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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?"
Is there a better removable RW medium for a GPG keyring?
I find that 2 floppy disks work great for installing Debian over the 'net.
~.Evanrude
The funniest part about that is it's actually usefull.
You can boot from a CDROM and install the mscdex files to a DOS system and reboot and access the CDROM normally...
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
Better yet, why not CompactFlash?
8M CF cards are cheap, and would make great boot disks with more than enough room for a good set of utilities.
256M CF cards aren't as cheap, but you can fit a pretty decent OS on one, or most of a compressed boot partition.
(FWIW, yeah, I still have my 1.44M floppy. Haven't used it in ages, but it's nice to know it's there Just In Case. I can't be bothered with a bootable CD-ROM on a 'doze box, but I've got floppies with real-mode DOS drivers that'll let me load what I need from any CD-ROM, bootable or not.)
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)
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
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
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
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 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?
I have my original Windows 3.1 and 3.11 disks on floppy as well as MSDos 5.0 through 6.22. Not sure WHY I still have them, but I do. I think there's an old version of PowerBuilder around, as well as the original Doom, and if I looked hard enough, I could probably find some others.
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.
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.
xD and SmartMedia are neat, but I'd rather get Compact Flash. CF has the controller built into the card while the other two have the controller on the device. If the controller goes bad, with CF you just get a new CF card. With the other two, you have to replace the gadget (which can be expensive if that gadget is an $800 digital camera).
Having the controller on the device (xD and SM) means you have set card capacities you can use. For example, the Olympus C3030 and C4040 cameras can use up to 128MB SmartMedia cards. If someone makes a 256MB SM card, the cameras cannot use them. With CF, since the controller is on the card, if a manufacturer produces a large capacity card, it should work in any CF compliant device with no problems.
Actually, on a 'doze box, at least for me, it ain't.
1) Win9x install CD != any way to FDISK or third-party-partitioning-utility a brand-new drive safely. (Granted, not something you do everyday, but something you probably do want to do if you're using it as an emergency boot disk. Maybe you just had an emergency :-)
2) Win9x install CD == over-1h install time for a "virgin" install". Nuff said.
3) WinAnything install CD == another 20-60 minutes going through the checklist to un-dumb-down the "virgin" install ("HELL YES, I want to see file extensions and full path names, you w33nb@gz!"), regedits to disable dumb things like warning me that I'm "low" on disk space with 100M left on a 1G boot/OS partition, setting X-Follows-Mouse activation, etc.
4) Win9x install CD != third-party video/audio/other-hardware drivers. (Granted, once you do this, you need one disk image per box)
5) WinAnything install CD != basic set of appz - Nutscrape/Mozilla, M$Orifice, MP3/DiVX players of choice, SysInternals utilities, M$ PowerTools, etc.
6) WinAnything install CD != however many twisty mazes of service packs you want installed, and in the correct order.
7) AnyOtherOperatingSystem: "dd" is a heck of a lot easier to use anyways :)
Disk images rule. Install disks drool :)
I'll grant that everything depends on the quality of the disk image -- doing it yourself gives you a recovery to a known cruft-free point on your boot (or windoze) partition without disturbing the data (or other OSses) sitting on other partitions.
Using a vendor-supplied "recovery CD" as a disk image, of course, is a whole different story, and sucks supermassive black holes through buckytubes. Then again, I don't buy from brand-name vendors for precisely that reason.
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!
I filled out the form in the back of the Windows 98 booklet and sent it in to Microsoft so that they sent me the 3-1/2" floppy version of Windows 98. It cost about $10 to do so, and they screwed up at their end and sent two copies by mistake.
But, then, I also sent in the form when I got Windows 95 and ordered the 5-1/4" floppy version. It's an interesting version of Windows 95 in that it does not prompt for a CD key, or 'fingerprint' the diskettes like the 3-1/2" version. It's also extremely primative, the first version of Windows 95, that didn't include Internet Explorer. The floppies can all be copied over to a directory on a CD to make the 'free' version of Windows 95 that has no 'tracable numbering', CD key, or fingerprinting.
I use both Linux and WinXP on the same machine, and occasionally I want to transfer data between the two. However, since WinXP uses NTFS and Linux cannot write to NTFS, it's fairly one-way; that is why I use floppies on the machine. I could also use CD-Rs, but it's really a waste to do that. As for CD-RWs, there is a nice piece of software for Windows called DirectCD that lets me use it as if it were a true random access media, but I don't know of any equivalents for Linux. Also, CD-RWs have a limited number of writes, too, just a hell of a lot more than a CD-R. Personally, I wish someone would just invent a bigger piece of magnetic media, like ZIP or LS-120, and then put it into public domain or release the specs and let others clone it so we wouldn't have this problem.
The nice thing about floppies is that until Macs started coming without them, they were universal on personal computers. We should come up with a replacement before we throw the old one away.
BTW, when I lived in Hungary (about 1 year behind the US in technology back then), my 386 had a 5.25 in floppy drive as well as a 3.5 in stiffy drive. 5.25s were a lot cheaper, and when I moved here, I was saddened that I couldn't use a lot of my old software because no computers had 5.25 in drives.
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/)
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)
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.
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.