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The Death of the Floppy Disk
vook writes "Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life. "
When is the death of "Death of..." articles going to come? They are usually wrong, and are always annoying.
We keep hearing this. I still see a floppy in almost every computer I deal with. They're a useful tool.
Since when should people be listening to Bill Gates, aside from when he points out the obvious? Quotes from the article:
"Apple become the first mass-market computer manufacturer to stop including floppy drives altogether with the release of their iMac model in 1998."
then it said....
"Bill Gates recently predicted the DVD would be obsolete within a decade."
Obvious, really, but shouldn't they be listening to Apple, if they were the first to really see such a trend in the market and drop the floppy? Since when has Microsoft, or Bill Gates, *led* the industry in anything new?
"This just in! IBM builds the best stuff in the world, but let's interview Tandy PC makers for their opinion instead!".
The rational for such logic escapes me.
Also, the title of the article should have been "The SLOW death of the floppy disk." It wasn't until USB flash drives came out that people felt comfortable with replacing their floppy. (IMHO)
Does SP2 cause bovine lesbianism?
I'd much rather use a USB key than a floppy anytime. More space, more convenient to carry. Did I mention more space?
I guess apple had the right idea a while back when they stopped using floppies... It might have been a little bit early though, before the huge rise of usb memory drives.
I have an external USB floppy I use when I need it.
And sum up the top three posts to appear in this article:
1. Duh!
2. Nuh-uh!
3. So what?
Wow, this might have been newsworthy ... about ten years ago. You might as well have said "processors are getting faster!"
I mean, seriously.
The first company to ship and popularize Sony's revolutionary 3.5" hard-case floppy drives and disks, and...
The first company to realize that the floppy was dead, and that it was time to wisely move consumers away from it.
(Not to mention the first computers[1] to include USB, FireWire, etc. - and wise enough to eliminate ancient legacy ports at the same time.)
Many consumers weren't *ready* to give up floppies in 1998, but it was more out of fear than actual need. The PC industry even played into that fear with the iMac, scaring customers with it's lack of a floppy drive. And 5 years later, the PC industry followed along. Hmm, 5 years...that seems about right...
[1] Yes, yes, someone will come up with some retarded example about some other obscure thing that was "first", but let's face it: Apple was the first to mainstream technologies in so many of these realms. "First" to 802.11? No, but the first to force prices of access points down from over $1000 to under $300, and cards from $300 to under $100, and to include integrated wireless in its laptops and desktops...and then everyone else followed in earnest a couple years later. "First" to 64-bit on the desktop? No, but some random company someone has never heard of ("BOXX TECHNOLOGIES") doesn't really count, and Apple's G5 orders far eclipsed any other 64-bit *desktop* offering from any vendor the first day it was introduced. "First" to an online music store? No, but the first one to receive widespread press and the first one to not completely and utterly blow that normal people can (and actually do) use. Let's face the facts: like it or not, Apple is the innovator here, and one of very, very few in the industry.
Then what am I going to do with the pile of AOL floppies on my desk??
We're going to start racing floppy disks?
Coincidentally I am in ATLANTA and used a floppy today for the first time in years ;)
... who were screaming, but in a short time, they adjusted."
ATLANTA - Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life.
And think about your breathing, say some home computer users. The march of technology must go on.
Like the penny, the floppy drive is hardly worth the trouble, computer makers say.
Dell Computer Corp. stopped including a floppy drive in new computers in spring 2003, and Gateway Inc. has followed suit on some models. Floppies are available on request for $10 to $20 extra.
"To some customers out there, it's like a security blanket," said Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca. "Every computer they've ever had has had a floppy, so they still feel the need to order a floppy drive."
A few customers have complained when they found their new computers don't have floppy drives, but it's becoming uncommon as they realize the benefits of newer technologies, Menchaca said. Almost all new laptops don't come with a floppy.
More and more people are willing to say goodbye to the venerable floppy, said Gateway spokeswoman Lisa Emard.
"As long as we see customers request it, we'll continue to offer it," she said. "We'll be happy to move off the floppy once our customers are ready to make that move."
Some people may hesitate to abandon the floppy just because they're so comfortable with it, said Tarun Bhakta, president of Vision Computers outside Atlanta, one of the largest computer retailers in the South.
At his store, the basic computer model comes with all necessary equipment, but no floppy.
"People say they want a floppy drive, and then I ask them, 'When was the last time you used it?' A lot of the time, they say, 'Never,'" Bhakta said.
But plenty of regular, everyday computer users don't want to let their floppies go.
"For my children, they can work at school and at home. I think they're a pretty good idea," said shopper Mark Ordway.
"I just want something simple for me and my husband to use," said Pat Blaisdell.
The floppy disk has several replacements, including writeable compact discs and keychain flash memory devices. Both can hold much more data and are less likely to break.
Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around.
"There's always some nostalgia," said Scott Wills, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Georgia Tech who has held on to an old 8-inch floppy disk. "It's a technology I'm glad to be rid of. I'd never label them, and I never knew what any of them were until I put them in and looked."
In a sense, it's amazing floppy disks have hung around for this long.
They only hold 1.44 megabytes of space -- still enough for word processing documents but little else. By comparison, CDs store upward of 700 megabytes, and the flash memory drives typically carry between 64 and 256 megabytes.
And it's been a long time since floppy disks were even floppy. They used to come in a bendable plastic casing and were 5.25 inches wide, but Apple Computer Inc. pioneered the smaller, higher density disks with its Macintosh (news - web sites) computers in the mid-1980s.
Then Apple become the first mass-market computer manufacturer to stop including floppy drives altogether with the release of their iMac model in 1998.
"It's not officially dead, but there's no question it's a slow demise," said Tim Bajarin, principle analyst for Creative Strategies, a technology consulting firm near San Jose, Calif. "You had a few people
It may not be too many years before floppy disks are joined by DVDs. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (news - web sites) recently predicted the DVD would be obsolete within a decade.
Is it just me, or does everyone else have like 50% failure rate on floppies? I'm not talking about abused ones, I'm talking about ones I keep in a case on my desk. They just... suck. With how common broadband is now, and with USB drives and bootable CDs, there's just no reason to use them anymore. Good riddance.
... as long as I still have old 486's and Pentiums lying around for gateways and cheap storage, I will gladly use floppy disks as a boot medium. =]
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
I thought Viagra was designed to stop floppies?
liqbase
This has been heralded since the dawn of time... OK, maybe not exactly since the dawn of time, but al least since my cdrom was a hefty 1x and it didn't even eject the cd, it just puked the tray!
O make me a mask
floppies will always be useful for machines just slapped together, with no OS and no networking as of yet. you need some way to boot an OS initially.
No need for them...I back my important files up to a Digital RP06 drive :-)
What "death of floppies" article would be complete without a link to Floppy RAID!
Speak truth to power.
BTW: fp?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
there will always be room for a floppy on all my boxen
"Dell Computer Corp. stopped including a floppy drive in new computers in spring 2003"
Didn't Apple drop the floppy drive with the release of the iMac in what 1998?
Sheesh, get with the program people
... or were floppies getting worse and worse still the last decennium? I remember actually depending on floppies for backups and (god forbid) copying stuff, and usually they worked.
Now what I remember from the few times I used floppies the last five years is that invariabily almost half of them would be rotten in no time sharp, giving read errors and all kinds of data loss. Could it be that the quality of floppies or floppy drives slipped, anticipating the ultimate demise of the floppy?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
...while installing MS Office on all new PC's in the company. MS Office came on 28 floppies or so in that time.
Other then for upgrading firmware on a motherboard who uses floppies? I back up most documents that I need to web based e-mail. Seems like most office environments have super redundant servers to the point that the only stuff YOU need to backup are personal items on your home machine. I keep my resume on hotmail and yahoo, the rest of the junk I need wouldn't fit on a floppy.
I boycott signatures
yeah, and my bl**dy wife's got two. More s*dding expensive than my car as well....
"...the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life."
Kind of reminds me of the compact disc and the mp3. Seems like the music industry is headed the way of the pony express.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Why didn't anyone tell me this earlier?
I still have 2532 floppy disks of Doom 3 left to install!!
Live forever, or die trying.
The Zip disk probably doesn't stand as good of a chance on the LS-120 Superdisk, but it's still around. The LS-120 Superdisk looks just like a regular floppy disk, but it has 120 MB storage capacity. And the drive can still read regular floppy disks.
Uhh, horses are still around.
...is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life.
Did you even continue to read that sentence?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Couple of months ago I installed XP Pro with RAID - the only way one can do this is by inserting a floppy with RAID drivers into drive a: ! Long live the floppy!
One of the reasons I like Apple hardware and switched to it several years ago is how often Apple leads the way. I read a story like this and I think, "Huh? Floppies? Who still uses those?" I got the same reaction last year to all those Intel wireless billboards. "Huh? They're just now pushing wireless?" So go ahead and whine and moan about higher prices and one-button mice. I'll keep moving into the future and watching Bill eat my dust. :)
Install Windows XP to a non-southbridge SATA or IDE RAID controller without giving it the driver floppy, I'll believe that they're dead.
Until then, though, floppy drives cost $10. I will put one in each compute I build.
(or, alternately, I'll buy the $29 combo floppy drive w/ USB media reader)
Floppies have been been around for way too many years and are still standard in practically every desktop. Granted, they get used less and less (why with USB Flash drives getting so darned cheap and CDs), but when dealing with older technology sometimes a floppy is the only way to go.
Remember, floppies won't die, only the data on them.
I thought floppies were done and dusted too, until I came into work today to find (yet another) Windows virus. LAN traffic got so bad that we had to disconnect all machines to disinfect them. Only way to get anything useful done in the meantime was floppies & USB keyrings.
Anyone heard of this virus, btw? I can't find any info on it yet. It runs as a process named nvsysvc32.exe. We can cure a machine, but haven't yet figured out how it spreads, so we don't have a vaccine yet.
I have had my computer for a year now and built it myself with out a floppy drive. I have a couple floppy disks I got with hardware but you rarely actually have to install the crap off there and I haven't had any problems. The only problem is it has that ugly floppy drive shaped hole in the front of my case...
Trust Your Technolust
When I see a "Boot from USB storage device" in the Bios boot menu, then I'll believe floppies are gone.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
A lot of vendors started discarding serial ports on laptops as well. This proves difficult if you need to debug a lot of, say, RS-485 stuff using your laptop (on-site), and can't use an USB-to-Serial converter to make sure you are not introducing any interface-quirks with that. The next port is probably the ieee-1284 (parallel) - everyone has a USB-printer nowadays anyway.
In someway this is OK, but there will and should always remain a small segment of the market devoted to (a correct implementation of!) these "obsolete" technologies to make sure applications relying on them can still be debugged in the future...
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The sad part is that, what reason are students going to give to their teachers for not having their homework done? I mean, I quickly moved from "My dog ate my homework" to "My dog ate my floppy". What now? "My dog ate my computer!"?
We've had CD writers, keychain drives, network storage, and a zillion types of removable media for how many years now? The iMac shipped without a floppy drive back in 1998; why is this a story all of a sudden?
the coolest club on
Well, it did take me over a year to discover that the floppy drive in one of my machines didn't work.
the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car
Yeah, but people can get emotionally attached to horses, and buy them for fun. When's the last time you bought a floppy drive for fun - or, for that matter, became emotionally attached to it?
The horse occupies a special place in modern society. We view it as the carriers of roman invaders. The transportation of the american frontiersman. Specialised groups breed and cherish the horse. We will never see the eyes of the world on Kentucky for a "Floppy Disk" event.
That's the point!
I got some new kit to play Doom 3 on last week, including a WD Raptor HD. It was only after I built the thing (sans floppy of course) and tried to install XP that I realised the original WinXP setup CD I had didn't know wtf a serial ATA hard drive was.
Try as I might, without actually burning the drivers onto a CD with Windows XP, there was no way I was going to get the setup program to see them and therefore use the HD.
I eventually ripped a FD out of another PC to use, but that didn't work (layers upon layers of dust), so resorted to a second FD drive before finally getting it to work. I'm much too lazy to open the PC up again to take it out, so looks like my state of the art new PC will always have an FD in it.
Point of this ramble... you can predict all you like, Bill, but if your OS is going to insist on going back to the dark ages in order to get it installed I don't know how you're going to be able to drive progress forward!
