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?"

Comments

BOOT DISK

[shaldannon]

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)...

Re:BOOT DISK

[MattCohn.com]

Please mod parent up.

This is one of the few times I would think I ever realy used a floppy. While I still use them ocasionaly to transfer files instead of FTP, when needing a boot disk these solutions don't work.

And am I the only one with about 120 floppies sitting in my computer room in boxes? Including the boot disks for Windows versions 95 - XP?

Re:BOOT DISK

[AndyChrist]

Yeah, and most surviving american cars from the 70s and 80s run great, too. Doesn't mean the vast majority weren't pieces of crap with serious quality control problems.

Not all Iomega drives fail/failed, but enough have that anyone who has used many, or knows more than a handful of people who have, is likely to know at least one person who had a bad drive, and is likely to have encountered numerous bad disks.

I've never come across a bad Jaz drive, but I HAVE had a bad disk.

BTW, GOOD RIDDANCE to floppies. I wouldn't be saying that, but for the fact that the quality of the media has been crap for the last 6 years or more. To my knowledge you simply cannot buy good floppies (that is to say, floppies you can actually trust with your data) anymore.

I worked in a few university computer labs, and not a week went by someone didn't lose a paper (or ALL of their papers for that semester) to a bad floppy disk...and that was just in the hours I was working.

I'd sooner trust my data to a stack of post-it notes than a floppy disk. Older disks lasted for years...All (all I've checked, anyhow) my 20 year old apple disks which are still flawless, as are my 8 year old 1.44s. Disks I got more recently, I'd trust for maybe a week.

Used to be people would reuse AOL or Prodigy floppies...people would joke about how bad they were, how unreliable. And they were. Thing is, they were no less reliable than the average floppy is today.

Floppies turned to crap when? When they got cheap.

CDRs are getting really cheap now. What do you think is happening?

A few years ago, I never saw the aluminum flaking right off of CDs which hadn't been abused. I have seen this in the past year.

Sony Mavica

[Kraegar]

I use a Sony Mavica digital camera - it saves all its pictures directly to 3.5" floppy in JPEG format. Floppies are great for storing pictures, because they're so damned cheap. Sure, I can only get between 4 and 8 pictures of decent resolution (1024x768 or above). But when you can drive over to the nearest best buy and get a package of 100 floppies for $2.50 after rebate, it's worth it.

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.

but it's not a real hardware selection read/write

[wmoore]

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 ...

Re:Compact Flash

[Honig the Apothecary]

Some of the newer laptops (IBM and Toshiba so far) I have worked on have CF readers built in. It makes it super handy when you need that 3.5 Meg USB Floppy driver so you can read a file off the floppy drive.

Some form of Memory card will replace the floppy. One thing that CF has going for it, is that it has an IDE Interface built into the card hence, its bootable with the proper reader built into the system. Here is the google link to IDE Compact Flash readers. They could be pretty close cost wise too, especially if they remove the slow floppy controller from the motherboards in the not too distant future.

Re:GPG

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you are incorrect. On the PC it is a software-controlled toggle, that is to say, the software reads the status of the beam or switch trying to pass through the hole, and decides if you can read or write to the disk.

This is fairly easily overridden if you access the ports directly (in and out asm commands) rather than go through the BIOS or a device driver in Windows. Or patch the device driver to suit.

I remember in my old DOS days a friend of a guy I used to work with wrote a program to do just that. He demoed it to us once; I was pretty impressed.

Mt. Rainier drives should fit the bill

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Compact Flash

[Doppler00]

Actually, any laptop with a PCMCIA (PC Card) slot, which is basically all laptops, can read CF cards with a $15 adapter. I would suspect that floppy disks will disapear in laptops first before the desktop market, as the space is more precious.

Re:Along with it...

[kravlor]

Keep in mind that if you're creating your own custom-built interfaces, it's *much easier* to rig them for serial/parallel communication, rather than running through Firewire or USB. Besides, how else are we supposed to play Doom via SS20? IPX? ;)

Re:CD-RW too hard to use

[Stormie]

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".

It has changed in MacOS X.

"Winchester" disks

[Accidental Angel]

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.