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Dell Dropping The Floppy
adambwells writes "Dell wants to stop including floppy drives as standard hardware on its Dimension line of desktops, and will start this practice later this quarter, as reported in this Yahoo article. Says Dell's product marketing: We would like to see customers migrate away from floppies as quickly as possible, because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago." They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
It's about time. I haven't had a floppy drive in years (except in server machines).
Good job dell.
Next thing you know, they're going to take away our serial ports and PS/2 ports. Bastards.
------------
I say good riddance to the floppy. I've had more of them go bad on me than I care to count.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
but this is old news. no floppy has been the default for some time now.
could just be the hied site i use tho
I remember when they ADDED the new-fangled 3 1/4 inch floppy drive to machines.
Back before there was dirt, and a computer weighed 6,000 tons!
And we programmed with ones and with zeros - and sometimes we ran out of ones!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Wow -- about time! I've been trying to warn people off of floppies for the past 5 years. Just say no to removable magnetic media. You will lose your data.
-Turkey
And I really don't think a CDR/CDRW is yet the answer to storage, unless UDF is standardized enough (as in supported at the OS level).
I just used one to do a Mandrake network install the other day.
RIP
I would be happy to see a Compact Flash reader included in all Dell boxes.
How will I ever install "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego" now?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
why the floppy that could fit about 175MB didn't become popular. I've never seen rawrite work for a CDRW. I believe there are still things out there that you absolutely need a floppy to do. Burn a CD to flash your BIOS?
With any "new" technology ( new = something nobody is doing atm, not necessarily a new invention ), someone has to be first. Something like this only works if its ubiquitous, leading to a Catch-22. USB pendrives may be the next floppy - they're the most useful, user-friendly replacement I've seen.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Why oh why didn't ye catch on? :(
Boot Disk?
but they're handy when needed,why waste a cd for a file smaller than 1.44 megs?
I've got a real disk drive in mine. "Floppy" is the way I likes it!
iToldyouso.
S. Jobs
The "back in the day" jokes are older than an 8088.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
sorry, mod me down
love is just extroverted narcissism
I love the idea of these things, but I wonder - can you boot off a USB device yet?
:)
What would be neat is booting off a bootable CD-R/W, and being able to use it in R/W mode. *That's* a floppy replacement.
Now if you could just put it in a square black plastic sleeve, you could boot it "old school"!
Its interesting to not that Apple got a lot of complaints when they scrapped the floppy from the iMac back in 1998. However, after a couple of months, nobody who actually used the iMac seemed to complain anymore. I think its about time that the rest of the computer industry scrapped this "stoneage" technology.
It took a story about Dell dropping the floppy to remind me I haven't used one in about HALF A DECADE!
Everyone bitched when Apple pushed Mac users off the floppy (*PC* uses made fun of Apple for doing it -- as if it affected them)... and after all the fuss, I'd have to say the floppy drive was a terrible device. I find it amazing PCs still use them! It just seems so old and useless. Glad to see Dell doing something... even if it still isn't very innovative.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Unless one of them is a Mac.
Not everyone has a CDRW, and not everyone has USB key-drives. But ALL PCs have floppies.
Ñ'
First of all, floppy drives are very cheap. If I have to share some data (small size) ofline with another person, floppy makes perfect sense. CD-R, usb pens are cool and better storage devices, but dont dump floppies just because they are 15 years old. If they are useful, there is no point discontinuing them
They make a stand-alone machine to transfer files from a floppy (mac or PC) to a pen drive or some future format. That way you wouldn't need to keep an old comp around for legacy reasons.
My first reaction was "Yay Dell!". Then I thought what if I need to update the BIOS of my motherboard.
Does the average Joe User know how to make a bootable CD? Most PC BIOS are unable to boot from USB or Firewire yet, so it seems like creating a bootable CD to do firmware upgrades is the only option.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Floppy drives are still useful for most users. I know for myself, there's nothing simpler than copying files to a floppy and bringing them over to another computer. There's no messing around with CD burners, and no problems with not being able to install drivers for USB devices on older computers.
As a medium for customizable boot disks and as a medium for other emergency recovery tasks, I have found there is no better method than the floppy.
I had a customer that just bought a new notebook with no included floppy (it was from HP). This customer purchased an external USB floppy disk drive for it within a week.
I guess as long as other computer manufacturers and "white box" computer makers keep including floppy drives in their computers, Dell will be at a disadvantage in the marketplace.
These are the good old days you'll be telling your children about. Make them worthwhile.
old story
And the only thing Dell says about this is: "soon".
Wanna know how to bring a 8 processor 40 GBram server to it's knees in 2 seconds? Shove in a floppy and hit FORMAT.
Cd's are now cheaper then floppies in some cases. Someone just needs to make a better rewritable format that will still read in every old cdrom too.
The only purpose i see floppies as being would be bootdisks (be it windows/linux/whatever).
,i know mac already did... but i said PC)
I can't move files from one to another unless they're tiny. even my school says Zip or CD for turning in things.
I'm glad to see a PC manufacturer doing this. (yea
...when it's so trivial to interface a paper tape reader through the serial port?
The rest of the industry didn't seem to care or follow suit when Apple made this move, but will we see other PC vendors start dropping the floppy drive now that Dell has dropped the ball?
Does anyone expect to see Dell or other PC vendors moving towards a completely legacy-free PC, as Apple has already done? Most systems I've seen still ship with PS/2 keyboards and mice, although I'm sure there are some smaller PC vendors that have taken Apple's initiative and thrown out legacy technology.
usually dropping floppies isn't something that's desired. I remember the days before CDs, carrying all 27 floppies needed to install WIndows 95, you drop the stack, and, well, you'll never install off that set again.
Oh, you mean... I see.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I don't even bother to use the floppy drive anymore. Why? 1) The files I tend to transfer are well over 1.44mb 2) Buying CD-Rs in bulk is cheaper than buying half the number of floppies (esp. on a sales day), and although you cannot reuse them like their CD-RW counterparts, multi-session burning can insure space isn't wasted 3) CD-ROMs these days transfer faster AND don't have the tendency to halt older OSs 4) I've already replaced one too many That's not to say there's some merit to owning a floppy drive, but let's be frank: there are more practical alternatives.
Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
Also, I can't use USB drives at the machines at work (due to security risks of removing sensitive data). Sure, you can remove data on a floppy, but try doing that with a 50+ MB compressed file.
pc floppies have one key quality - they are almost universally supported.
sure, they are old and a bit slow, but they are useful because of their omnipresence. for moving snippets of data from here to there under any condition, it is still hard to beat floppies.
usb key drives are nice - i have one - but they need to get a bit cheaper. then they would be a nice replacement for the "quick snippet" niche.
>They plan to educate their customers
Oh yeah, that's brilliant. Can't see any problems with that approach, nossir.
I always wondered what this slot in front of my Dell computer was.. I've never used it. I thought it was a slot to hold your letters.
Or, have Apple draw it for you.
What is really missing now is a universal ability to boot from USB drives, including pen drives. And, frankly, Linux installers should be able to work from USB drives, which many of them currently don't.
Where I'm from "dropping the floppy" in public will get you fined. Possibly chased away by a mob. Dell should not be allowed to do this just because he is a celebrity.
I see why this has been posted under the "nuts" topic...
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
They have computers that do not have any floppy drives or any form of external copying devices (CDR). But!!! They still have a USB port, and you can still copy stuff using a USB keychain drive :) . Also, it takes just 3 lines of code to hack their nice system and gain "ROOT" access. And they have made a virus that can infect any, and I MEAN ANY, electronic device. It spreads through the world though the powersupply, internet, and anything... oh my god..
For the clueless, this is from a movie currently in theaters.
"You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago."
And why not? If it does the job, why should I care when the processor was made? Dell's trying hard to sell new products, and that's understandable, but it's ridiculous to think that everybody buys stuff just because it's "new". Heck, I'm still using hardware from the early 90's (10 years old), and it works fine. I'm not gonna blow money on something just because it's "new".
And as far as alternative technologies, they're still not good enough. I've never heard of a "USB Pen", and I'm sure as hell not going to waste money on some cutting edge technology that nobody's using yet. CD-R's are either very slow, one time burns, or very slow, very incompatible CD-RW's. Neither is good if I need to sneakernet a bit of data.
But then again, I'm not a Dell customer. I use a computer until it literally falls apart, and then I buy a closeout or used computer at great prices when I need a "new" one. No point in spending top dollar for a computer these days unless you're into games, or you have some big server needs.
as soon as usb pen drives cost $10 and the media is FREE.
floppies are just near irreplaceable
Unless the bootable NIC cards become standard in their machines. Otherwise many of us will still need a boot disk to image/ghost machines. I actually prefer floppies to bootable CD's for this purpose. CD-burners would also have to become standard for laptop users, no more saving to floppy! The cost is minimal and a floppy can take much more abuse than a CD can!
How Floppy Disk Drives Work
by Gary Brown
If you have spent any time at all working with a computer, then chances are good that you have used a floppy disk at some point. The floppy disk drive (FDD) was the primary means of adding data to a computer until the CD-ROM drive became popular. In fact, FDDs have been an key component of most personal computers for more than 20 years.
Basically, a floppy disk drive reads and writes data to a small, circular piece of metal-coated plastic similar to audio cassette tape. In this edition of How Stuff Works, you will learn more about what is inside a floppy disk drive and how it works. You will also find out some cool facts about FDDs.
History of the Floppy Disk Drive
The floppy disk drive (FDD) was invented at IBM by Alan Shugart in 1967. The first floppy drives used an 8-inch disk (later called a "diskette" as it got smaller), which evolved into the 5.25-inch disk that was used on the first IBM Personal Computer in August 1981. The 5.25-inch disk held 360 kilobytes compared to the 1.44 megabyte capacity of today's 3.5-inch diskette.
The 5.25-inch disks were dubbed "floppy" because the diskette packaging was a very flexible plastic envelope, unlike the rigid case used to hold today's 3.5-inch diskettes.
By the mid-1980s, the improved designs of the read/write heads, along with improvements in the magnetic recording media, led to the less-flexible, 3.5-inch, 1.44-megabyte (MB) capacity FDD in use today. For a few years, computers had both FDD sizes (3.5-inch and 5.25-inch). But by the mid-1990s, the 5.25-inch version had fallen out of popularity, partly because the diskette's recording surface could easily become contaminated by fingerprints through the open access area.
Parts of a Floppy Disk Drive
Floppy Disk Drive Terminology
* Floppy disk - Also called diskette. The common size is 3.5 inches.
* Floppy disk drive - The electromechanical device that reads and writes floppy disks.
* Track - Concentric ring of data on a side of a disk.
* Sector - A subset of a track, similar to wedge or a slice of pie.
The Disk
A floppy disk is a lot like a cassette tape:
* Both use a thin plastic base material coated with iron oxide. This oxide is a ferromagnetic material, meaning that if you expose it to a magnetic field it is permanently magnetized by the field.
* Both can record information instantly.
* Both can be erased and reused many times.
* Both are very inexpensive and easy to use.
If you have ever used an audio cassette, you know that it has one big disadvantage -- it is a sequential device. The tape has a beginning and an end, and to move the tape to another song later in the sequence of songs on the tape you have to use the fast forward and rewind buttons to find the start of the song, since the tape heads are stationary. For a long audio cassette tape it can take a minute or two to rewind the whole tape, making it hard to find a song in the middle of the tape.
A floppy disk, like a cassette tape, is made from a thin piece of plastic coated with a magnetic material on both sides. However, it is shaped like a disk rather than a long thin ribbon. The tracks are arranged in concentric rings so that the software can jump from "file 1" to "file 19" without having to fast forward through files 2-18. The diskette spins like a record and the heads move to the correct track, providing what is known as direct access storage.
In the illustration above, you can see how the disk is divided into tracks (brown) and sectors (yellow).
The Drive
The major parts of a FDD include:
* Read/Write Heads: Located on both sides of a diskette, they move together on the same assembly. The heads are not directly opposite each other in an effort to prevent interaction between write operations on each of the two media surfaces. The same head is used for reading and writing, while a second, wider head is used for erasing a track just prior to it being written. This allows the data to be written on a wider "clean slate," without interfering with the analog data on an adjacent track.
* Drive Motor: A very small spindle motor engages the metal hub at the center of the diskette, spinning it at either 300 or 360 rotations per minute (RPM).
* Stepper Motor: This motor makes a precise number of stepped revolutions to move the read/write head assembly to the proper track position. The read/write head assembly is fastened to the stepper motor shaft.
* Mechanical Frame: A system of levers that opens the little protective window on the diskette to allow the read/write heads to touch the dual-sided diskette media. An external button allows the diskette to be ejected, at which point the spring-loaded protective window on the diskette closes.
* Circuit Board: Contains all of the electronics to handle the data read from or written to the diskette. It also controls the stepper-motor control circuits used to move the read/write heads to each track, as well as the movement of the read/write heads toward the diskette surface.
The read/write heads do not touch the diskette media when the heads are traveling between tracks. Electronic optics check for the presence of an opening in the lower corner of a 3.5-inch diskette (or a notch in the side of a 5.25-inch diskette) to see if the user wants to prevent data from being written on it.
Click on the picture to see a brief video of a diskette being inserted. Look for the silver, sliding door opening up and the read/write heads being lowered to the diskette surface.
Read/write heads for each side of the diskette
Writing Data on a Floppy Disk
The following is an overview of how a floppy disk drive writes data to a floppy disk. Reading data is very similar. Here's what happens:
1. The computer program passes an instruction to the computer hardware to write a data file on a floppy disk, which is very similar to a single platter in a hard disk drive except that it is spinning much slower, with far less capacity and slower access time.
2. The computer hardware and the floppy-disk-drive controller start the motor in the diskette drive to spin the floppy disk.
The disk has many concentric tracks on each side. Each track is divided into smaller segments called sectors, like slices of a pie.
3. A second motor, called a stepper motor, rotates a worm-gear shaft (a miniature version of the worm gear in a bench-top vise) in minute increments that match the spacing between tracks.
The time it takes to get to the correct track is called "access time." This stepping action (partial revolutions) of the stepper motor moves the read/write heads like the jaws of a bench-top vise. The floppy-disk-drive electronics know how may steps the motor has to turn to move the read/write heads to the correct track.
4. The read/write heads stop at the track. The read head checks the prewritten address on the formatted diskette to be sure it is using the correct side of the diskette and is at the proper track. This operation is very similar to the way a record player automatically goes to a certain groove on a vinyl record.
5. Before the data from the program is written to the diskette, an erase coil (on the same read/write head assembly) is energized to "clear" a wide, "clean slate" sector prior to writing the sector data with the write head. The erased sector is wider than the written sector -- this way, no signals from sectors in adjacent tracks will interfere with the sector in the track being written.
6. The energized write head puts data on the diskette by magnetizing minute, iron, bar-magnet particles embedded in the diskette surface, very similar to the technology used in the mag stripe on the back of a credit card. The magnetized particles have their north and south poles oriented in such a way that their pattern may be detected and read on a subsequent read operation.
7. The diskette stops spinning. The floppy disk drive waits for the next command.
On a typical floppy disk drive, the small indicator light stays on during all of the above operations.
Floppy Disk Drive Facts
Here are some interesting things to note about FDDs:
* Two floppy disks do not get corrupted if they are stored together, due to the low level of magnetism in each one.
* In your PC, there is a twist in the FDD data-ribbon cable -- this twist tells the computer whether the drive is an A-drive or a B-drive.
* Like many household appliances, there are really no serviceable parts in today's FDDs. This is because the cost of a new drive is considerably less than the hourly rate typically charged to disassemble and repair a drive.
* If you wish to redisplay the data on a diskette drive after changing a diskette, you can simply tap the F5 key (in most Windows applications).
* In the corner of every 3.5-inch diskette, there is a small slider. If you uncover the hole by moving the slider, you have protected the data on the diskette from being written over or erased.
* Floppy disks, while rarely used to distribute software (as in the past), are still used in these applications:
o in some Sony digital cameras
o for software recovery after a system crash or a virus attack
o when data from one computer is needed on a second computer and the two computers are not networked
o in bootable diskettes used for updating the BIOS on a personal computer
o in high-density form, used in the popular Zip drive
Lots More Information!
Related HSW Articles
* How Hard Disks Work
* How Analog and Digital Recording Works
* How Tape Recorders Work
Where to Buy
* Compare prices of floppy disk drives
* Super Deals
Other Great Links
* PC Guide Reference Guide: Floppy Disk Drive
* PC Mechanic's Floppy Drives
* Troubleshooting Floppy Disk Drives
They're like phone booths: I never use them but I still want to have them around!
I just got a new thinkpad and my IT department thinks no one needs a floppy. Now I can not support current customers: that will not allow me to connect ot their network, and do not have cd-rom on thier machines, network loaded. And do not have USB turned on. But they do have floppies drives.
I have to customer software from time to time that the master key comes encrypted on a floppy. Realy great the most servers that I get to work on do not now have floppies.
Can some one tell DELL and hardware houses, that the customer right? We need equipment to meet customer needs not some point head pencil pusher.
CD
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Or what about my nerd-style sexual innuendo? I suppose we still have hard disks
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I just built a new machine. 3.06Ghz Intel, Radeon 9700 Pro, the works. As a joke, I put a dual 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 drive in it that I got off ebay. None of my friends "got it." They aren't geeks. Sigh.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
I hope that they will make CDRW drives standard at this point. Colin
I think it didn't catch because (IIRC) the media was a tad expensive at the time. And of course, no major vendor jumped on it. I think Zeos (anyone remember Zeos? Yay!) was the only one that offered it as an option on some of their high-end 486 mofo towers.
Gah, I'm having PC Magazine flashbacks now.
Yes, the new technologies work great, but the cost of media is ALOT cheaper with floppies.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I dunno, the USB key/pen/stick/whatever drives aren't anywhere near as convenient as floppies yet. There are still lots of old PCs out there that don't have USB. Lots more do have it, but the ports are in back and a pain to get to.
CDRs on the other hand have been around a lot longer and work on more platforms. Now that new CD burners don't make coasters nearly as often, just give us small cheap 80mm CDRs with thin jewelboxes to carry them in and you have a great floppy replacement.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
It is excellent to see that a 'big' contender in the prefab PC market is adopting this stand point. Although they're not the first to do it, I think that this move will encourage other companies to follow suit. And needless to say it is about time. Good stuff Dell!
Blah blah, compaq did this a while ago as well as making XP the ONLY MS os they would install dropping 2k and ME
The 1.44mb diskettes technology is really below the standards of today's computing.
Not even that you can't put a single average MP3 on it, there's a huge chance it would get corrupted with bad sectors.
Nothing justifies the existence of that technology in new computers. Almost everybody have E-Mail addresses today, so sending something as small as 1.44MB to someone is really quick and doesn't require a diskette.
0x2b or not 0x2b, the answer is -1
When I was little (like, 4), we had a Commodore 64. All the software was on 5 inch floppy disks. So I thought they were floppy disks because they "flopped" if you shook them around. Later on we got an Amiga which used 3 inch floppies. Took me years to figure out that when people were saying "hard disks" they werent talking about them. (before you flame me for being an idiot, years was about when we got a 386 which actually HAD a hard disk drive, and I couldnt have been more than 10.)
By god, in those days we had BBS's on 2400 baud modems and we liked it! My mom and her friend actually had one of the top 100 in the country, per some magazine... sandcastle anyone? I think it still exists.
Floppy, we shall miss thee.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
You can't boot from a USB device, can you? Can the BIOS keep up with all these new devices? About the only time I use the floppy is to boot a reduced Linux system to try an recover a (usually Windows) machine that has goot itself in a twist. Very handy. I guess I could make a bootable CD. And a bootable USB device. And hope that the BIOS allows me to boot from either. I guess it had to go, but I'd like to see a universally available replacement first, supported by every (new, I guess) BIOS. Maybe it is all a plot to make sure we only boot pre-installed operating systems? :-)
Hi!