People have been telling me how floppies are just trash for a long time. The fact is that they are very useful for small data transfers. If I'm late one morning and need to work on a document on campus, it's faster to bring it with me on a floppy than to negotiate a secure FTP connection which is often slow. If I need to help a friend build a PC, it's no use e-mailing him the necessary drivers before we've even got to setting up the Internet connection.
Also, I always giggle when people burn a 1 MB Word document on a 800 MB CD-R to bring it to work.
Sure, floppies aren't used as often as they were in the Glorious Days of DOS ten years ago, but they can bail you out when you occasionally need to transfer small files and a network connection isn't possible or too much of a hassle.
I broke the floppy drive in my then-two-year-old Mac in 1998, the same year I got broadband. My mantra become "if it's small enough for a floppy, it's small enough to email." It wasn't until I sold that Mac to a friend so I could buy myself a new G4 that I realized I'd had a broken floppy drive for three years. I'd simply forgot. It was like I had my appendix taken out and there wasn't even a scar. I probably wouldn't have noticed if my friend hadn't been trying to upload her old files via floppy.
On a related note: Sales of slide rules have seen a dramatic decrease over the last 40 years.
So... my old floppy disks will be put out to stud and possibly race each other, whilst other more modern disk mediums will pollute the atmosphere and cause a few hundered thousand serious / fatal road accidents a year? Interesting analogy, yet a bleak look at the future of data storage.
+1 insightful for Taco!
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
What I find most amusing about these "Floppy/Dot Matrix/Dial up/Paul is dead" articles is that they seem to picture the process of becoming actually obsolete as in not used anymore -or being replaced by a double- as an industry decision, and not consumers'. There is more at becoming obsolete that not being profittable anymore at all for the companies producing the product; not even having been outpaced in capabilities and the price/mb ratio by optical drives a long, long time ago -in a store near, near your place- or even since the beggining, floppies will last. But I'm talking obvious for the ./ crowd here, perhaps.
O make me a mask
>Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files
Let's not forget its most important use: spreading viruses around in the workplace. In our network, most viruses get in because people bring them in on floppies from home, from school sites, etc.>the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car
I own a horse, you insensitive clod. Went for a good long ride at the beach yesterday and didn't handle a floppy once.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Slashdot is news for nerds, stuff that matters... in my not so humble opinion... floppies don't matter anymore.
Time to move on people!
the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car
You mean that, in the future, I will use floppies on a hobby/recreational basis?? Kick ass!
What is this "floppy disk" that you mention?
... instead of the ubiquitous floppy, we've now got:
- smartmedia cards
- compact flash cards
- sony memory sticks
- USB drives
- MMC cards
&etc.
think this is better? i don't. sure, they're all nice, but what a bitch it is to have to carry around my own "drive unit" just to be able to accept these "Standardized Media".
standards aren't.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I keep hearing this on Slashdot and other places but it's not true. Floppies are nice. They are the best way to transport word documents and they are cheap. Until a cheap, universal medium appears with the advantages of a floppy appears, floppies will stay.
The 5 1/2 didn't die until the 3 1/2 appeared. Single density didn't disappear until double density. To kill floppies, they need the same but better. It would even be acceptable if the new disks were a dollar a piece.
Dell and Gateway are just trying to put an extra $20 charge on their computers. They'll usually get it.
Unfortunately, upgrading a Linux powered PC's BIOS will probably still require a floppy as many motherboard manufacturer's "non-floppy" based BIOS upgrade utilities run in Windows.
Most MoBos support that.
Best Slashdot Co
You mean our daughters will spend all weekend looking after them, and spend all their pocket money on books about them etc...
Can't see it myself, floppy disks just don't have that cute appeal ;-)
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
The Death of FreeBSD
(...) FreeBSD is going the way of the Hurd upon the arrival of the Linux: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life. "
I think this article would make more sense after native operating system support for Mt. Rainier is available.
More headlines for you:
8-bit NES System Sales Slump
Pneumatic Tyre Replacing Wooden Wheel
"You Don't Have To Hand-Crank Your Car" New Invention Promises
Elizabeth Taylor No Longer Attractive
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Horses still have much usage. Police units around the world find them extremely handy in crowd control, et al. They are still a main means for transportation and the "vehicle of choice" for certain, rough terrain where no other land vehicle is practical. They are nearly irreplacable in mountainous terrain, et al. Sure, they lost their place as a common-mode piece in daily life among commoners, but they function well in their existing niche. They are a basic military vehicle even in recent wars for those forces without the means and benefits of modern technology (the Soviet-Afghan war).
The floppy drive, too, will not go away soon. It is far too common a device when all else fails and serves to basic a purpose in trouble-shooting a PC IMO. With 2 P4s here, and one having a bad NIC in it, I used the floppy drives just recently to transfer some important docs. New, glitsy, devices blow away the speed and storage of a floppy, but they are not replete throughout the PC world to replace that old horse....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
1. I can install 3rd party disk drivers during a Windows install from a CD or USB device (right now you can only do that with a floppy) 2. EVERY BIOS supports booting from a USB key device 3. USB keys universally work across all platforms and OS's. Some do already, but some don't and rely on the OS to have builtin drivers already. 4. ALL OEMs stop relying on floppies for ANYTHING (Dell for example). Once all these come to pass, we can safely throw away our floppies and be fine. Until then, floppies will cling to life by a thin thread for admins, hackers, and power users, even though none of them wish to use floppies. Normal users have no need for floppies these days, so this won't affect them much.
Space for rent, inquire within
BFD. I haven't had a working floppy drive in either of my computers in over 5 years because the hardware failed. Any disk I have tried to read recently on other computers has been full of disk errors. I was pretty glad I didn't have to deal with that shit anymore on a regular basis.
Now comes the USB SD/CF reader that I have been using in my digital camera for about 9 months. For some reason it decided that it no longer could hold 512MB and only could hold 40MB. Whatever was on there outside of the 40MB was gone and I had to copy over the remaining images and format the disk. Looks like a whole different problem for this type of media.
While USB keydrives have survived washing machines and dryers and SD cards can hold a TON more data than floppies (with faster speeds and less hassle) we might be opening ourselves to new problems as we move up in technology.
Every time I want to use one of my old floppy disks, I encounter a problem of bad sectors. It's up to the point that when I absolutely need to carry data on FD (old computers with no usb, no CDRW and no internet), I copy it twice on each of two disks.
Is it going to be the same for CD as they get older ? I am considering moving my data archive from CD to hard drives with RAID.
Ah this reminds me of this story : http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Obsoletism is quite relative when it comes to computing. Something isn't completely obsolete until it's no longer used at all. However I know many instances where people use older systems with bootable linux distros as routers, firewalls, webservers, and the like. Floppy disks maybe old, but they work. It won't be until the USB technology is expanded to the point that all motherboards recognize mass media drives in the boot process (in the event that the cdrom isn't working, or one isn't present such as systems employed in high security locations i.e. langly,White sands, etc...), will floppy drives have no use at all. However even then the use of floopys in older systems, and thin clients will still be relavent. Honestly I don't think that the floopy will be completely obsolete for quite a many years to come.
The wired is really the same thing as the real world.
the xp-installer refuse to get the drivers from anything but a floppy...
Have you tried buying a SuperDisk recently? I tried to buy a drive about two or three years ago and there was nobody selling them at all. The format never really took off, partially because of the competition (regular floppy drives, Zip drives), and is practically dead.
A good idea, granted, but it takes more than that to succeed.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
As long as Symantec Ghost defaults to booting from floppies I will always have a use for floppies. Yeah I know you can make a bootable Ghost CD, but man that's a pain....
I still load all my programs in with a cassette tape recorder...never bought one of them "floppy drives" for my computer as I thought it wouldn't last.
Turns out I'm right after all! Saved my self some bucks.
Though it takes about 2 hours now to just boot my computer off the cassette. And I won't even begin to tell ya how long it took to compile Gentoo.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Ever since CD-ROMs started being bootable, I haven't really needed them, although I think it's bad juju to run a server without one.
vk.
Billy My dog ate...uh...the Internet! So I can't access my homework.
teacher Really? It must have been a very large dog, then.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
1. What consumer ever heard of "DEC" or "Digital", or had one at home?
2. What group of people considered DEC workstations "desktops"?
3. When Apple said it had "the first 64-bit personal computer", it said this in the context of the desktop. People challenged that with BOXX's 64-bit "desktop" offering, not DEC. Sorry, DEC isn't and wasn't classified as a "desktop" or "personal computer" in any way, shape, or form.
I'm ALMOST ready to solely rely on a USB memory stick. I have one and use it personally all the time, but I work in a corporate environment where the admins have locked down the system, and you can't install ANY drivers. There are still a few Win98 boxes left around, and even XP isn't fully installed with some of the more obvious drivers.
When I first bought the USB stick, I had all the intention of it being the main portable memory device. Until I found out it wouldn't work on the majority of the computers I use in the office. I still use an odd mix of floppies and CD-Rs.
The one aspect that I liked about the floppy that I still don't see is universal availability. Floppies are cheap, and worked on (almost) all machines at the time. You were safe to assume that a machine had a floppy drive. As a matter of fact, you never even bothered to think twice about it. I'm sure USB sticks will get there, eventually, but right now there's no guarantee that the machine you attend even has a USB port. Some machines have restrictions that won't allow driver installations, which renders the USB stick into a glorified key-chain. CD's are the only universal item that I trust, so when I absolutely certainly need to have a certain item available during travel to an unknown location, I make sure I have a CD of it with me.
All in all, I must say the floppy was quite the invention, it was long lived (longer than CD-Rs, for sure, which will probably die out much faster), worked great, was durable, cheap, and available. That's one peripheral that's gonna be hard to beat!
For the majority of people floppy disk are something that they think they need, but in this modern world of CD-R's, USB storage devices, etc. they have no use.
I personally wouldn't rely on the a floppy disk any more to backup or transfer information, the number of times I've tried to read a floppy disk and my computer has turned around and said there was something wrong with it. It amazes me that people will keep the only copy of their very important piece of work on a floppy disk! I wouldn't even keep the only copy of an important piece of work on my hard drive!
I can't remember the last time that I used a floppy disk, in fact, I don't even know why I've still got a floppy disk drive (except the fact that I'd have a strange and pointless floppy disk shaped hole in the front of my computer!).
The only one that has a floppy on purpose is a computer I built for my wife last December. She is a psychologist and uses software that still uses "key" disks to allow you to run the sofware, or that count the number of uses.
She has several programs like this or worse - one runs in a DOS window and uses an old ASCII database program! These are not "old" programs, they have all been purchased within the last couple of years.
I guess the market is too small to pay for updating them. I am sure there are other "vertical" markets like this for various professionals that have odd-ball programs that still old features like floppy authentication and DOS based terminal windows.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Unfortunately, there are still applications that crop up from time to time that require a floppy disk. For example, Maxtor won't give you an RMA unless you run their hard drive diagnostic software. The software doesn't run on top of an OS, so you have to boot into it directly, but unfortunately they don't provide CD ISO's of it on their website - they only have floppy images available.
That said, I haven't had a floppy drive in any of my machines (well, other than my laptop) for several years. This is in part because when it comes to installing floppy drives, I seem to have some sort of Touch of Death.
yeah. 10 years ago, the floppy went the way of the buffalo. this is shocking, earth-shattering news that gets posted here on /.
I think we all saw it coming, When Dell started charging for Floppy Drives on PC's, with the pen drives getting bigger and bigger, with the technology getting faster and faster with USB available in every system. So See Ya Floppy in the Computer Junkyard.
I actually USED a floppy disk for the first time in about a year last month, when installing Windows XP on a new VIA SATA chipset (no drivers)...
:-) ) but they don't have word processors on half their machines :-/ so I just use my trusty flash drive to go from lappy to school box as PDF, print and be done with it. plus I have an automagic backup of all my printed work in 3.5 places (laptop as .doc and .pdf, flash drive as .pdf and the hard copy).
Other than that, I carry around a 512MB lexar flash drive on a lanyard that either camps out in my laptop bag or my pocket. My community college doesn't allow student computers on their network (the scare tactic is "we'll remove your computer by force" and/or the MAC needs to be registered, both i've proved are BS by jacking in
I gave my old 128MB drive to a friend, and it's been through a washing machine at least twice and still works! I'd like to see a floppy do that!
