used modem card - and i got it for free!! due to an unusual situation, the lesser of two computers in my home uses the internet and i can't share it. (physical limitations) - so i carry source tarballs to my real machine by floppy, and 'dd' them to size when necessary. these are two examples in my personal life, and i'm sure one can recount more. CDs, firewire, WiFi, etc. are all wonderful and nice, but the older hardware is still useful and capable. if producers want to leave the drive out, i don't care - but do not take away the floppy controller!
Floppys are a nice medium to put FixKlez on... At my job I use that program all the time!
Yes. My wife's laptop only has CDRom. My work laptop only has CDRom. My main computer has CDRW. My only real file exchange between computers is floppy or e-mail. It seems silly to burn a 300K file on a CDR to use on a computer w/o CDR (the laptops). How do I get my work back to other computers? Buying CDRW for either laptop not really an option. The keychain USB storage could be cool, I suppose. Or use my digital camera and its USB connection.
Actually, when the final Debian Woody came out I've started using floppies for installation a lot more than before. It's just simple and functional and I always have spare floppy drives. Also, since ext3+md-raid-1 has become more stable, I find myself having more and more systems with two cheap ide drives as RAID-1, booting from a floppy.
I had a time when the floppies were almost never used but nowadays, I'm actually using floppies more every month. Just a matter of what stuff you have around - functional cd-rom-drives seem to have 'better use', but floppy drives I never run out of. So I use them.
Booting is probably the biggest issue.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I don't know about you guys, but if I were to format c:\...I would need to load the cd rom drivers via floppy in order to install an OS from cd rom. no floppy == no OS.
I have an old 486 that I've stripped down to the absolute bare bones. All it is is a floppy drive, motherboard, and powersupply, plus nics and a video card. For software, I run LRP on a... you guessed it... floppy! Easy to manipulate, you can write-protect the disk, it's quieter... overall a nice solution.
Floppies still have a heavy educational use... Not enough students have a computer at home and most universities/colleges don't offer a student share (even if they did I wouldn't trust my term pappers to it). Yeah, 1.44MB isn't much, but even a 100 page research paper doesn't take up that much space.
I love those mini 1 disk OS's!
r g/projects/loaf// www.menuetos.org/
Long live the 3.5!
http://www.qnx.com/demodisk/
http://www.ecks.o
http://www.freesco.org/
http:/
Yes, there are valid reasons for continuing to use a floppy as many here have pointed out. But it seems equally clear (from my own experience and anecdotal evidence on this thread and elsewhere) that those uses are few and far between. So why _not_ get rid of the floppy as a default option and let those who still need them pay the extra $10 to get one? Why persist offering it as a standard when usage of a floppy is clearly non-standard?
Since my hard drive is larger than my bios supports, I have to have EZ Drive installed. The only way I've found to boot into Mandrake is using a boot disk.
I'm suprised with all the advancements in technology, we don't have 1 gigabyte floppy disk by now--something that is the same size as a floppy and a drive that reads both the regular and larger sizes. I know sony tried something like that but it just wasn't big enought (like 100 something meg) and couldn't compete with the zip disk.
I use 8-inch hard-sectored diskettes to back up my 8-inch soft-sectored diskettes. 12 index holes! The IBM drive weighs about 25 pounds.
BTW, you need to see an 8 incher to know why they were called floppy.
I came across a box of 8-inchers while moving 6 years ago. Boy, do they look enormous these days! The SSSD versions held a whopping 160 KB IIRC. I could probably still do a head alignment on one of the drives (besides Jerry Pournelle and me, who else remembers the "cats-eyes" pattern?).
has anyone considered flash memory? compact flash cards or pcmcia 1 or 2 cards would be nice, they last forever, dont corrupt and arent nearly as sensitive to heat or shock.
Backup for critical files, esp. from laptops. If you're using a borrowed laptop, perhaps you don't care about anything except 1-3 documents - a floppy backs them up very nicely.
Are you sure? Personally I wouldn't trust floppy for anything.
The only reason that I still need them is bootdisks, and when I need one, it's really hard to get one to work right - I copy the file to a new floppy, and guess what? I cannot read it one minute after I copied it, not talking about rewriting this floppy..
I usually find it much easier to burn the image to a CD.
You are correct, I should have written CD-R not CD-RW.
the floppy is invaluable for anyone in college, especially in dorms. when you write a paper on word, for example, you need to (typically) either go to another room, or the library to edit and or print. it's impractical to burn it to a cd and have to reburn all following saves or what have you. emailing is always an option, but it has its flaws. if zip disks weren't the laserdisc of the late 90's, they could be an option too. the floppy is for sure necessary to these people, at the very least, and at my last count there were a lot of computer sales to college students.
dude, you're getting a floppy. (not funny)
A bios level Floppy <-> Compact Flash translator.
Transparent to the OS... ?
Possible?
If there was a plug-in replacement for floppy drives, such as a 1" floppy micro drive that plugged into a floppy cable this would not be a bad thing.
Everyone seems to have moved to ide.
I do not have a floppy drive in my computer and I miss it. I need to flash my bios and boot with every so often.
Hint - [to transfer Mac dual-fork files] use .bin or .hqx.
So how do you copy the bin or hqx decoder? It too, like all Classic Mac apps, is a dual fork file. And how do you get an FTP client?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If they get rid the the floppy drive, then what will the default file size be for the .rar file inside the .jar file inside the .ace file inside the .zip file? How will we know if it isn't corrupt? That 1.44 size sure is fun when you are downloading the latest game.
Who is John Galt?
Since I don't seem to be able to boot off my DVD drive, I still use the floppy for installing OSes. Both Win2K and Mandrake required a floppy drive last time I installed them.
It's a good "sneakernet" option, as many times my laptop isn't hooked up to a network. Useless for MP3 files and PowerPoint, as the article points out, but still useful for Word files. And Bluetooth and IrDA are still too unreliable and insecure.
As a matter of fact, I have a single floppy drive amongst my PCs and it uses the USB port. For the past few years all the motherboards I was buying had "Boot from USB Floppy" or some variant on that option. It finally dawned on me that if I shell out for ONE of those I could stop putting dedicated floppies in for the off occasion that I needed to boot from floppy. It's also worked for sneaker netting files to machines that aren't ready to talk to my network yet.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Let's say you need to transfer a driver....they always fit on a floppy.
Let's also say that the machine you're putting the driver does not have a internet connection.....and you have to find it on the web w/another machine...
Transfering it to a floppy is a great way to do this...
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
My experience on this is mixed. On the one hand, I have an Adtronics case with an ECS mlb. The channel for the floppy is fairly low on the mlb and the fdd bay is at the very top of the case. I installed the fdd, but my cable was way too short to reach. I just left in unplugged. My only complaint so far is that my bios insists on spending a few extra seconds searching for a boot record from floppy on those rare occasions I have to boot the machine.
On the other hand, I know a fellow who contracts to various local companies. He had a customer who needed a DDR setup, but had little in the way of spare hardware. They did have a spare 486 that was, mainly, functional. Minus an hdd. My friend put together a floppy image of a Coyote Linux install and copied it to a disk. Now the customer has a low cost DDR that works fine. The machine has virtually no downtime, which means few bootups - so the chance of the disk failing are slim. Even if it does, the image is cached on a local server - just dd it to another disk and pop in the disk. Presto! Instant DDR. Very cool.
I have a friend who was running a Win2K machine with no floppy drive and asked me to help him upgrade to XP. I agreed and proceeded to format his system drive (I prefer a new clean install over upgrades it's easier). So we go and get to installing XP and install various drivers and stuff which were downloaded beforehand and burned to a single CD.
In the end it turns out that I forgot one file that was a few hundred KB. Normally I'd just drop the file onto a floppy disk and be done, but he has no floppy drive and I'll be damned if I'm wasting a fill 700MB CD for a 1MB file.
In the end I had to hunt down my network equipment (mine was all packed away because I'm home for the summer). Sure would have been more convenient if he had a floppy drive.
I salvage old PCs, just stick a floppy in them and they can control your homebrew devices... It's a shame to see them go out, as I would hate to burn a CD for every change I made to the software. I figure the next good floppy substitute will be a small 8 GB drive.. perhaps flash.
Rarely, but I still put one in the home machine I recently built. It might have something to do with the fact my notebook only has a floppy drive for removable media. I need to be able to write floppies, if for no other reason than to be able to install new Linux distros on that notebook.
(I know, I can do it 100% over the net--unless I make a mistake.)
-kb, the Kent who really should update his notebook about now.
Instead of having media readers on IDE or USB, which requires a valuable channel, or for most people like me with many pheriphials, a USB hub, put a floppy-controler multimedia reader in it's place. Capable of at the least reading SmartMedia and CF.
SM and CF cards are available in decent sizes at reasonable prices--the only comprable devices presently are USB Flash drives, which are rediculously expensive for their capicity, probably becaue they need the USB interface AND memory in such a small package.
I believe that there was/is a company that made something to the tune of a "FlashPath" adapter. You put a SmartMedia card in, and put the adapter in your floppy drive...well if the floppy drive is able to read it with the addition of a form factor changing device, how hard would it be to make it read SM and CF natively?
If one of these devices existed in semi-uniquity, I would purchase a 512MB CF card for $300 or so, or a smaller one for about half that amount, as opposed to about $500 for a half-gig USB drive, and $1k for a 1-gig one.
see dpreview
While it is popular to boot from CDROM, what about out of the box use as a CD-R. It seems to me that it would not be that hard with any odd instructions loaded, but I guess that is the problem. A floppy is a floppy is a floppy. Oh but if we could get the same standardization of the floppy as with larger (and faster) devices.
Floppies are excellent for:
:oP)
school: they fit in your bag or pocket
emergency: you can boot a computer with it and use a uLinux distro to recover files from almost every filesystem
school: you can take documents with you, since email doesn't always work the way it should
amiga: can't think of any other way to play my old games... not every game is hd installable
yamaha: my yamaha sequencer and sampler use floppies for the midi and sample files... a scsi harddrive is handy, but the interface is way TOO expensive!
summer: handy for your cola
etc.
trust me, i could name more reasons...
F/OSS & IT Consultant
I've got a bunch of old Sun systems that I boot off of floppies to do net installs of NetBSD and such. All new x86 systems I bring in don't have CD's either because I can boot off of the FreeBSD floppy and install from a network server.
When there is a good replacement I could live with out it, and I do live with out it on my desktop systems. But I need them on all of my servers.
Superdisk
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
that is about the only thing I can think of I've used it for. I also have Ls-120 drives that I like really well now that they are bootable.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I can imagine the anthropologists and computer historians reading with great interest a thread like this in say, 100 or 200 years, hell even 5000 years if humans can make it that far.
I've hated iomega for a while. The superdisk WAS the future but they marketed their zip drives in a way that put the superdisk out of the OEMs systems. The latest incarnation of the super disk can do a 240mb superfloppy and a 32mb write once floppy. How cool is that? Turn an ordinary floppy into a 32mb disk!
Its rare that i use a floppy. Its usualy a last resort boot option when working on an older computer that wouldnt handle windows 2000 so i use one to get the cd-rom drivers to load then im pretty much done with it.
and now and then instructors come into my work with floppys for students to take class files home.
I have a 200gig linux fileserver that has never had a floppy hooked up. My desktops floppy is used once maybe twice a year. My laptop well i took the foppy off and put the weight saver in its place.
Floppies are cheap
True, but not cheap enough. Not by a longshot.
You can get a pack of 10 floppies for about $2. Or even say 20 for $2.
At 1.44 MB each, that's 28.8 Megs, $1 buys you 14.4 Megs.
I just saw a 50 pack of CD-R's at walmart for a little less than $18.
At 700 MB per disk, that's 35,000 Megs, and a dollar buys you 1.944 GIGS.
Now, even if you're talking CD-RW's so you have the same capabilities, you can still get 10 CD-RW's for $10.
At 700 MB, that's 7,000 MB, and $1 buys you 700 Megs.
Or how about Hard Drives? You can reliably find an 80 GB hard drive for $130. At 80,000 Megs, a dollar buys you 615 MB.
Which is cheaper?
~Will
sig?
Recently I visited a university where they gave me guest access to their computer lab. Since I was not allowed to connect my laptop to their network, the only way I could save important work to my laptop was, you guessed it, via floppy. Since it's abundantly clear that universities hesitate to install CD-R drives on public computers so the kids won't burn ILLEGAL COPIES of music and software, a floppy is the sure way to go.
Of course, I could've emailed the files, gone back to my hotel room, signed up for a free AOL account, and then downloaded the files to my laptop over a ridiculously slow connection, but this is not convenient.
I'm amazed that everyone seems to view floppies so favorably.
All these good things are true, but they are incredibly unreliable. I make a boot disk on a brand new floppy, and in two weeks, WITHOUT USE, it goes flakey. THey're not reliable enough for encryption keys despite their convenience.
I don't remember them being quite so bad in the old days. Some have said there were higher manufacturing standards. Someone else suggested that it's because we use them infrequently that they are less reliable, because crud accumulates in the drive.
Either way I have been desperately trying to banish them from my home and my work, keeping only systems that boot from CD, and even getting bootable NICs for emergencies. But, so far, they are still necessary evil.
It drives me nuts.
Take a look at this AMAZING project:
http://www.ohmslaw.com/robot.htm
credit goes to:
http://www.epanorama.net/links/robotics.html
I keep my gpg private key on a floppy. My ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg file is a symlink to /mnt/floppy/secring.gpg. When I need to sign or decrypt something I push the floppy in, mount it, use the key, unmount, and eject.
My box has been hacked a few times, but I like knowing for certain that the key wasn't taken.
i still like my floppy, i keep a extra disk partition with Linux installed and mostly unused untill i need to fix something in my regular Linux install that is used 99.9% of the time, so far i havent had to use it for fixing anything, but it is like insurance, hope i don;t need it but if i heed to boot it i do it with a boot floppy...
Since the drivers for Micorsoft's shiny, new OS don't include IDE drivers for the Abit AT7 Motherboard on the CD, you need to install them from a floppy disk before installation.
We use them to hold NIC boot ROM's. Sure, you can buy NIC with the boot ROM on it, but that's not common. Also, you could use one CD-ROM for every machine but that's kinda expensive if you have 10k machines..
It was really pretty convenient, in that you could buy more "film" almost anywhere.
Even at the highest resolution (1024x768) I could get about 8 shots per "roll".
To view, stick the "film" in any floppy drive, and access via a web browser...
Now I've gone off in the opposite direction entirely: a Canon Pro 90IS that has a 340mb IBM Microdrive HDD in it..