Floppies are legacy devices. New PCs, with their CDROM bootable BIOS and stuff pretty much eliminated the need for floppies. Good move for Dell, it's time for new faster/bigger/more reliable options (like CDRW) to replace it.
Keep that floppy drive around though, there's WAY too many PCs out there without CDROMs (let alone bootable BIOSes) and you'll still need floppies for quite awhile.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Personally I find CDRWs annoying and USB solid state storage devices expensive.
So what do I do?
I use my network connection.
There's an awful lot of people nowadays that have broadband connections, and those connections constitute a lovely way to move files back and forth.
Since I've come to school (2 years ago, now) I don't believe I've used a single floppy.
I, for one, will not miss the Floppy Disk in future computers at all.
I have not had a floppy on any of my computers I have built in the past 5 years, nor have I ever owned a floppy drive that worked properly. They are antiques; worthless pieces of hardware that should have been eliminated at least 10 years ago. There is no need for them when you can cheaply burn cds, email files to yourself, use your hard drive, etc. Linux ISOs have been bootable for a long time now, and even Microsoft Windows install cds are bootable.
Floppies are slow, low capacity, and TOTALLY UNRELIABLE. I worked as a lab assistant in college and if it wasn't for the daily floppy drive corruption problems I probably wouldn't have had a job. We were allowed 100MB of network storage, but people still used floppy drives and consequently lost their work. The sooner the public is weaned away from this antiquated technology the better.
The floptical. I used to have one, and I can tell you why they didn't become popular - they sucked. All the slowness and unreliability of a floppy with none of the ubiquity. No thanks.
Well... at least people will finally stop calling 3.5" floppies "hard disks"... you know because they are not as floppy as 5.25" ones.
Oh... and this guy I know must be rich because he "bought the internet" the other day. I didn't know best buy owned it...
--
"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
"Our margin on Dimension line up 0.85% thanks to our decision to stop including floppy disk drives."
Well, at least this avoids mistakes during flashing, as now you can no longer flash...
Say no to software patents.
Looks like Dell is finally starting to catch up to Apple. My 1999 Lombard G3 Powerbook doesn't seem to have one, and they started to disappear with the advent of the original iMacs, if not earlier...
Reminds me of the old MS-bashing comment, Windows 95 (or 98 or whatever) still hasn't caught up to Mac 1984..."
That's my purse! I don't know you! -- Bobby Hill
again...the company was ahead of its time.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'm sorry, Dell. When USB pens are thinner and cheaper than floppies for greater capacity, or writable mini-CDs are cheaper and the drives at least as small and cheap, I'll think of migrating.
But they'll have to be WAY cheaper to make up for the compatability issues during the migration.
And that will be hard - because an external floppy drive is under $50 retail now, the floppies are still way cheaper than a calling-card writable CD (let alone a RAM pen), and the pens are thick while the CD drives are a larger form factor.
You need about a times-ten improvement in price-performance to justify a changeover.
Meanwhile, until all the machines are upgraded, you need the floppy for things like sneakernet and recovery disks. That might be a long time for older machines that are dedicated to some well-debugged application.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The reason PC's have so many obsolete doodads is that none of the manufacturers would take the lead.
Now that Dell has such a huge share of the market it's able to dictate what to include or drop from a standard PC.
A major manufacturer educating his customers about technologies which could be used to... dare I say it? Making backups!
Run, O Dell, for thou hath invoked the Wrath of Valenti!
The difference between ignorance and apathy? I sure don't know, and I don't care either.
I've heard it said before but no answers yet... What are you supposed to do for boot floppies? Burning CDs is one good option, but requires a CD burner and a working high-level OS. Can BIOSes boot off of USB keys?
Wah!
This might seem a bit quaint, but floppy drives are useful for those that are interested in OS kernel development. Its quite easy to put together a bootable floppy disk. Its a bit harder to make bootable CD-ROMs. While this is probably not going to affect the move away from floppy drives, just thought I'd point it out...
Frank W. Miller
Parallel Port: I'd like to keep using my older printers and my old parallel Zip Drive. It's slow, but handy sometimes.
Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?
Seriously, there's no reason to drop these devices. Why not include them with the newer stuff.
Besides, USB is not to be trusted.
------------
Well, although I seldom use floppies these days (God bless CD-Rs!), I would be sorry to see the drives go out totally. For instance, when a machine goes down badly, booting off the floppy is often the fastest and easiest way of getting things back up and running. Note, it is also much easier for novice users to create bootable floppies than it is for them to create a bootable CD -- so this will mean fewer users will be able to fix their machines without help. A second point concerns 'legacy' data. I still have a few large format floppies around. The data is backed up elsewhere, but backups are not always trustworthy. It is good to be able to go back to the originals. Also, for many of us who have been using machines for years, we all have a few old floppies around that were just not important enough to be worth backing up. However, every once in a while it is nice to be able to grab a few lines of ancient code that is just perfect for some current job, or grab a paragraph from a paper written in grad school. I will admit to having a bit of a thing for backward compatibility, but on balance, I would be happier to have machines with floppies than not.
However, both of these purposes have been "surplanted" by Microsoft's OS tools and monolithic device driver packages (read: Creative Labs). If your MS OS goes bad, you're supposed to plug in the CD Rom and use their tools to fix the problem, but this is sometimes not enough, or not advanced enough (eg , you're left with the extreme ends of choices of just doing a scandisk, or doing a complete reformat/reinstall of Windows). Advanced users know what programs to run and what specific files to tackle if something goes wrong. And because all Dell machines are Windows based, they don't consider the Linux users, where floppy rescue disks are still the norm.
Plus there's still the fact that floppies are good for the transferring of some media types, like short word processing documents and pictures. Particularly if we're talking parents and grandparents that have that donated pre-Pentium computer without a CD rom or the like, the floppy is an excellent way to get those types of things to them.
Plus, it's what, all of $10 to add a floppy? I'd rather see the choice of a floppy as an option to add on, rather that remove it all together or keeping it as a standard feature, but there's still plenty of reasons for floppy use.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I haven't really followed up with MiniDisc technology too much, but.. why don't we use MD's for storage? They're re-writable, it's optical media, it stores a fair amount of data, and the media is relatively cheap.. Does Sony own exclusive rights to MD or is something else standing in the path for this to happen?
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
Oh yeah? Well mine is 8". And still floppy.
One of the main reasons for doing this is support: floppy drives result in people having broken machines and lost data. Back in 1996-7 when I helped support a high school's computers, 75% of the hardware problems on the Dells and 100% of the hardware problems on the Macs were with floppy drives, and most of the other problems we had to deal with were people who had lost their paper by trying to rewrite a floppy disc too many times (people still think a floppy disc can last for a whole semester!). The next year when Apple dropped the floppy disc, we never had a hardware problem with the new Macs; it's easy to see why Dell wants to do the same: you can instantly cut support costs drastically and increase customer satisfaction.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I boot one of my machines into RedHat 8.0, Lindows 3.0, Mandrake 8.0 and Windows 2000. I count on floppies for partition maintenance. I help folks with boot problems and other system contaminations frequently. ALL of this requires a floppy. They should continue to be available as a configuration option. I was just speaking with an associate yesterday who regularly uses a 1942 rotary phone. Don't poo-poo something like the floppy drive because of its age.
Thanks, Apple, for leading the way yet again.
When Apple dropped the floppy drive it was "stupidity."
When Dell drops the floppy drive it'll be called "innovation."
Will they allow things like BIOS flash updates to run from El Torito cdroms? I mean last time I checked most low level utilities will check to make sure they aren't running out of a virtual floppy because when the BIOS is being overwritten etc the virtualization tech might break and leave the system in an unrecoverable state.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I have mixed feelings abou this topic. I see their point about wanting to move on to other technologies, but I think they'll have a hard time engendering discontent among floppy disk users.
I use floppies all of the time. I also use writable CD's all of the time. The criteria that I use in determining which storage medium to use is 1) the size of the file(s) I want to transfer and 2) the permanence needed. If I want to copy a small file that I don't need to keep a backup copy of (like a text or image file), I use floppies. If I download an executable or media file, I record it to a CD.
Note that my selection criteria do not include consideration of the age of the technology. And why should it?
CDs are not good replacements for floppies. They are too big. They require a case. They are less hardy. I can see USB storage devices taking over floppies, though. They can be rather small and convenient.
I have a drawer with about 200 3.25 floppies in from the last time I stocked up - about 15 years ago - and every time I come to buy CDs I wonder whether I'm heedlessly stockpiling as I think of buying into DVD and DVDR. These days I mostly use a USB drive and, occasionally, a CDR where I would have used a floppy. Try finding a motherboard to allow boot from USB drive, though. There are times when only a floppy will do the job and one of my old machines doesn't know about boot from CD options. Anyone remember disk-doublers?
Heck, why just they use those mini CDRW's of about 150MB? Just throw into the package a bunch of them! Label them as 'FREE' and you will se that people will start buying it!
Just a thought...
var sig = function() { sig(); }
Personally I say good riddance as I have been running without for quite sometime. Professionally I think companies (specifically Dell) are not ready to phase out the floppy drive.
An example of which, two weeks ago I ran into an issue with a Dell machine not recognizing the CD as bootable while loading the OS (please, no "have you tried" replies as it's fixed). It was a pain in the butt as I didn't have another machine available to pull a floppy drive from. All of those thinking "serves you right for not having had a floppy drive" are correct. The amount of money I wasted in that one instance troubleshooting, rebuilding, rebuilding, hunting down a floppy drive, rebuilding again, etc. would have more than paid for us to have kept a floppy drive in that machine (quite a few machines actually).
-D.
I have put floppy drives in all the boxes that I've built. The drive isn't very useful for transferring data, however there are times when having the option of booting off some other media is helpful. Often this is when the machine is misbehaving, and having the ability to boot off the floppy makes for faster troubleshooting. Of course, since the CD is bootable, for many people the floppy isn't required.
==
"They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
1. Stop selling floppy drives
2. Start selling pen drives
3. PROFIT!!
Of course I had to bring up security -- this is Slashdot afterall.
In my office floppies are used rarely, VERY rarely. Instead everyone sets their Windows box to share the local drives so they can access their files everywhere. This makes our work easier and avoid floppies (which are too small for most of our work anyway), but few people take the time to set up proper security/permissions.
If the, say, 50% of computer users that still sneakernet things switches to insecure file sharing on their Windows desktops the security implications could be severe.
Do you have any idea how bad this is? You probably do, but either choose to ignore it because it doesn't affect you personally, or you think this will actually not hurt people and businesses.
Until someone sells a device that easily converts a person's floppy collection to equivalent file systems on new media, this is just a thorn in the side of many users. Think of all the games that will need to be cracked to install from the new media, rather than just inserting floppy disk 2!
I'm teasing just a little bit, but you do realize this is not good. It is like Sony deciding to not make any more stereos with audio cassette decks in them. This is not like removing support for the "8-track" of the computing world.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Or *Mac owners, since Apple hasn't included a floppy drive in any of their machines in quite some time.
3.5" floppies are anything but reliable. Consider yourself lucky if you've never had one go bad on you.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
yeah..there are the media cards like those used in cameras...128megs...hrm...my original zip drive only held 100...and they have those cute little plastic cases for them too =)
it is sad when students still come to me asking for a floppy to save work on to take home...
of course I have my own collection for emergency use =) but come on folks...especially y'all bios people...get with the program and make it so you can boot off of anything connected to any port on a mother board!
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
My friend got a Toshiba notebook with something like a PII 366 that had it standard.
Not like it matters.
I dislike floppy drives because floppy disks are so unreliable. In my opinion this is result of cheaper and cheaper manufacturing. In fact, old used disks from mid-90s seem to work better than brandnew ones.
However, some software requires a floppy disk drive installed. An example is "DriveCrypt Plus Pack" which creates an emergency recovery disk ONLY to drive A:\ and ONLY when A:\ is a physical 1.44mb drive (ie: subst A: somwhere\ is not acceptable).
For CD-Rom, a variety of software emulators exist to satisfy such "broken" software (ie: CloneCD, DaemonTools, etc).
My question to Slashdot is: Does such software exist for floppy disks? Is there any virtual floppy drive for Win2k/XP?
Marc
Of course, the floppy works with all your other crap, which Flash doesn't, particularly anything pre-USB.
I've been using a USB adaptor and the CF from my digital camera to move big files around (though I need more capacity than the meager 32MB it has, may make a quick trip to the store and get some extra memory today :-)
Then there's the archive (blow dust off a floppy filer) disks, fulla valuable old junk^H^H^H^Htreasures from years gone by. When I built my home PC (back in Dec., hey CC, where the fsck are my rebates!?!?) it was still a foregone conclusion to get a 3.5" floppy drive and I have used it, several times, so the 3.5" floppy isn't dead yet (or I'm just a crusty old curmudgeon clinging to the past.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
The same line of questioning was levelled at Apple back in '98 when they dropped the floppy. That nincompoop Dvorak insisted (and still insists, last I checked) that losing the floppy drive would be the death of Apple.
If Dell drops the floppy, manufacturers of hardware will stop providing install disks on floppies. They will ensure that their BIOS supports booting from a USB drive. I know this to be true because Dell didn't get to be a big successful company by being stupid, and because we done already did this with Apple.
-Waldo Jaquith
Don't droppy that floppy!
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
El Torito!
I don't use floppies. I have an ftp server. But for the other 99.9% of the world this is bad. I'm in high school and a floppy is the only way (besides ftp) to get stuff home. Our cheapass school doesn't have cd-rs on the coms. The newest ones do have accessable usb ports, but nobody has a usb key drive.
Hmm... I just remembered that the new coms at school are Dells now. Maybe we'll go back to gateway and decent monitors.
So go dell.
apparently, this is classic marketing/sales thought here... without any thought to the technicians maintaining the computers...
:(
(yet another example why only car mechanics should be able to design cars)
ever tried installing a Windows Server from the bootable CD, that requires a third party SCSI or RAID driver to access the drives? What do you use now, if there's no floppy? (esp. when windows doesn't detect the controller)
furthermore, what happens when you're CDROM driver goes bad, or you work on a machine that doesn't have a NIC or some such...
looks like I'll have to add a spare floppy drive to my list of parts that I carry around with me..
I'm only saddened to realize that while there are lots of technical people out here on slashdot, there's just doesn't appear to be a lot of experienced technicians/troubleshooters..
I remember being in high school ('86-'90), I'd carry about floppies with me all year around
Wow. That's probably all you remember from high school, since you most likely never got laid with cheerleaders, partied, or played football.
UDF is the answer, but neither Linux nor Windows support it very well. The only Windows solution I know of is a 3rd party add-on called Adaptec DirectCD, that comes with EZ CD Creator. It's free for reading, but commercial for writing. Is there anything else? What does Linux support?
If he can't RTFM then he has no business using a computer.
Yeah, this is an original idea. No one has thought of this before. Yep, completely new.
*cough*APPLE*cough*
Too bad that floppies are needed sometimes in certain situations on PCs... installing a driver for your CDROM or USB card when you don't have an internet connection might be kind of a sticky situation.
redgopher
http://redgopher.com
I hope the prices of Dell PCs will go down by $5 to reflect the manufacturing savings...
Seriously--I can buy an OEM floppy drive and cable for under ten dollars. One can only guess how much cheaper a company like Dell can get them by buying a pallet of them at a time. What's the harm in keeping the floppy drive around?
A lot of not so old digital cameras have a floppy on which they record the pictures. I think Dell's decision to exclude a floppy drive, is definately going to become a negative criterion for common people buying new computers.
I remember getting some SunOS software on a
/dev/sda, rather than as a floppy, so anaconda/yast2 still need fixing.
floppy from a vendor once upon a time. We had something like 60 Suns. No floppy drive on any of them. Had a hell of a time installing that software. (Of course this was the vendor's fault for only shipping on floppy.)
Now, Dell will face the same problem. Want to install linux on that new RAID controller...Hmm, you need your HBA driver from your driver diskette. Diskette? Oh crap, time to fix anaconda and yast installers.
good riddance to the floppy, tho I fear it is too ingrained in the PC (and servers with PC heritage)
to really disappear.
Maybe USB floppy drive that you carry around....
Though those show up as scsi disk,
If you can fit it on a floppy it's small enough to email. It's very rare that you encounter a machine without some sort of Internet connection, even if all you can do is get to your favorite freemail service. If you don't have any kind of network access whatsoever it probably indicates a larger problem that would require some sort of OS install and therefore a CD.
I'm sure you'll reply with all sorts of situations where you would need a floppy, but for most consumers they simply aren't needed. Dealing with legacy equipment is one such situation, another is with non-networked systems. Both are fairly rare when dealing with desktops.
Whatever. I haven't needed a floppy disk in many, many moons and will give less than a crap about its demise.
Without the floppies how will Del users flash their Bios?
Now I'll be honest that I haven't looked into whether or not USB solid state storage is standard across the board, but if they're doing away with floppies then I had better be able to boot from my USB pen/key/dongle storage device if & when needed by simply changing the boot order.
//ct
If I want/need to run some low level hardware diagnostics (IBM's Drive Fitness Test tool anyone?) or flash to a new BIOS revision or update the firmware on a SCSI controller - a floppy is basically the only way to go - especially with downloadable updates that REQUIRE you to create a floppy from them.
If the only way I can update these parts is by disassembling the now crippled machines & putting their components into a machine that does have a floppy to update them, then replace (x 250 machines...) - Dell can count on number of enterprise customers nixing them from the list of potential hardware vendors. Don't limit my options - period.
But that's just my opinion.
Can you boot off a pen drive?
I think this is the main point of a floppy these days isn't it? A backup boot method... Sure you can use bootable CD-roms, but what if your CD-writer is on the machine that got toasted?
Floppies and the drives that run them are simple, cheap, abundant, and effective for what they do. Until there is a replacement that is standard on all PC's, these should always be available.
Perhaps Apple made the change several years too early.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Then I need another fairly common media you can use to bootup an OS with in cases of catastrophic failures. The retail CD? Yeah, works good as long as it solves my problem. When I need a custom CD, I'll then need to burn a bootable CD-R (actually, preferrably a CD-RW for these purposes) in a special program made to burn CD's. And I can't even write on it at boot time if I'd need to, since the BIOS doesn't contain CD-RW drivers.
What's the best cheap, boot-time writeable, removable, non-floppy media out there on the market anyway? A bonus if it's common, since that would make it easier to get.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I swear, Dell counts on nobody using their floppy drives...so they put in the cheapest ones they can find. I've got three Dell machines at home, and all of them have floppy drives that eat disks.
They're saying this so they can shave a few bucks off that cost and we'll pay the same...guess it's time to get a USB key-chain drive.
Don't worry! With M$ Palladium BIOS Utility you won't be allowed to go near your BIOS. Any BIOS upgrades will be distributed to you unknowingly by M$*
*Microsoft is not liable in the incident where your computer stops responding during a BIOS update. You're screwed. Thank you, have a nice day.
like, how am I going to boot to a prompt to flash a BIOS? I know dell can do away with floppies cause they probably have some CD boot flash program, but not the rest of us who build our own PCs.
Aren't those USB drives expensive? The thing about floppy's is that they're cheap and if you just wanted to move a paper you types for english from your computer to a school computer, it's effiecient.
How will I upgrade the bios? Through Windows like how many companies are trying to get people to do? Risky endeavor at best.
besides making cd/rw the 'new floppy' i would
have to insist all the various riaa/mpaa/copyright
"taxes" and surcharges be removed from blank media.
i REALLY, did i say *REALLY*, resent paying taxes
for a presumption of copyright guilt to use hardware that provides no real alternative.