As far as boot utilities, with the exception of a needed RAID driver, I haven't used one in ages, i have a boot CD with a win9x boot floppy image that compliments my knoppix cd, but that's as close to boot floppy as I get.
Haven't included floppies in client boxen in ages, they have to ask to get em, and the first thing I do when I get a mothballed box from somewhere is pull the plug on the floppy drive.
Rather not remove altogether, I usually find a need for a floppy once every 3-6 months or so.
MNy english prof. recommends "get a floppy disk so you can save your writing on it or get a computer you can use yourself" my roommate and I who share that class immediatly whip out the flash drives, heh.
If the students save their work to that one floppy (and they will), they'll be a roomful of crybabies come finals, and i'll just sit back and laugh.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
The general public may no longer have use for a floppy disk, I know I haven't purchased new ones for personal use in about 8 years at least. Tech support and repair shops will still need the use of some. Just running simple recovery programs and bios updates is all I ever use them for now. Booting old machines without CDRom drives to load an image over the network is another use for them.
Maybe in several more years once a lot of the older machines have finally turned over and died and practically every machine has a usb port that can use a USB key as a boot device. I would much rather keep all my utilities and such on one USB key than several floppies that I lose, damage, etc.
Lots of articles covered the "death of the floppy." A few:
d is ks_face_extinction/p hp?sec=mag&id=59r onicle/tech/98/09/ 25/main.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/02/06/floppy_
http://www.ccnmag.com/index.
http://www.chron.com/content/ch
Floppy drives are cheap, (somewhat) reliable, universally known and understood. It will be years before they disappear completely, maybe when all the legacy (non-USB) hardware is retired. If you're like me, that will likely be never (still have a PDP-11 here somewhere).
What if I need to load an external driver for my SATA / SCSI controller during the installation of Windows 2000 / XP ?
I agree with the idea that the floppy is going to become less and less used as time goes on, as more and more people start to get / use USB key chain (thumb drive, jump drive, what ever you want to call them).
This is why I believe they will become the "next floppy":
1. I'm a teacher and I frquently see more and more students saying stuff like "My printer was busted can I use this (a USB key chain drive) to print it off your printer?
2. If your transporting art projects of any sort (music, photo shoped pictures etc) han the key chain drive is MUCH better tool than a floppy disc.
3. Other files such as drivers are also to big to fit on a floppy, but would be dumb to waste a CD on... Thumb drives are perfect for this.
4. really forget full people do attach USB drives to their key rings or wear them arround their neck... (I'm talking again about students here, as well as other teachers.)
Note: this has been posted by r.future (a person who spends way to much time on the internet!)
Then try downloading your floppy images and booting to a FLASH drive with a floppy image from your BIOS vendor - how you gonna' manage that one smartboy?
...I think we're beating a dead one here. The death of the floppy has been proclaimed countless times. I understand what this is trying to get at, but it really doesn't matter. As long as people get shit done, who cares? My roommate insists on using floppies, mainly out of laziness, but even that is a self-correcting behavior as most floppies made these days can't be used more than once or twice without producing crippling errors. Lose enough important work and you'll catch on. Either way, we don't need someone to tell us how it is or how it will be. People might cling to the floppy yet in the future because it's what they know. Then again, they might randomly get the courage to try something new. It is impossible to predict, but that is not important because it really couldn't matter less what happens.
I am feeling fat and sassy
Put it on a floppy disk, then degauss the disk. People will point out your mistake of trusting your important data to a floppy, but will accept that it was a mistake. You see it in movies all the time.
Does this mean I should throw away my disk notchers? Humh... Maybe I can use them on my hard drives...
A hard disk.
Apple was the first to have CD-ROM drives as standard gear for all the models they sold. All other manufacturers had the CD-ROM option (with or without), but with Apple, it was standard issue, no way out.
still, its tough when you break a nail or three compiling Gentoo. almost done now though.
Whatever happened to Zip Drives? I bet they have appeared somewhere in a weird sci-fi snore-fest with Tom Cruise in it...
I hardly ever use my floppy drive. The only time it gets any use is when I have to rebuild Windows - as my RAID card is not natively supported by XP, so I am required to use a floppy disk during the install. Way to present multiple options, MS. I guess I could probably rip the drivers to a CD, but I haven't as of yet.
Looks to me like MS is a large player in holding the floppy drive at bay (so to speak). Should MS decide to go to a system like gentoo, where you can connect to the web before/during, and not only after the install to get the drivers you need, maybe then the floppy will come closer to completely dying. Although my disks themselves die on a regular basis...
A while back I helped an elderly woman purchase a laptop, one that did not have a native floppy drive. I showed her how to use CDr's instead, and she's wonderfully happy doing so, and doesn't understand why anyone would need a floppy drive. DirectCD is a wonderful thing in this case.
Being "floppyless" CAN be done, but it can be a real inconvenience - if you're used to having one.
I bought my parents a Dell laptop, which did not come with a floppy drive as standard (weak) so I bought them one with it. While I may not use it 99% of the time --- there is that 1% of the time that I will use it - and that 1% of the time will be the MOST crucial period.
So the hell with Billy's prediction, floppy is still useful.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
So Horses are dead? I don't know if I should trust slashdot as a reliable source anymore...
The problem with not including a floppy diskette is that for many third-party mass storage devices without a driver in the preloaded packages (i.e anything newer than the OS you're running...like SATA controllers on Windows XP) you need to specify a driver at install time, to be able to install onto that device.
Windows Setup requires this file to be on a floppy diskette in your A: drive. You may not specify a CD-ROM to pull txtsetup.oem from. Hardware suppliers include the requisite driver disk with their hardware...but if it can't be used, there's no point.
Granted, on a Dell, most people won't be adding a 3ware SATA-RAID controller or anything of the sort, so this issue is somewhat irrelevant. People who need them, will always have them; people who don't need them will move onto something better.
I haven't used floppies since my Macs stopped coming with them. Come to think of it, I didn't use floppies much before that, either -- my PowerBook expansion bay floppy drive (I was insecure) was a waste of money, even though it worked with iMation super-disks or something. Just never used it.
.Mac server if I need them back and forth between work -- the XP machine connects to my account just fine.
Making bootable CD's on a Mac has been easy for ages and ages -- ironically the advent of OS X made it a bit trickier for while, there. It's still not super-easy, but at least manageable.
To prove I'm not a Mac snob, I'll volunteer that I have an x86 box, too. I built it without a floppy -- what was the purpose of including one?
I haven't moved to a USB keychain drive yet. I usually put things on my
Oh, there *is* one thing that screwed me by not having a floppy to boot from on the PC. It was hard as hell to run the dang unlocking program for my Maxtor drive to get it to work with my Tivo. All of the Tivo boot CD's are Linux (as is Tivo), but for some reason the dang unlocking program is DOS only. I think it took me two hours to figure out how to make a bootable DOS disk, add the unlocking program to another session, and merge the dang sessions. Yeah, I *could* have run to the store and bought a floppy drive for $10, but that wasn't the point.
--Jim (me)
I'm Canadian, and I hardly see floppies anywhere these days. But I'm willing to bet that in developing nations, floppy disks continue to be used as the primary portable media. They're cheap, small, light, and relatively reliable. I doubt that the (as an example) Romanian government hands out USB keychains to its employees.
The article may have wanted to take that into account.
CDRW's should have been drag and drop write/erase like any other media since day one, and if they couldnt do it on day one, then day two. But this is what, year 5? It's why ZipDrives, even at their insane failure rates and price per meg are still popular with many people, because they've performed the miracle of "being able to drag and drop and erase from it". What's so hard about making that happen with Windows/Linux even at the very lowest level (as in, from a command line, safe mode, whatever).
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
... is the 9 pin serial port. Hands up who used one the last 10 years. Noone? Right ... why are those things still included on new computers? So people can still keep using their serial port mouses?
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
"The Death of the Floppy Disk" Is this some sort of joke? Floppies have been dead for a long time. I, personally, have not had a floppy drive in my computer since around 1997 or 1998. Why do people still use these things?
The Zip Drive is now obsolete, and that was, well, 69.44 times better than a floppy drive in the late 90s (and who knows how many times faster).
Floppys have not held that "same relevance in everyday life" since the first hard drive was included with a personal computer. As soon as that happened, the floppy's relavance changed. It was all downhill from there.
Floppies suck. Period.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Now that most of the world's computer users carry at least one flash drive or thumbdrive there is no need for floppies unless you still have a computer that does not have a USB port on it. To say that floppies are still used is not only a wrong statement but to agree with something I once heard, "The floppies are going the way of the horse!". 'Nuff said
You can install Windows using a bootable CD as long as your BIOS isn't ancient and supports booting from CD. I've used that method for quite some time. Haven't used a floppy for booting the install disc since Windows 98.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *FDD is dying...
What the Heck happened to the LS-120 drives? They were perfectly poised to breathe new life into the floppy by being bootable, completely compatible with existing media and supporting a faster and relatively cheap 120 MB disk. Best of both worlds when the only other option was ZIP 100MB which suck in comparison.
Yes, there are certain phrases that alway tell me that I'm hearing the sound of an axe being ground.
One is the "thus-and-such is dead" meme. First of all, who cares? Most technologies experience very slow declines. The floppy became "dead" for me when I bought a PowerMac G4 in 2000 which didn't include a floppy drive, and at the instance when I decided I didn't to spend $89 for an an add-on external floppy drive. But it's still "alive" for my wife because the Win98 box she bought at about the same time has one.
Why should anyone bother to try to declare the exact point at which some slowly-declining technology is "dead?" Usually, it is motivated by some company that hopes to influence consumers to stop using it. I notice the reporter spoke to Dell and Gateway. Very likely there are product managers at those companies responsible for some models that don't have floppies, who are annoyed that those pesky customers persist in buying floppy-equipped models instead and hoping this article will influence consumers.
The other one is the phrase "X-killer." This always seems to be traceable to marketing and sales and is never close to being true. The "X-killers" never have more than a rough similarity to the product they're supposed to be killing. Let me see, which IBM product was supposed to be the "VAX-killer?" Adobe InDesign was said to be a "Quark killer" when it was introduced in... when? 2001? Indeed Quark is experiencing what looks like a long slow, painful decline, due mostly to self-inflicted wounds, partly as a result of outsourced software development that neither succeeded brilliantly nor failed utterly, and somewhat due to InDesign... but the process is taking years and years and years.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I still cannot upgrade the BIOS of my computer using an Asus P4P without using a floppy disk to boot into DOS.
Someone please prove me wrong.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Reed Solomon is the key here: use PAR2-files to protect your investment.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I think my floppy drive died on me yesterday and I'm debating getting a new or even a used one.
The first company to ship and popularize Sony's revolutionary 3.5" hard-case floppy drives and disks...
Kind of reminds me of the compact disc and the mp3.
Did you mean horse is to CD as car is to MP3? I burn my MP3s on CD-R, you insensitive clod! Or did you mean horse is to vinyl as car is to MP3 CDs?
I'm not totally convinced, and here's why:
I just built a (screaming) athlon system that included SATA. However, the SATA drivers were not availble when installing Windows (Linux isn't an option for me at this point) off of the XP CD. So I had to load an external driver using... You guessed it, a floppy.
I had actually considered not buying a floppy for the machine, but I did "just in case". If I hadn't, I wouldn't be able to get the machine working until I went out and bought one.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Seems like a nice place to ask about this... What about RAID drivers:
I'd like to install Windows XP on a pair of RAID1 disks (on a machine without a floppy drive). During the install sequence, it asks me to press F6 to load RAID drivers (if no drivers are loaded, the disks are not recognized)...
Can the drivers be loaded from a USB flash disk?
How about an external USB floppy drive?
Has anybody gone through this??? I'd prefer something USB so I can also use it on my iBook.
I will be happy to leave the floppy drive behind, but when pushing a single Windows 2000 image to multiple computers it is nice to have. Using the sysprep utility, the mini-setup looks for the file sysprep.inf in the root directory of the A: drive. Mini-setup will also look for sysprep.inf in a folder named sysprep on the C: drive, but each computer needs a separate sysprep.inf, so the easiest way still seems to be separate floppies. If mini-setup would check for sysprep.inf on a CD-ROM or other media, I would seriously consider ordering computers without them. Until then, the extra expense for a floppy drive will be small compared to the time we save using sysprep.
We win together or suffer without.
