Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
I using mine as an apache web server.
/. article :-)
I would post the link but I really think it deserves its own
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!
Murphy's law of floppy drives-
Once you get rid of your floppy drive, within three days you will have dire need of it.
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!
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.
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)
I find that 2 floppy disks work great for installing Debian over the 'net.
~.Evanrude
Hint to vendors: Provide tools that run under Linux, or provide bootable CD images PLEASE!
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!
what about CD-RWs for the same purposes?
I was in a great trouble when my floppy disks refused to read after backup...
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.
That's a really high bitrate you're using for your mp3's. Don't you think that 39,320 kbit/sec is a little high? I mean even CDs use only approximately 1,200 kbits/sec.
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.
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.
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
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)
and you can eject it with the touch of a button (risking a corrupt fs if it is mounted rw though, but at least you can eject the floppy and take it with you when you are not siting at the computer).
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
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
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!
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.)
It's important, though, that external drives remain available, so that old media can be read when necessary.
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.
--
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.
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
The reason that everybody calls them 1.44 is because they hold 1440 (base-2) kbytes, then people shorten this by performing a base-10 division to get 1.44. This mixing of a base-2 (1024) division followed by base-10 is just... weird.
This would be more useful if everyone had one, and I would certainly grin holding a floppy with 32 megs of stuff on it. ;)
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...
...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"
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
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?
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
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)
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.
I think programming classes are moving toward turning source online now. The system I'm familiar will even tell you if the code compiles or not when you submit it.
I use boot floppies too but I suppose its just a matter of time until dealing with CD-RWs is practical enough as to make disks obsolete for almost everything they are used for. As long as I have to deal with mkisofs and cdrecord every time I want to master a CD I'll go with floppies though.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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 ...
Around here (College Station, Texas) blank CDRs cost less than floppy discs, per unit. Now admittedly you can only write them once, but I also like to keep around (read: not change) my obsd boot floppies for archival purposes. To install (or in my case recently, upgrade) my OpenBSD box, I downloaded the floppy image and the base installation (.tgz files) and burned them to a CD. Booted the box and finished the entire process in under 5 minutes, and now I've got a bootable disc for future use.
http://www.nu2.nu/ is a great reference for making more advanced bootable CDs, including having multiple floppy images on one CD and a menu to choose between them. Works great with my OpenBSD box. You can have all three of the i386 boot images on one CD, as well as a custom boot floopy and damn near anything else you could want. I used this process to build a CD combining 3 different Windows flavors onto one CD for easy installation (well, back when I had a job at least!). One CD could install Windows 2000, Windows 98 or Windows NT4, and was preferable to a network installation if we needed to do it during the day--we had very heavy network usage.
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
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.
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
...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
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.
...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....
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.
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
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 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).
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.
This page is full of anecdotes of stupid things people did with their floppy drives.
Now thoses USB keychain ROM/RAM/flash memory units, those are almost ideal for storing PGP/GPG keys. What beter place for your computer keys than on your keychain? How much simpler than that can you get for bringing new PGP/GPG users up to speed on the importance of keys and where to keep them? People already know how their house/car/mail keys work. Crypo keys are just an extension of that.
for the crypto keys, the 3.5" is king until those USB keys mature and catch on. For other uses, your USM keychain results will vary.
Unless personal magnetic swipe cards catch on quickly. That may not happen, simply becuase the credit card industry may not want that kind of hardware widespread.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
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?
you can control whether or not it is read or read/write by a hardware toggle.
I'm not so sure this is true. According to a number of my friends, while there is a hardware R/RW selection switch, the functionality is still controlled by software.
That means that a kernel could be hacked in such a way that your keys could be modified.
The above was demonstrated by the ability of several viruses to infect write protected floppes inserted into an already infected system.
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
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'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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
All the computers have zip drives, but no one uses it.
That's because a zip disk costs $10. Floppies are basically free.
The middle mind speaks!
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!!"
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
How come ZIP disks never caught on?
Because zip disks cost $10.
The middle mind speaks!