(a $50 usb token is not an alternative until
they are $2 per item)
Everyone (even the terminally ignorant) needs alternative boot devices beyond their WinXP system restore CD (if you *GET* one - BAD IBM!!![1]). Can you *boot* from a USB pen drive? Do you expect home users to make their own bootable CDs? How are they supposed to do that without a floppy image to use? Do CDRWs (especially packet formatted disks) still have problems reading in some CDROM drives or have they fixed that 'needs a special driver' problem?
Not that I'm against this - I recently had this argument with myself over a new PC I'm building for my wife and the no-floppy argument won, but I live with her so I can fix anything that'll come up. I just think there are issues that need to be addressed before floppies can be eliminated entirely.
[1] I recently bought a couple of IBM PCs for a couple of the users in my office. Nice boxes - HEAVY steel snap-tite cases with good hardware. They also have a very small factory-pre-installed-crap coefficient which made deployment easy. HOWEVER, it included no WinXP Pro install or system restore CDs. In short, no way to recover the PC if the hard drive dies because the setup files are on a special partition on the hard drive. I called IBM and unleashed the fury until they sent a set of recovery CDs to me, but sheesh - what's the world coming to! They said it was because MS made such practices a requirement of their OEM agreement. BTW, even more OT, but MS *really* *could* just make Linux a non-issue and maintain their market-dominating position if they would just STOP BEING EVIL! What is it about power that makes people greedy! Criminy, it's stuff like *THIS* that makes me seriously want to consider at Linux/StarOffice/LAMP as an alternative to MS, not the open-sourcedness of the alternative platforms. (Linux fanboys can take a hike - I'm not trolling, dorks. I love Linux and run a Woody box at home, it just can't the software we need at the office because our vendors are Windows-exclusive, but don't get me started on **THAT** again.) You know, this is the longest footnote I've ever typed in my life - in fact, you should get a free steak if you're still reading this, but I don't have the money right now. Try back later when my tax refund comes in.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
One of the first things to do when planning a change to a product is to go out and find out what your customers requirements are.
Dell will find, should they do this, that customers use floppies to fit three requirements:
1: Small data distributions from vendors (e.g. drivers, license keys, etc)
2: Legacy media access (e.g. old documents from school)
3: Storage for small pieces of data which must be prortable (e.g. resume, encryption keys, browser passwords, etc).
The first item is easily taken care of. Vendors have been moving toward CD for this for years, and this announcement will only spur them on.
The third is where USB-keychains really shine over floppies.
The second is something that Dell is either going to not care about or wish they'd done a whole lot more thinking on. The question is: how many potential Dell customers have old floppies that they think they might need to access. How many of those customers will buy a non-Dell system because they fear that they will need access to that old media?
We shall see...
I spent a couple days about a year ago, going through a box of old floppies, and using an image tool to make images of all the floppies.. there were a few bad ones, but for the most part they were all fine.. I blasted the image files to a CD-R, and even had room to store most them as raw files (not image files). I also put the image writer on the CD-R with the images.. I haven't needed them yet, but if I ever do, I don't have to worry about using a floppy to get some obsolote file..
I can't even remember the last time I needed a floppy.. worst case scenerio, I just stick the file on a web server and grab it from the web..
ChuckyG
I represent a company with 30,000 PCs, most of the Dells.
/shrug
Dell has a couple of problems with their new line. First and foremost the new LAPTOP line is a complete departure from the old C-series. The new D-series uses NO parts from the C-series. Your entire stockpile of replacement C-series parts (floppy, CD, battery, etc.) is useless for the D-series.
The Desktop line, just to make things worse, now uses the C-series (yes, the C, not D) floppy and CD-ROM bays for their SX versions of the desktop machines. And while I guess you have a source of replacement CD-ROM drives, you still only get one notebook style bay in their new SX machines. [The SX is the "Slim" GX version.] Between you and me, the SX is only smaller because they took out the power supply and put it on a brick on the power cord. YIPEE!
So, back to the REAL business desktop, the GX line. Most of you have seen an Optiplex desktop. You can get GX1/GXa machines at ComputerSurplusOutlet for $99 most days of the week. They're solid, easy to support machines with a huge number of replacement parts, interchangable pieces, and a great deal of familiarity with the people who support them. And while the new GX machines have gotten "tighter" to work in (ever since the 240 when the footprint got smaller), they're still easy to work on, have easy replacement parts, and everyone understands how to work on them.
They're ahead of the power-curve too, with serial ATA coming standard on the next round of GX machines on the roadmap..
Just stay away from the D-series laptops and the SX slimline machines. It's time to get a new RFQ from your other vendors. Your new machines are incompatable anyway, might as well shop around.
Subject says it all.
SmartMedia (or CompactFlash, or your other favorite tiny-memory-card) in PCMCIA adapter. Works perfectly. On desktops you need to add a slot for it, but I never use desktops anyway.
sulli
RTFJ.
- "We would like to see customers migrate away from floppies as quickly as possible, because there are better alternative technologies out there," said Mark Vena, director of product marketing for Dell's Dimension desktop PCs.
I disagree: there is no replacement I am aware of out there yet that I can trust to be as reliable, ubiquitous and cheap as floppies. CDR/Ws don't cut it because they take too long to burn, and USB thingies are, however neat they are, too expensive: I can't just give them away willy-nilly.[Shrugs] I'll just be one of the people ordering the "deluxe upgrade: include 1.44 MB floppy drive" then.
My main question is: where the heck does Dell get off making this strategic decision for their customers? Seems like a picturebook example of something the market would be old & wise enough to decide on it's own (for once).
yes, we have no bananas
They still make those things? Who'd've thought. Last few machines I built I never even considered one. Small files: easier to move via network. Boot for install: CD. Large files: CDR.
What possible purpose does the floppy drive serve today?
All sweeping generalizations suck.
I suppose their time has come, but every once in a while you'd like an OS that fits on a floppy. or at least a few system tools.
/really/ need one, there's no alternative. Are you supposed to burn an 'emergency ISO CD' in advance for the blue screen of death?
When you
I have a pen drive and i use it all the time here at work. And we mainly have all Dell Dimesions here too, which are decent computers. The Dimensions have the front USB's BUT there are in a horrible place. It would be a whole lot more convient if their placement was a little more practical!!
Interesting question, if the 3.5" really does go the way of the 8"...
Will bootable CDs based on the El Torito method (which makes the first 2880 or 5760 blocks on a CD look like fd0) all suddenly stop working?
When companies make decisions like this, either for financial or marketing reasons, they *really* need to consider the technical problems such decisions may cause. This one strikes me as amusing because, although they can get rid of the convenience of *having* a floppy drive, they can't actually get rid of the BIOS support for it without breaking quite a lot of seemingly-non-floppy media.
actually Dell themselves still offers the LS-120 drives as an option. In fact the only place I have ever seen the drives outside of retail packaging was on the Dell's from the CAD department, they used em because they could transfer large design files without a network or anything and on the laptops they can be used without carrying yet another accessory.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You know, most of you probabally dont use or need floppies, but that one time you have to install windows 98 fresh to get some old app running, you'll be the first one crying for an ol' reliable floppy disk.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I just spec'd a Dell Insipiron laptop for a coworker today and found that the modular floppy is now optional. Just a month ago, it was included with the system.
Overall, I see this is a great move. The only downer that I could see off the top of my head would be the process of updating a BIOS in a system...
Couldn't have been worse than the stillborn 2.88MB 3.5" floppy standard. I only remember that being on old NeXT computers and as an odd BIOS setting on 90's-era motherboards.
The only advantage to it was using those old DC2120-type tape backup systems that hooked up to the floppy cable. My tape drive worked at double speed with that setting if the FD controller supported it.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
I dont know of anyway to do bios upgrades for us DIY sytem builders besides a floppy. They need to make USB bootable now.
The last time I received a Dell system, the system drive was stupidly partitioned... a tiny logical C: drive, and a huge logical D: drive. Dell: clue up!!!! Windows software wants to install into C:Program Files, OK? The system was an expensive paperweight until I repartitition.
Dell are idiots. Moneymaking idiots, but idiots none the less. They don't get my money.
I use dual floppies as part of my crypto system. Each contain approxamatly 1MB of white noise based random numbers. I guess I could do the same thing with CD ROMS, but I am not sure of the ability to quickly destroy them. Floppies are easy to destroy should the need arise.
I have no problem with the idea of abandoning the floppy disk, but good luck getting manufacturers to supply all their drivers on CD. I bought a USB2 card for my PowerMac last week and the driver still came on a floppy! Luckily I was able to copy the file from my PC over the network.
There are many viable alternatives which can and will be as cheap as floppies eventually. These technologies are currently more expensive due to the total lack of use. Example is the Zip or the Super Drive (f/ Sony). These are both very portable, hold a large amount of data, and can be bootable.
If enough manufacturuers equip their machines with one of these (please, let's stay standardized!) the prices on the media will drop dramatically due to the large amount of product consumers will buy and the competition to obtain these customers. We have seen the same with floppies, CD's, DVD's and even backup media such as tapes.
I used to be a MS fan but then I was brainwashed. Now I see the Light. Mac OS X pwns u.
- cheap drive
- cheap media
- fully read-write
- small, easy to carry media
- readable in nearly all machines
- writeable in nearly all machines
CDRs have 3 out of 6. USB keychain things have 3 out of 6. Zip drives have 3 out of 6. How about offer a real replacement before removing functionality?I rarely use floppies anymore, but once every month or two, a floppy is *the* solution.
Because I haven't archived all my old DOS startup floppy disks onto Hard Drive or CD!
I can't remember how many floppies I have floating around b/c of all the DOS games I played. All that work I did to tweak autoexec.bat and config.sys to get games to boot was epic!
It's about time Dell caught up to APPLE... A company that obviously continues to change the face of computing, sometimes YEARS before PC people know it...
Some of us still need them. I have somewhere around 900 floppies that I reguarly use, and yes I've got a CDRW and a DVDRW, and they work fine for backups; but what they should be doing is swapping the old 1.44 floppy out with a higher capacity ZIP or LS120(do they even make those anymore?) that has backwards compatibility.
Hell it should have been done 4 years ago with ZIP or LS120; I think ZIP would be the better way to go, with larger addaption but still; we need floppies of some kind still; wether it's in a 200MB flavor or a 1.44MB flavor.
Om, nomnomnom...
True, floppy drives are antique and are obsolete...and maybe that's why I still like having one around. Same reason I play my old 8-bit NES more than my Playstation 2 and why I use my PII 333MHz box more than my higher-end ultra-leet "f33r me bitches, i r0x0r" computer (sorry, too much time on IRC). There's something to be said about relics.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
So they remove floppy drives from the machines, leave the price the same, then charge 150 bucks to put a drive back in.
Thanks dell.
-- Point? None! Cob.
So how can the RIAA claim that the primary use of CD-R and CD-RW is to copy music and charge a fee in Canada for each and everyone purchased when there will no longer be a floppy drive for booting and exchanging files? Clearly CDs now have undeniable uses that do not involve copying music. Seems to me they should have to drop or lower the fee to compensate for this fact.
The last three systems I've owned have been sans-floppy, And I've never needed one. I built all 3, and I made the choice to exclude the floppy drive in all 3. cdr media is way cheap, cdr drives are reasonably priced, and pretty much every motherboard built in the last few years has a bios that can handle bootable cd's. So what I'm asking is - who out there has built their own system and left out the floppy?
btw - yay dell, way to move forward!
- I'm full of tinier men!
More companies are doing what Apple did some time ago, and making BIOS updates self-contained. On a Mac, you run the updater, it restarts the computer, updates the the sytem, and restarts again.
I know some PCs can do essentially the same thing, but I can't recall who does it. Sorry for the lack of details.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Just like the AMI Guy said about the TCPA, "Woohoo! Over here! Look the other way for a minute! We're not taking away your freedoms! Trust me."
... but the three last time I used floppies in the 2 last years were after downloading drivers from dell, for my dell. :
I had the files on my hard disk, and those where executable asking me to
-insert a floppy
-run the programm
-open the floppy in the explorer.(no reboot).
If Dell was a little more organized, as far as I'm concerned, they could have dropped them 3 years ago.
I would also like to see them offer a computer without PS2, Serial, Game & Printer ports. Instead have extra USB 2.0 & IEEE1394 ports. Maybe put a memory card reader where the floppy was. Even use Serial ATA over IDE. I think Dell could offer this as a seperate PC along with the other "legacy computers".
For those who need them you can get an external USB Floppy drive. Or the IBM docking station that plugs into a USB port and provides Serial, PS2 & Printer ports plus double as a USB hub.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
There's alot of people saying something along the lines of "well damn! I better still be able to flash my BIOS".
Now go say that to the standard Dell consumer and they may just look at you like you sprouted a new arm from the middle of your forehead. The vast majority of computer users don't know anything about BIOS's, flashing them, updating firmware, or screwing with your SCSI controller. If this is the sort of thing you're planning on doing well... why exactley do you have a dell?
I need to plug a floppy drive into my computer to update the firmware in the DVD-ROM drive. Apparently there's no other way to do it.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but the shuttle does use processors from 15 years ago...
the thing is that when apple droped the floppy, was that they dint replace it with anything, no cdrw no zip nothing so that, if you wanted to transfer files, your forced to ether buy a floppy drive, or an external cdrw, now that cdrw drives are installed in almost all new computers, its about time to start getting rid of floppies.
I use floppies everyday at work. Until all the BIOS vendors implement the full El Torito standard to enable mass acceptance of bootable CD-ROMS, I don't think floppies will go away. Until USB Pen Drives are as cheap as floppies, I don't think floppies will go away.
Check out http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/ for some bootable cd-rom info.
Bootable CD's have been around how long? Cut the cord already. Where there's a will / need / dollar, there's a way. Flashing a BIOS can be done from other bootable media (CD-R), and instead of making a boot floppy to save a machine, you make a bootable CD.
1.44megs (or 2.88 or anything in between for that matter) of storage space isn't enough to be worthwhile to most people. Sure you can do cool stuff (www.coyotelinux.com) if you're so inclined, but let a dead horse die already.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I still have arguments with people that try to tell me the 5.25 is the floppy and the 3.5 is a hard disk.
Pubcrawler.ca
.
I haven't put a floppy in any of the 10 or so machines i've built over the last 2 years
none of them...not even my own high-end tweaked workstation
this came back to bite me in the ass 2 weeks ago when i needed to flash the bios - doh! had to go digging through boxes to find one
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
But I wouldn't want a machine without a floppy. They're cheap, easy to replace, and versatile; I can transfer data to and from a 10 year old machine without a hassle. True, such a situation doesn't occur often, but when it does I'm glad to have the floppy's versatility. Much of my file movement involves relatively small text files, for which floppies are optimal.
I want the floppy available when I need it, rather than buying external drives or following around with USB devices.
I think it is a good idea to stop including these drives as it just gives people a crutch to lean on and slows down the adoption and advancement of new media devices. This isn't to say that someone couldn't get a USB floppy drive if they need one, just there is no reason to make it the default option.
What needs to happen now is manufacturers must come up with ways to boot off of USB memory devices so that we still have all the conviniences offered by floppies. (It would also help if there is almost always a USB port in the front of the computer) Dropping floppies is the first step though. Without the floppy as a crutch manufacturers will be forced to come up with devices that have the same bootable convenience.
I've not had a floppy drive on any of the machines I put together myself for several years now. I have one somewhere which I could install if I ever needed to but the need has never arisen. Basically any file small enough to fit on a floppy gets copied over a network or emailed these days. As long as dell provide some way for people who actually want a floppy to get one this is no big deal. It's a good thing in fact.
Sig is taking a break!
Last time I tried to install XP without a floppy drive in the system it would hang during the hardware detection (the quick one at the very begging of every NT/XP boot up sequence). The odd thing was it would boot/detect just fine if I enabled floppy support in the bios without attaching the floppy drive.
This sig is worse than my last.
The next time I hear a teenager say "back in the day" when referring to something in his own life that was only a few years ago, I'm going to smack him upside the head.
This is basically a speil by Dell to make more money (of-course).
They have supply lines of over priced, under performing USB pen drives or whatever else they plan to push with their new computers.
I bet the markup of these new device are pretty high, and since they remove the disk drive lots of Joes will go, Oh I prolly need that, when they see Dells infospiel about how Floppys are passe and not included but you have to buy this USB thing for only $79 with your new $999 computer.
Truth is they are old, but they work, and often when you need it, you REALLY need it.
I think some people are missing the point. Dell isn't going to include floppy drives as a "standard" features. I say, so what. If you really want a floppy drive, and some people do, then have it installed extra. If you use a floppy boot disc on occasion, keep an extra floppy drive around to use for those rare times. But in my experience (and I am sure in most peoples) I haven't used a floppy drive in about ten years.
People that have purchased Sony Mavica digital cameras are "checking" the $10 option box for a floppy drive to be installed on their new Dell PC.
....
....
....
Just because Dell is removing the floppy from its standard PC package doesn't mean that ou won't be able to get one!
Moving on, the Sony coorporation, along with other manufacturers of digital cameras that store their images on floppy disks, have decided to embrace the Dell corporation's decision to remove floppys from their new PCs and only produce cameras that use memory sticks and that have USB conectivity.
In retail news, leading electronic distributers Best Buy and Circuit City have seen their stock sink a couple points after announcing that they will have to liquidate all floppy digital cameras at prices lower than wholesale
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
This is a huge marketing scheme, Come on, how many time have you gone into a lab(university, college), wrote some code and had to port it somewhere else.
If they are trying to push CD-R's, there is money involved for them. Imagine buring a 800k file to port it to another computer.
F*&king stupid.
It's about fscking time people using pc's at least started catching up with the apples are used-
I work for a university and one of the grant projects I support recently bought about 40 ibooks with burners for students. One of the teachers in charge has us order $1700 worth of floppy drives with the reason being that it was the format they use to hand out and receive homework.
cd's are so much cheaper, faster and more reliable that it's amazing it's not the standard for educators yet- teachers are behind the learning curve. And this is supposed to be a technology related grant program to boot! It was very frustrating to have to deal with a such a poor and wasteful decision.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Nah, its still stupid:
PCs:
Don't have a standardized way of flashing bios's from within the OS
Don't have a standardized way of netbooting - MS's PXE is closed, but people have tried to hack it into use.
Without floppies, it will be a pain to do sysadmin stuff unless these issues are addressed. Ideally, a smarter pc bios that could net boot a boot image would be ideal - a lot of 1st tier intel based servers have such functionality.
ostiguy
Not only did I remove the dang thing from my case, I have the floppy controller turned off. I haven't used a floppy disk (by choice) in about 3 years
There seems to be some industry rule, that anything that works must be improved til it doesn't work any more!
I recently had a corrupt BIOS flash (power went out as I was flashing it). Thinking I would need to shell out money for a new Flash ROM or motherboard I was pretty pissed off. Then I read on my motherboard's website that if I copied the BIOS file to a floppy disk, named it a certain file, and pressed a certain key combo (the details escape me at the moment), the computer would flash the BIOS. I was in luck, it worked! And I was soon back to computing. BIOS manufacturers should now include support for this feature in bootable CD-ROMs or USB pen drives in case of catastrophes like this.
Floppies are cheap! CDR's SHOULD be cheap too but think of our Canadian and (possibly Austrailian)friends who have to pay never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed media taxes.
Think about it..
Floppies retail cost anywhere from 15-20 bucks. So you're looking at about an extra $800 bucks in parts for all your PC's.
For $800 these days you can add a nice bit of hard disk space to your 40 clients. Prices have dropped around a dollar a gigabyte. You can also buy a decent backup system for around that price too to back them all up. Hell you can even get a pretty decent networked laserjet for that price.
Personally, I would much rather have more hard disk space or backup for the network than a floppy. I agree with Dell %100 on this issue.