No way man, I use floppies for all my installs...
Has anyone got disk #543 for Doom 3, I seem to have lost it...
...trying to install Windows onto a RAID card (or indeed load any other drivers for exotic hardware at install time) without a floppy drive.
Cripes, even Debian Woody install media has the ability to load drivers from floppy, CDROM, USB, NFS, FTP and HTTP. The situation with windows has gotten to the stage where I need to make slipstream install media all the time as I, unlike Microsoft, am trying to obsolete the 3.5" floppy into a belated grave.
Now if only BIOS manafacturers and bootdisk.com would make it a tad easier for us to make bootable DOS drives out fo CDR's and USB keys.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
If Floppies are to optical media as horses are to cars does that mean people will keep floppy drives as pets and wax poetically about 'the good old days' of floppy drives?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I'm not certain that would work if your updating your BIOS.
1) Most BIOS tools are DOS based.
2) Most BIOS tools save the old BIOS on the floppy. You usually need a special program to do that on a CD-RW.
3) Catch-22 for some. Depending on how the CD-RW's connected to the PC. You may need drivers first to get the burner recognized.
I actually ran into this with the knoppix disk. Booted up until I selected knoppix26, then it couldn't find it's filesystem because the SCSI card wasn't auto-detected.
they use 20-year old technology, they are probably produced on the same lines as 20 years ago, nobody probably cares that much about them being reliable or usable at all. As the article mentions it, most people buy them just because they're used to them. It's like to buy a pc without a keyboard - most people don't use it anyway, too ;)
At the local community college they use USB flash drives. The school got new Dells a year ago and by November half had the XP floppy problem(it can't read any and wants to format every floppy, new or used, and can't). So for the spring every student had to get a flash drive. No more problems.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I am amused that the Slackware distribution still focuses on booting from floppies. Yes i know it can install froma a CD (I use it), but if you look at their web site you might feel you are still in 1995. Here are some interesting tidbits from the main Slackware install faq:
Wow. I haven't used a floppy in years, and don't intend to use one anytime soon. I do have a few old pent 1 machines lying about, but even they will boot off of a CD. If I still had an old 486 motherboard system lying about that needed a floppy for alternative booting, I'd go to the nearest surplus store/garage sale and spend the $30 required to replace it with a crappy pent mobo system that will boot off of a CD. Dave
I'll get rid of the last floppy drive in my house when my wife's loser college stops requiring floppies for papers and stuff... The won't let her use my thumb drive, "it might contain viruses" or some such nonsense.. *rolls eyes*
I didn't say you couldn't use serial anymore - but who knows what quirks the USB-to-serial interface introduces in my applications ?
One has to trust on the implementation of the USB-to-serial - a black-box in a way. In practice, this would mean you have to start testing the interface from the ground-up...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
So floppies have been condemned officially. Great. What about those damn PS/2 ports? Now those are way overdue for being phased out.
Perhaps I'm overlooking a really good reason not to switch all input devices to USB?
Transistors and Beer!!
is that AOL moved to sending out CDs a long time ago, so our free floppy source is all gone.
(Actually, that's only *half* humor.)
More seriously, I recently bought floppies for my kids to take data to and from school. Schools seldom have *new* equipment, CDRWs are finicky for older drives, and as someone else said, you hate to burn a CDR for memtest86. Kids' reports are smaller than that, even with multisession. KISS.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The thing I'd miss is downloading a 1.44MB image for FreeBSD to do an FTP install of it. FTP install is my favourite install method for FreeBSD.
Currently AFAIK the only choice is that, or a full CD with all the ports.
Wish there was a CD image for an FTP install you can download so you don't need three or four hours to download the ISO...
=D
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
But seriously, 1998 called and it wants its "Death of the Floppy Disk" story back. Jesus.
(I'll head off the obvious response now: "2001 called, it wants its joke back." Thank you, I'm here all week.)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
What about oscilliscopes?
Not exactly a mass market use for floppies, but the only way to get screen captures from most oscilliscopes is through a floppy disk.
Yes you could mail things, but I know a surprising number of people with old PCs and no dialup.
Oh and has anyone ever tried to talk about usb mass storage bootability to USB key or BIOS manufacturers? I note that USB.org has published a few more specs than last time I looked at this, but 6 months ago it seemed like random city. Those usb/BIOS manufacturers who even replied to me just gave me a "sorry...proprietry...".
You know where you are with floppies on that front...
It's a easy, quick, cheap way to boot/repair/replace configs on those non-essential things like SCSI controllers, especially those low-dollar RAID controllers. (Necessary through at least 2002's batch of RAID controllers, if they've progressed beyond the floppy for config since then, I don't know, as I don't own any newer RAID controllers.)
Speaking of which, this is one area that IDE RAID controllers, at least those cheaper ones, absolutely fail on. Lose your config on those, you may as well flip a coin as to whether you'll recover that striped set or not.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I finally bought a laptop at the start of this year and it came without an internal floppy drive. OK, I said, I don't really use one all that much. What could possibly go wrong?
I hit my first snag that evening when I was trying to use Partition Magic to generate my dual-boot partition (Linux). PM cannot repartition the drive opon which it is running, so I needed to create a floppy set for booting off of and partitioning from. With no ready method to do so, and no easy way (at that time) to generate a bootable CD, it was back to the BestFutureCircuitFry store to get a USB external floppy
I must admit that the floppy is almost never used, but it's nice to have it around when needed. I make use of it when working with paritions or ghosting drives. Without the external floppy, it would be difficult to do either.
It is my opinion that, unless an OS comes with the ability to create a bootable CD with the same ease that one could previously create a bootable diskette, then the diskette will not be devoid of value or usefulness. Until Bill has a "create emergency boot CD" option alongside (or in place of) the "create boot Diskette" option, then MS-Windows will still require the occasional use of a floppy drive.
I also know that it's possible to create a bootable USB key, but it's not easy enough yet (for the average user), and most people don't have a box of USB keys around like they would a box of diskettes or a spool of CD blanks.
Now, what to do with my cases of 5.25" floppies. And the two 8" Elelephant disks that I have, since the IMSA got donated.
It cuts your 9 inch hard drive down to a 3 1/2 inch floppy and throws it out Windows.
The group I work for is ICS, and we run the largest system of general computing labs on campus. The latest batch of Dells didn't include floppies as part of the standard package and we would have had to pay extra for them. So we just left them out.
Also, for consistency, we've disabled the floppy drives in the other 300 Dells we have, and removed the external drives from all 70 iMacs. You can't sit down at any of our machines and use your floppies anymore.
Instead, we've been pushing technologies like CD-RW, Netfiles (campus wide network storage), and little USB drives. Any one of these media are more durable than floppies; I can't remember how many people over the years have come crying to me because they lost the only copy of their final paper. And there hasn't been any huge uproar over it either among the students or faculty (at least I gaven't noticed any multi-page DI exposes).
Hmm. I bought myself one of them there Turing Machines. Sure, I've got to work hard to supply it with enough paper my computer can do anything that these new-fangled "pentiums" can do.
You know, audio cassettes can hold your data forever. Plus it has that old skool street cred!
...but I needed a floppy drive just last week. I had built a P4 box and had thrown in a floppy drive for pretty much the reasons the article points out ... nostalgia and the "well, maybe I'll need it" excuse.
Last week I needed it. And I discovered that it was broken.
I was trying to install, of all things, Win95 with VMWare to test something. Since the disc isn't bootable, I had to use the floppy drive just to put dos on it first. First I had to *find* a copy of dos...luckily a coworker still had a set. Then I discovered the drive was busted. And for some reason, VMWare wouldn't acknowledge the new USB floppy drive as "B:". Lots of cursing and threats, and finally got it working by *networking* the floppy drive off my Linux machine, which I couldn't spare to swap the drive from.
In short, it's 2004, and not only are floppies *not* completely removed from my geek life, neither is dos!
The only upshot is that I could play nibbles.bas again.
Yes, Windows can boot from a CD. But over the last few years I have seen numerous examples in which the only way for someone to make repairs on a machine is to boot with a floppy and go back to old-school DOS looking stuff.
Every time I see that, I'm appalled that you do require some knowledge from the way-back machine on using DOS to repair windows. (*)
(*) Note, I'm not claiming that this applies to the latest and greatest window, but I've seen it a lot.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yes but this means if your floppy becomes lame, as they frequently do, you can take it out back and shoot it. God Bless America...
I don't believe you... Assuming the 300 baus speed of the C64 floppy drive (when in doubt about what hardwar someone is usaing, always assume C64) and the typical amount of data that neads to be read during the Linux boot (when in doubt about the OS, always assume Linux) it would take about 16 days to boot your system.
When you install windows XP on a SCSI or SATA drive you need a floppy to give it a place to look for the drivers for your HD. In fact, you can't place the drivers anywhere else as windows will automatically check your floppy drive (and only your floppy drive) for them!
I'd really love to see some *BSD troll rewrite that Pearl Jam cover of "Last Kiss" yet again but for "where oh where can my floppy be, the lord took it away from me..." I mean that double entendre could be funny... I tried to take a stab at it but it just wasn't working for... oh where is a troll when you need one?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
As can be seen here.
Compact Flash (type I & II), Memory stick & Memory Stick Pro, Secure Digital, Multi Media Cards, Microdrive
ZIP drives, well, not cheap and not small, and not widely built-in by box builders and (some think) not all that reliable.
CD-RW, well, not small, and the software was not built-in until Windows XP, and even that software is "one big burn" and doesn't let you copy/delete individual files one at a time so you can use it "like a floppy" and (some think) not all that reliable.
Then we come to USB disk-on-key. Small, software already mostly built-in, random access, can be used "like a floppy". Not real fast, but probably works pretty good for many floppy-like applications. But will it work for data backup? Most people aren't aware that the technology there tolerates a quite limited number of rewrites. Will people be happy when they discover their $50 USB dongle fails after less than a year of daily backups?
When it comes to making casual backups, the battle to replace the floppy is still ongoing. Maybe there'll never be a clear winner, or maybe it's going to be one of these technologies.
One of the most useful applications for the floppy drive was the flashpath readers
These were nice because they were one of the only ways to read media on some laptops.
It also allowed you to essentially have a zip drive out of a regular floppy if you used the 128MB media.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
The way I see it, floppies were ever only useful if your files are up to 100KB in size. Anything bigger has a good chance of catching a bad sector in the middle of it even if the file is only stored for a few days.
Back when, we did 30-floppy backups using FastBack, which was notorious for failing to restore a backup if even one sector in one of the disks was bad. These backups turned out to have had a half-life of about two hours. And floppy drives have not gotten any more reliable in the past 20 years; they only got cheaper.
Fairly recently, I've seen floppies used for students to pass homework, but lately most teachers are replacing this with e-mail submission.
And the classical irreplaceable use of floppies, to boot the box with an unbootable HD, is no longer relevant, as all more or less modern boxes can boot from CD.
So, between my 5 computers there are 3 floppy drives, and none of them work. The last one broke about 2 years ago, and I've not missed it since.
P.S. In the car-horse analogy, this would be like still having several horses, all of which are dead.
One and a half years ago, I gave my so an USB keydrive. She's had it on her keychain ever since, and it works without a problem. She uses it to carry data between her home, the university and the office.
And yes, she actually liked the present.
Actually, for me, the death of the floppy disk usually involved a stack of double density 3.5ers, a power drill and the hopes of saving a few bucks.
Cheers,
Adolfo
Militant Apple Fans, laugh it is a joke
... and as such should be discouraged. There is already a perfectly good (and better sounding, IMHO) word: "viruses".
Last time I had to use a floppy was to install network drivers on a PC.
or, for that matter, became emotionally attached to it?
The year was 1991. I was running a BBS off my Tandy 1000HX(a POS PC clone). I ran my BBS off its singular 720K drive. The disk failed, about the 3rd time in a row. I took the disk, threw it as hard as I could against the wall, slightly loosening its metal door.
I put it back in the computer. The drive was ruined from the door screwing up the heads.
If you love something, set it free.
The last diskdrive I actually bought must have been around '95 (my first pc!). Anyway, if Bill really thinks he can let the floppies go by now I like to know if his crappy OS can allready deal with this as I remember windows 2000 would detect a diskdrive anyway and hang for 10 seconds every time a drive-list is shown somewhere.