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
... a universally accepted, cross-platform, dirt-cheap, pocket-sized, rewritable storage medium? Beats me.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
What they don't know is that the floopy disk is stored in my safety deposit box at the bank, and the actual private key is on multiple encrypted loopback devices. Oops. I shouldn't have said that. Now I have to bury the disk behind the barn. I shouldn't have said that either.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
>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!
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)
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
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
You are correct, I should have written CD-R not CD-RW.
A bios level Floppy <-> Compact Flash translator.
Transparent to the OS... ?
Possible?
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.
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.
At my high school, each user gets approximately 2 gigs of space on the central server. For 1200 students, that's 2400 GB of storage they've got somewhere...
I trust it implicitly. It's an easy way to share files with my friends at school (gave my best friend my login which he used to leave papers for me to proof read for him, trade notes across different classrooms, etc.) The only problem was when I was logged in during a server failure and my account glitched, and it crosslinked my share with another kid's share, somehow literally merging our files...one of my c++ programs had my code at the beginning and his code at the end, and a word doc appeared with two different topics in it.
I haven't used floppies since I got the share space--floppies are stolen by cheat-hungry classmates, break, are corrupted, etc.
They went with floppy because there were a bunch of suckers out there who were easily sold on the idea of storing photos on floppies instead of obviously much superior flash technologies so they wouldn't have to deal with card readers, USB, etc. Of course, these people didn't think much about how few images you can fit in 1.44MB, or compare prices with other brands to see how much better a camera they could get from Olympus or Canon or Nikon or Kodak.
Sony has a lot of customers that will buy just about anything Sony sticks its name on.
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?
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.
3.5" floppy disks in digital cameras were a bad idea... my camera produces pics that are about a meg (on average) and that's not even on the 'superfine' compression. Floppy would store one pic for me... whereas my CF card is about 1/9 the size and stores a couple hundred images. CompactFlash is by far superior...
Yes, booting to a ZIP is possible, I've done it.
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
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.
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.
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"
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.
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
Not true. Floppies are so unreliable, that you have a less than 50% chance of really being able to recover the data.
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...)
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
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!
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
You sir, are the proud parent of either:
;-)
A. A future engineer
B. A future pr0n star
In either case, congratulations.
-MB-
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.
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.
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).
Where do you get quality CD-Rs for free? I have never seen such a thing anywhere ... (I am not in the USA though.)
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
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
What!? I was costco a couple of weeks ago and an enormous stock of boxed floppies (100 per box) next to the CD-R/Rws. There's must've been at least 1000 boxes total.
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.
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.'"
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?
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/
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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 ;-)
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 want an MD drive instead of a stupid floppy. They would be far more useful.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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
Right, MagicGate is the equivalent of the SD in the Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard area. I stand corrected. :)
USB keyring storage... works easier than a floppy, more secure and more convienent.
I use one every day. (along with my Ibutton) and every OS that is current supports it without special drivers that aren't already a part of the OS.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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...
Ah I see ... your comments about them relying on people losing the receipt or forgetting about the rebate make sense. Sending snail mail these days low on my list of priorities. The last time I did it was 7 months ago for the rebate on my plextor CD-Rw. Before that, the last time was ... sending in university application correspondence.
Here in Canada, the last time we got CD-R discs the price was CDN$30 for a 50disc Fujifilm spindle. But I have never seen a rebate equal to the price of the discs.
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'
"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!"
Where in Raleigh-Durham? I live in northeast Raleigh and work downtown.....been in the area a couple years....maybe I haven't been observant.
:}
Feel free to drop me a message next time you see a special...
What is your Slash Rating?
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 have to disagree with this somewhat.
I have an original SCSI Zip drive from 1996, and except for maybe 5 disks (which Iomega will replace free if I ever bothered to send them in) I haven't had any problems at all. I do remember the click of death problem, but never experienced it with any of the Zip drives I have used personally over the years.
On the other hand I have floppies as old as many of the Zip disks I have that are either unreadable, or if you try to erase and reuse them will fail during formatting.
-- 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 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.