I'd love to have a bootable compactflash, multimedia/secure digital or smartmedia card reader in place of my floppy drive. Key word here is "bootable". I'd be willing to give up floppies if I could boot off another cheap, randomly-rewriteable media. A nice bonus would be the ability to read digital images faster than through a USB1.1 camera or card reader. Better yet, a combo reader that does all of them. USB versions of combo readers are cheap enough, I don't see IDE versions being any more expensive.
(Then maybe, just maybe, those goddamn Sony Mavicas will die the horrible death they deserve...)
Ironic since the NeXT was actually the first platform to abandon the floppy, in favour of an MO drive (but then it really was too soon). The exclusion of the drive from the iMac (and G4 Cube) could be seen as Jobs's revenge on the damn thing. ;)
Those 2.88MB 3.5" floppies were standard (pun intended) on a lot of IBM MCA PS/2 machines, which did nothing to increase their popularity.
The weirdest part is that such a thing already exists: Mount Rainier, aka CD-MRW. The damn standard is sitting there waiting for people to start using it. So where the hell is it? It's not like I'm asking for a Rocket Car.
CDs are in no way as convenient as the rewritability of floppies. First of all, most cdr media is made so cheap these days, many old drives can't even read the media, they read straight through them. Second, most cd media is just as finicky as floppies, all it takes is a stray fingerprint, scratch, or dust and the disk will end up misbehaving, stalling, or simply not reading. As for floppies, I enjoy using them, nothing is quite as transparent, been around for as long, and just the right size for booting without wasting all the excess space on media like cd. Lastly, for those of you who use floppies, do you NOT conditionally format them anymore? I find as long as I do this, they work perfectly fine. I guess with XP and its quick formatting, it is no wonder so many people have problems using the media. It really doesn't take long to format floppies on modern hardware, yet most people are too lazy to do it, and would rather blame it on the hardware or the age of the device rather than using commonsense. I rarely have problems with any of the floppies I use, matter of fact I have had more problems with cdrom drives than some of the floppy drives I use on my newer machines and even my old p75. Yes I still use a p75, it is a damn good machine. It is a shame dell is forcing this on users, it should be an option. I will never buy another dell if they are going to be dictating what I get with my computer.
* when i have guest at my place and i take some digital photos, i give them on floppy. i can't use USB flash disk for this (too expensive).
* i have lots of floppy which i got free from my company trash
* does bios support booting on USB flash?
* i can boot a pc using a floppy and duplicate the boot floppy immediately. haven't found a way to do this with cd-rw. many PCs do support boot by CD, but the CDs don't contain cd-rw driver in a way that i can duplicate boot cd (without going through other hassles of installing and configuring).
* Easy to label floppy than CD or USB flash disk.
* Incremental changes on floppies are much more trivial than on cd-rw.
* old hardware
* old archived floppies
* guaranteed compatibility
* NT doesn't support USB. Does it support bootable CDs?
* Older linux doesn't support USB. Many have trouble using CD-RWs too.
* Server machines usually have a floppy drive but no CD-RW. Some don't have USB support
* Floppy drives are cheap and takes only a small volume
Having said all these, I haven't used a PC floppy drive for last two years, but i would still prefer, that some robust, stable alternative to exist before removing floppy drive altogether.
The marketing synergies with Viagra are awe inspiring...
You can get a decent internal reader that will fit in a 3.5 bay for $20 - $30, and it will be SO much more useful in the long term. This way, you will not have to burn a disk for a 1mb file you want to share. 32MB SM cards are as cheap as $10. Not as cheap as a CD, but a LOT smaller and more convenient for smaller files
>PS/2 USB converter.
Yay, $30 to replace a $2 IC and $0.50 connector. Not that the connector counts, as you did have to pay for a USB connector anyways.
>Get a print server for your old printers (two-ports can be had for under $100, and networking them is a snap), and buy a CD-RW drive. ZIP drives are slow, kludgy, low-capacity, and have a tendency to click your media (and drive) to death at a seemingly random time (usually disk 13 of 26 is the victim).
So, spend $100 to replace a $0.50 port again (which again, you still would have paid for as a USB port). Bad investment. There's actually no cost for the IC -- AFAIK, nobody actually make a floppy, serial, and parallel-less chipset/multi-io yet, so the only savings is in not placing the port on the mobo.
Plus, this guy should buy a new zip drive to read his backups? Bad idea.
>Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
I'd tell you what serial ports are still being used for, but then I'd be in trouble via the DMCA. Suffice it to say there are about 5 - 10 million of them in use commonly today, the number is ever growing, and that you might want to read about the ISO-7816 standard.
>Becauses the busses are slow, kludgy, and cost sillicon and valuable board real-estate that could be used for UATA133 or additional USB 2.0 (450+ MB/Sec) or IEEE1394 / FireWire (400+ MB/Sec) connectors, or to make motherboards smaller and/or less expensive.
A) It's already in all chipsets I know of. My legacy-free laptop still has a controller with floppy, serial, and parallel just to do IR.
B) Valuable board real-estate? Uhh, VLSI was invented a long time ago. If 1 sq. in. makes or breaks a full size computer (or most laptops) the designer is on crack.
C) Really, we're talking zero-cost here, it's nothing more than a money grab to make a computer "legacy-free" -- that is, unless you are going to give me a better price on it.
>I'll assume you've got some figures to support this otherwise baseless claim?
Baseless? Uhhuh... try harder to troll next time.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Last time I grabbed an updated BIOS from Dell for my Inspiron 3800 (3 years old or so), they had a Windows executable that flashed the BIOS straight out of Windows - no boot floppy needed.
:-)
No idea if it runs under linux with Wine though.
#DeleteChrome
I do, but it's older than most (Palm III) and I'm seriously considering upgrading it. And when I do, it'll be USB, partly since it's much faster, and mostly because nobody makes serial PDAs anymore. And if in the future I get a Mac or a new laptop (current one only has parallel and PS2, most others seem to be the same), I'd like to be able to use it without buying an extra (admittedly inexpensive) adapter.
How many people need to configure a piece of network gear?
No need to burden home PCs with outdated, unused features. Somebody could/should make a card with serial ports for admins to use. Or they could get one of the serial/USB adapters that've been around ever since Macs went to USB exclusively.
How many people have needed to get to the serial consone on their unix box?
See above. Home computers don't need serial.
How many people have rack mount gear that the only console is serial?
Joe Luser is not an admin. See above.
Serial won't die any time soon.
The only serial thing I've used in the last decade is my Palm Pilot. And that's several years old. I don't know of anyone else (besides net admins) that still use serial for anything.
Here's where they're going: 16MB Dell USB Memory Key
I just saw this when I was scoping out the Precision 350's.
Btw, it's $29.00.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
Get your head out of your ass. If you can deflate your ego long enough, that is.
Not everyone has multiple mainboards or chipwriters just laying around, dumbass. Sometimes it *is* difficult to 'flash it somewhere else'.
But I guess you've got some kind of megalab there in your parents' basement. Workbenches, oscilloscopes, a dozen systems and parts for a dozen more strewn about... and you say to yourself, yeah, that must be what everyone's room looks like too. Yeah, that's the ticket.
If this goes down, the Business Software Alliance will have to change their catch-phrase!
I have to admit, "Don't Copy That USB Keychain Flash Media Device" doesn't have the same ring as "Don't Copy That Floppy"...
Can I boot to my USB pen?
.....quit sending all those free 3.5" floppies to use, they became obsolete for me.
There's Michael Dell lying on a makeshift bed...he wakes up and sees a blurry figure standing over him...his eyes slowly focus and he realizes that it's Steve Jobs...and Steve says, "welcome...to the real world..." *Fade to black*
I'm still using the 5 1/4 drive
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So in order to burn in or test a computer, we need a working IDE / SCSI / USB interface in order to possibly debug the IDE / SCSI / USB interface?
it's an antique technology...
Yeah, but so is the wheel. Doesn't make it any less useful. Are Ford planning to stop putting wheels on cars just because it's old technology ?
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
is the re-recordable DVD @ 4.7 GB.
They are fast and easy to use.
They are as low as $200 in some cases and movies can be recorded as well.
Maybe is was good for Microsoft to allow the clone market to flourish, but it made IBM a bit player in the platform it created. The IBM clones made PC hardware standard, but that didn't particularly benefit IBM in any real way...
I wasn't aware that Intel's Preboot eXecution Environment(original pdf) was closed...
iMacs sucked 'cos they dropped the floppy. There's nothing more irritating than using an iMac, Sparc , and now a Dell, and not being about to save your document to a floppy in a matter of seconds. Floppies are more convenient than a cd burner for the small jobs.
Don't have a standardized way of netbooting - MS's PXE is closed, but people have tried to hack it into use PXE is Intel's, and it is open, although they no longer support their Linux sdk.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Well I guess they are hoping that the BIOSes that ship on their mobos never need any sort of flashing. It is quite simple to throw together a Win95 (or whatever) floppy with a new image on there.
Of course my one friend is an avid flash from bootable CD guy. But for this job the floppy is perfect: the size, the ease of creation, and the simplicity. Until we hit those next gen motherboards where such things aren't necessary, I see having a floppy being a great safety measure.
What is music when you despise all sound?
I get soooo tired of setting up HP servers:
1. boot from CD
2. MAKE drivers floppy from CD?!?
3. boot from W2k server CD
4. Press F6 at the right moment
5. insert floppy.
6. rinse, repeat.
(No, I _don't_ wanna hear about how it works in linux. I'm AWARE of how it works in linux. It's not an option.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
nt
There's Michael Dell lying on a makeshift bed...he wakes up and sees a blurry figure standing over him...his eyes slowly focus and he realizes that it's Steve Jobs...and Steve says, "welcome...to the real world..." ***Fade to black***
Yea, when I've tried to resuscitate old PCs from my internet-connected iBook, the reliance on boot floppies was real helpful. I'd have to burn a cd, then copy the files from cd to floppy on the pc and reboot. that was real stupid, cause everything relied on boot floppies. bleh.
I don't mind if they will let me boot from the USB pen drive.
Raj
re: bad quality floppy media
It's like vinyl records. Far superior in sound quality than CD provided a) you have a good quality vinyl, and b) you have an amazing player/stylus. But as they were fazing out records for mainstream albums, they produced crappy quality records. I mean I had an album purchased in 1980 which has not crackles and hisses, whereas an album produced in the early nineties was all static.
I've been using PXE for years.. It's an Intel standard. I've used both grub and bpbatch to netboot linux machines. I just finished a PXE based re-intall of all the nodes in the cluster I run. The machines net-boot every boot, so all i have to do is flag their PXE config to switch the to re-install mode.. it clears the partition table, and starts redhat kickstart. very good stuff
h ttp://www.bpbatch.comg rub/html_node/Network.h tml
Links:
http://www.intel.com/labs/manage/WfM/
http://www.gnu.org/manual/
http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php
I havn't seen a decent USB boot spec tho. I normaly do CD booting if PXE is not an option.
Years from now people will be asking the question, "why does it start with C:?"
"Dude, You're not getting a floppy!"
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." -- Benjamin Franklin
Most of the posts on this thread seem confused, or are downright wrong. I hope this clears up some confusion.
Many are complaining about BIOS flashing, diagnostic drivers, etc. I hope the slashdot crowd realizes that the floppy drives are being pulled from NEW computers. Most new PCs can do a BIOS flash from within Windows, or through a bootable CD (which acts just like a floppy)if you are using another OS. Obviously, the drivers for the other hardware won't be on floppies, but as it is, Windows XP has exccellent hardware support, and requires few or no driver disks/CDs. Dell's target audience doesn't use exotic hardware, or install hardware from their older PCs.
Most new motherboards support booting from USB and Firewire devices, and all motherboards support booting from CDs (including CD-Rs and CD-RWs). Debian can be installed off of a CD, though it is admittedly not as efficent as it cuold be. Gentoo has a more ideal configuration in a 100mb CD image which includes all the device drivers and utilities you are likely to need in order to download the distribution. All the other major distros are only supported by installing from a CD.
CD-R and RW drives are cheap. 48x models can be found for under $75. At the higher speeds, it takes under 3 minutes to burn a CDR, and about 5 minutes to burn a CDRW (when you think about it, it would take about 6 hours to copy 650 megs of data to floppies). CDRWs can be erased, making them ideal for smaller files. There are no instances in which Floppies are faster (execpt for savnig a small (>1mb) document, in which case CDRWs are still adequately fast). I only hope that Mount Reiner is finalized by the time these PCs ship.
New PCs have front USB ports. You don't have to reach around into the back to plug in a "Pen Drive".
Users with exotic hardware requirments (serial or Parallel ports for terminals, barcode scanners, recepit printers, etc) can either purchase a PCI card or USB adapter to satisfy this requirment. These can be found VERY cheaply.
Finally, Dell's not the first company to drop floppy drives. IBM has begun dropping them, sony has dropped them, and Apple dropped them 5 years ago.
While for the most part, I absolutely despise Dell, I applaud them for this decision. They don't use AMD, use cheap hardware, their cases have RAZOR SHARP edges on them (bad for hardware geeks), don't adhere to ATX standards, use proprietary hardware, and they agressively marketed WinME (a nightmare for people like me who don't want to fork over the cash for XP, but want their PC to be stable)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
How much do you want to bet that they'll label this a "revolution", as once again Dell comes through with a brand-new idea? It makes me sick.
I'm sure a lot of people here build their own boxes like me so what does it matter what Dell does? I am my companies main support guy so it might matter there but if need be I'll just get a usb floppy but once again we don't even use Dell so I don't care.
We use Systemax boxes and they suck beyond belief. I've never seen so many boxes with dead cdroms and failed hard drives. It's like they never test their products. I guess when the company chooses to go cheap then this is what I have to deal with.
I also like the way our head IT guy does major hardware/network upgrades with no notice/warning during peak work hours. He is an MCSE so that might be the reason.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Dell is about 4 years behind Apple. Right on schedule if you ask me.
In all seriousness, who ever uses floppies anymore? we have a USB floppy drive here at the office, and it gets plugged in every once in a great while.
True. I remember a summer job where I did wire-wrapping for an engineer building a computer around that new-fangled 8008 processor.
Obviously you're not a gamer.
Response time for input devices is Teh s|_|XX0Rz via USB!
Legacy may freak out and go haywire with ATX superdooper-powerwhatnotmanagement every odd week - it does with me, I allways have to turn off the comp, unplug the Keyboard plugin again and restart - but response time rulez.
No fragging way can you get multiple keypress and mousemovement responses at the same time in that speed via USB.
No, legacy is gonna be around for a loooong time until they come up with an alternative zero-delay "input bridge" of some sorts in the chipsets. Or some extra freakin fast active firewire Keyboard and Mouse combo or so.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Why is Twirlip's comment here moderated as -1, Troll?
/this/ is certainly not one I would have tagged, had I any moderator points when I read it, becaue, and get this--
I've tagged lots of people as trolls before, and
He's right.
Having USB ports on the keyboard happens to be one of the nicest things I can think of about Apple's keyboards. It's so nice, in fact, that I can't get along well without them these days (no reason to reach around my PowerBook when I can just plug my Canon PowerShot into the side of the external keyboard I'm using), not to mention how other keyboard manufacturers have adopted the practice of including USB ports since Apple shipped the first iMac.
Twirlip's right on the money, here, whether the mod who tagged this one is an Apple fan or not.
Hope some lucky moderator gets to meta-moderate this one.
-/-
Mikey-San
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I can put a file or two (zipped if necessary) on a floppy and drop that floppy right in a pocket or my bookbag without too much worry. Would you put one or two small files on a CD then drop it in your pocket? Yes, I'm aware of the cheapness of CD jewel cases...but try putting a CD in a calendar book or shirt pocket.
My new laptop doesn't have an internal floppy drive, which doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would. Plus, HP had a coupon for a free USB floppy drive (after rebate) so I can use floppies when I need to, without carrying the drive around for the 99%+ of the time I don't need it.
VNC? The VNC client fits on a floppy. How cool is that?
It may be old technology, but it still does the job.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
If you want to install any non standard driver with Microsoft Windows 2000, or even XP, you have to do it off of a floppy. Yes, it is absurd, and a pain, but what are you going to do when you find out that your Dell with Windows XP has a special IDE controller and you need to install the driver while loading your OS. Oops!
That's why Apple have reverted to using UNIX? Many an OS have been using *nix for many many years. And then there's Apple being miles behind in what model AGP graphics they include in their machines (a GF4 MX for goodness sake), not too mention the fact that the OS never had decent stuff like an FTP/email/www client, etc, until the last minute.
I have an IOGEAR PS/2 To USB converter for my IBM 'M' keyboard. When it worked it worked. However occasionally the keyboard would "disappear" and nothing except, either a cold reboot, or plugging in a PS/2 keyboard and "CTRL+ALT+DEL" would make it reappear. While the PS/2 port is %100 reliable. So no I'm not completely sold on the idea.
I have had mine since 12/1993 when I first got my custom built computer (486 DX2/66). The 3.5" disk drive still works after all these years. Currently I am using an Athlon XP 2200+ and the disk drive still works. I wonder how long I can use it until it finally dies or become useless (e.g., no need for boot disks).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Some of us still want floppy drives, and that's all there is to it. It costs Dell something like $5 to put a floppy drive into a machine as it's being manufactured, but it costs me a lot more in terms of time to install one. If Dell wants to shave a little bit more of its manufacturing costs, that's fine, but then I won't buy one because a floppy drive is on my baseline requirements checklist, as is a keyboard, mouse, CD burner, 3D accelerator card, and somewhere to plug speakers in.
One short sight I have see is the lack of boot-support for USB floppies on stock intel hardware. I work in manufacturing and would love to ditch all the floppies as they frequently go bad in our environment. But...most stock Intel boards (that is all Dell sells!) are very lax on boot options. Via and SiS boards have had these for some time, but Intel Bioses always seem to be lacking.
I really like network booting...Just setup a tftp site for gentoo that we can point our networks to! True internet PC! It's been too long since the days of the ROM-boot machines.
I think floppy drives have become 'Comfort' devices. I could use CD-Rs and CD-RWs for all my data transfers, or to boot when my PC goes down, but there have been times when something has gone horribly wrong with my system and a Floppy was there to fix the problem. I like that! Its not so much that I need my floppy or that some other media couldn't be used, but it gives me that sense of security that only a floppy drive can give. It says "Hey big boy, don't you worry! Ill be here when you need to boot to a DOS prompt". Maybe its just me, but even tho floppys can be flaky sometimes, for emergency recovery purposes id rather have trusty boot disk than relying on bootable CDs (Maybe its just me but my PCs dont always like to boot off bootable CDs)
When I ordered my Inspiron 8200 laptop 4 months back, it arrived with 2 floppy drives! (Instead of a CDRW)
...or at least that's what everybody said about the iMac four and a half years ago.
The only reason most people use floppy drives is A) because a driver or something comes on floppy, or B) an emergency boot disk for when the OS is hosed, C) making one of the above to be used in another machine, or D) transporting small files (Word documents) between computers.
A) is easily solved: the companies who currently ship floppies need to ship CDs instead. CDs are pretty cheap; this is not unreasonable. But, there's no motivation to do it as long as everyone has a floppy drive. Dell removing floppies (and others following suit) is a good motivator.
B) isn't an issue on new versions of Windows since it won't boot from a floppy anyway. PC users tend to forget that OS CDs are bootable!
C) is an issue for those of us with a 486 in the corner. Yes, I need a floppy drive in that machine, since it won't boot from CD. That's my only floppy drive, though.
D) can be done just as well (better!) with a USB keychain. Bigger capacity, and they work on nearly any computer. As far as I know, they're even bootable.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
When your AMI bios gets screwed, you copy the latest bios to a blank floppy and rename the file to AMIBOOT.ROM. Part of the bios on the machine never gets erased and will search for this file when switching the machine on after a bad flash. Tell me, how does Dell plan to get around this? Oh wait, Dell have their own proprietary bios/cmos which REALLY suck. Ever tried editing the CMOS settings on a Dell? Good luck!