1. You just can't put anything interesting on them anymore. I used to be able to copy Word files or graphics files to a floppy and carry them back and forth to work on them. Most of the Word files (something more interesting than a 1-page letter) I work with lately are bigger than a floppy! Many of the graphics I work with are too. You simply need something bigger than a floppy nowadays.
2. Bootable CDs are filling the niche for system recovery. Used to be I always had a boot floppy with me to recover systems. Now I carry a bootable credit card CD with a lot more tools on it.
3. Floppy quality is going down. The last box of floppies that I bought, I threw away about 30%! Not only that, I've noticed that they don't seem to hold files like they used to. I write a file on floppy, check it two weeks later and the file is unreadable. I format the floppy and come up with 200k of bad sectors when previously there were none.
IMO, Sysadmins and desktop techs won't let it happen in a corporate envinronment.
Floppy drives are just too handy when Ghosting desktop machines, doing flash upgrades, and making boot disks.
Like the article says, it's not a big deal for home users that can use DVD-R(W), CD-R(W), and Flash Drives, but in the enterprise, floppy drives are still needed.
I look at a 5 1/4" floppy drive as
an extra layer of security for small files,
I want to kept from prying eyes.
Simply because you don't see many of them
these days, and most the one's you do
see are homes for giant dust bunnies!
In another ten years...I may say the same
thing about 3 1/2" floppies, however some
of the old 5 1/4" drives are built like a
tank, while the 3 1/2" drives as of late
most are junk.
Great tools do only ONE thing, but do that ONE thing very, very well.
What about bootability? USB mass storage is pretty general, it's just SCSI over USB. It just returns the blocks asked for by the host and does all the other things a regular disk would do.
Most of the issues for bootability are silly things like forcing A-Z,0-9 serial numbers and stuff so crappy BIOSes won't freak out. But in general if the device follows the Mass Storage spec correctly it oughta be able to boot off a capable chipset.
Of course many many many USB keys don't correctly follow the spec...
One big reason for their decline is the usb flash drive.Also their high mortality rate.The other day day i kept my cell phone on a floppy disk(yes my company still has a fewfloppies).The phone rang and the floppy instantly died(rendered useless).Thats just one lovely way to kill a floppy :-).
Lord of the Binges.
Here's the thing: Floppies suck.
Don't agree? Too bad, they still suck
From a guy who spent the middle part of the 90's working in a college computer lab, I can't tell you how many kids would come in with a floppy telling me that they couldn't get the only copy of their final paper (or worse, their thesis) off of their floppy disk. I had to tell them "tough tacos", that their data was lost, and they should have backed it up to something. The Zip drives, also floppy magnetic media, were just as bad (if not worse...with the click of death and all). The fact is that floppy disks are a horribly unreliable storage medium...combined with their low transfer rate and incredibly low storage density, they downright suck ass. Some people whine about the longetivity of CD's -- however, due to the frailty of floppy disks, I believe this is a moot argument. (You lose your data if you breathe on floppies wrong!) The people who support floppies because they're "convenient" and it's the only thing they know how to use...I hate to say it, but they sorta deserve to lose their data. Why should we have to suffer (and/or buy crappy technology) because floppies are convenient for some folks?
As far as needing bootable floppies for things like BIOS updates -- floppy advocates may have a point here. I still keep one floppy drive around for this purpose. However, under most circumstances, I'll make a boot floppy on the one system that has a floppy, then burn it to a bootable CD. This way, I won't have to shuffle that drive around. Some will complain that burning a CD is a waste of space and money. I reject that argument because unless you're still using your free AOL floppies from the mid 90's, CDR/RW's are just as cheap as floppies (if not cheaper). Outside of the per-disk cost, on a cost-per-MB basis, it's an absolute no-brainer. Even if you waste 96% of the space on a CD, you're still making off better than you would with a floppy.
Anyway, the end is near for this technology. It's not quite here yet, because manufacturers are still updating bios' with floppies. There are ways around them, but until manufacturers start shipping CD ISO's, these are still hacks. I welcome the demise of floppy technology with open arms. Now, when will analog modems go this way too?
-Turkey
Next bit of breaking news for the tech savvy crowd:
VHS gives way to DVD dominance!
For one good reason: the majority of new external peripherals are now connected by USB 1.1/2.0 ports.
I mean look at the majority of multifunction (printer/scanner/fax) printers now being sold--they use USB ports almost exclusively to connect back to the computer. And scanners are now mostly connected to computers using USB ports, too.
IEEE-1394 ports will have their place, mostly for connecting devices that need large amounts of data being transferred to the computer (digital camcorders, professional grade scanners, etc.).
Google is your friend:s /intro.ht ml
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/abacu
use Signature::Witty;
You said wang...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Since I got my USB drive I'm only holding on to the one, but that one disk has seen quite a bit of use, between flashing my bios to transfering files to non-USB computers, and stuff.
Also, a lot of time laptops don't come with floppy drives, which becomes a huge problem when drivers only are available on a disk. This happens a lot at work (radioshack). A customer will come in, buy something like a Serial-to-USB adapter, and then be unable to use it because they can't get the drivers off the floppy disk.
I think just leaving the drive out is a bad idea, which will just cause the customer problems for years to come.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
...is media defects. try running this [under freebsd] someday on a stack of em you THOUGHT were fine. better have your trashcan handy. then store the good ones on a shelf for a year and run it again...toss another n% of em.
fdformat -y -f 1440 -F 0x55 fd0
fdformat -y -f 1440 -F 0xaa fd0
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fd0
Does that mean that, just like horses, 100 years from now they'll have olympic events using them, even though it shows little athleticism on the part of the human being involved?
Design for Use, not Construction!
If you need a reliable floppy drive then just scavenge one from an old 386. Back then they were built to last as people really relied upon them. Newer floppy drives are hardly ever used and it is reflected in their quality.
When working as tech support I would constantly have people coming to me with broken floppies. But the floppies worked fine with an older drive. Those newer $15 drives are really only worth $15.
I haven't had a floppy in any of my systems for several years now, but every once in a while it comes back to bite me in the ass.
Windows XP, installs, for instance, STILL have to laod driver extras (RAID, SCSI, etc) from a floppy at boot -- even if the computer in question doesn't have one.
Companies such as Dell often package their driver and BIOS releases only onto floppy disk images; it's damn near impossible to pull out these files and install them from the hard drive or CD. That drives me nuts, but it happens.
So I keep a couple of old drives, cables and all, hanging around in a box, and I plug 'em in to the desktop systems when needed. Luckily my laptop has never needed one... I'd feel just plain silly going out and buying a USB floppy drive these days.
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
My wife was quite upset when she bought her 12" Powerbook G4 last year. It, of course, did not have a floppy drive. I haven't used floppies since I bought a laptop of my own. She was concern that she could not look at her old files, or store new school presentations or anything. I let her use my 256MB USB drive as a temporary measure, but she started to use it more that I would. So I ended up buying one for her to use. She seems to like it so much better. It works on Mac, it works on Windows, it works on Linux... Everyone's happy.
She still has her 100 or so floppies. So I guess I would have to find a computer with USB to transfer the data. I hope none of them have any old virii..
Coderz 4 Life
I, for one, really miss the floppy.
I just got a new laptop for racecar support - brand spankin' new HP zd7280us with all the bells and whistles. P4-3.2. Monster 17" widescreen. DVD burner. USB ports up the yinyang. No floppy, no serial port.
The machine it replaces is a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25, a military-spec indestructable deal. P150. No CD burner, no USB - but a floppy drive.
99% of the software moved from one machine to the other was actually installed from scratch, so the lack of connectivity from one to the other wasn't all that big a deal. DATA, on the other hand, is proving to be a pain in the ass. It'd be SO simple to just zip it and dump it to floppy.....
Where I have a real bitch though is the deletion of the serial port from modern laptops. I found a USB-serial converter at RadioShack, but that's the last thing I wanted to do - further complicate my cabling. Grr. Don't the laptop people realize that the most popular way to connect widgets to computers (save printers) is via the serial port?
My phone uses a serial port. The ECU and datalogger on the race car uses the serial port. The scales, pyrometer, shock dyno, and every other measuring equipment I have all use the serial port. And in a pinch, a null-modem cable and ZMODEM makes for a decent file-transfer solution.
Grrr. I want my damn serial port back!
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
While we're not yet to the point where children think of the phone as something you put in your pocket, the typical phone icons used are quite old fashioned. Some icons even feature a dial instead of keypad!
Great now we'll be riding floppy disks at birthday parties, betting on them at the track and fighting for their rights outside glue factories.
I am suprised that no one has made a "champing at the bit" joke yet.
Old information storage devices never die, they just fade away....
It's easy to forget history. But Windows NT was running on DEC Alpha PCs almost from its first release. These machines were perhaps not "popular", but at that time very few PCs were. This is pre-DELL, largely.
The DEC Alpha workstations were personal computers in form factor running a quintessential PC operating system (Windows), and sold as high-performance workstations and cheap servers.
Claiming that these were not "mass-market 64-bit PCs" is just twisting the facts. Apple are a great innovator but the honour of bringing 64-bit computing to the desktop lies with the gifted engineers of DEC, who made almost the whole stack of their Alpha/NT workstations, from the silicon to the operating system (The VMS people - Dave Custer and his team wrote - most of NT).
History is actually important. DEC were lousy salesmen but they were fantastic engineers. Apple are great salesmen but they have borrowed many of their key concepts.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
That would mean that VCRs don't exist? Hmm, I still have one, and use it often. Until they come up with a portable, reusable, recordable format VCRs will be here. Hell, sounds like they might outlive the DVD player.
VCRs play AND record - DVD players just play.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
... one machine, and old toshiba satellite 115 laptop. IIRC pentium 1 (100?) with 16 megs ram and either a 300 or a 500 meg hdd, but no CD drive, just a floppy drive. It has 95b on it now, but I would *like* to put some sort of linux on it, but dang if I know how to do it. Ideally maybe something like a downloadable floppy image I can get to my FC2 machine, then use that via sneakernet to boot the toshiba and get online with, then finish an install with something linuxy-ish and useful beyond a firewall. Anyone have any recommendations? I've looked at the small distros before, don't remember seeing any that would do this, but who knows, those change all the time and I very easily could be missing what I want.
Thanks in advance and there's a use for a floppy right there maybe.
what is the new HP media center pc then? i wouldn't call it a workstation... heck i'd be hard pressed to call it a desktop really... yet it has PCI-X slots...
But for the most part it just sits in the box of recovery disks and old video cards.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
I was using floppies this year, when I had no Internet access at home, and I wanted to bring some stuff (you can put whole application from freshmeat.net on one or few floppies!) from work. Then I bought pendrive. It's faster, bigger, and much easier to use. I don't see any reason to use floppy drive again. Pendrive is also cheap, so...
IIRC, the 3.5" disk was introduced with the Apple II GS, not the Macintosh. Although, I suppose you could fire up the (slow as hell) Finder and pretend it's a Mac.
The earlier HP-120, which ran CP/M, on a Z-80, also had 3.5" diskettes. But as one of the last CP/M machines, it was a dead end.
Apple didn't ship the original Macintosh with 3.5" drives until 1984. The Lisa had 5.25" drives (made by Apple, and crappy), and a hard drive (made by Apple, and crappy). Apple never made disk drives again after the Lisa.
The original Mac had no hard drive and only one floppy, remember. Everybody else was shipping machines with two floppies and a hard drive by 1984. Not until the Mac got a hard drive was it useful, or did it make money for Apple.
err ... he did not say that.
As long as I still need to haul them around to customers to boot off of, floppies will never die for me.
Floppy disks becoming a thing of the past along with floppy tits thanks to Dr. Calabro. http://www.salcalabro.com/
The death of the what, now?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
They do care about quality. But for one, back when HDTV first came out, you had to spend THOUSANDS of dollars for a set...a set at the time that didn't have any content to watch.
Also, a HUGE problem is that the American networks dragged and dragged and dragged their heals with HDTV upgrades to their transmitters because of the initial cost that the FCC finally had to say "Fine, we're putting our foot down and everything has to be HDTV by a certain date" or words to that effect. But the networks STILL rebelled.