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
It took me almost an hour to remove the 3.5" disk he had jammed upside down inside the mechanism My granddaughter did the same thing to mine about two years ago. the drive had a plastic latch that broke to discriminate between a floppy inserted right side up and up side down. because the latch was broken the drive would except a floppy upside down if the sliding cover was removed and would jam if the cover was still there. I found that if I re-formatted the floppies upside down they would read/write fine upside down but not right side up sort of security thru obscurity thing.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I just assume use a hotmail account over a floppy. If I want to print something out or transfer it to another computer I just mail it to myself, then open it up on the other end at hotmail. Faster, easier, and its hard to leave an email account at home or loose it, etc.
Where else will dust enter my case so easily?
Windows 2000 requires you to load SCSI drivers from a floppy during install! Makes it hard when the drivers come on a CD and you don't have a floppy. I had to take the disk to work any copy my drivers. How stupid is that ?
I got a SB Live Platinum with the 5.25 LiveDrive unit, which meant I had to get rid of my floppy drive (I have hard drives and one CD-ROM drive in the other bays.)
I haven't missed having a floppy drive at all.
...especially the ones that don't need drivers in WinXX (of course they don't need drivers in MacOSX).
Yeah, I've got four or five burners but I'm sure everybody has got that one Aunt who doesn't. When CD Burners are $2 on pricewatch and you can ALWAYS find quality CDr's for free we should get rid of the floppy in NEW systems. Whenever I used to take work home I'd always email a copy and back a copy up on floppy.... (everyone doesn't have Zip Disk either)!
I hadn't had to use a floppy disk in months... until I started working in a machine shop with a couple of computer controlled milling machines (in my case, it's the ProtoTRAK MX3). They all run their milling software on top of DOS, and the only ways to get your part's program onto the machine are by parallel port or floppy disk. Sometimes I fear that I'll need to mill a part whose program won't fit on a single disk, but fortunately, that hasn't happened yet :)
I have three PCs and when I want to swap a small file between them, I'll use a floppy disk. It's quick, easy, and dependable. Many times I have thought that I have lost files only to find them later on transfer floppies.
Since the whole purpose of computers is to provide a functional dependable tool with which to acomplish real productive work, I say keep the floppy drive in the PC forever. It's one more piece of technology that has proven its worth and can be counted on to work when everything else fails.
Last year, for both of my first year CS courses, all assignments had to be handed in on a 3.5" floppy. Kinda sucked when I had to sprint across campus to hand in an assignment that I put off until the last minute (ie: most of my assingments ;)
The prof I had second semester actually used linux, and when discussing it with him, he said he wished our computer labs were linux/unix/whatever based (as opposed to, ugh, NT). He said that'd make it easier for him to automate handing in assignments via email.
-kidlinux.
My Coyote Linux firewall runs entirely off of a 3.5" floppy...
My god, a Hal Hartley reference on Slashdot!
Will wonders never cease?
For one thing, 5" CDs are not very portable (you can't easily stick one in a coat pocket)...
Ok, so you say 3" disks...yes, they are portable, but they are not as compatable as the 5" CDs and they still have the same problems as CDs. Try bending a CD...it'll snap...If you bend a 3.5", the casing might snap, but the media inside should be fine...I have actually been able to restore someone's Floppy by fixing theirs with a blank...And we won't get into the durability of a 5" floppy...can you say unstoppable?
And then we talk about cost. CDs still cost ~$1/each for a decent brand (without discount)...Floppies on the other hand, can be bought for much less...100 floppies for $12.
But, then we come to quality, alot of Floppies (even expensive ones) seem to be degrading in quality...this is just an observation, it actually seems to be happening on every format really...
And then we come to the idea of Zip discs...not very many ppl use those now...mainly because the format was closed...costs were kept high, CD-RWs surpassed them in cost/MB and speed, and they weren't very compatible...What we really need is an open format that gives us the instant read/write access, durability, comaptability, and portablity of a 3.5" and the storage capacity and speed of a 3" CD...
Until schools, companies, gov't agencies, etc are willing to convert to another open format, it's just not gonna happen.
What about Imation's SuperDisk aka LS-120? Apparently it is an open format, as multiple manufacturers create the drives. It seems to be the best candidate to replace the floppy as it can read old 3.5" 1.44MB disks as well as their 120MB SuperDisks. I have never used one, but I would hope that the speed is much faster with their media.
The drives go for 30$ and the media 3/20$ (pricewatch).
My 3.5" floppy has been broken for about 2 years, and I haven't needed to fix it during that time...
Besides everyone could use a couple more inches, so I hang on to my 5.25"
I actually had need of a boot floppy set after my win2K box went belly up. I couldn't get it to boot from CD for some reason.
For whatever does replace the floppy the other question becomes, what file format will it use? I've seen some USB drives (pieces of crap or at least the one I bought) and they use FAT16! Certainly limits the media size. At least Floppies can be read on all computers without too much trouble. CD's come in a number of formats. I don't know off hand which format is compatible over all platforms (*nix, dos, windows, mac, osx, beos blah blah blah.)
It's self-sufficient (works even if the network is down), ridiculously inexpensive, and requires no special instruction other than File | Save As... or File | Open...
Plus the faculty member can take the exam disks home for grading.
although i dont have the problem, most people need some way to bring files to work on to their computer labs, school public use computers, and libraries, where many people use systems they dont own themselves.
I used them recently when a friend needed to print some pictures at kinkos... i knew a floppy would work at kinkos, and i didnt need to spend the time burning anything, nor did i need to ask for it back.
The same goes for many school files back in my college days.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Anyone who says they don't use or have a use for a FDD is either:
1) A stinky liar
2) Never had to fix/repair/install/configure hardware/software.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, comes close to the availability,convience,ease of use,intra-operability and versatility of a floppy drive.
Newer OS's are making it less necessary for a floppy but with the glut of legacy hardware and software still in use the viablity of the FDD is assured for many years to come.
Maybe its primary use has changed, maybe there are better ways for specific tasks to be accomplished, but nothing is even on the horizon to replace this absolutely vital piece of equipment.
blah
I need it when I do emergency repairs for a test windows 98 box. I also need it when I am boot a new installation of Redhat since Linux seems to have an issue with installing from non-0 scsi point.
I've come across occasions where my bleeding edge system, with its new chipsets and BIOS, can't even present a drive to winblows when I want to set up a dual-boot.
technology is moving so fast, the only media you can depend on is 3.5" floppies because nobody is mucking with it.
It's only a model.
It took me a year to realise the Sparc5 on my desk didn't have a floppy drive. More recently, I have been installing Debian on various Sun boxen using RARP. Certainly no more difficult than floppy and a lot more convenient. :o)
What the PC needs (more than a removal of floppy drives) is a sane boot system/standard that is reasonably open ended about how and from where the box boots.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
There is nothing to really replace the 3,5" disk on the market at the moment. Look around. Cds and Dvds are big, yes, but what if you need to just move 10 mb of data from A to B? 10 Mb are too much for email, but not worth the effort of burning a cd. ZipDisks, MD Data and stuff are good, but not widely distributed.. and therefore, everyone keeps disk drives, "to carry that text without having to burn a cd". the question is : which rewritable no-burning-needed media will replace the disk?
Karma
"Does anyone out there still use their floppy"
I hate floppies, but until vendors stop shipping software on floppies, I'll always have one. I just bought a brand-new Netgear ethernet card, and lo and behold, the driver came on a floppy. No CD. I would have returned it and bought another card, but (besides being a hassle) there was no guarantee that the next card I bought would have the driver on a CD. Vendors need to stop being idiots and shipping product on floppies, but for now the floppy drive is idiot vendor insurance.
Also, there is no ubiquitous sneakernet media yet other than floppies. CD-RW does not cut it. Too slow and klunky, and the drives are far bigger than floppies. You shouldn't have to have a CD burner in your system just so you can copy files between home and work. Zip drives are almost as lame as floppies, and are not very common. So they're out. There just ain't no substitute, and there probably won't be until some committee comes up with an open standard that is free of lameness and cost.
You don't need a floppy drive on every machine, though. I have only one between three machines, and that's fine. It's only an issue if I have to boot off floppy for that very, very rare circumstance where I have an OS install CD that's not bootable for some reason. In that case, I might have to temporarily relocate my floppy to the target machine. Otherwise, I just copy the files from the machine with the drive to the final destination.
Floppies are sublime for a few things. Yes they are too small for storing files (especially the ultra-bloat introduced by M$ office products). Whatever you say, they are cheap enough to be disposable. Here are some places that floppies are perfect:
1) diskless routers --- how much extra is that for a hardware write-protected HD?
2) flashing the bios of your boxen
and as others have mentioned
3) booting up to figure out why GRUB went grubby or LI didn't LO on nodes in a cluster -- if you have lot of headless notes floppy drives are much cheaper than CD drives.
Noway!
What if your going to share a file with a friend. With a floppies price you could just give him the disk. Are you going to give him a 8MB CF or USB key?
SuperDisk drives are 30$ and media is 3/20$ is 3.5" 1.44MB floppy compatible and their native media holds 120MB.
Sureley if the drive were EVER to catch on the media would get to the price of the current defacto floppy.
Due to HP's wonderful policy on not wanting you to be able to install or even reinstall an OS without the built in ( just a hidden FAT partition ) rescue option... the bios'es in some of the later model computer ( mine included ) do not let you boot off of CD-ROM, period, and the motherboard is non-standard, which means that it can't be flashed so taht you can boot off of a CD-ROM... I hope that HP fixes this in the future.
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Plus you can use SuperDisk media which holds 120MB!
Boot Disk... (Understand?)
This is a backwards place but I don't feel like driving in reverse.
Keep in mind that some of us still use a platform that runs DOS games quite well, and that some of us have been collecting games for the PC for over a decade.
I suspect I'll want/need a floppy drive for the next 10 years, at least on one of my boxes...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I've had a lot of problems with Zip disks (slow and very unreliable), and sometimes a 650 Mb CD is just a wee bit too big for a 10.3 k text file with my roleplaying characters stats. :P
When it comes to bringing my roleplaying characters around on a disk, the floppy drives easily beats the monster drives in speed and portability. I think I'll be holding on to my floppy drive for a good many years to come.
http://www.deadpete.tripod.com/
I don't care how WinXP boots. I care how my computer boot.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I don't have a floppy drive. Bring your data on CD, USB mass storage device or firewire drive. You can also send it to me as email. Otherwise don't bother. The most attractive replacement for floppy disks are usb "thumbdrives": a couple megabytes of flash memory with a usb interface chip combined in a very durable and small device without any moving parts. Faster than floppies, much more reliable, more space, bootable on modern mainboards and about as expensive as floppies if you don't cheat by leaving the floppy drive out of the equation.
And I do not miss it. Actually I rather love my all-in-one-CDRW-bootCD (with x-diffrent bootdisk options at my fingertips) I hacked-up for myself instead of those dreaded *damed* floppys that just gave me headaches :).
who *_REALY!_* needs a floppy these days? CDRWs are IMHO far more redundant, and can store a lot more.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
The drive is $30, and native 120MB media is 3/20$, not to mention you can still use your old 1.44MB disks.
i'm a programmer, but unfortunately part of my job also entails fixing broken machines for fellow employees.
true, my job would be easier if i could not boot troubled machines with a Windows rescue disk, Partition Magic, Norton Ghost, etc. i would love a format-and-reinstall-only policy, but its just not feasable in my opinion. the huge increase in bitching from users who've lost their data or personal settings alone would drive one to insanity.
if more rescue tools came on CD our many disks (which normally die after two uses anyway) could be replaced, but few do. at least not the ones we use. there are also lots of diagnostic and legacy tools that only work from DOS, such as hard-drive conditioners, expansion card diagnostic programs, etc.
home users probably don't need floppy drives. people with a decent operating system don't either. companies that have a really nice backup system probably don't either. but, the interface should definately remain for a while longer, just in case.
Until I figure out what's wrong with LILO and why it isn't showing up on boot, I'll continue using my floppy drive to boot to my Linux drive.
Compact flash is superior in all manners to the 3.5" floppy.
o More storage space.
o Smaller form factor.
o No mechanical moving parts.
o Hella cheap.
God I hope the days of fishing bent floppies out of drives with dental tools and a flashlight are over! CAN I GET A WITNESS ?!!?!
Have you EVER used your floppy? :-)
(and NO, by yourself in front of the computer doesn't count)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
... they should really lower the prices of zip drives/disks.
I thought they were called "flippies" 'cause you could throw them with less likelihood of damage.
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I just wish someone would have made a titanium cased floppy with magnetic shielding and something to stablize / protect the disk inside so that I could carry them around in my pocket without damaging them. I'll trade the IP on this idea for a mod++.
PS: Most of my Macs don't have floppy drives either, but they have a more elegant approach to booting off CDs.
I have a 200K file I wish to store on a physical media. Which is cheaper for me? The floppy or the CD?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The floppy is still a very essential part of computer science departments in colleges across the nation. If the department opts against online submitting of assignments it is forced to the floppy.
Most old school geeks were typing on greenscreens (Lear Siegler ADM-3A's, VT100's, Televideo what-nots) back when you were a kid (not a geek) fiddling around on that little Apple micro.
And people with real computers were using them with double sided drives, i.e. 5-1/4" and 8" floppies on CP-M machines.
Not true. Floppies are so unreliable, that you have a less than 50% chance of really being able to recover the data.
The CD, unless your data is worthless and you don't mind losing it.
I honestly don't understand why people want to kill floppies!
What would the benefit be over not having one compared with having one? Until they come up with something that almost all computers support, is small, portable, and just big enough to tranfer small files, I think they should keep it.
If you don't have a network, and no floppy, your screwed if you want to get a file to another computer, unless you burn it on a cd of course.
There have been many many many times when I have written a report at home, and taken it to school to continue working on it. The only alternative would be to email it to yourself (which some internet access places don't even allow) burn it on a cd (that would get old, and if you wanted to save it, and there wasn't a computer with a burner around, your real screwed), or put it on some server (which again can be a pain with places that censor what you can do (if they would only allow access to ftp.exe).
I constantly use my floppy, and so do many people I see. I use it to get my blank or broken hard drive up and running, and many many other uses. Sure, if your not writting or breaking hard drives you might not use it often, but its a REAL life saver if you need to get a fairly small (with todays standards) file from one computer to another.
I'm real currious of what other people use in place of a floppy. Mainly for school or buisiness documents that you want to get from home to school/work or the other way around.
I still use floppy disks occasionally - like once in a blue moon for a boot disk. However, after I discovered the fine art of making bootable CD's, it's really no longer something I need to do.
My main machine has the floppy still installed, but you have to pull the side off of the case to access it, and it has to be enabled in the BIOS. That's just because you never know.
My SQL server still has a floppy as well, but *only* because I don't have anything to plug into the hole it takes up now.
That's why I keep floppy drives. For one of these days.
Yes, dear, I know you told me to clean the attic. I'll get right to it (one of these days...)