For the people who don't know what pen drives are or where you can them, they're basically portable flash drives (i.e. solid state thus no moving parts like traditional floopy disks) that plug into your USB port and you can get them from pretty much anywhere including good ole Thinkgeek. For the more budget concerned, you can look at Yahoo! shopping for more choices (Yahoo! shopping link is just a quick search for 'usb pen drive').
Happy Shopping!
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
The Bondi iMac was the first iMac, so yes it never had a floppy drive.
And I was a few months off. Sue me.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
be support for them on the motherboard? I don't care if they're gone, but it'd be nice to have the option to install one if I need it. USB floppy drives are much more expensive than a simple IDE floppy.
The floppy issue is not a PC problem -- it's specific to the Windows disk scheduling system, and will probably never be fixed.
I can use floppies in my Linux box quite happily. It's just like another hard drive.
(Pet Peeve: that goddamn mechanical eject button *sucks*. Apple was smart enough not to use it, but it was devised in an age that didn't have enough memory to do buffered disk I/O, and it's a royal pain for those of us with OSes that can buffer up writes -- you *can* manually eject the thing w/o umounting it).
Mechanical ejects should only be used as an emergency measure...
Haven't seen what things are like in OS X (heck, may be hard to find an OS X system with a floppy), but I doubt things are that different from BSD -- probably works just fine too.
May we never see th
I say that if we are to move forward someone has to come up with a way to replace old technology. If Dell can make it so that I never have to use a floppy again, I say right on. Of course, every system will have to have a CD-RW so that boot disks can be made. But for everything else, use a USB keychain. They hold more than a floppy, are smaller than a floppy, and faster than a floppy. Some giant has to come along to upgrade a standard. Go Dell!
You know, I was rebuilding someone's PC, and the only way I could load Windows 2000 on that computer was through the 4 floppy disks. They don't have anything yet that can replace the Floppy Disk. Plus the fact, that when transfering just a few word documents or a files at a time, nothing beats the floppy disk. They are one of the few things that almost all PC's have. When you are in a classroom enviroment, most of the time you have to use Floppy disks. Theres no other way to take the work to your own PC.
Once upon a time, I once I had a great Sig.....then I lost it.
There is no denying that floppies are cheap and easy to use and do exactly what you want them to do (until they fail miserably) and are so well supported across the computing world that they do indeed do their job well.
But why hasn't a good replacement appeared?
Why hasn't a "new" device that does exactly the same thing as a floppy and is NOT based on crazy and expensive proprietry hardware been designed yet?
If I could by a solidstate disk that held about 5 MB (plenty of space for documents), was durable, could support thousands of rewrites, and was almost as cheap as a floppy.. etc etc... then it would be perfect for the job and would surely sell very well too.
I always feel stupid writing a 1 MB document to a CD; I *payed* for the other 639/699/799 MB and I'm not even *using* it!
I can't believe that no-one has mentioned it, yet...
floppies are by far the most convenient way to handle data that must be read-only most, but not all, of the time. Like tripwire database files.
And not every computer has network access, remember, floppies are still the storage of choice for sneakernets.
what?! for that price, I can buy 50 blank floppys :*)
Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Got a cable/ADSL modem at home? Notice that thing on the back... seems to be a serial port plug. A lot of routers/etc use a web-based or telnet interface now too, but there's added security in having it as an onboard port
No floppy drive is a pain, cos it makes deploying several hundred diskless workstations/Xterms ala the linux terminal server project (http://k12ltsp.org/) much more difficult.
It means you need boot proms in the network cards or some other simple low capacity, low cost bootable media.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The floppy persists because it is the only convenient way of transporting small files without a network using inexpensive reusable media that everyone can read. All of the floppy's competitors fail on one or more of those three requirements. The only medium that comes close these days would be the rewritable CD, but burning a CD is a lot less convenient than copying a file to a floppy, and -- at least in my experience -- CD-RWs are a lot less reliable than 3.5" floppies if they get passed around much. Floppies, after all, don't scratch easily.
It seems to me that not having a floppy drive would make it harder to flash BIOS firmware. I suppose it could be done with an El Torito image, though.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
But to people who *don't* always use the same computer, dropping the floppy is like condemning them to death.
Outside of my office, right now, some 80 students are banging away at the public access machines. They're doing research, writing papers, (probably surfing porn), and doing other tasks that they need to preserve the results of.
These machines are not assigned to them - it's pick-as-you-please. The students do not have network accounts, so there's no server for them to upload to.
They *need* floppies.
"Why not just make them purchase CD-RWs? They're just as cheap!" -- do all students have CD-RW's at home? Do they all know how to use burning software? Do I *really* want to have to train them in it? All 3000+ of them on campus? Do I have to explain the virtues of ISO9600 over Joliet over UDF over... You have to KNOW that shit to burn a CD that will work the way to expect it to.
Ditto with USB pen drives, zip drives, holo-cubes and direct brain-plugs.
Floppies are a standard everyone can agree on. Take the floppies away and they're left with a hodge-podge menagerie of devices in which the support staff must support *all* of them, or tell the student "too bad you didn't buy the $200 porto-wafer storage solution that we recommend" when they panic because they can't bring up the final project they finished 5 minutes ago and are about to lose.
Everyone knows floppies. Floppies are nice. Floppies are available everywhere. Floppies don't need updated drivers, and you don't have to plug a floppy in and hope that USB doesn't crash. Unless you buy a USB floppy drive, in which case, you get what you deserve.
When it's just your office machine and your home machine, it's easy to keep the two connected. When it's your home machine (if you have one) and whatever machine is free at the moment, you need to keep it simple.
Keep the floppy.
GMFTatsujin
I for one I am glad Dell is dropping floppy drives. This is one step towards reducing their ubiquity; and when they're no longer ubiquitous they're no longer required, and maybe more productive uses can be made of the space, weight, materials and money formerly devoted to floppy drives. This is not much of an issue on a desktop machine, but the change is great for laptops - just imagine all the cool stuff laptop makers can pack into the space formerly reserved for floppy drives.
Sure I can pull it out and put something else in, but I'd rather not have paid for something I'm not going to use (no I don't need a boot disk - I have Knoppix and a custom bootable CD).
Read my keyboard review.
I don't know about most schools/colleges, seeing that I have not been in one for years now. Not like I even do anything associated with my degree anymore.
My wife is taking night classes and they still use floppies to save their information. Sure it is a small spreadsheet (note: they are NOT using M$ Excel), but where else are you going to save your work so you can hand it in to the professor?
Hell, people have enough problems even trying to figure out how to use a cd-rom drive? What makes you think they will know how to burn a CD, especially if the school is using some burning software the user is unfamiliar with?
No floppy on that one. Nor do I miss it. BIOS updates run from Windows(!), think it has a fail-safe boot ROM as backup though. If I need to reinstall, I can boot from CD, done that.
Floppy discs should die. Along with the parallell port (ever since I replaced my zip drive with something less clunky, and printer with USB printer), and serial port. And parallell ATA. They all got way oversized footprints hogging space. The PS/2 ports I'll give the benefit of the doubt (compared to USB), but wouldn't mind if they disappeared too. I hope they put serial ATA in the next Shuttle XPC. I had a helluva time fitting the PATA cables in *this* case, and I don't have that many drives (CD-writer, DVD, 2xHDD).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I sure hope Dell can withstand the pressure from the RIAA/MPAA.
Imagine. The entire Dell customer/user base, will now officially be branded as a bunch of pirates.
/. Where the truth
My school has a fleet of Dells (ick) in the programming lab where I do all my work. I've had to get used to emailing my code home because every time I use one of those miserable little devices, it corrupts at least part of the data.
My floppy drive at home doesn't have any problems reading or writing. This leads me to believe that there is something inherently wrong with the Dell floppy drive. So, IMHO Dell hasn't had a floppy drive in their systems for years...
-- ignoring AC's since... well, always --
Floppies are outdated technology, but my father had an interesting situation last tax season. With a floppy data is easily replaced quickly. Even small ammounts of data on CDRW take a while to rewrite. You also have to erase first in order to replace. A buggy, clunky zip wasn't an option. We opted for a superdisk. Also, he's USED to a floppy and thinks burning CDs seems wrong. I do agree that the floppy is outdated and if Dell wants to save a few bucks like Apple, then I say more power to em. I am considering a USB thumb drive as an option, my Dad would love something like that!
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
(and would thus have to replace one day):
* installing Debian with only two floppies (great for old laptops with no CDROM)
* running firewall, NAT, dhcpd and caching DNS without a hard drive or CDROM - one floppy (with two floppies: FreeS/WAN daemon) - can YOU carry your firewall software in your pocket?
* maintaining my GPG keys on portable media (ok, I could use a key fob for that)
* booting a host with TomsRtBt (hello bbc-lnx or knoppix)
* performing network boots with a PXE or Etherboot floppy (I don't WANT to buy an EEPROM burner!)
* flashing my BIOS (ok, somebody else said it)
* telling some helpdesk drone, "Here, just toss this floppy in and do Start - Run - A:\setup.exe"
"The cup... the drop... it's a YES!"
There are devices to convert your floppy collection into files on a CD or other new media. It's called a computer. You've probably seen them. Heck, you might even have one!
Industry wants to eliminate storage techniques that are 15 years old or older. I feel sorry for people who, 15 years ago, thought floppies were a good place to save pictures or other personal items. If you're planning on saving pictures on cds now to show your grandchildren 50 years from now, you better not use a CD because Dell's dumping those in 2010.
I hope industry doesn't decide to get rid of paper... that's where I keep my sentimental pictures.
NT4.0 Server.
Ditching the floppy is a dumb idea.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
2) Plenty of device drivers that would fit on a floppy and would otherwise be a massive waste of a CDROM.
3) When the net servers go down... Sneakernet!
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
They are:
- small
- getting cheaper
- fast enough
- already being used on PDAs, digital cameras and other gadgets
The only downside is there are at least 5 types of them! (SD, MMC, MS, CF, SM). However there are already plenty of card readers in the market that accept all of them. Some of these devices can be installed into the 3.5" enclosures that are being used for floppy drives for now. So I think it is a reasonable replacement for floppy drives. I've even seen floppy drive + 6in1 card reader combo.
The main problem with taking away the floppy drive and replacing it with CDRWs or USB pen drives (?!) is that neither of those technolgies are as ubiquitous or standardized as the floppy. With a PC-formatted floppy, I can transfer files between new and old, networked and non-networked PCs, floppy-enabled Macs, and Amigas, to name a few.
Just today, for instance, my girlfriend had to email a Word document to work. There are two computers there - one has network access, and one has access to a printer. The networked unit does not have a CDR drive. The printer unit has no CD drive at all. Retarded setups such as this are not uncommon. In this and many other instances, floppies are the only way to transfer information between machines.
Until I can be sure that every other computer I may need to transfer information to has a standard re-writeable (read: non-wasteful) storage device besides a floppy drive, I'm sticking to my guns.
I wish they'd replace it with the new 5.25 inch disk drives. Those things are fast and hold a lot of data.
1. Bad signature
2. ?????
3. Profit
Memory sticks are awesome. I have a USB-thumb drive and did not have to touch a floppy for the last months. I hope theses little devices will replace the floppy. And the computer manufacturers could make life easier by placing at least one USB port at the front of the computer.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
You'll still need a floppy drive if you want to install non-standard(i.e. not included with NT) RAID controller. If you simply boot off the CD, you can't install the additional controller driver. You MUST use the FLOPPY method of setup. Also. It would be a neat trick to update your BIOS without a clean boot from a floppy drive. Why waste 700Meg of write once storage for a 6K file? Personally, I'd rather keep my floppy. It may not get used much, but when its the last resort, it will get me 'outside' the OS(NTFSPRO) so I can manually get to the file system to do any repairs.
Writing a 50K file to a floppy is a lot faster than burning it to a CD-ROM. Remember all of that "lead-in" and "lead-out" crap?
USB solid state drives? Come on! I can hand out floppies like candy. Can you afford to give a $50 USB drive to someone every time they need a 100K file?
"Move the files across the Internet." Yeah, that's real practical when the files you need are the Ethernet drivers that came on a floppy. Also a great idea for embedded systems without Internet connectivity.
Floppy drives are $10. The interface might cost $1 to have on the motherboard. Suppose the cable is another $1. Hoo-boy, $12. How much is your time worth? At 11:00PM when you need to get a file off of an old floppy, tell me that the $12 you saved was worth it.
I just used a floppy to load a bunch of fonts that I bought ten years ago. Why? I had a document that needed them.
If you argued against internal floppies in laptops, I'd be all in favor of that, but there is a weight, heat, cost (laptop floppy drives are not $10), and reliability issue there.
Irony: People cheering the demise of the "old technology" 3.5" floppy by typing messages on a keyboard layout that was designed in 1874 (to minimize jamming of manual typewriters) and moving these messages across a protocol (TCP/IP) that was defined in 1978 -- two years prior to the introduction of the 3.5" floppy.
I don't use floppies often, but when I do, I really need them. It's how I install FreeBSD, and how lots of people install *NIX systems. You burn one or two floppies then install via ftp. Does Dell really expect us to burn two floppy's worth of data onto a CDR? Will I be able to write those floppy images to a USB "pen" and boot from it?
Floppies are a standard for removable read/write media. You can't get rid of them until there is a new standard to replace them. USB "pen" drives are not the standard. If Dell is going to fully support all these drives in BIOS so that they work with zero configuration under Linux/BSD/NIX then I'll accept it. Otherwise I want a floppy drive. They cost $5 wholesale.
p.s. How do you get one of these USB drives working under Windows? You insert the floppy that came with the drive and install a new driver.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
but I don't trust unencrpyted lines for login.
Anyone have some export-restricted cryptographic dumb terminals? I'm in the USA, but my government doesn't mind the import of crypto. I'll pay $5/terminal if you pay for shipping.
For those that are wondering, dumbies make excellent devices for printing realtime security logs. Be sure to prepend ^G to every message, don't expect to sleep in the server room.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Give me a a USB receiver in your neighborhood to pick up your keyboard messages.
I never thought those tiny 3.5" disks would catch on.
I bet they don't hold nearly as much as my 8" floppies.
Although it is the perhaps the most popular one for CD-RW (and what comes budled with XP). Nero software is generally considered better by the "in crowd," and is now fully multitasking ( true use your computer while you burn capability without becoming a "coaster factory").
i st .html
Anyone can implement UDF. Not just Adaptec (excuse me, Roxio).
The UDF file format is an ISO standard format under the control of OSTA (Optical Software Trade Association). It was orginally developed for DVD's, as the CD file format could not handle the large file sizes needed by video.
It was also felt by the "media industry" that some sort of "universal" ( that's what the U in UDF stands for)file format would be needed in the future that could handle any given binary data, i.e. video, music, data, etc., all mixed on a single disk.
There isn't even inherently anything that requires rewritable CD's or DVD's to use the UDF file format, but it does make a certain amount of sense, being "universal" and all.
http://www.softarch.com/us/products/UDFproductl
KFG
THe fact that I could use a USB pen drive does not mean much in my task of moving files to an old 386 laptop that my wife uses to dial in to her office (Private BBS) and send her daily work. (Her main machine is on broadband and nowhere near a phoneline --- so she copies her work files to a floppy and lugs it across the house...)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
have the unique ability to work over any serial connection.
:)), or modem(anything external). It will work.
This means that I can use it across the country through a modem link. (Yes, there was a mystic and magical times when modems were more than glorified(degraded?) sound cards!)
USB uses a more complicate controller/device model making it impossible to recreate such a link without reverse engineering the device in question and implementing an emulator.
Yes you can implement a terminal over USB; I did so with my Sharp Zaurus. No it was not fun, and yes I missed rs232(foo232, bar232, or whatever the hell it is these days.)
Dumb terminals are cool because they operate on the foundation of digital communication. I can plug one into my palmtop(Linux Zaurus), desktop/server(Linux Offbrand(w/ two floppies!)), graphing calculator(hp49g), printer(from a commodore
KVMs are a bitch, and many places have unused dumb terminals in stock for sale. In our world of fancy X servers and virtual terminals the dumb terminal still has a place, if not just as a terminal. Why not run a while loop of fortune and sleep to it?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Okay, the punter quoted this at me: "... because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago. They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
But I have a CD-RW drive... and it doesn't work. It's an "antique" Oak Tech Socrates... and the bleeding thing coughed, shat, and died over a period of several months. Moreover, OTI is no longer in the CD-drive business, so I can't even get archived drivers for my Socrates.
On top of that, my other CD drive operates rather well as a regular CD drive except when the process takes a long time, so any games with FMVs or lengthy installations like for OSes are right out. Which was a real bit of bother recently when I was installing Red Hat 8.0 on my machine... and the CD seemed a bit crappy... and my hard drive was left half-installed and basically useless. So, I took my MAC POWERPC 7100/66 and mounted bootnet.img on a FLOPPY and was able to successfully run a remote installation on my PC, because the floppy drive doesn't require any drivers or what-not.
If I were to replace my reliable, old floppy drives with anything, it would be a portable Flash memory device that I could move from PC to PC, but CD burners aren't perfect, they are relatively expensive, and burnt CDs are just not the best for archiving (They are easily damaged, and the backing has a tendency to degrade).
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
seem to be lamenting how we will flash our BIOS. well, we being geeks will have floppy drives. we being joe user never flash our bios anyway so it doesn't matter.
-
I use floppies all the time to support workstations and servers. I can think of 3 good reasons to keep floppies around for a while longer:
1. Many diagnostic software packages boot from a floppy. RAM diagnostic software like Ramexam and Docmem are designed to run from a bootable DOS diskette. All the major hard drive mfg have hard disk diagnostic software on bootable diskettes: IBM Drive Fitness Test, Seagate Seatools, Fujitsu drive diags, WD Data Lifeguard utilities and I'm sure Maxtor has one as well. Dell diagnostics come on diskettes last time I checked!
2. Firmware updates often come in the form of a DOS bootable diskette. Ever flash your motherboard? Video card? SCSI controller?
3. Network boot diskettes are quite useful for cloning and filesystem level utilities.
While it's true many of these things could be done with a bootable CD, but it can be quite clumsy! The fact that the CD is a read-only device in DOS means that log files generated by any of these processes can't be captured. Consider that a floppy only adds maybe $10 to the price of the system and EVERY x86 system (up til now) has one. I maintain that the floppy drive is still a valuable system maintenance tool.
Why waste putting floppy drives in 100% of computers when 2% at most of all users make use of them? It's that simple.
Now I wish this general principle would carry over to PC design in general. We've gotten to where hospitals and insurance agencies use PCs with Pentium 4s and GeForce 4s, simply because that's what you get from Dell. It would be easy to dismiss this with "well, it doesn't matter that you don't need all that computing power," except that you pay for it with increased power consumption and it's just more junk to end up in a landfill one day.
by ct
No, you boot from CD. If you need to build a recovery boot disk, you burn an El Torito CD-R. Learn about it here. There are some great web tutorials on how to take a floppy image and make a bootable CD-R from them using free (beer) software on either Windows or *nix. USB is for sneakernet purposes, though, not booting. USB and aftermarket floppies are always available. They're just not going to be standard any more.by afidel
Last I checked, Dell's do.by Masem
I pay ~$0.10 per CDR, or $1.00 for a CD-RW. How much are you paying for your floppies? And you say "most drivers can fit on to one floppy"... you can fit ALL your drivers on one CD if you burn at once, or burn one-at-a-time about a dozen times (1MB for the driver + 50MB overhead per session). And if you're using CD-RW, this is a total nonissue. Either way, I don't see why this is worse than a floppy.Well, it's the almost perfect media. The perfect media would be just like that, except 451 times as large.