So don't lump everything into one group. There's plenty of blame to go around.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
as most motherboards assume that there is a floppy drive around somewhere, the floppies won't die.
h tml
... these were awesome floppies, they looked so cool and new instead of these old annoying tapes and taperecorders .... just plug and pray
most os's still support creating boot floppies, minimalistic tools as disk repairers and ghosters are still around.
i'd personally prefer to use these mini cd -s instead, cause they don't get corrupted as often as the floppies. but since writing onto a cd is pretty complex business, we will have to wait quite some time to accept it as a common operation.
althrough lately it would be more handy to create a booting memory stick which can hold up to 1gb data (if the data amount hasn't been even more lately), and basically could contain an entire OS by today's standards.
just to remember the old days
http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/flop8.
can you still remember these ? i can
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
apple was the first manufacturer to include a 3.5" floppy drive
on its machines -- in 1984. a 5.25" drive never existed as
an option on the macintosh -- they started their 1.0 machine
with 3.5" floppies (and was also y2k ready in 1984).
apple was also the first manufacturer to NOT include
a 3.5 drive on their machine -- the iMac in 1998.
because they've included being able to boot off a CD* on all
macs since the advent of the powerPC processor migration,
one of the main uses of the floppy on the PC side of things
(i.e. being able to boot a 3.5" floppy to restoring a PC system) --
on the mac, this use for the floppy was eliminated, and
burning CDs has now become the norm.
* you can create a bootable backup system CD on the mac,
just by dragging a system folder onto it before you burn it.
j
CD-ROMs and CD-Rs are derived from audio CDs. Audio is sequential and didn't need random access. So there's no true seek-to-block-n capability. The seeking that is available only gets you to the general area, not to the exact block.
You can fake random access for reads, by positioning ahead of what you want and throwing away the blocks that you didn't need. That doesn't work for writes.
CD-ROM is a kludge on top of audio CDs. It works fairly well. CD-R is another kludge on top of that, and it works OK if you stay away from some of the trickier bits. Packet writing is yet another layer of kludges on top of that, and it's a miracle if it works at all. Way too much cruft.
It would have been nice if Philips and Sony had shown more foresight when they designed the audio CD. A more flexible, general purpose design would have helped, even for audio purposes: longer running time with lower quality mono or shorter running time with higher quality would have been useful options. But the processing power was just not affordable back then. Most of the work was done by hardware, with room for only one format for the data on the disc.
The CD-ROM is a flawed design. But we wouldn't have it without the audio CD. Only a high volume consumer device like the CD player could have dropped the price to the point where adaptation for computer use was reasonable. And CD-Rs would not have taken off unless they were backwards compatible with audio players - making audio discs is still a major use for burners.
DVD+RW is designed for random access write. So is BluRay. The drives include processors far more powerful than any personal computer from 1980. So we won't repeat the mistakes of the CD. We'll make new ones. The media companies consider the lack of DRM on CDs a mistake, and don't want to repeat it. We need to convince them that any DRM that ties content to a particular object is a mistake. Every time that the media companies get what they want, it fails. Every time that consumers get what they want, the media companies make even more money. Will they ever learn?
He's also the one making billions and will never have to work again as long as he lives unless he wants to. For all his clouded predictions, how much are you making again?
Be that as it may, this news is so stale it's growing mold. Of course the FDD is dead. It was dead the day you didn't have to load a seperate CDROM driver from floppy when you booted as a standard, which was a long time ago. I mean a boot CD with more space and all the utilites you can cram on it? Dead, dead, dead.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Perhaps the manufacturing industry is slow to adapt, but I remember another job were we needed to work on the machines on the factory floor and floppies were the medium of choice for transferring control programs from the office desktops to the laptops used on the floor.
Apple is ahead of the curve. They proclaimed the death of the floppy disk in 1998 when they announced the Imac.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
This is so true. When I bought my high-power laptop posing as a desktop last summer, I was considering foregoing the removable floppy disk drive; but I decided to get it because I do have a few floppy disks of things that I use once every five blue moons. In the year or so that I've owned my deliciously sweet Dell Inspiron 8500, I've swapped in the 3.5-inch diskette drive once or twice at the most.
Now you're probably not wondering: What did I do with all those disks of data and shareware programs that I made over the years (from 1995 till now)? Nothing. Bit rot's already taken care of most of those disks anyway. CD-Rs and the Internet have thoroughly replaced the need for an unreliable, low-capacity digital data storage mechanism for me.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
And you "may" not see your old pet floppy recycled at your local "Fast Food" joint..... well maybe in the nuggets.
...the floppy disk is going the way of the horse...
Naw, there's more you can do with dead horses than with dead floppies.
I cannot let go of the joys of typing a: or b:. Or the joys of the floppy "grind" that lets me know my data is being written with care.
All your Sybase are belong to us.
There have been lots of posts here about how it is useful to keep floppies around - for "just in case", for loading specialized drivers, for obscure dual-boot setups, etc. While I agree that there are *rare* occasions to use a floppy (disclaimer: your definition of rare may vary from mine), they are too small (storage, not physical), too slow, and too easily corrupt for common use.
This leads me to my main point:
The REAL reason floppies are still around is, every three months, some tech writer gets bored and writes yet another "The Death of the Floppy Disk" article.
Floppies are undead! Ever try to shuffle stuff to college and back and use college owned desktops with monitor projectors? College uses older systems, without USB support, and you need to write to them and they only have CD-ROMs. The floppy is your only option unless they have Internet support, even then, better hope their Internet connection doesn't fail.
:)
A classmate of mine got a floppyless laptop. One of her team members made a Powerpoint presentation on a floppy, and gave it to her to use on her laptop. The only CD writer was on her laptop. Then someone got smart and saved it to a Yahoo briefcase on a college machine with Internet access, and then used her wireless access to get it. Without the Internet, they couldn't get it to work.
The a team member of mine uses floppies, but they are the Immation/3M crappy ones that lose the data and come up with errors. Yeah lifetime warranty, but how much is your data worth? She didn't save to the hard drive, just the floppy. No machine at college could use it, and chkdsk and scandisk found no errors on it, yet it said it had problems reading the disk when trying to access the files on it.
The floppy disk has survived:
#1 The Zip Disk
#2 The LS-120 floppy replacement
#3 The null modem cable
#4 The tape backup (Those 120M floppy interface backups anyway)
My laptop is floppyless, but I got a USB floppy drive to read/write floppy disks.
Hmmm, just remove the floppy controller and free up an interupt. Use USB for your floppy drive, or install a ZIP or LS-120 drive and boot off of that.
I'm still waiting for the holocube storage to be invented.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Since 9/11, when discussing building security, it makes sense to differentiate between biological viruses and computer "virii." Also, when the computer community tried to discourage the misuse of a term "hacker": it failed miserably. The mainstream media continues to call criminal computer users, "hackers." After that, it seems pointless to me to either discourage or encourage any word usage. I'll ask to clarify terms for my personal understanding, and that's it.
In other news, old technology becomes obsolete.
You can buy external ones, which lead to grose abuses of technology: http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
But what I want is an internal one (ideally with both a cable to attach it internally and externally with not much more than a metal slide-case to put around it).
There you go :-)
I was looking at this before the mass storage bootability spec was available to non- usb.org members. After a bad experience with one device, then success on the same system with the same config with another device, I wanted to know why the failing device (Sony) wasn't giving up that boot sector...
At the time, I spent many frustrating hours trying to prise details of BIOS implementation or copies of the specs out of suppliers and various other sources.
Maybe my "unresolved issues" with usb mass storage bootability can be resolved by settling down tonight with the specs and a nice cup of tea ;-)
I'm still not sure I would yet rely on a random usb key to be bootable unless explicitly stated...
I think what's going to be really hot is when those usb pen drives get big enought to hold an OS, with all your personal data. Now you combine that with USB boot and what do you get? empty computers with no hd! you just plug your usb-memory and boot, work on that particular machine and then shutdown -h and walk away with everything in your pocket...
(of course, there are some problems here with weiard drivers, harware, etc etc, but it is possible with little effort)
For the EVEN more futurisctic folks: I can see wireless devices, not bluethoot, call it wahtever you want it, way more faster and secure; really small devices that can go IN your body, (like a piercing in the belly button) and then you just go to a computer and conect it to your memory unit, boot up and there you go! your desktop, your programs, your files.. everything! 24/7 with you!
isnt it nice to dream?
ps: yep, the battery issue, well, you move around dont you? that should be anought to power the memory unit if you put a lot of phisics work into it)
James
www.cincinato.org
Throughout my college career (1994-1998), I carried a 3.5" floppy disk in the back pocket of my jeans. For the most part, this contained my entire semester's work and was often the only copy in existance.
Last semester I bought my girlfriend a USB flash dongle so she could work on her papers freely from home, work, even on my linux boxes. And with a quarter gig of memory, she could store her entire college career on one little device... and still have enough space left over to store anything else she wanted to.
I thought it was funny, the stark contrast between technology then (my HDD was 170MB) and now (I've peed things bigger than her 256MB drive).
:wq
I have a couple boxes of Apple II games on 5.25" floppies from 1984/5. 20 years old. I think one of maybe 125 or so (and there's data on both sides of these single-sided floppy disks) has gone bad. I still use them in my Apple IIgs.
On a related note, I've known data written to some recent 1.44MB 3.5" floppies to give up the ghost after a period of 1 week or more...
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
In June I put together my very first flopyless PC. What a great moment! It's a p4-3ghz, 1 gig of ram, raid0 (240gig) storage, 1 dvd burner, 1 cd burner, 1 dvd-rom and more.
I had one problem installing Windows XP on it. The intel raid drivers needed to be on a floppy to set up windows. Even though my bios has some option that lets a memory stick/card work as a floppy, I couldn't get that to work. In the end I took an old floppy drive and connected it temporarily to install it. The biggest issue was finding a floppy from my drawer that wasn't corrupt.
I haven't used one since.
Floppy disks are still useful for doing things like PXE booting. PXE booting (in case you didn't know) allows you to boot up a computer over the network using a virtual floppy disk image. Before doing away with the floppy, the PXE issue would need to be addressed.
She does medical transcription at home for the OB/Gyn clinic she works for. When the doctors dictate a referral letter, they need to proof it before it goes out in the mail. So she takes to the office on floppy, makes corrections if necessary and sends 'em out.
These are just small word documents, way too much to waste a CD on.
Burn a Knoppix boot CD. Boot to it. You can mount FAT and NTFS partitions in Knoppix and access them to do repair/removal etc.
Unless you don't have a CD Drive either.
If you are in a network environment, learn how to do a network boot (PXE.) Microsoft servers can boot you up to the network.
Or put in a dualboot partition on your Network PCs so you can boot to DOS at bootup, if that is what you are after.
I thought LS120 was to be the end of the Floppy? Whatever happened there?
More and more work places are banning USB devices so this will be a problem. No floppies, no USB devices. Maybe GmailFS?
-- Leeeter than leet
I hate to troll /., but no shit.
I can scarcely remember the last time I used a floppy for non-disgnostic purposes.
I can't tell you how funny I think that story was.
...your son's school is in--from an IT infrastructure standpoint anyways. The pre-MMX Pentium 133 I had seven years ago had USB ports for cryin' out loud. And even over a DECADE ago when I was in high school we had a LAN and a dial-up connection/BBS. Granted, there were still some 8088s hanging around when I was in tenth grade, but they were gone the next year and even then the technology was there to fire up Telix at home, dial up the school and download your stuff--all during the age of widespread floppy use--at a small rural school no less.
Ironically however those capabilities were rarely used as floppies were so commonplace (and I believe better made than the crap they sell now), and students don't want to do homework so bad that they'd download it from the BBS at a maximum raging speed of 2400 baud.
Anyways, the death of the floppy may be long and slow but it has been dying for a few years now. I'd say it was diagnosed with a terminal illness when Apple started selling floppy-less machines. My employer uses floppies for license keys right now, but by this time next year the requirement for floppy drives will be gone completely and replaced with a network-based system. Other supliers are rapidly replacing LPT dongles and floppies with USB keys or network-based schemes as well. Industrial and commercial users hang onto technology longer than home users, and even they are getting rid of floppies now. Oddly enough, although home consumers were complaining about missing floppy drives, I find that business and industrial customers are screaming for the opposite--they WANT to get rid of floppy drives and floppies in general. Floppies are unreliable, cause disorganisation and can compromise the security of important systems--they were always a pain in the ass that you had to deal with because there was no alternative. There are alternatives now and I'm betting floppies will get harder to find in stock and prices will rise a bit until they are overpriced, special order items like 30- and 72-pin SIMM memory is now. It's already happining--if you go to the local Future Shop or Best Buy they are relegated to a tiny space on the end of the bottom shelf of a big rack packed with flash media cards, DVD+/-Rs and CDRs--most all of which are cheaper per megabyte and more reliable than floppies.