A few months back my laptop bit the big one, and because I didn't have an easy way of getting the data off my system, I backed it up like once every 6 months (bad idea on my part). So what do I do? Simple, I pop the HD in an older machine using a cheap adapter, and boot off of a FLOPPY DISK LINUX DISTRO. I then proceed to accss the drive and copy the contents of my source code and documents to ANOTHER FLOPPY DISK. Thanks to the miracle of FLOPPY DISKS, I managed to save everything that needed saving, and have been able to (relatively painlessly) continue working on data that would have been lost forever were it not for our friend the FLOPPY DRIVE.
10$ extra for a floppy drive on a computer; it would be a bargain at twice the price!
Besides, chicks dig a guy who carries floppy disks with them at all times ("Hey geek boy, is that a floppy disk in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?").
If there is one essential drive I insist upon being in any computer that I buy, it's the floppy drive; true when the imac came ou, true when they stripped it off the G4, true now, and until they come up with something that is just as universal, cheap, portable, standard, and easy to use, true forever!
...to boot my RO linux firewall. Try getting that up and running in about 3 minutes on a machine that still smells like the bubblewrap you just finished popping with a cdrw (considering we're talking about any hardware from any vendor here...)
Well I don't need to physicaly 'touch' them everyday but.. My LRP (linux router project) boots of a readonly floppy.. my DMZ's tripwire database is on a readonly floppy, which is verified everynight.. i'm only concerned if the floppy media will die after too much usage..
I still have to use floppies to turn in programming assignments for class, plus I use them to transfer small items (text files, etc) back and forth to work. I don't use them all that much, but they're not that much of a hassle (unless one goes bad and I lose data)
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Due to being an outsource gaurd, they give me a computer and no login. If I can get on the network without using Windows and without anything installed on the machine itself, they don't care. If it werent for Floppix my job as a night guard in a children's hospital would be a *lot* more boring.
Help us build a better map!
Yep, the ol' 3 1/2 incher isn't going away anytime soon here in Mexico.
The current official tax paying program requires that you transfer the information from your computer to a floppy disk, and that's the way you deliver your annual(or monthly or bi-monthly or whatever) tax declaration to the government.
I believe it's also used in the government medical insurance plan. You deliver your insurance report in a floppy.
Now, CD-ROMs have started to fill that niche, and CD-R drives are widespread enough to replace the floppy. But CD-R/CD-RW disks are a hassle to create and update, and not every machine comes in a form factor where a CD-ROM makes sense. And 700M is just not a lot of space for distribution media anymore.
What I would like to see even more is for the BIOS, flash updates, and other system software to simply know how to talk to USB mass storage devices. USB ports are really cheap and almost every machine can have one. USB interface cards seem fairly well standardized. That way, I get a wide variety of choices for system installation. Imagine: you could put the latest Linux distribution, BIOS updates, and other software on a USB pocket drive and install it by just plugging it into any USB port and rebooting.
i teach at a community college and i must say that students by and large only know how to use a floppy. burning cds is too compliated for some. FTP is beyond the capabilities of most. for this market I believe USB keychain drives could take over thanks to their ease of use... but anything more technical than that will not.
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
which one? My 3.5 or my 5.25?
No, Apple did not "back down" from this issue. Even today you can get a low-end Mac (eMac) without a floppy and without a CD-RW.
Like it or not, Ethernet IS "good enough" for sharing files. Barring incompetant wiring, it's faster and more reliable.
If you absolutely need a floppy, external USB floppies are cheap and plentiful. And I say this as someone who bought one three years ago and has used it twice - both times for writing a set of DOS 6.22 floppies (disk images are fun). Bootable CDs are not difficult to make (on the Mac you would have to be brain-dead not to be able to make one) and are simple to maintain.
On the PC side the only thing I do with floppies is to make network boot disks. That's it. Once the system is on the network I can perform a variety of tasks, from prepping for OS installs, HD imaging, driver updates - plenty of annoying required PC maintenance.
Frankly at this point I'm getting ready to start making network boot CDs instead - every system I work with can boot off CD, and floppies develop bad sectors when I look at them funny (necessitating a reformatting & recreating the floppy). Though I have noticed plenty of floppy imaging software will happily ignore the bad sectors (as in fail to write but not modify the structure to avoid that sector), providing me with a disk of dubious usefulness.
This isn't to say that I don't know people who don't use floppy for file storage and transfers. They knock on my door every week or two, bearing a floppy that has developed bad sectors, all confused as to where their file has gone. I sigh heavily, take the floppy, explain how floppies are not reliable for storage, then try my damndest to recover the data. (almost always in succeeding recovering some to all of it)
Moof!
the cost I would pay to buy one, plus the installation cost would I consider this. I have found 3.5 floppies invaluable but to get only a $10 discount is BS!
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
I actually would like to see USB keychain-type things more than CompactFlash. CF is nice, but not everyone has adaptors.
Most individuals have USB ports now, so USB memory storage doesn't really require anything else in the way of hardware.
Granted, USB keychains are expensive right now, but if everyone started using them, prices would hopefully go down.
Put two flopies together, and slide the cover things open so you can look through both disks at once. It reduces the sun to a dusky red color, but they shape is still really clear.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
theres still no REAL replacement for a floppy available..everything else needs some form of driver.. bios enabled cd-mrw drives maybe that doesnt need ANY external drivers may be one way to go but there will still be pc's that doesnt have that for years to come so the floppy is gonna be around for at LEAST 5 years..
You sir, are the proud parent of either:
;-)
A. A future engineer
B. A future pr0n star
In either case, congratulations.
-MB-
Emulation!
~~Some people never go crazy what truly horrible lives they must lead.~~ Charles Bukowski
it's a shame that it never caught on (critical-mass) wise. but it's a great technology that really should be standarized and widely used as a floppy replacement.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
they wanna kill the 3.5 floppy? GREAT! it's a waste of space anyway.... i've used it i think 1nce in the last 6 months because i needed to make a boot disk for my laptop because it dosent support booting from the cd-rom... i used it a lot more pefore i had a burner... but now that i have a burner... i think a flopy is the most useless thing in the world.... cd-rs are cheap... pretty mutch as cheap as floppys... but in my oppionion more reliable... and a HELL of a lot bigger... i remeber before i owned a cd-burnr... if i wanted to store a large program... back up my mpes... anything like that... it was imposible... there is software that i was told let u divide big files over muilitple disks... but it never worked for me... i hate floppys.. i once needed to copy a driver for my network card.... it was like 2.2mb, and i couldent downlaod it directly to that computer, or send it though my home network because... well... figure it out.... and i couldent get it to fir ona disk...lol... so i ended up haveing someone burn it onto a cd for me (along with some other shit ;) )
i'm so glad i have my burner... i dunno how i lived withought it... if software can be develipted to making burning a cd as easy as it is to write to a disk.. then we would be all set ;)... it's not hard... but to have to open up another program... u know... plus ppl say it takes a long time to burn... even on fast drives... but think about how mutch data ur putting on there... how long would it take you to write to 451 floppys?
but i suppose most new computers are sold with cd-rw drives... anyway...
why would anyone complain about the death of a floppy... who uses them anymore? they are irrilible.... small... and sensitive to data loss... (ever stick a disk in ur pocket with ur hw on it, plannign to prin it out in the lab b4 class.... to find out that the rubbing of the fabric agenst the disk cased data lost and curruption?
where oh where is the turd report? I miss the hilarity!
I'm only 14 and I'd be lost with out my floppys. How do you8 think I tranfer data from school to home?
Peace and Love, Anthony
Ok, but what media will be the standard readable/writeable that we can move between PCs. My parents don't have a burner... and neither do my grandfolks.
2. Network outages. I once heard about a girl who brought her whole iMac to campus because she couldn't get online to send her file to herself. $10 doesn't seem worth that kind of hassle.
3. Legacy software. There's always some stupid software that some user has to use for some reason that won't install from anything but 3.5" floppies. Not to mention a certain four-letter word of a computer manufacturer that forces admins to extract system drivers to floppy disks before installing them...
4. Disk Imaging. How the heck do you make an ImageCast/Ghost boot cd?
etc, etc... Floppies are one piece of PC design cruft that's going to be around a while...
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
eheh, good one.
When you replace your 3.5" drive with CF, CD-R(w), or whatever, you give up control of your system. Think about it - you can start up your system today from a floppy with operating systems like DOS, QNX, and Windows. In fact, DOS and QNX can reside on one 3.5" floppy.
When you no longer have a floppy you become subject to whatever restrictions are in place for CF/CD/Whatever media have at the time - and we all know hardware based DRM is on the way. Don't be short-sighted: keep those 3.5" drives spinning!
I have two, and even though i'm the only one who can use them (everyone else in this house has zip drives) i still have the option to use floppies. You dont need drivers with 2k and up, not sure about win98, and even linux supports them. most bioses can select it to boot as well, and i really dont see why they arent 'the standard' now ...
And floppies have one fatal flaw ... they dont last for crap. now i know some of you are going to be like 'ive had floppies for years! and they still work!' and i'll just have to reply in advance ... i used to have floppies for years and they'd still work but in this house they are corrupt the instant it enters this house, not really sure why ... superdisks arent affected, and neither are cd's if you take good care of them, so i use them =)
and for all of you who want bootable images for cd's ... get a win98 bootdisk, rip the image, and use the bootsector from the image on your cd's
No, I am not an English major. My posts are subject to typos and incorrect grammar. Do not expect perfection.
I use floppy drives to carry around small games like Scorched Earth, or Liero. And if I bore of that, I can always dismantle the disk and have little pieces to throw at people.
that that is is that that is not is not
I'm a sysadmin part time and a field tech the rest of the time...I need those freakin' little lifesavers every coupla days! Intel drivers for the nic card and such all need to be extracted to the floppy drive to be installed...All Dell (I know, but hey if the customers got 'em I gotta fix 'em) machines use floppies to update the bios, and then a good deal of my clients don't even have a network Just jane in accounting and the owners machine...So everything they need transferred needs to be sneakered around... Without floppies how would I get a proper novell install going in an office that's still using token ring for their network...Novell 3 does not like burning cd's...
So it depends on how much actual work you do...I don't mean "Hey I code all day" I mean actual hardware and OS level crap...and of course how varied your systems are...but I would be lost without floppies as I believe a lot of corporate sysadmins would be...
Maybe the alternative could be those USB storage devices, since USB isn't proprietary, and (quite) modern OSes support such storage devices natively.
Both these have significant backward-compatibility issues, but at least they are better than Zip. And anything but floppies will have compatibility issues -- except the internet itself, of course, since all usable computers by definition have internet access (and that truly has become the replacement for floppies).
first off, nothing against the Mac crowd, but you don't have to worry as much about crashes... no and wonky diag tools that only come on floppies. Do your average end users need floppy drives? prolly not, most all of what they will want to do is burn pictures and music and whatnot... least that is what end-user computer companies would want them to think anyway. I agree with one of the earlier posts though, I am certainly not going to run a crossover between two systems (provided they have NICs) or burn a dinky text-only document, that is just a waste of about 20 meg on a CD-R that could be used for better things.
CF cards are a viable solution admittedly as would a USB drive, but they have their limits, for instance I can buy about 100 floppies for under 30 bucks, but even a cheap 16 meg cf card will cost me 20... also the only thing around here that has a CF slot in it is a PDA... unless you can get bootable USB CF readers (dunno, can you?) I don't think it will work
My firewall, an old P-120 junker, doesn't even have a hard drive -- it just boots Linux from floppy, loads the firewall rules, and works like a champ.
So the firewall needs a floppy drive and my desktop needs one to make the disk that goes in the firewall.
(Download the firewall disk from http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/)
I'd have to say that the floppy disc is pretty much dead... It's easier and cheaper now to burn a CD... Besides, when was the last time you had information you wanted to make portable that would FIT on a floppy?
:)) *Pets large box full of 24x cdr spindles*
Hell, my latest computer (an athy xp 1800 that I built about 6 months ago), doesn't even HAVE a floppy drive... I bought one to put in it, but never bothered. I also know for a FACT that I actually OWN floppy discs, but I can't for the life of me find one. *Shrugs* Oh well... I'm better off with my Sony 24x cdrw anyway
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
The CD!!!
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I gave up using floppies the day I got my IoMega ZIP 100, even I gave up on the ZIP media since my last drive COD (Click-Of-Death) on me. I'm a happy CD-RW user putting my data into CDs. Not only do I find them lasting longer (just take proper care of your CDs) they are also cheaper. I buy them in bulk and they cost me around $0.20 per 700MB CD.
But I still do have the "LEGACY" device in my tower from my last upgrade, something todo with the fact that my bosses still insist on passing them soft copies of my reports on them, and what happened to my old floppies which might be workable??? Well they're now sitting in a local art college, my buddy turned it into some modern art piece.
During the last year, I've been removing the floppy drives from my beige Macs so that I'll have room for another hard drive. Even when I need to install Debian or NetBSD from a floppy, I just use a disk image to install onto another drive. Fun!
I drank what? -- Socrates
burning a cd to run memtest would be a little silly.
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
Yep, you can't install Mandrake 8.0 on an IBM Thinkpad without a floppy disk, and how much I missed the floppy disk when I found that out.
I have no signature
No, the proper word for that is flaccid. ;)
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
For network Linux installs. Gotta boot the bare box from something. Having to install a CD-ROM in every system seems silly. Unless they install a 10/100/1000 network interface with a net boot option (which would, of course, have to be supported by Linux for installs) on every new system. Then I could live without a floppy drive though I'd still prefer to have one around. They're just too damned handy for dumping a file to hand to a friend or for making a quick tar of some files that you want to bring to/from work (3.5" diskettes fit so nicely in your shirt pocket).
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Yes, I use the 3.5in floppy drive every single day. It provides a quick alternative to a 2x CD burner for small files (although with my new 20x burner it's becoming less true).
Even more importantly... I've been working on an operating system for the last 18 months and a floppy disk is the only way to transfer files (operating system/application/data) from my development machine to my OS's dedicated machine.
If you wanna kill the floppy drive, just write network/cdrom/hdd drivers that will work with my OS first!
-.-- -.-- --..
One fish / Two fish / Red fish / Blue fish
ShyaOS - Think Differently!
I was annoyed when I got my first iMac without a floppy drive, but I look back, and I haven't even needed my PC floppy in all this time - except once:
;) ... On the other hand, the iMac is now my mother's, and since she has a lot of older Mac software, the first thing my dad did was to go out and buy an external floppy drive for her to use so she could install all her old games and things.
It was when I took a class involving x86 machine language at my university. All other CS assignments are turned in electronically, but that involves Sun hardware (I think), so the x86 assignments wouldn't work. Each assignment had to be turned in on a floppy disk. I had to go out and buy some just so I could turn in my homework
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
For booting into linux this way EVIL MS doesn't overwrite it.
Does anyone out there still use their floppy?