Do you have any idea what the margins are on a PC? OEMs like Dell literally agonize over pennies, I've watched it.by The Bungi
CDRs are now standard, on the front of the case no less.
What's UDF got to do with it? WinXP has CD-R(W) support built in, which masters Joliet CDs that can be read on Win95. And I know Dell includes the rest of Roxio's solution.
by Auckerman
Ditto for XP using the recovery CD. And note that in the scenario you described, it wasn't "from the OS" on the PC, because it was a new PC in pieces (try building a Mac from pieces and see how the experience compares!).
by BWJones
The PC world in general has to wait much longer and be much more careful about dropping legacy support. The expectations and market are just different. This was being pushed by MS when I started working there in '97, and the market is just now ready for it (apparantly).
--dan
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Anyone with an ASUS A7V-266 board knows how anoying it is to bootup especially if you're using ATA-1xx.
Could somebody explain to me why this has not been done?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
why not share your config.sys with everyone?!?! Information wants to be free! So do Natalie Portman's clothes, but hey! hot grits for all!
Despite the continuous criticism of Apple and that they should just go away, once again Michael Dell follows in the "beleaguered" company's footsteps. When Apple did this, everyone called them crazy--Dell does it and the story is completely different.
Vote Quimby.
Hey Dell... How about if you release some BIOS upgrades to make your old Dell PCs bootable from CD-ROM?
I was trying to install Debian from CD on an old Optiplex GXM-5166 the other day. I had to write boot disks to floppy, because the old Dell wouldn't boot from CD-ROM. I checked the Dell web site, but no BIOS upgrade available.
Ten years ago I adopted the belief, sworn before anyone who would listen, that I could throw a floppy disk a lot further than I would trust one.
Only a total fucking idiot would put anything of importance on a floppy.
Set aside for a moment the fact that they can only hold text files and a few jpegs... They cannot be trusted. Not even for a trip across town.
The last few times that I used one (was the last time last year or the year before), I made multiple copies of every file that it contained. Experience indicates any one or two of them will be corrupt by the time that I try to read them.
Will always hate the floppy. I helped out in my high school's library/computer lab all the time in the early 90's. Floppies were everywhere. For Bob's sake, I still have my floppy case filled with 100 floppies in my closet (collecting dust). I hate them because there was no reliability in floppies. I remember doing an informal study of floppy disks with the library staff. We found that about 20% of the floppies would have at least one serious block failure within 3 months of a newly opened pack, almost no matter what manufacturer we looked at. (Very informal... this was not a scientific study, but still highlights why I hate them.)
I got quite good at using some Mac utilities to dump some people's word processing documents off of corrupted blocks into a new text document so that they didn't have to retype the whole thing. (We had a good sized lab of Macs and ClarisWorks was the word processor of choice.) Of course, a big section in the middle would be gone, but that's still better than nothing. And in a smallish high school of 600-700 students, I was doing this about once a day, every day, so it was common enough that I ended up hating the floppy.
As for the comments currently up, I can see the "problems" with dropping the floppy. But, do we really want to be shackled to this antiquated technology forever? Granted, there aren't many decent alternatives (even though I REALLY like the USB keychain storage ideas), but, for Bob's sake, people, it's not like you can't put a floppy on, if you really need it.
The point is, without some pushing, people will be content on using these old floppy disks, which given current technology, are absolutely terrible forms of media. I applaud Dell for pushing this a bit, since it encourages us to either work with some current, better solutions... or maybe even... *GASP!*... develop a replacement that is better. Maybe, given the void created by the loss of the floppies, those USB storage keychain thingies will drop significantly in price and become the new floppy... or maybe CD-RW technology will become more ubiquitous and transparent...? The point is that someone (a major player, not just Apple, who never had to worry about BIY BIOS issues or whatnot) had to step forward and just push the others into looking at the floppy problem. It's a bold step, and I hope that it really pushes us out of using these stupid floppies.
-Jellisky
-floppy-free (and bad block free) since 1998...
If you drop the Floppy Drive you have to drop the POCD (Plain Old CD ROM). You can only use CD Writers, re-writers, or other writable/re-writeable media. So when you take away the FDD you have to remove the CDROM too, as it would be pointless to only have a read only device as your only source of removable media.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
How to double you floppy capacity, a do-it-yourself guide: 1. Ok, *gently* squeeze open the plastic casing of your new floppy disk. If you have difficulty doing this you can start the process off with a hobby knife. 2. Be careful to collect all the springs and sleeves that might fall out, you might need these later ;)
3. See that round black disc inside, that's where the data is stored...remove this and open another floppy.
4. Right, now this is the easy bit, simply place the round disc from the other floppy on top of the disc in the second, newly opened, floppy.
5. Now re-assemble this second floppy, making sure to replace any of those springs and things that popped out. You can discard the first floppy casing. If you have trouble re-sealing the casing any old plastic or hobby glue might help. I find the standard 'super glue' products do the job quite nicely. Dont use sticky tape, it simply will not do!
6. *Presto*, your floppy now (theoretically) has twice the storage media capacity.
Disclaimer: No responsiblity is taken by the author, try this at your own risk. You may damage your floppy drive, or (in some rare cases) even loose data!
I completly regard your post as +2 insigtful / -1 Flamebait.
:)
I think the "Legacy" technology you refer to is in essence "mature", yet I take an absolute opposite approach you have chosen. I want legacy IO, but not integrated on the motherboard. If any part on your motherboard malfunctions and dies, then you are stuck with a motherboard with bad parts integrated upon it that will either:
1) effect the system performance
2) damage other integrated components
3) require specialized tools and skill to extract or replace them
In my experience, besides the joy of having a motherboard that has many features, I have had integrated parts go bad or I don't utilize them and often am without resources to expand the system with other devices.
IF I COULD CHOOSE BETWEEN A MOTHERBOARD WITH NO INTEGRATED IO AND 1:AGP,6:PCI, and 1:ISA SLOTS, or a BARE MINIMUM MOTHERBOARD WITH 10:PCI SLOTS...
I WOULD CHOOSE THE BARE MINIMUM MOTHERBOARD. My reasoning is:
1) Hardware that fails or is bad are a simple 3-step process to replace without specialized parts
2) I can change User-interface IO technology without the cruft of legacy (If I use a USB keyboard, I have no reason for PS2, and same is true when I use only SCSI data storage and have no desire for unused IDE controllers)
3) Motherboards can be designed to superior form-factor for "other" projects or custom assembly (I don't like the illogical ATX form-factor and its design of the IO on the rear of a PC)
All my claims are valid. I want RS232C, IDE, and Floppy Disk controllers on a separate PCI card so I may remove it for easy and logical upgrade path as well as retain a given computer's upgradability, compatibility, and ease of troubleshooting issues.
Thankyou for the opportunity to respond, glad to contribute my thoughts.
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
After you've installed Linux on your old clunker PC and donated it to your local school, how are you going to take your perfectly legal copy of Windows95 and install it in a partition for game playing? Remember, the W95 asks (for your typical W95 upgrade CD ROM) ..."insert proof of product..." ie the Windows 3.1 floppy!
I've checked for them in just about every local store, including Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City, Staples, OfficeMax and more. If I can't buy them then they don't exist. If I have to give some unknown enity on the Internet my credit card number and expiration date, and hope they show up, they don't exist. If I have to pay more in shipping that the cost of the discs, then they don't exist. By the way, I have a 48x24x48x CDRW drive and 24x CDRW media doesn't exist either.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
There is nothing you can do with a floppy disk that you can't theoretically do with a cd
How about writing to them on the cheapest computers? The most inexpensive PCs still come with CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives, not CD-RW drives.
How about writing to them while listening to an audio disc? Most computers have only one CD drive.
How about booting from them on old computers? Many old computers' BIOS don't support booting from a CD-ROM drive.
How about making a bootable CD at all? When Roxio Easy CD Creator 4 makes an El Torito boot image, it does the equivalent of a 1440 KB 'dd' from drive A:. I don't know how other tools for Windows work because I haven't bought them.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Thanks for being an Anonymous Coward. Hose bag.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Does anyone here have a CD-RW drive that has not started acting flaky and dying within two years? Tell me which one.
Does anyone here have a floppy drive that has started acting flaky and dying within two years? Tell me which one.
--
est modus in rebus
They *need* floppies."
Erm. Couldn't they just email their work to themselves? Or... get a freakin' mac. Burning a CD is easy as putting information on a floppy.
Insert CD, drag files to CD, Eject CD.
Get a print server for your old printers (two-ports can be had for under $100, and networking them is a snap), and buy a CD-RW drive.
That addresses the specific issues of printers and Zip drives, but it does not address the issue of other parallel port legacy hardware such as Super NES controller adapters, GBA/PC link cables, and some Game Boy Advance cart writers.
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
How else is a developer supposed to debug a full-screen application without a terminal to run the debugger's interface on?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Floppies can still be very unreliable yes, CRC errors are incredibly common unfortunately and from time to time I have found the occassional drive which will not speak to another drive (assuming the heads are slightly mis-aligned between models) - you can format read / delete fine in both drives, but not between each other.
However, until drag and drop CDRW is common (and I mean immensly common like the cd-rom) we really shouldn't be doing this yet. I frequently pull out a floppy disk every 3 months at least to fix a machine.
We need full DOS based access for the drives, read AND write as well as drag / drop to the drive easily and making them bootable easier.
The whole Mt Rainer thing is going FAIRLY well, but it's still not really there yet.
I for one won't be giving mine up for at least 2 or 3 years I would say at a guess.
Ok...without floppies, how do you flash your bios?
;)
Only way I know how to is with a handy-dandy floppy disk.
Along with being able to boot into DOS when your hard drive is being a pain..
Unless one of them is a PC.
Not everyone has a NIC, and not everyone has PS2 key-drives. But ALL Macs have networking.
Floppies are essential in college, alot of your work has to be turned in on a 3.5. Besides who wants to pay 10 bucks for a zip disk or keep having to burn cd's when you can just reuse that same floppy for the whole year. If they do this then they need to make cd burners standard equipment on all computers. My laptop I bought last year didn't come with a burner, I bet alot of computers sold don't have burners, this is a crap decision.
I have a USB floppy drive from smartdisk. Access to HFS-formatted floppies is just fine. However, access to DOS-formatted floppies is abysmally slow. I've never timed it, but I'd guess 4-5 minutes to format a floppy in DOS.
Hmm... well, at least, the above was true under 10.1.5. Haven't tried 10.2 yet.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
At the end of the day, the floppy drive will only go away when another technology has total ubiquitous driver support, cheap availability from the corner store, and ease of transportability.
CDRW's are pretty much there, except perhaps for their large formfactor. The "business card" or mini-CDRW's would help, except the media is still not cheap enough.
Maybe we should lobby AOL to send out AOL 8.0 on mini-CDRW's -- that'll bootstrap the change!
USB drives are not as viable because they aren't cheap enough, and driver support is broken on various still-used platforms (mostly pre Win98-OSR2 PC's and older Linux and Mac OS).
Dell can bridge the gap by shipping USB floppy drives with their PC's. Hell, Apple did away with the floppy...
AAAACK!
What about my 250 MB colorado backup drive that needs a floppy connector?
-ted
1) It's the size stupid, when it's not large enough to hold the DOS help file!
2) Dell and other users finally realized that Microsoft is NOT going to let them make their own boot disk, have XP?, just try!
3) Dell needs the space to power Intels CPU, while Microsoft OS drains every milliamp of current with XP hard drive memory paging and other intersting OS background task.
My real comment is why it takes the PC world soooo long on things that are sooooo obvious. Next Dell will add slot load CD/DVD/RW/DVD-RW-R drives, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g, Bluetooth connectivity, all without pulling your arm out of socket.......No really this story is silly.
Barry
.....Don't Get Mad, Don't Get Even, Up The Ante.....
no exactly legacy-free, besaides the ISH4 and the northbridge still have FDD controller built in, but no actual traces leading from them.
In this day and age of bootable CDs and USB keyboards and mice, the older ports and drives just aren't necessary. If you do have legacy software or equipment, then you should purchase new equipment according to your needs. And its not like they are taking away the floppies and not offering a choice. I am sure that you will be able to get one as an option. However, the typical user running WinXP with an internet connection simply doesn't need a floppy. Almost all computers come with a CD burner for larger files and small files can be emailed or ftp'd to another computer. Most files nowadays are too big for floppies anyway. I am now using an iBook so the point is moot in my case. Apple hasn't offered floppies as standard equipment for at least 4 years now and the Apple customers don't seem to mind too much. If I ever build another x86 type machine, I will probably skip the floppy because I just don't use it.
Smeghead every day of the week.
I hate floppies. I am responible for mataining over 300 PCs for one department at a university. Each semseter I have to replace 30 to 40 floppies because students shove their disks in without regard for the drive. The metal flap always falls off and damages the head. Or the student complains that their floppy works at home but here. Starting at the end of summer 2002 I removed the floppies from all department labs. I put in 250 MB zip drives. The students and faculty complained. I told them to use the zip drive, most were already using the zip drive because the assignments are too large to fit on floppies any more. I also suggested they purchase one of the mini usb drives (the diskonkey stuff works nice). They come in 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, and 512MB models and they are cheaper than having to buy an expensive zip drive and expensive media. Plus all of our PCs have front mounted USB ports. I am planning on replacing 1 lab of PCs with Wyse thin clients, if Wyse ever gets around to releaseing a thin client that can support a zip drive. I hear Wyse is going to release a thin client this year that has front mounted usb ports. I am eagerly waiting for this. Now if only they would get rid of the serial and parallel ports I would happier.
I'm very annoyed at the general aura of support for this move that most people seem to have. Sure, floppy drives are old, but they're essential. All you people who are talking about being able to boot machines of networks and what not are thinking like geeks - what of the average user? How unlikely a scenario is it for someone to have two non-networked machines in their home and want to transfer, say, a Word document or a jpeg from one to the other? Are they going to have to waste a CD burning those few kilobytes? And hands up here who hasn't had their ass saved big time by something like the Windows rescue disk or tomsrtbt or similar floppy? For the average Joe who doesn't have USB devices aplenty, the floppy drive is the way to go for everyday things like transfering documents to work/school, and if something blows up, you can always fall back onto a floppy disk to save you. And besides, how much motherboard realestate and money are /really/ saved by getting rid of the floppy drive? I'm guessing next to none. So why not just keep 'em there so that they're there when you need em? 'Nuff said.
Granted, OS 9 was pretty dated. It was not a strong kernel. I will give you this. But be aware that the first consumer machine with a GUI, the Apple Lisa, had a preemptive multitasking operating system. If only Apple had brought such a kernel over to the Macintosh System when the Mac debuted in '84.
Not quite...
Apple was far and away the flag-carrier for SCSI. The Mac Plus was the first consumer machine to have SCSI on-board. I have a Mac Plus and recently spent weeks trying to upgrade the external SCSI HD on the unit. The difficulty was that the Mac Plus' implementation of SCSI was based on a version of SCSI that actually preceeded the official SCSI spec--it was pre-SCSI, in truth. Only this one Toshiba drive would work on the unit (I tried 5 drives). PC SCSI did not even exist at this point...
The original Mac did not have a dedicated HD interface or a general bus interface of any sort and so people rapidly developed external HD's that plugged into the floppy port of the Mac. The MacBottom was one such unit. Slow, sure, but it worked. There was no "disallowing" mechanism in play here, friend.
By time the pretty colored Macs were coming out, NeXT had already taken over Apple and was porting NeXTSTEP/OpenStep -- the most advanced OS I have ever seen, to the Mac. The seed had been planted to bring an ideal UNIX environment to the masses, and it is now here.
But not realizing the innovation here, one might actually choose to use Windows, it seems. I so pity those that are letting this, the OS X experience, pass them by. You really don't know what you are missing.
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
Is there any way to get USB devices to run well under 95? I haven't found many USB devices that work on Win95, as the USB support sucks. I know, I should use Win98, and I used it in the past, but there are a few reasons I reverted to 95:
1. No IE
2. Faster at file deletes, copies, moves, etc. by a factor of 20, on my machine at least.
3. It's been 5 years since I've had a virus, worm, or any kind of security problem on it, not even a found or blocked virus by my scan software.
I can't justify upgrading when faced with #3. Every Win98/NT 4.0/2000 box I've had at work in that time has been hit by something in that time period, most recently the 2K box by the SQL worm. None of them were because of any action on my part. I know 95 has it's problems, but IE is a security nightmare. Why break into a house with an open 3rd story window when every other house in the neighborhood has their back door wide open?
This sentence no verb.
What about the apps where you DO NOT BOOT WINBLOZ ?!!!
I sell firewall systems that boot from 1.44m floppy. I can name NUMEROUS applications where you need to boot from a floppy disk.
You can NOT boot from the retarded thumb drive on older mobo's. I suspect that SOME newer mobo's might be able to but I'm not aware of any, a google search shows everyone asking about booting from thumb but no one reporting that they can.
IMHO, the thumb is a doo-dad fad. Nice for MP3 pirates, you can put a whole CD on a 128m thumb drive. Kids will love this..
But us tech types know this device is a just a toy and a fad. It serves no useful purpose from a PRACTICAL viewpoint..
I'll admit I almost never use floppies. But they do come in handy, and when you need them, YOU NEED THEM TRUST ME. It's not to cut costs obviously... Floppy drives are like $9 at most.
Anyway, you'll need a floppy disk:
a) Even if you never use them, somebody might give you documents or something on a floppy and you can't use it because you don't have a drive.
b) I just bought a piece of wireless equipment the other day that came with drivers on floppy only.
c) Boot disks...duh.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
For $2, I could buy enough CD-R discs to hold the contents of 2,500 blank floppies. Beat that AC.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A CD-R can hold up to 99 sessions.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wait, You mean I can't install my 48 disk set of Orcad with Xilinx!?!?!?! And I (errr my company) paid good money for that!!!!
But seriously I have been in it from the changeover to 3 1/2 from 5 1/4... So I guess I trust my 3 1/2 a bit more (having used it so much.)
I agree that progress should be made, but I have yet to find a stable drag and Drop to CD-RW piece of software. Yes, I run Win2k and linux (still trying to get my favorite games to run on linux.) USB drives eh? Last time I looked they were ALOT more expensive then CD-RW disks. And I haven't heard about booting off of them.
I've also supported many different computers running a general computer fix it shop. And I can tell you, the worst day is when you go to a persons house and find that they have a usb keyboard that uses nonstandard drivers. Thank god there's a ps/2 port to plug in the old standby.
Someone talked about getting rid of the parrell port and serial port, well I'm all for getting rid of the parrell port as I don't use it. (my printer uses usb.... which does flake out every so often, but I just fix it and hit print again.) but I am one of those few people that uses a dumb terminal.... it's rather nice in the kitchen to look up recipies and phone numbers.... (since I got it for $0 anyway)
just my 2 cents.
I'm still (this year) getting hardware that includes the software drivers on floppy, and in one case there isn't even a webpage to get an update from. That, plus applications that insist on making a floppy disk for BIOS flashing or similar updates, give me the impression that removal of the floppy drive is premature. Taking it away now will still leave too many people in need of it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I really like the idea of USB. However, I just ripped my optical mouse out of the USB port and plugged it into the PS/2 port via an adapter. Why? Mouse kept getting jerky and then dying, requiring a reboot. Decently late model machine; Win2000 Pro.
Also, we have a laptop that locks up every couple hours or so when a USB keyboard and/or mouse are being used. It has Win98, though.
What does that prove? Nothing, except that I personally am nervous about losing the PS/2 ports.
> Easily accessible USB ports is my main gripe about this idea
Look here and here and here.
I've never seen why you would NOT want a floppy drive. They the only thing that is pretty much guaranteed to be compatable with other computers, and the technology is stable and not likly to be replaced quickly. In anycase, a fd in under 20$ these days, so I don't see why a general desktop should not have one.