I'll take 4.7g over 650m for data storage any day of the week. DVD-R has replaced CD-R at the workplace and at home, and we couldn't be happier. Yeah, they take longer to burn, but when you're looking at burning off twelve gigs of data, you want it on as few chunks of plastic as possible.
For video, it's a leg up from VHS in that it doesn't decay with age and has happy-fun chapter skipping and menus and so forth. Laserdisc still rips the shit out of DVD, though- especially for cartoons.
still useful to boot a computer,
run an antivirus program.
load a network card driver
My laptop network modem card came on floppy i had to burn a cd just to get it connected.
some computers still dont boot from cd.
norton ghost boot disk when all else fails and there is no room for the virtual
partition. running fdisk and format.
geting a pc up and running enough to backup the data
sure floppys are not great not fast and pretty small, but wouldnt you prefer to keep that term paper somewhere else other than on a hard drive or on a cd
sure usb is geting better and more useful but if the computer is not runing xp then it needs drivers. good luck with a usb key drive which is unlabeled.
still ideal for documents that are still changing.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
I think I'll install one of the spare 5 1/4" floppy drives I have laying around. I need to do something with that empty 5 1/4 bay I have avaliable.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I guess apple had the right idea a while back when they stopped using floppies... It might have been a little bit early though, before the huge rise of usb memory drives.
Apple was wrong. There was no inherent problem in getting rid of the floppy diskette but Apple's failure was that they included no inexpensive removable media at all. Steve Job's email attachment nonsense was pure spin. My hunch is that Apple had intended to ship with a CD-R but CD-R mechanisms did not drop in price as expected. Apple was forced to go with ordinary CD, raise the price, or wait. Ordinary CD was the least painful option. It actually may have been an overall positive given all the free press the controversy caused.
Apple zealots comparisons to Dell and others are misguided. When PC manufactures abandoned the floppy diskette they did provide other alternatives like Zip and CD-R. I actually remember consumer PCs shipping with only Zip drives before iMac arrived. No controversy erupted.
That said, Apple is a great, innovative, and trend setting company but the removal of the floppy diskette is not an example of this.
... sneakernet. And until every computer that comes into the place where I work is equipped with a cd burner there's always going to be a use for downloading an antivirus fix file or a NIC driver onto a floppy from my workstation and using it on the busted PC.
The Patriots for Not Eating Babies in America say John Kerry eats aborted fetus heads for lunch. Kerry says he doesn't.
More on this controversial new debate at nine!
I'll stop using 3.5" Floppy disks as soon as Kirk, Spock, and Scotty stop using them!
It's +5, funny, not interesting. Damn braindamaged kiddies...
The California state Bar allows wannabe lawyers to take the bar exam on laptop. The test takers save their essays to a floppy, where it is later printed out to be given to graders.
At least for me for 10 years or more. Honestly I never understood how the HD 3 1/2" floppies lasted as long as they did. When I bought boxes, half the disks wouldn't format and the other half would die within a week. One of the most unreliable ways to store data I've ever seen.
Good by and good riddence!
I support Inter-Tel PBX systems. The only way to update and backup voice processor data and software is 3.5 floppies. There are LOTS of OEM hardware that have nothing to do with PCs that will need the support of floppies for MANY years to come. It is already a pain to find laptops with a working floppy drives and a 9-pin serial port for RS-232. Many USB conversion devices do not work with older 16-bit applications used to support older systems. PBX systems are meant to last 10-20 years. This is a constant problem for us.
But seriously, 1998 called and it wants its "Death of the Floppy Disk" story back. Jesus.
Here's a fun game you can play with your friends.
For every year since 1982, fill the gaps in the following phrase:-
The year is ____; floppy disks will soon be replaced by ____________________.
Here's a starter for you; 1982, "Bubble Memory".
Hint: "Kajagoogoo" is not a valid answer for 1983.
This is OT, but just to let you know, Partition Expert from Acronis can create a boot CD. Boot off that, and you don't need to worry about partitioning a drive that it's running on.
I bought mine early last year (US$45, downloaded) because Partition Magic 6.0 (which I had also bought) didn't work with Linux. PM v7.0 did work with ext2 (or was it ext3 already?) but by that time I was using ReiserFS on all my drives.
Drawback to Acronis Partition Expert: in the 2003 version, at least, you have to run it under Windows to create the boot CD. I still had Win2k at the time. Now that I haven't booted Windows in a year-and-a-half, I have to keep the ISO image around.
Yes, yes, I know, I should be using GNU PartEd and Ranish Partition Manager and all that free stuff. But I just wanted it to work and wasn't averse to paying a bit. Great program.
Someone can bring me up to date on the newest versions on Partition Magic / Partition Expert
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
In your recent CNN.com article "Floppy disk nears obsolescence", you overlooked a couple of key details that might discredit an otherwise interesting article.
Firstly, you mentioned Dell computers eliminating the floppy drive from some of their machines in 2003. It should be noted, however, that Apple Computer, Inc., was actually the first to completely exclude the floppy drive. In 1999, Apple rolled out the blue & white G3 Macintosh without a floppy drive. Instead, the G3 featured the much larger capacity Zip Drive.
Secondly, Apple didn't actually pioneer the floppy drive. Sony developed the technology. Apple purchased and installed Sony drives in the first Macintosh computers.
The decision to eliminate the floppy from all future Macintosh computers was a rather interesting maneuver on Steve Jobs' part.
In the early days of the Mac's development, Steve Jobs insisted that Apple make their own microfloppy drive. When Apple couldn't develop their own drive in time for the launch date of the Macintosh, they went with Plan B--the Sony drives.
Jobs' much publicized return to Apple in 1997 began the second revolution of the Macintosh, and with it, he pushed for the redesign of the Power Macintosh from the corporate "beige box" design... and threw out a few other things too... namely, the floppy drive he helped standardize.
Larger machines from SGI were already floppy-less prior to Apple's decision to ax the drive... but Apple was extremely successful pushing the floppy-free concept on consumers.
Apple may have had success in large part because of a clever bundling strategy... The replacement of the floppy with the Zip and eventually the CD/DVD burners that are now standard in Macintosh computers seems to have gone hand in hand with their gradual integration of proprietary multimedia content creation software--most of which produces files far too large for floppy drives.
The software was introduced, you'll note, right around the time that digital peripherals like digital cameras, video cameras, PDAs and the like were becoming functional ,practical, cost-effective and--above all--desirable. Apple found the perfect opportunity to re-brand the personal computer not as simply a word processor and e-mail surfer, but as a hub in which the content from all these digital appliances would seamlessly converge.
With the incredible success of Apple's "digital hub" strategy, everyone else followed in their shadow... attempting to emulate, but never quite able to duplicate--everything from PnP ports (USB, Firewire), to the evolutionary case design, to even the operating system. Windows XP, though, wouldn't be the first time Bill Gates has cribbed from the Mac OS, and probably not the last... Look for Longhorn, slated for release sometime this century. I predict it will look, less-than-mysteriously, even MORE like OS X than WinXP does.
It seems Apple has come full circle with their original all-in-one concept, now in the form of the iMac G5... but this time, the computer features an LCD screen and a DVD burner.
Some day, somewhere in the future, Macintosh computers may come equipped with a Star Trek-style matter replicator. When and if they do, look for an iTunes Music/Amazon.com-style store where you buy products and then materialize them at home...
Retailers, beware!
I will be a little sad when Floppy disks are totally gone from mainstream.
:P
They are the ONLY read/write media that has, until recently, enjoyed 100% compatibility with almost everything.
The only other thing currently with high compatibility is CD-ROM, but it is read-only; Writers are no where near as common as the ROM drives themselves.
And USB?! Yeesh... I must admit I prefer them, but 90% of the computers in the schools I work in CANNOT boot from a USB device, and I have to install drivers on all the 9x-based systems just to use them there!
I can see this is gonna be fun... in a decade or so I'll have to carry around diagnostic floppies, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, USB flash disks, holographic wafers and maybe a PsiAmp!
I hope those japanese guys finish their human augmentation harness thingy by then so I can carry all that crap around!
If someone would make a floppy DRIVE where the individual components cost more than 5 cents a piece maybe floppies would be a wee bit more reliable. I know it's ancient history, but there was a time 15 years ago when systems booted and ran off of floppy drives daily.
I think quality control on the hardware has gone out the window.
I was having trouble making a boot disk one day, I figured I must have a bad floppy, but I ended up going through three laptop floppy drive MODULES (the hardware) before I was able to find a drive that was able to successfully read all 80 tracks of a 3.5" disk for a mirror copy.
Gee maybe if the drive heads were aligned with some sort of precision? I guess I'm going to go dumpster diving for a drive that's 20 years old..at least I know it'll work.
But atleast we had the trusty iMacFloppy.com to help us! read more here... but don't got to iMacFloppy.com - its become a domain squatters paradise.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
I have noticed that floppy disks have also become encreasingly unreliable over the years. I remember the times when I dared things like installing, say, OS/2 from floppies, (I beleive it was in the area of 30 diskettes). Nowadays, diskettes are not always reliable even to store a 200k word document.
I believe, the reason for that is simple: floppys are not mass produced anymore. All the diskettes sold today in stores were produced more than five years ago, and they are quickly reaching the end of their shelf life.
I don't know why I was holding onto my seldom-used floppy drives, maybe nostalgia, maybe some insecurity? Last weekend during a round of upgrades for my three PCs, I discovered that two of the floppy drives were dead! I balked at the thought of letting them go to their final resting place, but eventually I was able to loose my grip on them and release their souls to the big PC in the sky. In fact, I am not even planning on replacing them.
Yet.
RIP two 3-1/2" floppy drives.
i wish someone would tell MAXTOR that the floppy disk is dead. twice now i've been forced to buy new floppy disk drives that have only been used to run their diagnostics on their "quality" drives before i could RMA them.
It's slow, but when nothing else works...
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The USB port on your keyboard, or the other USB port on the computer since you're smart and bussed the mouse through the keyboard like you shoudl right?
I don't really want to buy and carry around a keyboard with a built-in hub in case I visit the house of somebody who has a keyboard without a built-in hub.
I haven't had to use a floppy in years. I don't like clutter, and I already have too much stuff to carry around (laptop, digital camera, pda, the usual books and magazines). Instead of floppies I simply FTP everything to my main server. I'm able to contact it from any net connected site, so there is really no need for a floppy. And size is no limitation (unlike floppies, cd's, and usb keys). The best part is that I never have to worry about 'what if I lose my floppy, cd or usb-key'. Nor do I have to worry about media damage (especially when I travel). 1.44 Megs is just BARELY enough room to save most documents these days (thanks to M$'s ever bloating DOC format and the increasing need for more 'stuff' to be included in documentation..ie: graphs, charts, pictures, etc). Goodbye to floppies, and hopefully goodbye to ALL disposable storage media soon.
-Cnik
I'd like to get rid of the floppy, but I want to get somethign that can be boot off of and will last (like a floppy). Can you format/system USB devices? I have no experience with them. I take it, that is an affirmative. But I'm not sure what kind of "standard" product would be a good start?
I just tested this. I showed my collection of old floppies a CD I had just burned and they all got up and bolted.
Squirrel!
What will the "save" icon become once the general public has forgotten the venerable floppy?
In other news: Old technologies become obsolete as new technologies rise.
From a support standpoint floppies are still good to have. For example Dell's generally offer 3 types of BIOS flashes, you have floppy, Hard drive, and unpackaged. Hard drive is easiest, you just run the program from inside windows, but you have to be running windows, and your system has to be bootable at the time. The next easiest is floppy, just create a floppy disk and reboot, easy enough. The 3rd method is unpackaged you could put this on a USB key I imagine. But you have to have the bootable image on the USB key already (DOS image that is). Then you add the unpackaged files to that and run it manually at a DOS prompt. Now if I have to walk someone through this, which one can you guess I would NOT want to do? ;)
Build quality of floppies have been downhill for a while now (i still use floppies from the early '90s, which work better than new, out of the box ones) - but they're dirt cheap. Given, their Price per megabyte relationship sucks compared to, say, a Zip disk. But they're there when you need them to move small files.