I certianly hope so, otherwise the human race is doomed.
I use my floppy to help my dying pc it is a vital part of reparing a system from scratch, like a hard drive crash or or an os failure. You people must be crazy when leving out a floppy. Windows systyem disks and HD diagnostics disks are always floppys because the mini os(the one used to do diagnostics) must be independent and use the floppy as a "hd".
I don't understand why you would back up files locally on a network.
I think it would be best to have all networked machines backup to a common point.
Shoot you can even have a program to go and grap these files taking this resposibility away from Debbie in accounting.
You aslo mimimize instances of backup (and failure) and only introduce a workable internal bandwith issue.
Just my thoughts. Hope everyone is having a good summer.
... and furthermore
At work we use 3.5 in. floppies to store EPROM binaries on. The device programmer we use runs on DOS and it is a lot easier to put in a floppy to burn a chip, than it is to try to remember which version of the binaries on the hard disk to use. And the scripts, settings, etc. It's all on the floppy. Put it in and boot. Floppies are also the most universally common portable storage media. You can use it any PC made in the last 15 years. And that's a good thing. Don't take my floppies away! Programmers need to re-discover how to write efficient code, not bloated code that requires CDs. PowerBasic brags that Windows apps you make with their compiler can often fit on a floppy. We need to see more of that efficiency!
Dude, why not have a floppy. It's only $10 a shot, and kinda handy to have around. It would be nice if Zip drives and disks were that cheap The same goes for CD RW drives.
I have the original floppy 3.5" drive I bought over 10 years ago. It still works flawlessly. Its the most reliable piece of equipment on my computer. Of course my pentium 133 (OCed to 150!!) still works too :D
It seems that every time someone wants me to read a MS Office file, they feel compelled to give it to me on a floppy....
Until the Powers That Be supply us with some sort of alternative to the floppy, and I mean a good simple viable one, preferably some sort of magnetic media, as opposed to all that mucking about with CD burner utilities, I will keep a floppy on any system I buy/build. So far, there have been a few...Bernoulli, Syquest, Zip, Jaz, LS120 etc, but none have been made cheaply enough or ubiquitous enough to qualify. CD burning is a pain, and, while I don't mind using a bootable CD, using the burner to manipulate and transport files has always been a big pain!
Don't get me wrong. I like Apple products. I have owned my share of Macs and I will purchase more in the future. But I will believe little of the PR bull that comes out of Apple Computer Inc. and Steve Jobs.
You are a cocksucking bitch for having to backpedal like that.
The only time that I ever use the floppy drive on my old Power Mac 7500 is when I run PCX (a PC emulator). When I have to move files from one mac to another I put my Powerbook 165c into SCSI dock mode and use it as a HD.
"You can see I know very little about pimp policy." George McGovern.
If it's floppy it doesn't matter much that it's 8 inches, does it?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I have many older systems (8088's thru p1's) that absolutely require floppy's for I/O. Even the later ones with CD-ROMs still require drivers to read the CD, and that means a floppy.
CD-Rs and even RWs do not have the functionality that a non-sequentially rewritable floppy holds, so my sneakernet still runs on HD/DD 3.5".
Also, what happened to all those 'floppy killers' from a few years back? I'd pay to have a bootable 100 meg floppy, but can't find them anymore...
What the heck is a 'sig'?
What the world needs is a unified cdrom filesystem which is supported by everyone and makes it easy to load a binary, or preferrably different binaries based on architecture. Maybe something with a simple scripting language. Then floppies can go away and no one will mind much.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
AFAIK, the spec for Memory Stick was already released
Only half of the Sony MemoryStick standard was released. The other half (MagicGate, required by all Sony digital audio devices and by Sony PlayStation 2 memory cards) is still a trade secret.
I would LOVE it if they make removeable media such as CF/SM/MS/MMC bootable
CF is based on the ATA electrical interface; others have posted Google links to CF/IDE adapters that are merely a circuit board with an ATA connector, a molex power connector, and a CF connector, with no logic. Put a CF cartridge into one of those adapters (you can mount it in a drive bay if you want), and voila! Bootable CF.
Will I retire or break 10K?
i want to play my DOS games. they're still on floppies.
:(
but sonce my floppy drive failed, i haven't so much as looked at them.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Hell, I still have 5.25" floppy drives on all my critical work machines. And yes, sometimes I still need them. Not often, but enough that I'd not be without 'em. Same for 3.5" FDDs.
Floppy media is the one thing you can still count on being readable in nearly any machine. Maybe you and your clients all have nothing but the latest and greatest, but I don't think that's a realistic expectation for the world at large.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
[regarding giving floppies away for free,] have you ever heard of a company called america online?
America Online Inc. hasn't distributed its AOL client software on floppy bisk since the 3.x series. Here's some relevant poetry:
"AOL Is Sucks" by SaundersWill I retire or break 10K?
What the hell are they thinking? The floppy is the easiest way to transport data, because you know you'll be able to use it everywhere. That's golden! I can take data on the spectrum analyzer, save it to floppy and drop it in my pocket, go to the coffee shop and load it on my laptop to process and make plots, write those to floppy and bring it to the office to pop in the Sun and post the results to the lab weblog. Hell I could even take that floppy to the public library and post the data to the weblog from there! Kill the floppy and that flexibility will dissapear.
I used a 3.5'' disk today. I had to type an exam. (I have very bad handwriting.) The teacher said, "Give it to me on a disk." He did not say CD. He did not say Zip disk. He said disk, as in floppy.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
...because as long as Word documents fit on floppies, they won't be going away any time soon.
Damaged 3.5" disks have a smaller desktop footprint when used as a coaster compared to Compact Discs.
-SurturZ
I recently had a big discussion with several techie friends about the floppy drive and reasons it keeps lingering.
I think we came to a conclusion that 2 factors keep it alive. #1, the low price (both of the media and of the drives themselves). There's considerable usefulness to a form of digital storage that's so universal, yet nearly as inexpensive as pieces of paper. (Who doesn't have a bunch of old floppies lying around someplace or other, and would think nothing of giving one or two away to anyone who needed one?)
#2, motherboards always have the seperate floppy drive ribbon cable and connector on them. All of the alternatives that were supposed to "kill off the floppy" ended up co-existing with it instead (or dying off themselves). I think part of it is a psychological thing. People feel the need to use the slots and cable connections they're given in their PC. The zip drives, Syqyest and Orb removeables, and LS-120's all used SCSI, USB, parallel or IDE connectors. They never actually let you physically attach them to the floppy cable!
I knew many people who used up all of their IDE drive connectors and didn't want to mess around (or spend extra $'s for) a SCSI card. Therefore, they never considered an LS-120 or zip as an adequate floppy replacement. They simply had no place to connect one up. The floppy port has its own IRQ and I/O address space though, untouched by any other peripheral.
I have regularly had to use them for BIOS updates. Yeah, I could probably get by with only a couple in the house... but it's a bit late for that.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
As a long-time geek/packrate, I've got at least a dozen old systems around that don't support booting from a CD-ROM. Thanks to the oft-touted low system requirements of linux, these machines are still actually doing something, rather than being replaced by something newer (in order to run the bloated Windows OS) that supports booting from the CD.
I bought 8Mb flashcards for $1.88 (yes, one dollar and eighty eight cents) a piece on Brand Smart. A reader costs around $20 these days... It would be cool to have BIOS support to boot these beasts...
Floppies are still useful as many readers here have pointed out. I myself use them frequently for making boot disks to run DOS-only utilities. However, I am all for getting rid of floppy controllers on motherboards, and migrating to USB external floppy drives. Newer motherboard BIOSes support booting from USB devices, so you should be able to boot from a USB floppy (although I have never done so). And all of today's big OSes support them. And, I don't know for sure, but USB floppies can probably use advanced "high-speed" mechanisms like those found in the Sony Mavica FD cameras.
Two arguments against replacing internal models with USB models are that USB floppies are more expensive, and that it is more convenient to have the floppy located internally rather than externally.
The first argument may have held more water back when USB floppies cost $150, not the $30 to $50 they cost today. While this is 3-5 times more expensive than interal floppies, you may only need one USB floppy drive to service an entire room full of PCs, provided that the floppy is only used occasionally.
The second argument is more robust, especially in situations where floppies are used regularly (like for comp sci class submissions). In those situations (which I think are by far the minority), I would advocate that manufacturers build internal USB floppies. They could connect through USB motherboard headers, and draw power (if necessary) from the traditional floppy power connector. I think this is a much better solution than those ridiculous computer labs filled with iMacs with external floppy drives.
store my MoneyDance data on, and to make recovery diskettes (which I have never had to use.)
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
as well as several small businesses and non-profits in the area. There are several places that will *never* get management to allow them to network their machines; and several more that have to cart documents back and forth from home in similar situations. Yes, this may mean that much like your 486s you donated to charity; the floppy becomes a symbol of the 'lower computing class', but so be it.
I still keep zipped copies of particular patches; a couple sets of scripts, etc. in a 'toolkit' for work. Not every workstation is allowed to have a CD drive.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
when you buy a new HDD, how would you be able to set it up without the trusty dos boot disk (or the disk that comes with it, they dont come with cds for that stuff
what about school??? if you're in college and you type a paper in your dorm, you dont want to burn a word doc to cd just so you can print on the school's computers, and also if you type a paper at home (even gradeschoolers do it) and need to revise it at school, you use a floppy (alot of schools dont let you check personal email now so no emailing to yourself)
virus scanners always have emergency boot disks incase you get a boot virus (would you want that whole ~1mb of files on a CD!!???)
buy a new network card and you need the drivers before you can get on your network, and those come on a floppy disk
you format an old computer which you no longer have driver disks for, so you go to another computer and download all needed drivers that arent on the win(if you're using win) disk, and put those on floppy and run it to the other computer
i have been on many computers lately that wont boot from cdrom, which could be a prob when installing a new OS
sorry about the ones that are repeated from this page and such
Darn right, I use my floppy; ever try recovering a RAID configuration on a server with a Mylex control card? Good luck if you can't get a quick DOS image on your Unix machine before it tries to spin up the drives...
Lockable case like a antec 1030, best non-rackable case I've ever used.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Apple did not "back down" from this issue. Even today you can get a low-end Mac (eMac) without a floppy and without a CD-RW
You are mistaken. Apple went from no low-end Macs having removable writable media to nearly all low-end Macs having removable writable media. Also, your example is poor, the eMac was designed for educational environments where you often do not want students to carry away files, ie. piracy.
Like it or not, Ethernet IS "good enough" for sharing files
Irrelevant. Removable writable media is often needed/desired for backups.
If you absolutely need a floppy, external USB floppies are cheap and plentiful
Today's prices are irrelevant, when Apple gave us no option internal floppies were around US$10 and external USB floppies were well over US$100. Even when looking at today's prices an internal CD-R(W) is often less expensive than an external USB floppy.
Propz right back at ya...
---
Big_Ass_Spork
I recall years ago that when I needed to back something up onto floppies, I would do a
...
pkzip -r -p -&
and pkzip would SPAN DISKS. I would just continue to be prompted to add another disk until the backup was complete. This was a great feature. But as far as I can tell, there is no good way of doing this same thing with CDs. I have a 1.3 gig chunk of data that I would like to backup on CDs in a similar manner as the "-&" feature.
(Granted that doing this with floppies would take 700 and some odd disks but it is the point that I am trying to make...)
Is there any way to span CDs in a similar fashion? Once I can do this I will stop backing up my 30 gig drive to floppies.
Much like magnetic media, even if you 'crackle' the CD with the microwave you can extract some information from the parts that were not damaged. That's one reason why older hard disk platters on secure systems were completely cleaned by destroying them with a belt sander.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Almost everybody has one. When in trouble we can always use a floppy. Bootable, no drivers needed.
Why the hell would I want to burn a CD-RW just to move some few Kb size file to a friend? Zip? Chances are he doesn't have one.
A friend and I maintain a small website that's mostly just HTML and JPEGs, so floppies are much faster than burning a CD to transport a few silly HTML pages of very small size. What? They think that people have no use for small files anymore?
Used a floppy to flash the firmware on my DVD drive. . . . :-)
Yeah, it was just last month that I was grateful I hadn't ditched my last floppies.
I had a digital photo that I wanted to take to Ritz Camera to have printed out on their dumb-ass Windoze-based scanning & enlarging printing stations. The damn thing wouldn't read my zip disk from my OS X machine (which I had formatted as a DOS disk). So I came home and partitioned the zip into DOS, UFS, and HFS+, burned a cd-rom, and -> just in case, shoved a floppy into my linux box.
After doing: /mnt/floppy /dev/fd0H1440 /mnt/floppy /mnt/floppy
mkfs.msdos
mount
cp ~/img.jpg
I headed off to Ritz. I tried the first 2 media types first, to no luck, and was finally able to get my damn picture printed by using the floppy. Wow - that was amazingly sad.
Particularly for a shop that *sells* you images on cdrom.
- passion
Macs have Iomega drivers in by default; what's stopping peecee makers? Heck, I'm pretty sure a small enough Mac OS installation can boot off Zip.
I realize you are probably trolling but in case you are merely ignorant I'll point out that liking the Mac platform (especially lately) and liking Apple Computer, Inc. are two very different things. As a matter of fact the people who dislike Apple Computer the most are often people who like the Mac. Some Mac fans are immune to the Reality Distortion Field and like the Mac due to it's merits, and dislike the misdirection and bull that Apple uses in it's PR and sales efforts.
I just used my floppy to update my BIOS.
It's essential for this function.
But.. but... you seemed to like it last night!
uhm, if you put the disc in upside down, how did it spin the medium? and if it couldn't spin the medium, it couldn't format it, so your security threw obscurity bit doesn't seem to likely. nice buzzwordage. :)
Actually many minicomputers in the late 70's up to the mid 80's used 12" and 14" hard drives as well as disk packs. I worked on VAXes (running 4.2 and 4.3BSD) in the mid 80's that were so equipped. And the disk packs we had were not 'flexible media', the platters in the packs were made out of aluminum that was around 1/8" thick. We took apart a lot of those things in the late 80's as they failed and those old machines were decommissioned. Those big platters made great wallhangings, especially the ones with huge gouges ground into them from head crashes.
Yes, floppies are small and hold a miniscule amount of information. Yes, floppies are no longer the only boot media out there. However, there is one very big advantage that floppies have that no other removable computer media out there I know of has: Floppy disks and drives are commodities and an industry standard random-access media.
Zip disks (and their competitors) and flashROMs and such are all well and good, but when you get right down to it you're left with having to decide between two competing and incompatible manufacturers and hope you bet on the winner. What happens to your Zip disks if Iomega turns out to be the next tech company convicted of fuzzy accounting?