> Can I boot from a USB drive? And what about all of those install disks I still get? Hard Drive manufacturers still have their disk setup programs based on a floppy disk install.
+5 Insightful? Apparently there are other people here living in the stone age. I can hear the Mac users in here laughing their arses off already.
Where am I going to put my computer lint then?
My floppy drive is full of it, I believe it brings luck. Also acts as a good firestarter for when the feds break in.
whee -Me
[quote]Yes, the floppy drive is obsolete, however - it's not ready to give up the ghost yet simply because there is no replacement for it yet. (Boot disk when the system fails, transferring files to and from work/college).
[/quote]
Ever heard of a CD-R or CD-RW? I haven't had a floppy drive on my laptop for about 4 years. If I have to copy something to another machine, I burn it to a CD. CD-R media is cheaper than floppy disks, and holds 500-600 times the amount of data. Given that CD burners are also very cheap now (I've actually seen them go for FREE with manufacturer rebates), that the transfer speed and access times are much faster than a floppy, and that most systems can be configured via the BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM (I carry around a 3.5 inch boot CD that contains repair proggies for both windows and linux, as well as a couple of games since there was so much extra space), I can't think of a good reason to use floppies anymore.
Even though PCs can boot from a floppy, making a bootable CD in Roxio 4 requires a floppy drive, as the bootable CD wizard simply reads 1440 KB worth of raw sectors from drive A:.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What a bloody stupid idea. Floppies are still usefull in any number of situations, from Sneakernet situations to creating boot disks and rescue disks.
The comment made about floppies being an antique technology completely misses the point, sometimes technologies hang around because they are actually usefull. I mean, burning a couple of documents onto a CD-R is like using USB for your mouse or keyboard - complete overkill.
The Z-80 dates back from more than 15 years ago, right? We still use them in some of our products.
Do you work at Nintendo? The Game Boy and Game Boy Color systems have a Z80 clone processor, and the GBA switches into Z80 mode when it senses a GBC cartridge.
Will I retire or break 10K?
this takes away the option of booting with floppies, not that a windows user need to, but for linux users who might wanna boot with an alternate kernel..
yes, give it a thought!
I don't like the idea of a pc without floppy.
As an electronic music nerd I need floppies to do OS upgrades on my samplers. A lot of second hand gear I pick up needs a boot disk, and as the original floppies are usually missing or damaged I have to find a boot disk image on the web. (You can get Akai sampler OS upgrades here if you're interested). Occasionally PCs need a boot disk too, so I hear...
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Dell announces "we are Apple's bitch." A spokesperson commented saying, "They are just years ahead of us... well about 4 or 5 to be more precise."
Legacy technology in general:
Rather than tying up modern systems with legacy technology such as floppy drives and Serial, PS/2, and Parallel Ports, I think it's good that OEMs like DELL are making them non-standard. Odds are, if you need those ports/drives, you will buy the appropriate expansion card/drive to add the ports/drives to your system.
USB:
Modern commercial OSes like MacOS X and Windows XP have no problems with modern USB devices, thanks to better driver signing and more experience on the part of hardware makers with learning all the inner workings USB's specs (both 1.0 and 2.0). It took a while for USB to mature, and it will continue to do so.
Odds are, if you're experiencing a problem with USB, it's either the device or your OS is not modern enough.
Floppy Drives:
No Windows XP user needs a boot floppy when they can easily boot with their XP CD-ROM and run diagnostics, etc. from the Recovery Console.
Even the MacOS X CD has bootable recovery utilities on it.
All I use my floppy drive for is for the rare time I get paranoid enough to update my machine's ERD. But usually when my system volume goes bad, I just reinstall the OS from scratch.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
The only reason why this is introduced is to drive, mercilessly and brutally, the market to buy new shit they don't need at all.
Sigged!
Why kill it? It costs OEM a whole $5 (US) to add a floppy, why drop it? I doubt $5-$10 will be the determining factor for the majority of people.
But I got one anyways. The good news is that despite the fact that the floppy drive had been installed I wasn't charged for it. I would consider this something for nothing and celebrate my good fortune but now every time I look at my brand new computer I see the floppy drive staring back at me taunting as if to say "Look at me! Your system is old! OLD! I am eating FPS! I am chewing bandwidth! I AM YOUR LEGACY NIGHTMARE!"
No more floppy drives? How will computer users transfer data from one machine to another via physical removeable media?
:glances at a CD lying on his desk...:
OH...NO....
If you use a RAID controller for connecting your harddisk(s) then you cannot install Win2000 or WinXP without a floppy containing the RAID drivers.
I just finished going through my floppies from 1992. I had maybe 500 of them to go through. The number that failed just from being stored in a box was amazing. Luckily for me, the info wasn't really important, most of it was a daily backup of relay mail from my fidonet bbs. Unfortunately, a lot of good original software disks failed, including my Windows3.0, DesqView and DesqView/X originals, the Borland stuff, disks where I had stored school work, and so on.
This experience made me realize that I will only ever use floppies for one purpose, and that is for a boot disk, to be used once. If they won't even last 10 years under temperature-controlled storage, what good are they?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
What should happen (and should have happened long ago) is that the computer industry needs to come up with a new floppy standard. We need a drive disk with disk that can hold a large amount of data, yet also be backward compatible with older floppy disk. I know Imation tried a while back. But what we need is an industry wide standard. Of course, Iomega and CD-R drive manufactures probably wouldn't like it. But if you want to get rid of the floppy as it currently is, this is what you have to do.
Wow. I still have 5.25" disks at my parents place that contain all kinds of leet old school h4x0r files. I guess this makes me officially old.
If you have to load the CD driver after the OS is installed, how would you go about making a bootable rescue CD for when the OS gets corrupted? Is there a URL that tells some one how? I look for enlightenment, not criticism. The first builds me up, the later tears me down.
The computer labs at the college I go to are full of Dell's, so hopefully when they've replaced the current computers, floppies will be gone from the school. The drives get used so much that roughly every other disk is ruined, and working there I need to deal with the angry people who have just lost papers. Of course I'm sure people will just stick their floppies in the zip drives now (more than they already do, at least) and complain when they get stuck.
I'm starting to think this isn't the best place to promote my Anti-Sig Campaign.
Apple: We're dropping the floppy. You can buy the new Macs tomorrow online.
Dell: We're dropping the floppy. You can buy the new Dells in 6 months, plus shipping time, by phone.
NerfOnline - Because Nerf Guns aren't just for kids -
Dell doesn't want you to update there bios's and change from a crap oem bios, back into a normal system,Dell,Compaq bios's are just evil, Forget about updating any bios on those machine's for that matter. I SAY "MAKE IT AN OPTION" when you buy the machine, if you want a Floppy or NOT.
Several times I have been forced to resort to the "sneakernet" when the network connection wherever I was went down. The one thing I've been able to rely on is that, if all else fails, you can still get your files to the other computer on a floppy drive. Not all computers have CD burners or zip disks, but they all have floppy drives. And if you write a floppy in DOS format, you can generally read it on just about everything else too - including *NIX (mtools) and Mac (OSX and several generations back).
uhh... insightful? dumbass moderators. I guess another high-school-graduate turned stockboy has moderator points today.
Apple dropped the floppy five years ago. The whole industry predicted that either it would kill Apple, or they'd have floppy drives back in the very next generation of machines.
Neither happened. Life went on, because the floppy really was archaic and outdated; alternatives really did exist.
Now, granted, these were Macs, which have just about always had much better hardware/software integration than five years previous. As a Mac user myself, this argument of "but what about machines which don't boot off of USB or Firewire?" looks utterly absurd, because, well, why the hell aren't these machines capable of booting off of it? Or this bit about "How can the average user make bootable CD's?"; why the hell should making bootable CD's be so difficult that the average user can't do it?
Maybe it's just that I come from a Mac background, where things Just Work. But honestly, it sounds like the only reasons to keep the floppy around on the PC would be dealing with fundamental flaws in the PC's architecture. Then again, it's rather ironic that Dell uses a "you wouldn't use a processor that was 15 years old" when they use an outdated architecture that's even older, so maybe there's something to that. A blind insistence on pack-ratting old technologies, maybe, at the expense of advancement?
I'd much prefer an LS-120 drive. That's what we should have on all computers right now. Native driverless LS-120 control. Reads/writes to 1.44 MB faster, with the higher capacity available. Option to use cheap disposable 3.5" there as well as the 120 MB ones. Ideally the drive should have like a 4 MB buffer. When using the 120MB disks, it speeds things up. When using the 3.5" disks, have the option to write the entire data to memory, so the computer is free to do other stuff. Even better- when using the 3.5" disks, write to the memory, then software command eject that will write the final value to the disk. Ok, now what was I talking about again?
Pointing out that it's a 3 1/2 inch drive and a 5 1/4 inch drive will win me no karma points and no friends.
But I'm a pedant. Sorry.
--- My dad's political betting
This is really the best remark I have seen on this topic. I work at a big university, and while kids might all own a computer of their own nowadays, they often take stuff to the labs to be printed. Now you can make all the lab computers come with CD-RW's at $25 per in bulk or floppy drives at, what $3 per?
Without something like Mt. Rainier on CD drives, it doesn't look rosy for those students. Even then -- one bad burn and who knows what would happen.
That's what surprised me most about this story, Dell is a large supplier to my college. The floppy isn't even close to having a replacement in that kind of environment.
would replace floppies.
Oh well.
Mine was about 3 weeks ago, to make/use some bootdisks, and after going to buy the floppies and spending a good 15 minutes preparing them, I had 1 out of 4 of them die on me upon boot - disks that had been purchased no less than 30 minutes ago. I don't remember floppies being that bad before, but the disk quality must have really gone to shit...
Floppies suck - and need to die.
I'm just amazed its taken this long - PCs have been able to boot from CD for the last 7 years, and no one has seriously been able to use floppies to back stuff up in longer than that.
A quick CDRW drive these days is almost the same cost as a floppy drive was a few years back - and probably just as cheap if you replace the standard CDROM the PC would usually ship with, with a CDRW.
Floppies just do not make any sense any more...
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I agree, we will continue to buy Dell optiplexes with cd-rw drives and floppy drives for several more years I imagine. Until the cd-rw drive is as ubiquitous as the floppy drive.. I'll still buy them for the average office computer user. It's not like they take up any additional space, cost a significant amount, or add any significant support burden. CDs are great, but the most important aspect of removable, digital media is compatibility between devices.. floppy discs are still probably the best, with CDs trailing slightly for personal computers.
... Fight for your right to bear a floppy. Join the NFA (National Floppy Association).
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Sounds like what you do after slapping the salami.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Yes. To move a small text file. The first floppy I used, although fresh and ununused from the case, goes into the circular file. The second worked. I also used my USB device to move a large database. I also used my friends USB device that has a removable floppy shaped sub-postage-stamp-sized removable camera widget that held 64meg. I figure you could make a necklace of these 64 or 128 meg postage stamp sized deals. It might make your girl friend GIGgle.
Haw haw haw.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
I'm not blowing a CD just to make a boot disk. Wasted space, and considering how many installations I tend to do, wasted money and environmental harm.
Still, I jump for joy at the prospect of the death of floppies. The quality nowadays sucks total ass - probably due to their now dime-a-dozen pricerange.
In place of floppies, we need something to fill the niche left behind. I propose a flash ram setup of some sort. Huzzah. Yay. Verily.
Just make it a bit bigger than 1.44mb, eh?
When I first read this, I thought it was a pretty stupid idea. Sure, I rarely use floppy drives, but there are times when I *do* use them, and they save my ass when nothing else works.
But thats me, a semi-literate computer user. Thats not who Dell is targeting with this system. They're targeting home users who surf the web and read Email and play "Sims" and balance their checkbook and thats all. Those people wouldn't know a floppy if it bit them in the ass, won't need it for anything, and won't miss it when it's gone. They're not going to be flashing their bios or fixing dead computers by copying drivers from another system. If something acts up, they'll call Dell and let a technician come out and fix it.
I don't think Dell is doing this to save money on drives so much as to save space in their tiny cases and to have one less component that might fail or cause problems.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Seriously folks, how often do you expect the people buying Dells to do anything like flash their BIOS? I am responsible for 1000+ computers where I work (Probably well over 5000 have gone through the system since I've been there), and do you know how many times that I needed to flash a BIOS in order to fix ANY problem? Twice. Think of that, over 10 years of computers, and 2 flashes out of ~5000 computers. That is 0.04% of the computers. From what I read here, you'd think that people flashed their BIOS once a week, if not more often. Fact is that by the time that most of these computers would need to have their BIOS updated to support new hardware, most people are going to get rid of them. They don't flash their BIOS, they don't know how, and they don't care.
When is Dell selling desktop within 199-299 price line with Redhat 8.0 personal edition linux as we know that it will include open office and other great software..
I think we as buyer will welcome that.
. . . Until that's available, I want my floppy! CDs are a pain in the ass. Sure I can boot to one, but can I write to it as easily as the floppy I just booted to?
Dell marketoids dont have the forethought for such things. It wouldn't take much to rig the bios to read flash memory. Sony will probably be first. (Boot to mem-stick!)
--I use my nifty old 68k macs for fun once in awhile. Without floppies or a serial to serial cable I'd be up a stump for a lot of things. On my linux desktop I store just a few things on flop, like the boot disk they ask you if you want to make (yes), and for a few small security/utility apps I keep CLEAN for emergency purposes. And when I goto the library to use their broadband (really a schweet treet for me) all they allow is blank floppies in their machines to snag files with. And yep, I don't own a cd burner yet. When I see one for 25$ on the shelf locally I can buy with cash I'll buy one, but around here out in the stix burners retail on the shelf are still -->100$, and I don't buy much online, don't trust it, if my card get's scammed I'm hosed. In fact I rarely use a cc much anymore, once a quarter, tops. Small level mostly fixed income makes ya paranoid with your loot.. Especially ebay, just the idea of it gives me the buckwheats.
you pups! In my day, we had to use a stereoscope and an electromagnet made out of a horsehoe nail and a leyden jar to burn bits on our floppies, and they were made from mason jar lids!! And both ways, uphill! And we LIKED it!
I use floppies every day. Damn Apple for not including a floppy drive with the iMac. Between that, their one-buttoned mouse, and their use of that proprietary thing called "yoonicks," I'm a switcher for life... a Windows switcher!
[/sarcasm]
Given that most machines today are shipping with something that can write CDs, dropping the diskette drive makes sense. Other than obsolete software that requires a floppy ("Write NT Emergency Disk" comes to mind), what's the problem?)
We're talking about new computers here
I'm talking about a home or office containing two computers, one new and one old, or two different computers at home and school or at home and the office. You won't be able to move files from the old machine to the new one unless you put them in the same building (difficult if the home machine is a desktop) and run Cat-5 cable from one to the other.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As long as they don't remove the floppy connections and controllers this really isn't that big a deal for me. If I need to use a floppy for a bit I'll open up the case and install it. But again that's only possible if they remove just the floppy, not the floppy, cable port and floppy controller.
No... hang on... it's not. I don't have a floppy in my P4 machine and I haven't missed it. My Mac also does not have a floppy.
Unfortuately, the game has changed. Once, in a previous life, I designed an inventory system for a record store. It used dBaseII and 2 360K Floppies. Now that would be like trying to play golf at Pebble Beach with hickory shaft clubs.
The floppy drive is quite possibly the one component inside a computer that most users trust the most.
They've been around for many a year, and imho, many people would be reluctant to see them go - three months ago I wired my mum's computer onto Tim-Net (my home network and information control system) and she still believes in sneakernet as opposed to drag and drop through shared directories.
It's a real pity that LS-120 drives never caught on. These drives could read floppy disks (Unlike ZIP) in addition to their own 120 MB magneto-optical disks.
You know what I want? Cheap, reliable 8 MB disks. I don't need any more than that to carry my work and class documents on. Most of the hype today is on cramming as much information onto the smallest space possible and then charging $40+ *PER CARD*. Disks that pop in and out quickly, won't scratch, that will fit in a pocket and cost 50 cents to replace. It could be done and I believe that there is a large market for it. The people with the patents and the money to do it, however, don't seem to have the vision.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I use floppies all the time for building firewalls on disks. I could use a flash module, but it would cost much more to do so. I recently bought a dell inspiron laptop and they did not want to offer a floppy drive with the package...I had to add one for $20 bucks.
The reason the floppy has stayed around so long is because there is NOT a widely implemented system to replace it. Sure CDR's are nice, but I mean, 640MB is quite overkill for a couple of word documents. I have TRIED to get rid of the floppy in my machine. My newest machine I just built didn't have one in it, along with some of my older systems, and I had to break down and buy one because I was finding uses for it! I hate the idea of being stuck with a floppy boot disk and not being able to use it when all other forms of booting don't work. What if my CDROM dies? I have no backup (true I have two drives... DVD and CDRW... but meh).
If I want to take say a resume over to someones house and print it out (because I don't have a printer) the easiest way is either to email them, or take a floppy if they don't have internet access (or worse... modem).
"I" have ways around using a floppy, and they are not used daily by any stretch of the imagination, but USB keys are awkword to use, especially if you don't have front mounting ports, and how many times have you lost a floppy.. and went meh.. I'll just use another one. I doubt you'll be saying that with your USB key.
CDR's could replace, but they are even slower to use I find than floppy's for total time of mounting, writing, closing and ejecting than a floppy. I'll just keep my floppy drive for another 10 years thank you very much. The only thing I can think that I might switch to would be a Zip drive or something... but that is not going to happen. What other CHEAP, re-usable yet discardable media do we have?
I think floppies are around still because they really are useful, no matter who you are. My buddy carries his resume on floppy because a good percentage of computers still have working floppy's. They may be old, but it is a technology that is still quite useful. Why doesn't someone just come up with a new standard and create something to replace the floppy that is as cheap and easy to use, yet is more reliable? I think optical discs (such as a MD (minidisc)) would be something that I would be very interested in. Something around 144 megs sounds just about right to me.
I have no signature
Why did my usb2 card come with a floppy with drivers on it?
idiots.
You can still buy drives for the Apple II on ebay ;)
My blog can kick your blog's ass
The system Apple used was the SASI standard, from which the SCSI standard was derived. In theory, SCSI drives can be used as SASI ones, but advances over the years have made this almost impossible.
Main differences are multiple masters (arbitration), messages and multiple device types. For anyone that cares to know, the SASI system was initially designed for 8" floppy drives by Shugart, before small hard drives even existed. Given that we are talking about losing the floppy, this is an interesting coincidence.
I purchased a Sony VAIO laptop last fall with a USB floppy optional. I have yet to need it, so this "option" has been a good savings for me. I am glad to see this by Dell!
> But these things are all obnoxious PC-isms.
Wrong.
> Why should you need a setup disk for your hard drive? Just attach it.
I did.
> Why shouldn't you be able to boot a USB storage device?
I can.
> The firmware should be able to boot any attached storage device, or from the network.
It does.
Either you need to upgrade, stop talking out of your ass, or the moderators need to pass over whatever it is they're smoking.
Why not install internal SuperDisk drives instead? the price of the compuer goes up about $50 (maybe less?), the people who know what they are doing now have a 250MB Disk Drive that is backwards compatible with the old 3 1/4" drives, and the ignorant simply have what seems to be a faster floppy drive.
"It takes a very long time to count to 2 in binary." ~'Fourlegged'
This is the first of interesting articles that will probably pop up on the subject because when Dell says something Gateway says something contradictory or against it so will gateway keep the floppy or drop it. Frankly I will not by any computer with out a floppy drive
> Also, I can't use USB drives at the machines at work (due to security risks of removing sensitive data).