You'd think that for all the anti-DRM prattle that goes on here at Slashdot the floppy disk would be as celebrated as the CD-ROM for having open standards that no one company or group of companies can deny you access to. Seriously, do I have to spell it out for you people? If the floppy drive vanished tomorrow, the de facto replacement would be Iomega's Zip drives. Five minutes after the end of the floppy drive, Iomega will announce it's new DRM initiative in parternship with the ??AAs where all Zip drives manufactured from now on will have manditory DRM features. What about Castlewood and 3M, you say? It's a heck of a lot easier to buy off 3 companies than 300...
We're already getting raped by DVD region codes, why are you advocating the same treatment from magnetic disks?
Yes, I know you were being funny, but I have seen a 12" hard drive. It was at a computer museum, built by Winchester (the gun people). I think they used it in an early space shuttle for NASA. It was the largest hard drive I had ever seen. May have even been bigger than 12 inches.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I still use LOTS of floppies for my Sony FD (floppy disk) digital camera. I know it's old, but it works great for shots that don't need more than 1 megapixel.
Floopies are also great for backing up small documents, moving them around computers (especially if the network is down).
Size wise, floppies still have more space than an average person "needs" (ie: most people don't "create" more than 1mb of work anyway on a short notice, and anything below that fits nicely on a floppy).
Remember, a floppy can store the text version of most books, which is quite a bit of information.
Bloated programs aside, a floppy is still a great way to short-term store and move small data files around with you (certainly a lot more comptable and easier to use than anything else).
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
BIOS flashing is often times done with a floppy.
My first computer was an old Sinclair with 4k of RAM (add-on) and a B&W monitor. I spent many an hour playing, then hacking, Lunar Lander and fiddling with my tape drive. I soon upgraded to an Apple, then on to an Atari 800, a Tandy Coco, Commodore 64 - and on and on. Had to peek & poke my way to better graphics on my Coco. Enjoyed using a Tandy Model 4 to hack CompuServe and a trusty old Apple II to poke around AT&T.
Ahhh - the good ole days, playing Mule and BBSing. I miss it. (sniff)
i use the floppy to store (hardware) read only data, namely my aide databases.
i don't want even root to be able to change it.
-- p
No, I said toddler proof, not theif proof. A toddler were still manage to stick some pennies in the power supply exhaust grate. I'm just thankful he never found the red switch on the power supply ;-)
oh god, please tell me i'm not that "old-school"... this was a common practice for sure... DSDD disks tended to be at least 50% more in cost, so why NOT use the hole punch? yes, i guess we really ARE this old... heheheh
USB based Disk on Key's are the next solution for universally avaliable removable storage.
:-(
http://www.diskonkey.com/product.asp
in 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 and 512 meg sizes they're the way to go.
Unfortuantly computer makers aren't including them with new machines. My theory why is b/c they're a separate device not attached and removable like the venerable 3.5" floppy.
My SGI Indies don't, nor do my Indigos. I realized I'm pretty much f*&^ed if some goes deadly wrong which requires to boot from installation media, since I also don't have CD-ROM drives on those workstations. Of course my PCs do, except my latest. Since they're all networked I just don't see the point of having a 20 year old piece of technology on my Athlon 1800. Sorry about the bragging, I'm just so proud of my puppies...
Here we go again!
... used it to kill a mosquito - SPLAT!
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
it's not the size,
It's how you use it.
'eh?
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I have an Imation LS-120 in my box. Why not make these drives standard in most system packages. They are backward compatible to floppies and can actually read/write 1.44mb disks 20-40% faster than he standard floppy drive.
Using the standard LS disk, you can store 120mb. I think this is more than enough for most productive people.
Just a thought.
p.o.s. support on a SINGLE computer between OSes? Go ahead and try to write to NTFS, try to write to UFS from linux without corruption. What am I going to do, copy the file to another computer on the ethernet, then copy it back? I can see leaving floppies behind when bootable CDs work on 95% of computers, but it'll never be practical until someone writes a decent NTFS/UFS writer for linux/freebsd.
This ethernet-centricity doesn't stop there. Try to load gentoo linux off of a stage-1 CD without someone else connecting to the net and sharing and you'll see what I mean... every time I instlal gentoo I need to carry a PPP floppy with me... 'nuff said!
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life- the terror of art. -Franz Kafka
Actually, being an embedded systems engineer, I can't tell you how many labs I've seen with old programmers (eeprom programmers that is, not white-haired *nix guys :) that only take floppy disks. So I personally use floppy's all the time.
It wasn't easy being Greazy
Just a troll eer observation. Why is it that the same people who would bash my poor G4 for being a paltry 800mhz, seem to be of the same mindset to defend their legacy connections to the bitter end. Why does a person need a 2.2ghz box when every peripheral, with the exception of their raid of SCSI drives, is connected via RS-232 serial or parallel. With the exception of servers, why do you need the access speeds of a 10k SCSI drive when the data that you create "can easily fit on a floppy". Has anyone here tried using a firewire pocket drive? I can hot plug it into any Mac with a firewire port and it mounts. No drivers, no configuration, no power cable, instant access, transfers data almost as fast as my internal drives, bootable (I'm running OS X 10.2 off of it right now), can restore a system in minutes with a script I have on it, and repair any Mac with the copies of Techtool and DiskWarrior I have loaded on it. Oh.... I'm sorry, I forgot that windows support for firewire blows and linux support is almost nonexistent. I'm sure that somebody will counter with a comment about USB 2.0, please don't, it's an crippled version of firewire that shouldn't have been adopted. But, like every 2nd rate knock off born on the wintel side, I'm sure it will eventually overshadow a superior technology. Why eat prime rib when you can have 20lbs of tripe for the same price. I haven't used a floppy in close to 5 years. You can get CD-Rs in spools for around 10 cents a piece. I can email 1.44mb worth of data to myself in a pinch. Boot floppys??.....I feel your pain. Hell, even my 10gb pocket drive is starting to seem small. I'm sorry guys....you need to let go......let the floppy die. Sign the papers to take it off life support. Insist on support for better technologies ....or better yet, create support for those technologies. You're an industrious bunch of guys.
650 MB on a new Zipdisk, 650 MB on audio CD. Perfect size to sneakernet a bootleg
Coincidence...or Conspiracy.
Just wait for Hillary Rosen to notice this an try to prevent Iomega from selling them.
Floppies are good for installing things via the network on old machine with crappy cd drives; but I guess bootable cds would work to...oh well
Since we have our local "mirror", net installs are much quicker.
BTW. If anybody needs a bootdisk,try this website: http://www.bootdisk.com/
Yep, those things are fucking great... ...but if you can't boot off it, it's still not a replacement for a floppy.
How many machines offer 'boot off randomly chosen USB storage device' in the BIOS?
and you don't have to install a huge chunk of hardware into every machine in case one of them needs it.
That's all good, as long as you're only working with hardware from the last few years. But there's a whole lotta hardware that was built before that.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
I have a Mavica camera that records to floppy and I'd prefer that over compact flash or whatnot. The reason? If I'm on vacation and need more "film" it's cheap and available pretty much anywhere. Plus it's really easy to program utilities for, because you're just reading files from a disk (some of the compact flash ones will do this too, though). Currently I use a program that copies the file to one with the name based on the timestamp. Handy for knowing when the pic was taken.
Plus, nothing beats a floppy for when your PC is screwed up. Yeah, you can make boot CDs, but I find CD-R/RW to be a pain to use and really only use it because of the large size/standard reader. Floppies are easier to work with at that level.
Installation, though, CDs all the way. I was very happy when debian switched to tiny install CD instead of the 6 disks.
-no broken link
An end to the 3.5" floppy? Never! Well, at least not for a long time. We're stuck with them, the same way we are stuck with cassette tapes. When audio CDs first came out, they were sure replace the troublesome plastic rectangles we call tapes (and records beget eight-tracks, and eight-tracks beget...). So why do new albums still come in tape format? Why do stereo systems still come with a tape deck?
The fact is we like cassette tapes. They're cheaper, smaller, and you are far less likely to have your car stereo stolen if it only has a tape player. The same can be said for the annoying plastic square that is the floppy disk. Even though they are slower and only hold a fraction what a CD can, floppy disks are still very useful for saving files. CD burners cost extra, while floppy drives (like tape decks) come fully equipped, and even if you have one you probably don't use it to back up small text files.
I keep my journal on a floppy, and every time I add another sentence of rambling I'm not going burn it to a CD.
I think the usefulness of the 3.5" for businesses and certainly new software is coming to a close. However, the day a student walks into school and finds he cannot access the essay he typed at home because none of the computers have floppy drives is still a long way off.
"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties." -James Jeans
Working as a PC tech has shown me that floppies are good for storing re-written data. And when you no longer need the drive for that (or your kids get at the computer) you can use the drive as a coin bank. :)
.... this portion of the thread does not call for a factual analysis. Derision, maybe - but facts are meaningless at these depths....
You can reasonably carry a floppy disk in your wallet and pull it out when you need it without fear of destroying it.
Yes.
If by wallet, you mean purse.
"And like that
Drag a file to the CD-RW drive, and Windows copies it to a cache behind the scenes. Right click on the CD-RW drive, and tell it to burn the disc. If it's in RW mode, you don't even have to do that much, treat it as a floppy. If you're putting music files on it, you can burn it as a music CD just as easily. Or load up a playlist in media player, and select "copy to cd" to create a music CD.
Windows XP might suck, but it sure is nice. yeah.
"And like that
I use my floppy drives daily, they're so much more hassle free than cdr's, compatable with every OS, no special drivers needed, virtually every computer has one, whereas my older laptop tha i still use doesn't,, anyone can alter files on them, no special packet writing software or drive needed, etc.
Reece,
One word: Microwave
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
For Pete's sake, do you know how much work it takes to keep an Open Source OS, compiled nightly, booting from boot floppies? These poor developers keep reverse-engineering everything to stick with the 1.44MB boundary...
.02,
Quiet down about the death of the floppy, and just leave the damn thing in your PC - it's probably beige anyway. If not, why are you spending money on cases instead of MORE SCSI STORAGE!
A big problem with the release of Debian Woody was getting the damn b-f's to work, see the archive...
Besides, in an emergency you can always boot up ZipSlack and get on the network sans hard drive...
My
fdisk3hs
...if one was copying large quantities of games.
Oh, the days.
If you don't believe me, ask that guy over there.
While I only use floppies for emergency booting, a ton of the people at my university still use floppies to save papers. The composition professors never learn about nor teach students about FTP or using servers.
I work in the computer labs and have to deal with tons of problems, because students don't respect their disks. Then, the floppies break and I have to rescue their paper, because they either saved it on their hard drive at home or have no backup. Sometimes they also get stuck in the drives.
Floppies will still live on until people teach the non-tech savvy better alternatives.
For a network boot disk to run Ghost off the server.
:-)
Never bothered with that whole bootable NIC thing, too much like hard work.
Also I occasionally plug one into my home machine when ppl bring stuff over on floppy. I guess they could burn a 500k CD if they wanted to
Its much more convenient to simply put a pasword on the keyring than to rely upon the stability of floppy as a long-term storage medium.
The floppy will never die!!! MWAHAHAHAHA! It will haunt PCs... FOREVER!!!
:( I want to see if I can take a few of thier hands, but they keep them, sitting in corners to rot away! The horror!
/dev/fd1 drive!
I could fit three years of work from IT at school that I did on the Acorn RISC computers! That was before they replaced them with PCs.
Everyone should get a second floppy drive just so we can have a B:\ drive. Oops, I gave it away this time... I meant a
The Computer History Museum (www.computerhistory.org) has a hard drive platter that has a diameter of ~3 feet. I believe it held 10MB, way back in the day. I also think that ProFile system that came with the Apple /// had a 12-inch platter.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
New and old computers need to communicate:
/Engineering) do not have their own FTP servers. They could save the file and FTP from home to get it, but the university provides a very piddley amount of space which must be shared with your school email account. Floppy is still the best method for students to transfer their files at my university. As for the FTPing CS and Eng students, they still have to submit their programming assignements on floppies(at least in first and second year since they don't get access to the CS/Eng computers, just the general campus ones).
Many posts talk about how its just the old pcs that are a problem.
The problem is this. Most of the time when I do something that would require the use of a floppy it is because I have one machine that crapped out and the other machine is the source. Now, perhaps the old machine has a CD drive and I can burn a CD for it on the new machine, but probably the old machine can't boot cds. Going the other way. The new machine can boot CDs but the old machine does not have a burner.
Students:
At my university the options for file transfer are ethernet and floppy. Most people (asside from CS
rescue disk
yet again, owning a Gateway is also limiting yourself.
Floppy disks can be great in emergencies, but if we came out with Flash cards or whatever, that ended up cheaper and more reliable (those floppies sure do get bad sectors as they age) then that would be great.
Of course there's the issue of standardization, how are you going to get everyone to use the same thing?
though bit clunky. how else would desktops be revived, virus cleaned rebooted, smallsized program patches shared. Theyre invaluable. maybe usb memory stick removable 'disk' might become the floppy killer if prices go down.
Those weren't made by Winchester, rather they were called Winchester disks because the IBM 3340 (an early model) featured two 30MB volumes -- thus, 30-30, like the rifle. See the Jargon File for the reference.
Quite a few companies still assume that you have a bootable DOS disk handy to do BIOS upgrades on their firmware. This makes floppies practically mandatory, unless you want to waste a good CD making a floppy image (which will still require DOS)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
slightly OT, they are not "floppy" theyre quite rigid. i think the older ones were floppies. these are rigidies. hmm.
Ok, I have a modern system. (1.4ghz Tbird, 512 DDR ram, DVD drive, ASUS A7M266 mobo, ect...) It boots just fine from any bootable CD (win2k, winxp, Linux, ect...). But here's the catch. It's only two hard drives are a pluged into a Promise Fastrack TX2 PCI RAID controler (for RAID level 0). Without drivers for this card it is totally impossible to install any OS on my system. And I have yet to see any version of Windows or any Linux distro that supports this card out of the box. The card came with drivers, on 3.5 floppy disks. In order to install windows 2000 or XP these disks must be inserted at the start of the instilation process otherwise windows setup will not find the hard drives. Linux is the same way. So there you have it. A modern system that requires a floppy drive to install the operating system.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
The title should explain it all. I will continue to have a floppy drive in my computer for as long as I have arms and legs. First off, my girlfriend uses the floppy in her IBM laptop all the time to put documents from the laptop to her desktop. Yeah she has a network cable she can plug in and click around but using a floppy for her is 90% faster.
I personally don't use it all too much but in classes I used floppies all the time. Some instructors would even explain how work needs to be saved on floppies for whatever reason. For anyone to consider the floppy drive to be dead would be way off to me at least.
I would love to see the floppy make a disappearing act, but we need a replacement for it, an 8-32 MB bootable flash disk would be best.
But I do not believe the h/W makers are in a hurray to kill the floppy otherwise they could have done it a long time ago. I think they see it as a low cost item that they charge for it 3 times their cost.
/-\ |-|
Yes you can do a minimal install on a 100MB Zip disk and boot from it, and still have room on the disk for utilities.
In fact Iomega Tools has a feature called RescueDisk that will build the bootable disk for you, copy the system files (32.6MB) and a file utility such as DiskFirstAid, and I still have room for a complete Norton Utilities install and things like DriveSetup.
This doesn't work with OS X yet, but since you can boot from OS 9 that's not a problem.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
And No not for Sneaker Net either. PXE + floppy = unattended install/reinstall for 1 U servers and desktops. Boot from the floppy and go. Also what about Tomsrbt or for M$ users you have your DOS boot disk (and yes they are very useful). A way to boot for NFS installs rather than CD installs. NO don't get rid of my floppy. It's old, yes. But still very very useful. Heck where LRP be without it? Quieter than CD (in many cases, ever heard a 52X in the same price range as a floppy drive wind up?) It's like car insurance, most the time you don't need it. But for those times you do.you really need it!
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
This was my first thought. I figure they want to compete with CDs... they must be loosing business to CD-Rs.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
i seem to only use the 3.5 floppy drive when installing debian off the internet.
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
Heh, Actually, I just used mine literally 30 seconds ago. While Diskettes aren't useful for even smaller modern files; (such as most MP3s) for documents floppies are still one of the best ways to get information from one computer to the next. While I wouldn't them for anything heavy duty, in the case of today (I had to move a 40K document from one computer in my house to another) a Floppy was the obvious choice.
I am a student of software engineering and I am constantly required diskettes to submit programs I have coded, as well as printing hard-copies of the same code. Therefore, diskettes must remain in circulation so I may complete my assignments. Oh, and don't chop all the trees down yet either, or milk the squids dry.
Like it or not, Ethernet IS "good enough" for sharing files. Barring incompetant wiring, it's faster and more reliable.
Unless, for a great variety of possible reasons, the source machine and the destination machine are not both connected to an ethernet network. Sheesh. That would include everyone I know personally -- none of whom have, like me, a home LAN -- and, for that matter, my not-entirely-supported-by-Linux laptop and its entirely-unsupported-by-Linux PCMCIA Ethernet card, as well as standalone machines in schools and small businesses.
Snob.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Yep - still use the damn slow, buggy, outdated piece of old crappy hardware.
I've always hated them, since they were 'the latest thing' after the 'floppy' (which were worse)
There's still clients out there who give you stuff on stiffy disk, there's still workstations that require booting from a stiffy disk every now and then.
Sucks, don't it ?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I agree that the 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive is a thing of the past, however it remains very important to at least one group of computer users, which are machine/process automation and control designers.
One of the top software manufacturers in this arena is Rockwell Automation, the parent company of Allen Bradley. This company is rather strict when it comes to licensing of their software. To gain full use of any one of their products, the user must install an "activation" which is installed on a serial number encoded floppy disk that is typically sold separate from the software itself.
Unfortunately, the industry of machine/process automation and control is years behind when it comes to computer technology. Many hardware manufactures still sell "new" 500Mhz industrial computers that have ISA card slots. Some vendors have begun to see the light, offering USB hardware keys which provide licensing verification.
Personally, I have an Imation Superdisk drive, which I use rather often. Too bad Imation stopped making them. CD-Rs are okay for music and small backups, but I think they're just too wasteful for everyday file transfer. I've see people burn 20MB of MP3s to a CD-R, just to have the files copied to their harddive, then the CD-R tossed away. Yeah, I know all about the CD-RW, but I have yet to have someone lend me one that didn't have a recording error or scratch.
FYI, the company "Que" has a USB "Superdisk" drive that RWs 1.44MB, 120MB, and 240MB floppies. Give them a look.
Other than that.. I dunno but I still feel good having one around.
.02 Euro
my
i have a 3.5" floppy penis. It's rarely used, but would I really want to chop it off? ;)
my blog
ARE YOU ALL MAD???
Sometimes, if you use a computer that is stand-alone (not connected the net) or its on a network that's not connected to the normal corporate network because the sits in a locked room keeping people from access to it.
The only way to transfer documents is the floppy.
A floppy is quicker and easier to transport than a CD-R. Also, most computers have floppies than a CD-R.
I am all for the death of the floppy, because we can easily do better for cheaper.
/. a while back?</OFFTOPIC>
The problem now with eliminating the floppy (as many, many posts have already pointed out) is there will no longer be any viable storage medium for small files. I need to bring a Word document to a computer without 'net access. Why waste a whole CD? Why wait for a CD-RW to burn? You dont' really think I'm someday going to use DVD-RAM for 249k, do you?!?!?
The Imation SuperDrive is a thing of the past, however beautiful it was. ZIP Disks? Dont' make me laugh, I think everyone has been clicked to death. I actually had to open up a Zip Disk once to GLUE THE MEDIUM BACK TO THE SPINDLE because it stopped working. Fortuantely, I was able to recover about 95% of what was on the disk.
With all the advances in flash-style media, why not include built-in SmartMedia drives? Small, inexpensive, and already widely accepted. Or perhaps a USB Key ring-style device with 32MB of memory on board, just plug it in and it mounts as a USB disk? Any data you need to carry around can be put on this key ring, and just plug it in.
I'm sure others have suggested this before me, even right here under this story. So if it's such a good idea, why aren't we doing it? Whoever does this first will make millions, people do NOT want to RELY on the Internet.
<OFFTOPIC>Speaking of which, when do we get to have all disks as microships instead of magnetic media spinning at high rates? Woudln't access be faster? and what happened to those 20TB flash chips reported here on
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
It's been 10+ years since I bought my last floppy drive. My new dual Athlon-MPs box is still using the floppy drive which I bought for my 286.
:)
I think I made my point: this damn thing is by far the most reliable hardware in computer history.
A lot of systems that used to boot *nix CDs fine,
gave up on me recently.
Seems that they are not compatible with ISOlinux (the
new CD bootloader system used by a lot of distro's).
Some of them succeed in booting if you try the second time.
These machines are not that old (P-III 450 and a 500)
The floppy has had almost not real use for a year or so. In fact Compact Flash should replace it. At least they don't die if you look at them wrong, like floppy's. $50.00 for 128MB disk seams like a really good idea to me for protable media. Especially if every new system had a CF and Smart memory reader built in.
- DenialX
Granted, things change very quickly in the tech buis. But the floppy is one of the most standard, easily used, and most reliable pieces of media you can buy. Sure it only hold 1.4 meg, which on today's scale is nothing, however, if you need a paper, script, small pics, its perfect. What your saying is when i need to type a paper, report, or anything small for school, or buisness, i either have to wait for a CD to burn, put it on a zip(which have crashed on me and lost info more times than i can count), or upload to an email, which i am way too impatient to wait for, especially the times i'm using a dial up, as oppose to the few seconds it takes to write to a floppy. I have carried the same floppy in my coat pocket for months at a time, used it many times, and still had no prob getting data from. And for this we should throw away a $10 piece of hardware, and the few cents it cost for the media, because someone at a computer manufacuter thinks it out of date, I THINK NOT!!! SAVE THE FLOPPY, SAVE THE FLOPPY, SAVE THE FLOPPY!!!, and thats all i have to say
Let's say you screwed up your installation of Windows and you need to re-install it.
No problem, stick in 1 floppy when booting up the computer, you get access to LAN, and install the Ghosted image of the operating system of your choice whether it be Windows 98, NT, 2000, etc...
And it takes about 15 minutes to install the hard drive image on your computer from the LAN only using a floppy disk to boot the computer.
After 15 minutes, I have a fully working computer installed Windows 2000, Office, and etc.... with all the latest fixes and stuff that was applied to the Ghosted image.
CD ROM? Not if they don't exist on the computer to keep people from installing software they don't need.
Floppies are a nice, cheap, easy to use, disposable media. They are a default bootable device. How else do you boot? Use a cdrom or cdrw? They are in many cases far cheaper, but no where nearly as convinent. CDR/RW drives don't react well to shock while writing, making them less than ideal for laptops. They are by no means standard so if you need to make a boot disk, you have to find a machine with a cdr/rw to make your disk. If only using cdr's you waste the disk if you do it wrong, making things more difficult when trying to boot expiermental custom configs.
Floppies are supported in hardware. No drivers are necessary. You plug it in and it works. The technology is so old and so well tested that it just always works. There are no arguments about protocol, or drivers or copy protection. If I'm fixing something, I KNOW the floppy will work. I don't know if a zip, cdrom, network or whatever else will work.
In school, floppies come in handy, particularly in larger schools. Imagine a cs class turning in a 1 meg zipped assignment (usually using Visual C++ these days (yes it sucks)). Now if a professor has 200-300 students in class (common in larger schools), email might work, but it could be a pain getting 300 meg/wk in your inbox isn't fun. Besides he's not likely to grade it himself. He has people to do that for him. Floppies are the easiest answer. Give him a floppy. You don't care if you ever see the floppy again, he can read it, his graders can read it, it's easy to deal with. CDR/RW drives are rare enough that requiring them could cause problems for students.
I prefer to have a floppy available even though I barely use it. It's an emergency recovery device. I would like to see something better, but it would have to be high capacity, non propritary, rock stable, have inexpensive media, be supported from hardware (no drivers needed), and in most every machine.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
There is one little difference though: I treat my hardware with respect. I bought the case Iomega made for it, and I always handled the disks and the drive very gently. I always went sure that the surface on which it stood was hard and flat. The price of a Jaz was too high for a student to handle it like a piece of crap. I think the Jaz drives were not entirely conceived as portable devices, but more as stationary ones, only moving the disks. I had disks drop from my desk, mostly withing the cases they came with and they never developed any problems.
As I said, you probably had to be lucky. I am glad I was.
For your information, the Zip I mentioned in my post was the internal SCSI model. It lasted 4 years but was only used once in a month or so. So moving around doesn't really explain the breakage of either.
Look, I woudn't buy Iomega now...I have seen their hardware degrade over the years (Back in the day, I used Bernouilli Drives...but noone remembers them). But as far as I know there is no such thing as a portable removable non-propritary drive. CD-RW just doesn't cut it for me. (Cheapo drive that came with OEM computer kills every CD-RW I put in it, CD-R works fine. My Mac handles CD-RWs fine...even the ones killed by my PC)
And I still have my floppies too. They are lifesavers. I do have some bootable CD-Roms I made myself, but strangely enough Adaptec CD-Creator (also came with the crappy OEM drive) makes boot-CD's by asking a boot-floppy! Urks... So I still need floppies to be able to create a bootable image in order to make bootable CD's. Kinda breaks the idea of removing the floppy drive from a PC.
Anyone knows how to create bootable CD's on the Mac (OS X). Never saw the option anywhere.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Hello.
...
Yes. There are boot CD, Zip, Jazz, Compact Flash, any thing else. But these "drives" have much defects:
1) These are not cheap. A floppy is under 10 dolars, while CD over 90,
2) More of these are not standard: Zip is not standard. It's a company product, without consensus.
3) More of these are not easy for write: for example burn CD is not a process of several seconds. Its process is about minutes. You can "emulate" write-now feature with UDF software, but it's not hardware.
I think that LS-150 and Magneto Optics could be the next standard. The only defect of magneto optics is that its capacity is variable and the drive itself has to suppport this (the 650Mb MO is not supported in 200Mb drive).
I think that 150 Mb is worthy option. So LS-150 is the best drive for be standard in the future.
for capturing images from logic analyzer and digital oscilloscope
Oh wait it already did. At least all of mine. A few weeks ago I needed one (for the first time in years, I swear)
just to make a bootdisk to make a bootdisk image from for a vmware demo.
I went through 40 of my old disks before I found one that actually formatted ok.
Did I mention I hate floppy disks?
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Metal fan filter 92 mm should suffice. You can buy an extension (or make one) to the atx hookup in the back that locks all the dongles inside a peice of lockable aluminium. You might be able to pick one up at some warehouse/construction/retail aftermarket computer manufacturers.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
And the PC is partway there. First, make the OS/BIOS/etc., not need floppies. I can flash my ASUS motherboard's BIOS without needing a DOS boot disk. Second, stop installing the floppy as an option (giving a discount as in Gateway). Third, for those few who absolutely need one, have a market of cheap USB portables.
No one PC manufacturer can have the balls to make the arbitrary decision to eliminate floppies, but Gateway's incentives are a step in the right direction.
I only use 2 disks:
the kernel and mfsroot disk to install FreeBSD.
Zip came close but failed. There's only on media which even still has the potential to cause a relief of the 3.5" Floppy.
The MiniDisk.
If Sony would have also made this a computer data storage media, we'd be looking at a new standard today.
From what I gather, MD is/was somewhat error prone. Ok. So they should have made some rocksolid checksum mechanisim. They even could have wasted 10 or 15 MB on it without losing anything. (MD has 128MB!!!)
But Sony had some psychological image problem barrier that kept them from establishing MD as a computer storage medium. So they could somehow put it on one level with the CD (which is Philips, remember?) That's a real shame. Now we've got yet another halfdead digital audio media and are still stuck with 3,5" - which is more expensive than MD! MD, as of today since it was established, is the best possible media when seeking the cheapest, physically smallest, phsycally durable, most widespread, digital RW storage.
Mark my word: Even know Sony could start with MD Data drives and it still would have a good chance for causing floppy-reliefing impact.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
1) They're too cheap to spend $15 on a hub and $20 on cables.
2) They're mystified about how computers network, and think that fairies live inside their computers at work, blowing pixie dust from computer to computer. Because, like it or not, even SMALL businesses have networks these days. I've
Well, shit, I can't even think of a #3... you can't hide behind that they can't wire their house, people run coax from room-to-room all the damn time, twisted-pair isn't any harder (and Cat-5 is cheaper than RG6). Quite frankly, may I suggest you move into a more technical line of work? A week doesn't go by that someone at work walks up to me asking about DSL routers, firewalls, 802.11 routers... near as I can tell we have a good 50+ home networks out of a 100-ish person company. And some of these people are NOT very computer literate - so if THEY can do it... I suggest that you get a supported card, rather than whine on Slashdot about how your hardware is unsupported, and therefore it's a valid excuse not for networking the system. Get a supported PC Card - christ, they're under $50 now. Snob? You understand networking and don't help others to get them setup? And I'm the SNOB?!
Christ, if my 72-year-old mother can setup a 10BaseT network, your cheap/ignorant coworker/friends can freakin' get one setup too. And I'm 200+ miles away -- and she only called ONCE.
Get a clue. Or at least help others to get one.
Apple is used to such things. I remember that back in 1986 I had to write my thesis on a Mac (one of the first models, just two floppy discs) with no arrow keys. Everytime I wanted to correct my text, I had to move my hand to the mouse, and positioning the cursor in the needed place.
ciao, .mau.