*sigh* Do moderation points mean anything anymore? Well, I guess one of the following is going to have to happen then:
1. Your company goes out of business because its IT people can't figure out how to install floppy drives in its new machines.
2. Your company goes out of business because it doesn't realize there are other vendors out there who sell computers.
3. Your company has a meeting and revises the policy that will accomodate modern hardware availability.
4. Your company removes the stupid security policy (You can steal anything you want, as long as it's on a floppy disk!)
Floppy drives are virtually free - even externals are priced right for people who will actually need them. Floppys have proven themselves - but it is time to remove the crutch and force the development of more reliable alternatives.
Students at my University rely heavily on public computer labs (all Dell computers), and floppies are crucial.
You don't need a CD-RW to store a term paper. You can't carry a CD-RW in your jacket pocket. Scratching a CD-RW is a lot more likely and devestating than losing a 25 cent floppy disk.
Students can't afford extraneous USB devices just to use a School's computers.
and it takes my months-old floppy drive about one second to determine that it does not have a disk in it. Why?
I removed a: from the boot order in my BIOS soon after buying this computer.
The shareholder is always right.
This is a limitation of Roxio, though. I make bootable cds all the time in nero
I could buy a floppy drive for the price of a single seat Nero license.
Will I retire or break 10K?
VERY off topic here...
I wonder why using the pay phone is so much more expensive in the US than in Canada. It's still a quarter to make local calls here. Counting for our exchange rate, it is literal twice as expensive to make a call in the US!
Any ideas? Or does anyone really care?
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Too bad Sony never let too many people get ahold of Minidisc technology. I could really see that as a floppy killer due to it's storage for the price, durability and the fact that it's just so much cooler than a floppy or cd will be due to the cases and such. I would LOVE to have a minidisc drive on my computer.
I'm a helpdesk worker at a small midwestern college, and all I can say is: Good.
A few weeks ago, a graduate student came up to me in tears because she was saving her portfolio - at least two year's work on a floppy disk, and all of a sudden it just refused to read it. The disk had gone bad, and she didn't have any backups. I know it was silly of her to not back something like that up, but not everyone is computer literate, and not everyone knows that floppies are one of the most unstable forms of storage media out there.
In fact, it seems every week someone comes or calls me to magically fix their disk which has their twenty page Shakespeare paper or their proof positive of cold fusion. All I can do is try to use it on the three computers here, and if that doesn't work, say "Sorry, you're out of luck. Use the handy network drive we provide you with next time."
It kills me every time I have to say that.
Not a whole lot of people at this college are computer literate, and many don't know how easily disks can go bad. That's not their fault... I'd say it's high time to ditch the floppy, given with how user friendly CD burners have become, especially in regards to how seamlessly they are integrated into XP.
Think about this. One CD has the capacity of 500 floppies. Now think about how much even a pack of 10 floppies costs when compared to that one CD.
It's high time that we give the floppy its death knell.
Wouldn't it be funny if Dell gave you all the backup disks as floppies? hehehehe
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
I haven't had a floppy installed on my main system in, what, two years now...and to be honest there was only one time when i missed having it. When i was about to installed Debian on an older box that I had sitting around. Buying a floppy drive was going to cost me $25 CDN, for something that was going to be a one time thing. Removing the floppy drive from the Aptiva, and installing it in the PIII wasn't an option either. Wouldn't you know it, the older Pentium 166 box wouldn't boot off of the CD that I had sitting in front of me. I wound up installed Redhat (6.2 i think), simply because I had the boxed set, which happened to include the floppy disk. Downloaded my Debian boot floppies once this was done, and restarted the process. It was a huge pain in the ass, but I honestly considered it to be less of a nuisance than installing a floppy in my workstation. Other than that, honestly, never missed it, and I NEVER put one into a box that I build.
Anybody know where I can get some 5.25" floppy drives compatible with Linux? ;-)
Killing floppies is NOT a good idea. As a technician, I understand what can go wrong in a computer and the floppy drive is more reliable than the other parts of your computer as it is not very complicated. If they get rid of floppies, what happens when something fucks up, you need a boot disk and the more advanced drives are fubar? When everything else fails, your floppy drive will be one of the last things to go. If it's gone, I wonder how reliability of old computers will be affected in the future? People can't afford to replace their machines which might have been saved with a 1.44 boot disk (like a virus attacks and that boot disk could restore the computer). Any thoughts on the reliability of newer drives compared to the fossil 1.44 drives of an ancient age?
What is more reliable, the sword or the machine gun?
I go to a poor college, which is now facing another 6 million dollar budget cut. I am also in the student government. (yeah, no laughing, I'm a sucker.)
Anyway, the school doesn't allow external machines on the network, and I don't have a portable printer, so I am stuck with having to transfer files from my laptop to one of the P200MMXs we have in the office, so I can use the student gov't printer to print student gov't work that I do on my own machine.
Now, this was fine with my old laptop, but my new Vaio didn't come with a floppy drive. But hey, it's got a memory stick reader and USB! Well, none of the machines I have access to have USB, so I can't get a memory stick reader, and I can't use other USB devices.
Well, the Vaio has a CD-RW/DVD combo drive... burn CDs, right? Wrong. The machines in the office don't have optical drives, either. I told you we are a poor college with massive budget cuts.
It's floppy or nothing.
It also goes to show that yes, people would use processors from 15 years ago... well, at least 5 years ago.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I only use floppies for menial tasks. By that I mean I boot into FreeDOS or something similar in order to flash the BIOS, or do recovery operations on drives. Basically anything I can't do when my normal OS is running.
Can I boot off a USB pendrive thingy? It'd be awesome if I could boot from a USB pendrive that I have partitioned into two logical drives and then change which partition is active for booting. Then I could transfer boot images to the drive and by changing the active partition I could say boot into FreeDOS or boot into a cut-down Linux.
A better idea - can I have a lilo-like system to chose which OS on the pendrive to boot from?
... I bought a new mobo, with a FDD controller, got home to realize that ASUS had rearranged the layout, and my FDD cable now wasn't long enough to reach from controller to drive. So after that I haven't used the FDD in that machine... I was pissed at first, but realised I didn't use it anyway, so now I have a FDD, but it just sits there, no controller, no power, but it's better thah a hole in the case, right?!!!
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
All I have to say is;
The Macs I've had the pleasure of working with recently have had a USB hub plugged into the USB port on the *back* of the computer, a USB CDROM burner plugged into the USB hub and/or a DSL Modem plugged into the USB hub and/or a (100, 250, or 750) zip drive plugged into the USB hub _or_ stuck in the zip/floppy bay w/out a flippy cover (G4) and (all) a FLOPPY DRIVE hung off the USB hub.
It's not dead yet.
peace
As for USB flash gizmos, I'll say they've caught on as well as floppies when AOL starts sending them out for free in the mail. I went for a long time without having to actually buy any blank floppies, because I just reformatted the AOL free ones instead.
Well how would Dell or should we say MS cope with this.
Floppies are needed for server etc.
What am I talking about. Since NT's introduction everytime you install the a NT OS you will be greeted by a message saying some thing like "Hit F6 now to install 3rd party mass storage drivers"
This is needed if your HDD's are sitting on a controller that is not supported by the native drivers within NT install.
But the thing is, that when you need to feed the installtion with this 3rd party driver, then it will only look for the driver at A:, so how the hell would Dell redirect it to a CD, USB or whatever??
Floppies are long overdue to be replaced. 1.44MB is just not enough these days to ferry files between PCs, and a rescue CD can hold a lot more tools than a rescue floppy. Not to mention that magnteic storage can easily get corrupted.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Don't forget Mount Rainier. If it ever becomes widespread (can't understand why Sony's new do-it-all (DVD|CD)(+|-)(R|RW) drive doesn't include it), CD-RW's could be just like floppies: put them in and they just work.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
When someone comes up with a replacement media that does ALL of the following, I'll be ready to dump my floppy.
Is a bootable device.
Is supported completely in all bioses, both read and write access (no propritary extensions, no software drivers, no special software).
Is rewritable for a huge number of times (CD-RW's aren't)
Is cheap enough that I don't care about the media. (Zip Disks are too expensive).
Is small enough to carry without being so small as to get lost (external hard drives are too big, smart media although nice, is too small).
The drive also needs to be cheap enough that it is a trivial cost to a machine.
I've heard all the rebuttals, and they're crap.
Bootable CD's come closest to doing everyting floppies do, but there are still problems. They require special software to write, cdrw drives while not particularly expensive are still sufficiently expensive that they're often not included to lower the cost.
Some have said that smaller files can be transfered across networks, but that assumes that there is a network present, and you can get it running. If something is seriously wrong, and you can't tell what because you can't get any software to the machine, you're pretty much screwed without some type of transferable media.
Sure, it's true you rarely need floppies now, but there are occasions that you would be totally screwed without one.
Give me something as reliable as a floppy (at least as reliable as they used to be), and as flexible, and I'll be first in line to fire my floppy drive out of a floppy drive cannon, but untill then, I'll keep it around for a while.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/faqs/faq155 9.shtml
"How many times can you rewrite KODAK CD-RW media? It is our understanding that the behavior of CD-RW media is that it degrades very little up to a point (~1000 rewrites) and then very rapidly after that. If you would like to be very cautious about your data, you may want to limit your use to 500 rewrite cycles"
I've had floppies far less reliable and reusable than that. Especially if it's a boot disk you made years ago and now suddenly NEED it.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Whatever happened to the LS-120 superdisks?
120Mb on a single floppy is pretty good to me. we should use those instead of 1.44 floppies! hell, the drives are backwards compatible with regular floppy disks.
-- Fuck Beta
A TCP socket perhaps ?
Although I do agree that removing serial ports is a really dumb idea.
Just in the middle of replacing the laptop I use at work to configure new switches and routers, and I really had to trawl through all the different models before I found one that had serial ports built in and didn't provide them only via a port replicator.
The last thing I want to be doing in a cramped comms riser is trying to find a plug for a damn port replicator, then plugging the laptop into that, just so I can have a serial port
Microsoft bought $150 mil in non voting stock. As Apple had 2 billion plus assets lying around at the time, saying Microsoft "saved Apple's ass financially" is a gross exageration.
How many years ago did the imac first come out?
I didn't put a floppy in when I built my latest computer. Instead, I bought a pen drive, which I've been very happy with.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
They are too big! (storage capacity wise)
You want to transfer a 2 meg file. Too big for floppy (unless you compress the disk (or live in japan where they have 2.88Mb disks)). It would be overkill to buy an expensive cd to transfer the file.
Just like getting on a bus and paying for a £1.20 ticket into town with a £20 note.
CD-RW disks would be more efficient of course, but until CD-RW drives become as common in a computer as a floppy drive, we shouldn't drop them yet.
Also, USB storage (the stick like things, not USB disk drives) are worse! They can be incompatible across different operating systems! Are floppies? No!
Also (again), you could use smartmedia cards to store files too large for floppies. You can use the floppy drive! Just get an adapter.
Or you could span the file(s) over multiple disks using an archiver.
One day (quite soon possibly) you will get this kind of flexibility and effieciency from CD's and thier future replacements. Until then, perhaps it's too soon to kill of the humble floppy.
I know! Lets petition to get 2.88Mb disks over here! We've already got compatible drives (took our time didn't we?)
It's been years since I heard about this. Where did it get to?
Reminds me of 'What happened to the likely lads'
There are very split views here if this is a good thing or not - technically it is very good, but habits, and the fact that a floppy drive is very handy for reasons you've all repeated endlessly, cause some to desperately try to keep it.
;-)
However, this is how the market works(based on very loose facts)
100% of home users use computers
20% of home computers will ever be upgraded bios-wise etc. These could potentially use a floppy, but Dell has already saved $20*80% on the rest of the users, without someone ever complaining.
And some of you complain about USB unreliability. There is such a wonderous thing called a USB FLOPPY DRIVE, which is supported in the BIOS. No flaky drivers, no overhead or extra features that cause stuff to not work. It just works, like your ps2 keyboard or similar.
Plug that in, boot the machine with the floppy disk to upgrade your bios or copy your files, and bring the entire USB device home with you if you have to move files. Plug it in at home, and there you go. It is a bit bigger than just the floppy, but if that is an issue, get two drives.
Third: Office users cannot bring malicious stuff into their work computers without being allowed so. And if the sysadmins have to upgrade firmwares, they either do it from the OS(many BIOS upgrades now come with windows based software, OR via some corporate management utility(I know atleast Dell's OpenManage software can remote-upgrade the BIOS), or by taking their usb floppy drive, walking from machine to machine plugging in, pressing the power button, wait a few minutes, switch off and unplug the drive. It's BIOS supported with these machines, so no worries.
It's quite simple. Problem is my insightful log is so late in the posting it's gonna be ignored by most of you.
..this is about Dell trying to work the razor thin margins of PC hardware sales. I can by a generic OEM floppy for $10-- I expect Dell's cost is a significant fraction of that. It doesn't occupy an IDE port on my motherboard. My mom is nearly 70: after a career in journalism that found her very accomplished in high-end layout products, she went online about 5 years ago, a couple of years into retirement. She ebays. She emails. She does some light surfing and freelance editing. Her locally built 600 MHZ AMD machine does not have a CD-RW: and she is fine with that (she's not downloading tunez and warez from Kazaa all day after all). The offline data she and her peers exchange and backup
is perfectly suited to a floppy. I could install a CD-RW in her machine in half an hour: but she is one of many many users who's data writing and storage needs are met fine by a floppy. This is why I build my own: I don't like the big manufacturers shoving their requirements down my throat in the name of "modernization". This about Dell's bottom line, and nothing else.
... I need the floppy. How else am I supposed to triumphally state to everyone I know that while Windows is slow and bloated, Linux can 'just run from a floppy disk'?
Signatures are for stupids.
Its just one more step towards a DRM enabled pc.
Recently I had to copy 28Mb of Excel files from a relatives old PC to their new one. It is a standalone machine with a small HD and a floppy drive. How do Dell suppose we should tackle this kind of problem? There is no network connection, no cd burner, no USB (I know I could try and install a NIC, but what's the point when I have a floppy drive?)
You pervert! Don't you realise that your exhibitionism is scaring the BIOS, possibly causing emotional trauma that will last a long, long time.
If you sneak up on me and try to flash me, I won't scream, I'll just point at where your floppy is missing from, and laugh at you! HAHAHAHA!
</clueless>
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
... no, it's a moon animation
... that when this anouncement was released to my company (NDA's...) this actually prompted us to switch to IBM's NetVista series.
Why? Because we run Windows NT 4.0 Workstation (shudder) on 95% of our workstations (the remaining 5% being W2k, W98 and 2x Debian machines), which does not support USB, ruling out the thumb-drive option, and two, CD Burners are not a practical alternative, given how locked-down those NT4 desktops are. (Trained Monkeys using the NT systems... the joys of working with techophobes)
On my home machines, it's been around three years since I had a floppy permanently installed, but I still keep one around for installing the RAID drivers on my 2K box - the ONLY use I have for floppies at home =)
-Trav
I should really get around to creating a sig.... Nah - too lazy =)
i just bought a dell laptop and simply opted out of getting the floppy. hell, saved me 30 bucks.
You need to boot something other than Windows to do an image backup. The BIOS has to support your boot device. I'm saved by disk image backups several times a year. They sure beat reinstalling the operating system and all its software.
I think it has something to do with government control. In the US, the FCC is hell bent of making communications as profitable as possible for industry at the expense of the consumer. While I'm sure pay phone costs have increased, it's just one more little inconvenience that contributes to a symphony of expenses and slights that make the telecom system in this country a nightmare.
It has to do with the way it is written and erased, which is at a lower level than the filesystem organization.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Don't abandon the floppy just yet. Keep it an option and let the consumer vote with their dollars. There are a number of programs that still require a floppy for install. There is still nothing more convenient for moving 1MB files between computers that are not on a local network. CDR-W file formats depend on your software and are not universally readable. As to the old technology argument all I can say is Our most advanced word processors haven't made the pencil obsolete.
Apple tried eliminating the floppy with the iMac and imediately after-market companies started selling external floppy. So Apple saved $15 and cost their customers $99.
And even more so than IEEE1394, what to me is the major innovation in IEEE1394b (Firewire 800) that has been almost completely un-hyped is that it can be run in a circle! If you have two Firewire800 ports on your computer, you can daisy chain all of your devices in a circle and plug them back into the other port - you don't get increased throughput, but you get automatic double-reliability. If at _any_ point the chain breaks, the other side automatically picks up the slack with no delay.
So, you put your DV camera on the field and your laptop 100m away in the press booth and run two Firewire cords. One of them fails for some reason, the other one is fine and you don't lose a single shot.
Speaking as someone who maintains six radio stations, reliability and continuous uptime is key, more important than the speed increase.
-T
This is one of those things that peeves me to no end. Our desktops at work are mostly Compaq Evo machines with two USB ports on the front. I HAVE YET TO FIND A PEN DRIVE that will fit the fscking USB port on those things. They all want to make them "cigar" shaped. The USB on the Evo is recessed and barely larger than the USB connector. Anyone have a Slim-Line Pen drive they can recommend?
....once again.
Evil is the money of all root....
Yeah, a legacy free PC that still runs PC100 SDRAM... give me a floppy any day, I'll keep my DDR.
Hey Dude - You are getting Dicked By Dell Once again
LOL!! ... yeah, right.
Oh yes, those jocks and cheerleaders were just so cool. We were all jealous
The biggest partiers I knew - also the biggest drug dealers, by the way - were brainiacs, long-haired acid-eating dope-smokers. A few even went on to work on ARPAnet and start up software companies. After they made some money cooking up acid and software in college, of course, with a wimpy academic scholarship (if they got lucky - most had to pay their own way).
The jocks went on to work for daddy, or as salesmen, or as laborers. After playing some ball (and paying some long-haired brainiac doper to write their papers) in college, of course, with a full athletic scholarship.
When I go back to our HS reunions, the jocks look fat and old, the brains still look young.
"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." -- Robert Heinlein
and an 8MB card as Decimal craves is only about $15...
You missed the point completely. I said that I would settle for an 8 MB storage medium because a floppy-size disk could be sold CHEAP . For $15, I might as well buy a ZIP disk.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
An 8MB CF card is equivalent to about 5.5 floppies, which will cost you about $3, making my example about 5x more expensive than a floppy.
Doesn't matter. It's still $15 a pop (and I can actually buy packs of 5 floppies for a low price). Bulk comparisons don't change that. For example, you can praise the virtue of how newer hard drives are $1 a GB but that doesn't mean I could buy a 20 GB hard drive for 20 bucks.
(2MB and 4MB cards are available, and the 5X multiplier seems to apply across the price range).
How long before 2, 4, and even 8 MB cards are impossible to find in stores?
However, a CF card is much smaller than a floppy (let alone FIVE floppies), should last a lot longer (1M+ writes), is far more durable, reads faster, and can be used in a wider variety of devices. And of course, has higher capacity.
I think that of all the mini-cards, CF holds the most potential. (Not dangerously-thin like SmartMedia). But that potential will never be realized if the price never drops. In addition, one could argue that the cards are a little *too* small, and are easy to lose.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
see? we told you to think about for a week and you'd understand.
satire isnt so hard after all is it?
There are several alternatives like. The company I work for focuses on these kinds of alternatives:
s /usb2x. shtml
r na l7-in-1.shtml
r na l6-in-1.shtml
USB Flopy Drives (if supported in BIOS for booting (most are))
http://www.yedata.com/products/floppydrive
internal card readers ( need BIOS support for booting too)
http://www.yedata.com/products/cardreaders/inte
http://www.yedata.com/products/cardreaders/inte
PEN DRIVES
blade
http://www.yedata.com
http://www.ohlssonvox.com
Dell can go to hell for all it likes.
I need floppies because it's convenient when you
need to transfer files from/to an older pentium pc.
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all
real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an
understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.
-- R. Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
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