When I transfer files between my PCs at home, I either use SMB fileshares or FTP, because it's simple and it's quick. When I want to install an OS, it boots off CD. When I'm at work and I need to reimage someone's PC, the image is on the network, and the newer boxes boot off it.
But supposing that, on one of the PCs on a network, the network connection has stopped working, and you can't get to your files because they're on the network, and you can't get to the network config because of the system policy...
that'll be the day you realise that getting rid of the floppy drive was a bad idea.
All these alternatives are great, but $10 to save you the frustration has got to be worth it for me.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Apple's decision was based on three things:
1. The 3.5" was just too small. Most data files were more than a megabyte in size, and Apple's core user group had moved on.
2. There were too many competing replacement formats. Should they go with zip, SuperDisk, MiniDisc or the Olympus MO solution? Or should offices stick to Ethernet and be happy about it? "Best let the customer decide" was the mantra I remember hearing.
3. Jobs hated floppies for some strange reason. Well, not exactly floppies, but he hated (and still hates) legacy cruft in designs. He also hates noisy fans, but that's another story.
Despite the fact that Woz isn't playing any big role at Apple anymore, you can still see the Jobs/Woz split personality in the Mac lineup: the iMac/eMac line is designed for "fire and forget" operation, no user serviceable part inside (the Jobs philosophy). The Power Macs and xServes are designed for easy internal modification (the Woz philosophy). Leaving out the floppy was a typical Jobs solution (and why the iMac came before the B&W G3)
I use it if windows has wiped my MBR to get my linux partition back from M$'s clutches
I want an MD drive instead of a stupid floppy. They would be far more useful.
I as all you others has used a lot of floppy discs in its time. I probably still have a 5,25" lying around somewhere. When i went to university that was the std. medium so even trough the 3,5" single side disc was standard i still used the a "real floppy disc" for most things.
By '95 the 3,5" 1,44 disk was my std. medium but it did'nt hold enough files, so by '96 i bought my first syquest ez135 drive. 135MB on one disc was a big improvement but since nobody else used that i soon bought another external one for the parallel port.
That have served me well for year bringing work (etc) back and forth, but since the capacity is a bit limited i've also used removable harddiscs But the don't like the life in a bag on the back of a motorcycle...
I've also had a short experince with the LS-120 super floppy drive, but since i already had the syquest i dropped it again.
But now with the falling prices of flash ram my primary mean of moving files are a small 32mb usb flash drive. And when the files get to big i use a network connection or a CD-r/w enstead. I have 128MB in my digital camera and think about getting an adapter so I can use the compact flash card in the computer as well
BTW my notebook does not have a floppy drive but my main pc still do.
Anders Majland
I just installed OpenBSD from floppy yesterday for example, but maybe they could replace it by a burner in every PC but we need something thats rewritable fast.
From my time at Uni, everyone used zip disks. We did have lab's full of SGI's so no floppy. Most recent bios's let you boot off one anyway, so once you fill one with fdisk, P.M. or whatever you safe in any emergency.
I know when I last built a machine, I couldn't be bothered buying a floppy drive. Also, my PSU only had one mini power connecter, which went on the zip (scsi zip hence small power socket). I don't know how common this is on many PSU's...
The Floppy is convenient, it retains data much better
than a CD-R(W) (ever tried reading 10yr old
CD-R's ? flipped bits all over the place !)
The LS-120 is dead and ZIP drives aren't bootable.
First thing I bought for my iMac was a USB floppy
drive and I use it often for exchanging files
or making small backups.
This is the big one for me. If the only machines I had with floppy drives were my computers, I could imagine doing without them. But synthesizers and samplers also rely on floppy drives to get data in and out.
[TMB]
yes, but is it $10 useful? ...no.
I've found that the most headache-free way to dual boot my Win2k/Gentoo system is to put GRUB on a floppy. Floppy in = Linux Floppy out = Win2k (Q3 only) So I use mine almost daily. I wish CF cards would hurry up and take over though.
More handy than booting: use the floppy drive to install the NIC drivers before you are networked. Pain in the ass to burn a CD for that, especially if the system doesn't have a CD drive, or when I'm out of CDRs.
--
Barring incompetant wiring, it's faster and more reliable
That's the main issue here - incompetence. How many Joe Sixpacks do you know who has the slightest clue about Cat5/Cat6 cables, crossover/straight issues, hubs, switches, routers, BNC vs. RJ-45 (which looks a lot like an RJ-11 phone plug) and so on. I'd trust most /.'ers to know that (almost) by heart, but just about no-one else. I know that you don't need most of that for simple filesharing, but that's knowledge I've acquired simply because I'm a - well - geek. To the average guy the amount of cabling required for a standard PC (Macs are slightly better, but not much) is horrifying, and adding another cable won't help. It's not so much that ~5m of cross-linked Cat6 with RJ-45 plugs is hard to plug in, but if you THINK you have ZERO knowledge of it, you're not even going to try. At least if you belong to the ignorant masses outside places like this forum, and those are the EXACT same people whom we (while chuckling) tell to buy a Mac 'cause they're so damn easy to use...
I agree with the rest of your post though - good one.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Some investigation later led me to the floppy being the culprit. I have no idea if it was ME being dumb (possible), dodgy BIOS or broken hardware (drive/cable/whatever). In any event, I removed the floppy drive and it started working so much better.
Since then, I've stopped using floppies. I have four PCs at home; one is highly unstable (old P233; I suspect a dodgy CPU or MB) and unused, one is my server box, one is my desktop and the last is waiting to be rebuilt for stuff. None have Floppy drives (either due to being cannabilized or just because I removed the floppy) as they will all boot from CD and I can use ethernet/CD-R for file transfer.
This has caused me a problem precisely one time; a friend was visiting and had a floppy with some files he'd got from the internet (I dunno, silly pics, that kinda thing) which I couldn't view. Big deal; I might take it into work and copy it to my iPaq one of these days, probably not though.
Floppy refers to the technology used within the disc, not the outer casing. 3.5" discs, like 5.25" and 8" discs, use a flexible magnetic surface.
The LS120.. a 120meg Floppy disk.. the drives are backwards compatible with the 720k, 1.44meg, 2.88meg standards.
It's only about 50 bux Canadian... if they were sold in quantity.. I'm sure we'd get down to the 15$ Canadian that a normal floppy goes for.
120meg is a perfect size for today and tomorrow's needs in quick, cheap, EASY removable storage.
Lets face it.. even the brain dead can use a floppy!
-=-Ze End-=-
you're talking about 5.25" disks, it's impossible for a drive to spin a 3.5" disk inserted the wrong way round, besides it's more than a latch that stops a 3.5" disk from being inserted the wrong way round, there's a psot in the corner where the notch is that blocks incorrect insertions.
It would be very easy to create a small fat partition on you HD to exchange data. XP & linux are both fine with that.
I don't know about you, but I trust my 200GB of local storage to tape, not floppy. Backed up on a fixed schedule. Large enough, reliable enough, and no real concern about whether the file(s) I need can come back from the dead.
Reliability is the key here - floppies are not reliable. They are not a useful backup medium. They do not have a long shelf life, they are easily corrupted, and as a result they are annoying in this capacity unless you low-level format them every time you go to use them (which is a long, annoying process itself).
And as I tried to explain to you before, I'm getting sick, and tired, and seriously, seriously annoyed at people who think that floppies are useful for file sharing and archival storage, because sooner or later these ignorant SOBs end up on my doorstep, whining about how their floppy has developed bad sectors, and they really, really need that data on it. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. You could get a Mac floppy for $10? Really? Christ, I wish I knew you 5+ years ago, I could've made a killing on those, reselling them on eBay for a $50 to $90 dollar markup. I'd like to see you fit that cheap internal CD-R/-RW drive inside a slot- or tray-loading iMac. Or, for that matter, a breadbox-style (MicroATX or whatever the replacement is called) PC - which, like the iMac, use notebook-style slimline drives.
Of course, internal equipment isn't easy to share between two or more systems. And, similarly, installing an internal drive scares most people.
And for good reason. I know a woman who, somehow, managed to install one of those cheap IDE CD-RW drives with the IDE cable reversed. Keyed cable and all. I also know a man who decided to add 128MB of RAM to his system. When the DIMM wouldn't fit in the slot, he used a screwdriver to force it into the slot. Then his system went dead when he turned it on, because he had installed the DIMM backwards. (I was able to bring it back from the dead, of course)
External equipment is easier to share and easier to install. This ease of use and reliability comes at a price. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. TANSTAAFL. Learn it. Love it. It is the way the world works.
This is a true story...
I went to the local department store (Myer, in Brisbane, Australia) to buy 2.88Mb 3.5" (quad density, not high density) floppies for a DEC Alpha (Alphas had these since 1992, but they never caught on).
And the shop assistant told me they were the same as 1.44Mb floppies, you just turn them over and put them in the other way!
i don't see the floppy leaving our exsistance for another standerdized easily affordable rewritably media comes along.
i ng/5994.shtm l
i use floppies all the time. my personal reason for problem with cd's is when i want to transfer drivers(or small files) to a friend across the room, i quite literally throw a floppy. when i throw a cd as hard as possible and it hits the wall it is way more likely to shatter then a floppy.
i really wish thoose 2.88 floppy drives were more heavily used, i only know about 3 people besides myself who use them.
i don't know, the small usb 32 meg usp travel drives look promising i might get onw to play with, their just expensive. maybe i could attach to a foam glidder or something.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/comput
i've never built/owned a machine without a floppy, even ones that will just be a server that i'll never touch. i think i like the sense of security that i can boot off a floppy if i crash the os.
-the cowardly lion
I still use them. Quick, fast, read/write, universally bootable. Everything else comes after that. Don't get rid of apparently obsolete hardware. Remember ink pens that didn't write in low gravity conditions, remember the money spent by NASA --just because pencils were "obsolete"
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
I often get pricelists from manufacturers I deal with sent via snailmail on floppy's. I could not live without them and my floppy drive is worth much more than $10 to me.
Sindri Traustason.
> built by Winchester (the gun people).
Oh! The wisdom of the average slashdotter!
It was built by IBM you retard!
I'm glad you cleared that up. I thought the guy was standing on his head.
I use them to back up my 5.25" inch diskettes
Add I use my 8 inch diskettes to back up my 5.25
inch diskettes.
And I use my drum drive to back up my 8 inch diskettess.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
Floppy Drum. (tm)
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Have and old Fujitsu B112 and it has an external PCMCIA-card-based CD-rom that will not even eject without being initialized. I have to make those boot floppies somewhere =) So yes, there is a place for them floppy-drives too
That doesn't imply that net installs will be impossible, only that a new install method is being written. "boot-floppies" is the name of the old system (even though it also supported other devices), and doesn't refer to the concept of booting from a floppy disk.
Security is so tight here, that the only way to exchange data (that is not text) that everybody ends up using is the floppy drive.
My company would stop functioning if it wasn't for the floppy drive.
Ernest J.W. ter Kuile
I don't need nor have a CDROM drive in my Computer
so the FLoppy is the only way to boot up for
Installation and then going to net....
Who needs CDROMs anyway?
A trainer at work calls them stiffies.
I built a desktop machine last summer and I put a 250mb zip drive in, instead of the floppy drive. Why? Simple, I wanted one so that I could easily take files back and forth to the labs at school and it's also very convenient rewritable storage whichhas more space and greater reliability than the current floppy disks. Not to mention: I use CDs as boot disks, I use CDs for software installation...heck I use CDs for excess storage! Wait...I never use floppy disks! :-)
Derek Greene
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) allows businesses to submit their annual reports of payroll withholding on 'magnetic media'. Last year the list included floppies and an array of tape (including 9 track!). This year I dutifully pulled out the external floppy for my notebook and blew off the dust as it hadn't been used since last year end. I had to go and BUY some disks (I think my wife got tired of the collection of AOL recycling). Then as I was filling out the form, discovered that they finally accept CD-ROM. Oh well, it seems a waste to send a 24kb file on CD, but the damn floppies were more expensive than blank CDR's (AUD$9.00 for a box of 10) as the local shop only had Sony!
My $0.05 (AUD - we don't have pennies any more)
a document via sneaker net (for printing onto say camera ready paper at Kinko's..etc) ...I don't use the floppy drive.
I suppose I could get away with not having one all together if I made a boot CD and every computer I was going to deal with had a CD/RW drive that got along with each other.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
A few digital cameras use floppies to store images. It might not be as great as plugging your camera into your usb port, but then again, when the folder you downloaded those pics into is gone, you'd still have the floppies with the original pictures on them. I also find it easier to store floppies than rolls of negatives. You can usually find a floppy disk holder for dirt cheap at any local compusa, or even a dirt mall. They've got uses, enough for me to pay the $10 to order one everytime I build a new comp. I have yet to hear someone say, "I don't need a floppy" when pricing a system either.
"I lost my genitals in a fire"
I use them as boot floppies for my FreeBSD boxen. For reasons unknown to me, the ISP I work at always runs out of them, too. I think the $ales guys use them to "back up" their proposals.
"The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (09 FEB 02)"
stiffy
<storage, jargon> (University of Lowell, Massachusetts) A
3.5-inch microfloppy, so called because their jackets are
more rigid than those of the 5.25-inch and the (obsolete)
8-inch floppy disk. Elsewhere this might be called a
"firmy".
Jargon File
(1994-11-03)
He saw some dirty arabs and fired. Too bad it was just some friendly kurds, BBC reporters and his fellow cowboys.
I find floppies very convenient and useful for backing up small files (e.g. C++ source files, various documents) that I am working on and which, since they are constantly changing, are inappropriate for CD-ROM storage. They are also good for transporting such files between systems.
So I might write an HTML file about some astronomical topic on mys system at home and carry it to the astronomy club's system on a floppy.
Moreover, floppies lack the security encryption nonsense that DVDs have, and which is the reason I absolutely refuse to buy DVD hardware. So nobody can tell me what I can or cannot record, how many times I can read it, or any other such crap.
--- Brian
Still have to have them to infect there machines with viruses brought from there home.
I see that everybody is talking about alternatives, but why is it that manufacturers are not comming out with a replacement if they absolutly want to get rid of this floppy drive?
Thay had changed from 81/4 inch disk to 720K 3.5 inch and then to 1.44MG 3.5 inch disk. Seeing where the thechnlogy as got since their last "upgrade", they could probably release 100mb floppy at the same price they actually sell them.
And they could, at the same time, upgrade their interface if it bothers them so much, I dunno, make it work with the USB2 port.
I'd rather be sailing...
I think you are mistaken there. AFAIK it is hardware write protection. I remember an April's fools joke from the german c't Magazine where they said it could be overridden by software and the program would print "APRIL APRIL" if you tried it :-)
So unless you can show me this program, I believe this is a myth.
Tobias
Computers are a tool for my business: designing/maintaining websites. Clients come to me with files on every thinkable medium including floppies. And how about all those Mavica digital camera owners? I know the industry takes great pride in advancment, but we need to have a few lasting standards and the floppy is one of them.
Press to test... Release to detonate...
since there are over a 1000 posts, sorry if this is repeated.. i use a floppy for a mini distribution called toms [toms.net]. its fun to play around with. also linuxrouter [linuxrouter.org] is another distro that fits on a floppy and as the name implies is great as a router.
I write code.
Isn't it much more significant that the spindel is only visible on one side of the disk, with the opposite side being solid plastic?
Apple dropped support in MacOS 8.x for 800k disks. Sure, you could add a driver later to make them work, but one of the real issues was that the older format was GCR encoded, which used a variable speed based on the track being accessed. IBM formatted disks, however, have always been MFM, which is a constant speed regardless of the track being accessed. Thus, my question why Microsoft would drop support.
Hey, XP is large enough, I'd rather spend the extra 500k (being generous) of driver support to allow 720k disks to be formatted than to have it removed because someone wanted to "move forward".
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
...is just precisely the fact that it's a $10 part. I mean, for the price of a couple of beers you can insure yourself against the increasingly unlikely (but still not nil) possibility that someone will hand you something useful on a floppy. Why go without, even if it is an increasingly irrelevant legacy part?
Heh. I remember when you could fit a minimal install of the os on one floppy with room for utilities.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
I used to work in a shop that had a top-secret security protected area. Obviously, we could not connect the secure network with the un-secure network.
But there was a process where we could bring floppies into the secure area to transfer a few small files, then destroy the floppies.
Made sense.
... at about the same time we get the Paperless Restroom!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Drivers!
;)
How many times has anyone installed something on a newish system, and had to have a driver disk on floppy? Oh, sure, there are Lots of new pieces of hardware that have HUGE drivers (NVidia, ATI, Creative Labs...) but most of the time (Modems, NICs etc) the drivers are small enough to fit on a handy-dandy HD floppy.
Also mentioned, are ROM updates and Boot Disks.
No technician worth his Tweaker would be without as assortment of 'em! Just about EVERY OS out there has Some sort of Boot disk on an HD Floppy!
It would be nice to see a downward compatible standard take hold, but that is realy unlikely. Imation had the right idea. New media, and access/use of the older stuff, too. Shame they didn't have a chance with IOmega flooding the market with those gawd-awful ZIP disks! They are just plain EVIL! (IMNSHO)
Anyone else feel the industry/common consumer needs an "Omni-Drive" that'll swallow and use just about any of the older media? I know, I know, "lay off the caffene, and cash that reality cheque"...
I'll just shut up now
Of course, another thing we should consider is that as more people get broadband (or just upgrade their modems to 56k), sticking the files on an FTP site or emailing them to yourself are sometimes better options than ANY removable medium.
grep -ri 'should work'
Boot disks.. for networks, ghost, linux, old machines... ( there are a LOT of old machines out there people .. )
Moving a single document around.. Rather time consuming to deal with a cd..
My laptop doesnt have a cdrom.... and i bet a lot of others dont either..
Cheaper...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I haven't used my floppy in I don't know how long. I have remember that one time this year I was searching franticaly for a floppy disk but only because my laptop was currently out of commision and I was forced to use the gateway desktops in the lab. I've never once used the removeable floppy that my laptop came with. It's much easier in my opinion, if I need to transfer files (which are more often than not larger than a couple floppys) to hook it up to my desktop or what not with a PP net. I wish they would get rid of floppys, make something usefull like DVD or CDRW drives standard (burn proof of course.)
Did you notice everytime you started talking I began to vomit.
Thanks to m$'s xp thing not letting you get into dos to fix your mbr, m$ has effectively ensured the life of the 3.5" diskette for a while.
"2. Reliability. Just yesterday I successfully transferred data from 18-year old 5.25" 140k disks (Apple //c!) without a hitch. But 3.5" 1.44MB disks are notoriously error-prone."
That 18-year old disk was probably manufactured much less cheaply than your typical modern 3.5" disk. I still use floppies, but they're so cheap and unreliable I don't trust them past a few months or 2-3 read-write cycles, whichever is less.
Freedom: "I won't!"
BOOT CD
Ok, let's say you have a new (or freshly formatted) computer. You're trying to get it on your network, but the NIC driver is not in the default list, so you have to download the driver (a file less than 1MB in size) onto a computer already up and running then transfer that driver to the new computer. How ya gonna do that? CD? Sure that'll work, but it's a bit overkill. Floppy is the answer. For 10$ it's a good thing to have, comes in handy, and if you don't use it think of it like insurance.
I would have said no, if I hadn't recently had the
pleasure of installing Windows XP on a system
using one of the newer Promise IDE RAID cards.
Without a floppy this is impossible (and I did
try), as Windows Setup will ONLY read from the A:
drive for the 'additional driver' disk. And it's
kinda hard to install an OS if it can't see your
hard disk(s).
I would expect the same goes for Linux on a system
with a disk setup that the installer's kernel has
no support for.
When all other methods of communication fail, try words.
I think the first time I realized that the floppy was truly falling into obscurity was when a friend of mine gave me his phone number written on a yellow 3.5" disk. Floppy as PostIt... hmm..
Our Network God created a great boot disk, dubbed a "Magic Boot Disk". Basically a Win 9x boot with a nice menu system, and drivers for every NIC in the company. I modified it for our home Novell Network, and it's great for setting up PC's that have blank HD's. It uses a directory on the novell server to keep the larger apps on (Ghost, etc...). Sure, it could be done on a CD, I've done it... but good luck using it on an IBM THinkpad 760... can't boot from the CD on one of those...
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
I needed one to reinstall a system on a computer less than a year old that would not boot from the CD-ROM drive. I use them to save time on boot ups on dual boot machines that are usually booted to one system but occasionally need to use another OS. When the iMac came out, the first thing I did to make it useful, after adding a serial port to the mezzine slot, was get an external floppy drive. The floppy may be on it's way out. but it will still be around until no one will accept todays hardware as a charitble donation.
Yep. I took all my old Zips and burned them onto CDs. I still have about 30 Zips and just use a few for short term backups when I dont feel like buring a CD-RW. Or for sneaker net'ing them to another Mac in the same room. I also email files to my self.
I leave the drive hooked up because I get Zip disks every day from people.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
I still use my floppy drive to update the bios on my computers. If it were not for the floppy then a bios update would not be possible.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
I like floppies because:
1) At work, we have a lot of machines where no one bothered to spring for a cdrom drive. So we can just pop in an install floppy and install over the net.
2) At home, I have a DSL connection (with a DSL router to get around the stupid PPPoE problem) and no cdrom burner. So I can just download a floppy of data and install over the net again.
Its a great pity that the ZIP technology is not as reliable as the three and one half inch floppy:
remember this?
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
I agree! Sometimes I want to copy stuff between home & work. My work PC doesn't have a Zip drive. Neither computer has a CD-burner. And my work e-mail is restricted for internal use only (and it's proxy server blocks webmail). Floppies are my only option!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
the 3.5" is good for:
Sony Mavica "film"
NFS installing Linux
Clandestine install of Linux at work
Reclaiming Linux install after reloading Windows
However, the 3.5 has been removed from all the Sun boxes and my file server...
ah yes, imagine buying new hardware with a nice CF card inside yeilding the drivers instead of a floppy
No, I can't ... for a variety of reasons. And although I doubt that I can convince you otherwise, it is not a myth.
...) it was able to "override" the copy protection slider on the disk. This was ... 7 or 8 years ago or so ...
With that being said, it may have taken advantage of certain drives not "honoring" the write protection slider on the disk and may not have been effective on every machine, but on the two machines I tried it on (because I didn't believe it either
Floppies are cheap or free and just the right size, to store your favorite Enlightenment and Gtk theme. untill I can buy a 3.5 inch scratch proof Re-write 200x150x400 BlueLight CDROM for $50 and media for $0.10, I'll stick with my floppies. [ No, I Dont think floppies compaire to my "Dream Drive" but wouldn't it be cool to have one, and it would fit in your shit pocket ;P ]
Need help finding the flow? http://www.myspace.com/naturalismandbalance
IBM used to make 2.88M drives that could be tortured to write 4M. It seams that there must be some technology advanced to write at least twice more these days. A drive that can write, say, 8M to existing floppies and perhaps more on new ones with the same form factor will be extemely useful. The problem with CF cards is that they are easy to loose and also too expensive for me to just give you one with something and forget about it. CD-RW comes close but has annoying problems (need a carrying case, slow to write small amounts of data, expensive drives, uncertain lifetime).
Standard disclaimer applies, blah, blah, blah...
I have a Flashpath adapter for the floppy drive. I originally bought it for the digital camera and have since used it for backing up data with high density SmartMedia cards (64MB, 128MB, etc). It has replaced my HP T1000 tape drive which Windoze somehow rendered inoperative by stealing a precious interrupt.
Tapes are a pain... Data transfer between WINNT/2K and WIN31/95/98 is impossible, neither reads the other formats.
All I need is the Flashpath drivers installed on any PC and I can read/write the contents of a SmartMedia card just like a standard floppy, which means that a simple DOS command line "XCOPY/s/m *.* a:" backs up all data ready for archiving. Flashpath provides drivers for WIN31, WIN95/95, WINNT, WIN2K, and even Mac. Drivers and DOS commands take up a lot less disk space than fancy backup GUIs. Ah, the power of a single DOS command...
Faster access than a tape, better data retention than most media, works on most popular OS, and no stupid proprietary format to worry about. Floppy drives are everywhere, but try and find a machine with a tape drive installed...
For those PCs not online or for data that is too sensitive to transfer over a network, it's the ideal data transfer tool. This is also perfect when I complete the transition from PC to Mac.
That floppy drive is the single most useful thing in my computer. The PC manufacturers greatly underestimate its value.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
At the long-defunct National Computer Conference maybe 20 years ago, there was a storage vendor giving away badges that said "Floppy now, hard later". As an aside, this was the show where Xerox introduced their Star system, forerunner to Lisa, forerunner to Mac. It's a terrible thing to be an old crock.
It is always important to use standards. Example: The area where I live got dsl a year ago. A friend of mine started to build his network with usb. We used a normal ethernet to build our network. Guess who has less problems today running servers behind the router?
:(
It's the same with floppies: It may be 20 years old and it can only store 1,44 MB. But it is a standard and used my millions of people while zip, jaz etc are still only used by a minority. And 1,44 MB is not much, but it is enough for the things I need it for: boot disks and sometimes transferring small files. I don't need a 100 MB disk to boot my linux system. And I can't understand people who say floppy is dead and want to use cdroms instead, usb2.0 if possible
Hmmm... I think it was 1995 when I formated and reinstalled the OS on my Apple PowerBook without any media or wires on a dare.
:) I haven't used a floppy for years on Mac's, Sun's, or SGI's. Only busted x86 hardware.
How did I do it: Created a RAM disk. Built a minimal OS and booted from the RAM disk. Formated my drive. Then installed OS from another computer over IR.
If you can get your x86 architecture to improve with a little R&D, hours wasted on BIOS, device, and OS conflicts might just get a little better.
There are several reasons for manufactures to keep the floppy. I see it maybe getting close to getting rid of them, but it will never happen. My teachers still require me to print my essays and everything instead of e-mail.
Sony Vaio and Compaq iPaq are 2 good reasons to keep the floppy. I have to connect an external USB floppy to the Sony Vaio PCG-C1VN (to the only USB port) to get it to boot. God know how to make a bootable CD for the external PCMCIA CD-ROM drive. I have yet to find drivers for it. And the iPaqs. Man, I like bootable CD-ROMs, but they don't even have those!
It's going to cost me about $1 for the CD, and I will never be able to use it again (though I would certainly have a few more sessions available). On the other hand, I have dozens of floppies that I can use over and over and over. In fact, I have one a mere six inches from my left hand. The nearest blank CD is on the other side of the building.
For long term data storage, the CD is best. For good old classic sneaker net, nothing beats a floppy.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I still use the floppy disks. The are goot DOS boot disks and for Text docs and Money files, SO THERE!!!!
There IS an alternative for such uses - I'm holding one in my hand right now. Try any one of the USB "pen drives". Anything from 8 MB to 128 MB (or more) can be bought on a drive the size of your thumb. It plugs into the USB port and most are compatible, without drivers, with Windows 2000, XP, Mac, and Linux (recent versions with USB of course). Check out eBay, pricewatch.com or any of the other sites selling these devices for prices.
If you absolutely need a floppy, external USB floppies are cheap and plentiful. And I say this as someone who bought one three years ago and has used it twice - both times for writing a set of DOS 6.22 floppies (disk images are fun).
You used the usb floppy drive to write boot floppies. Did you possibly use those floppies in a floppy drive to boot a PC? Was it the external USB floppy drive?
You're really stupid.
I still use a floppy drive to upload pictures from my Sony FD71 digital camera.
"Politicians always tell the truth, when they're calling each other liars."
Have a couple actually. rather cool and some really big hard drive inners that i like to wear as a hat... it looks like im in an old painting
the highest level of communication coming out of it is a floppy drive : i can sneakernet it tocommunicate with everything.
i may not havem uch say...but i say, we should keep the floppy around at least a little longer...for compatibility's sake.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I stopped using floppies when my comnputer wouldn't let me install it on my new computer. So i just got a cd rw and my life has been better ever since.
No size limits(well up 700mb) and its a loooooot faster
And the disk only held 360K
I can't believe everyone's missing the obvious.
:D) We need Dell to include it. We need HPaq to include it. We need the whitebox manufacturers to include it. We need Intel to drop the FDC on all their motherboards!
There's a technology that's been waiting in the wings to replace floppies for quite some time now. It's widely used in Europe, and not so much in the US, but it's use is growing.
It's the smart card, and readers are widely available; so much that Gateway could offer motherboards sans floppy controller, and computers sans floppy drive, and throw in a smart card reader, and they wouldn't have a penny extra in costs.
These are what I want to see ubiquitous. If there's a fast, portable way for people to carry around data, then web terminals become so much easier. Imagine having a SIM card, AmEx card, ATM card, and PC smart card in one, with all your account data. You bring it to a store, have money automatically deducted from your account (no interest); you throw it in your cellphone, make a call, take it out, or if you don't want to bring your cellphone, you throw it in a payphone and do the same; you go to that same payphone booth, throw in the card, have your web homepage automatically come up, be able to run all your applications. All from one little card.
It's easily possible, but only if smart cards become as common as 3.5 floppy drives are now. Sun has the foresight to include them in all its workstations, but that doesn't help us out, now does it? (Even if my next desktop will be a SPARC.