Also don't forget the most useful use of floppies nowadays - as boot disks. USB drives narrowed the gap, but if you need a quick, painless way to boot your computer from an alternate OS (to flash your bios f.ex, as it happened to me days ago), it's the easiest, most straighforward way.
Until i can buy an USB keychain for less than 20 bucks, or some other type of cheap, renovable media appears, floppies will still be arround and used. Minidiscs held some promise, but Sony never gave the format a chance in the PC world.
point me towards a RW replacement for the diskett? on that have RAM like qualitys the way the diskett have? most likely not, you cant delete data randomly from a CD-RW or similar.
the closest thing we have lately is the updated minidisc, the HI-MD. problem there is that sony is pushing it as a cassette tape replacement and therefor isnt showing of its ability to act as a data storage device...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Another problem is that most of the university lab computers are old and do not have USB. Some boot from CD, some do not. With education budgets so slim, upgrading is much more expensive than adding a floppy drive. And it means you can always boot to DOS.---- I still use 3 1/2 inch floppys about once a week. (I finally am in the process of transfering programs from 5 1/4 floppys to CD. What do you do with about 300 5 1/4 inch floppys? - Ebay?)
I read that some people report problems with reading floppys on different machines. Floppys are factory adjusted to position the head in the middle of the track. Some do not do a very good job. Interestingly enough, most of the grad students I work with, use Zip drives.
A few weeks ago I had to record a wedding ceremony. I went to Walmart and found only RCA and TDK audio tapes in packages of 5 or 6. I have not noticed portable CD recorders to replace the audio recorders. Am I missing something?
You heard it here first.
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/video/floppy.asx
I have a client who recently consulted with me regarding buying a lap top which would serve as data analysis machine for his dragster. He had the same dilima, all his hardware linked up via serial. I convinved him to upgrade his hardware to USB compatible devices. He was also quite pleased when he found some hardware which actually connected via WiFi. Moral of the story is dont just update your laptop, but all your hardware.
I've been building computers for family without the floppy drive for over 5 years now. Since CDROM and CD-R, the floppy has been unneeded, especially since USB keys.
But for some reason, OS installers always require a floppy or two, even though youre installing from a harddisk to a harddisk, and programs like loadlin do the job well (for linux), other OSes havent taken this lead.
I couldnt install minix, or elks, or plan9 on my non-floppy machine. They should learn lessons from BeOS and Knoppix. BSD are notorious too, and they dont have a loadlin equivalent, even though they do (finally) have bootable CDs. Things get worse when you move away from the x86 platform, most of which do not easily have bootable CDs. I have an old pile of disks and two drives at home just for the purpose.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I just bought a new floppy drive when I built my new ShuttlePC. It is a safe and reliable tool for all sorts of important things like BIOS upgrades, quickie sneakernetting of data, etc. I don't see why people dislike floppies so much - for certain jobs, they are the best tools IMHO.
However, I've still had to use floppys a lot... mostly for booting older systems that didn't have a cdrom drive or were a PITA to netboot.
Mak'tal shree lok'tak mek'ta sa'tak Oz! - Daniel Jackson
"All in all, I must say the floppy was quite the invention, it was long lived (longer than CD-Rs, for sure, which will probably die out much faster), worked great, was durable, cheap, and available. That's one peripheral that's gonna be hard to beat!"
Well there's two reasons to keep it.
1) Have a buttload of software and data on floppies.
2) Whatever are you going to do with that empty slot?
My router http://www.bbiagent.net/ is floppy based, and the 486 it's in doesn't contain a HD, CDRom Drive or USB ports. Heck, it doesn't even have PCI slots (to add a USB hub) if I remember correctly.
My Tech Posts on Twitter
Floppy? What is this floppy you speak of?
(Mac User)
A hidden buffer somewhere in the interface could seriously screw things - while the person making the interface could think "hey we live in the 0's, let's make a buffer to speed things up". And I am not talking about grabbing this interface to do stuff from the beginning. I am talking about a system that is in operation for like 10 years, then you suddenly have to add other stuff and need to debug the serial -lines. Suddenly finding out your data doesn't arrive bit-by-bit but in strokes of 256-bits could seriously mess things up. And you don't want to reimplement that thing, no matter how lousy your original implementation of the software was. You made the interface work, and you don't want to change it again. That was my point, and is my point still. QED
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I once wanted to download some software from school, since I had no internet access at my new home yet. One program I downloaded needed 3 floppies, the other one 5. As soon as I went back home, one floppy from each program was broken. I got so angry that I immediately took the bus back, just to download the programs again. This time I thought I'd download just the smaller one. I went back home and - you guessed it - one floppy disk was broken! Then I called my dad to tell him to burn them on a CD and then mail it to me - yes, snail mail! FYI, that lab still doesn't support USB dongles "for security reasons".
A friend of mine always carried his lab assignments in 3 copies in the same floppy disk, until sector 0 broke.
Umm, you guys may not have noticed, but I was just in one of the "Big Box" electronic stores yesterday and saw 32" direct view HD sets for just over $700. I expect the very popular 27" size is $100 or so less. And these were the "top" brands like Sorny and Panaphonics. Now, though there is currently precious little content (and it costs extra) to justify purchasing one of these, these prices are getting low enough for people to buy them anyway. When a meteorite hits your trusty old Magnetbox and you head down to the mall to replace it, are you going to spend an extra $200 for the comparable HD model? If you're employed and/or under your credit limit, I think so. I bet that within 2, maybe 3 years, we'll even see HD models becoming the majority of product offerings.
Me? I'm holding out for the Carnivalle, since "I really like to watch my TV."
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
All I can say is it's gotta be a slow day on /. when this makes the site.
Floppies going away is news? How many of us remember or have worked with 8" disks, 5.25" disks, MFM or RLL hard drives, or remember when DOS 2.0 was a big deal because storage on floppies went from 160 or 320K in DOS 1.0 (depending on if you used single sided or double sided drives) to 180 or 360k?
Floppies are already dead. Dirt cheap CDR's and USB keys put the nails in the floppy coffin in the past few years, and I dare say you can toss Zip disks in with 'em.
Thinking I submitted way better stories than this that got rejected,
- Dave
There are two seasons in my world - Hockey and Construction
A floppy my friend, a floppy...
"To some customers out there, it's like a security blanket," said Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca.
Riiight. I just re-installed windows xp - funny, i needed a damn floppy disk so that the xp installer could see my scsi raid as a valid installation target. Security blanket my ass.
Unless pc manufacturers include a feature to retarget a usb memory key as a floppy drive, they should still include a floppy drive.
drive 1.5 years ago. Almost 0 need for it.
But I wanted to use a SATA drive for booting XP, and there weren't any real good alternatives to the old "hit F5 at boot..." issue, because my XP install CDs didn't have hardware for SATA drives.
Since then, I haven't touched the floppy drive at all, I just get to enjoy its honking when XP decides it needs to poll the device.
So, money pretty much wasted. Good thing it was only $9 or so.
Didn't people say the same thing when the iMac came out with no floppy drive? With a PC, sometimes the floppy drive is the only way to recover from serious disasters, thanks to the lack of a halfway decent recovery method in Windows.
Brielle
Label seen on Tomato Ketchup bottle: Allergy warning - may contain extract of Tomato
Is that just gross stupidity, or are you buying really shitty ketchup that doesn't even contain tomato? Anyway, that's nothing...
Tesco Organic Skimmed Milk cartons' 'allergy-advice' small print reads as follows:-
"Contains milk".
It's the only way I can get files between home and work. My employer is a large multi-national which is paranoid about security. It gives each of us a standard issue PC with standard issue locked-down hardware and software. Nothing more can be installed - drivers for dongles or zip drives etc are out of the question. The PC has a floppy and CD-ROM drive but no burner. Any request to change the configuration would be rejected out of hand.
We are on the Net, but not allowed to send any e-Mail attachment ouside our internal network (in case a hacker intercepts it), nor are we allowed to receive any attachment from outside.
So how do I get docs to and from home? By floppy.
I just hope the management don't read this article or they will probably send a technician round to remove all our floppy drives.
Quote from the article :
Sorry, but I think the oldest form of removable storage must be magnetic tape in all of its various forms. Ok, its not used in the domestic market, but its still there and in use in data centres etc.
Every year CmdrTaco announces the Death of the Floppy disk. Sofar my floppy disk didn't die yet! I wonder when CmdrTaco will start using VooDoo needles to remove the floppy from my PC
What a total utter waiste of slashdot resources.
Robert
One of the sites for which I am responsible has some medical diagnostic equipment that uses 5.25" HD disks for data logging.
When I was asked to source a box of diskettes a while back the only place I could find them was eBay! I dread to think what will happen when they need a new box of diskettes next year!
AT&ROFLMAO
Death of the floopy? There go my old Apple II games!
Who knows? Maybe some of them would still work (that is, if floppies were still alive).
USB storage devices aren't allowed at the federal government facility where I work. The management thinks it's too easy to steal information using them. Sad but true: floppys, even removable hard disks are OK, but not USB keychains! Also forbidden are handheld organizers and anything wireless, including cell phones. Technology is passing me by...
To quote Winston Churchill, "This is the sort of arrogant pedantry up which I will not put."
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
That's giving Microsoft too much credit. You don't need to be able to write back to a bootable CD. You don't need to be able to write back to a floppy when booting! When have you ever needed to do that?
And you know, most BIOS these days can boot from CD, and then some.
And the machines that don't already have a floppy drive.
And you know that BIOS also need to include code to operate a floppy drive if it is present (and it's not exactly simple either).
I wouldn't miss it, especially if they replaced that functionality with better USB support at boot.
Please, put the tinfoil hat back on.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I use floppies to back up all my hard drives and with 200 gigs of data it doesnt take too many days. you will pry my floppies from my cold dead hands
Oh crap!
now I have to go change all my old 5'1/4 disk jokes to 3.5' disk jokes!
The trick with macs is that they have always had a very extensive firmware that would get them halfway booted (at least to the point where they could read HFS filesystems from a variety of attached devices; as supported by said firmware). On a mac with openfirmare (or a Sun or something) you're in much better shape.
/boot partition in Linux or NTLDR finding ntoskrnl.exe. No magic there. It'd be just as easy to make a bootable CD if you could skip needing those beginning parts (GrUB, NTLDR).
At that point it's like GrUB finding the
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
death of...seems to mean weirdo geeks who collect it can brag anyway...here's something cheap to add to your collection http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/346354 maybe you can add descent or some junk
;-)
enjoy
Most BIOS manufacturers, if they add a bootable USB feature, then they also add a feature that makes USB storage devices look like hard disks or floppy disks for DOS's benefit. (These emulation features would be ignored if a "real" OS was booted from the USB dongle).
This is done because one of the primary reasons to boot from a dongle is to flash the BIOS or do other maintenance. Since XP cannot be readily adapted to do this, and BIOS manufacturers weren't going out of their way to be Linux or BSD friendly, they must provide this DOS emulation for that feature to be marketable.
I can't think of a system I've yet to come across where the USB boot support has your supposed limitation.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I bought a USB key a while ago and I recomend you run to the store and buy one right now! They are the best. But I had to use a floppy recently becuase my school blocked up our accounts so much we couldn't play our games. I used a bootable floppy with some old MSDOS and a NTFS driver... loaded it up and copied both SAM and SYSTEM files from windows.... reversed the password, logged in and played our games :)
Which section does this article fall under? I'm reading /., not the local paper on the way to work.
Do you see what I did there?
Crap.
For a lot of reasons. Incremental improvement in quality while simultaneously being much more propietary and/or unrippable, and wasted money on duplicate purchases.
That being said, DVD-Audio would be a semi-decent choice if the media companies would release more than a double-CDs set worth of music on them for a modest price ( $25).
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I happen to actually /use/ a rotary phone, you insensitive clod!
he's running for president!
flip, flop, flip, flop...
The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!
is almost as difficult as writing to a CD-R for the host system. Floppy drives have next to zero internal smarts and the disk/head movement is almost entirely programmatically driven. This is not design at all. At least the CD-R allows for some seperation of mechanics to logical layout, and adheres to some specification (ATAPI/MMC).
Meanwhile, we your 100MB+ floppies. They're called Zip drives. They're cost-effective floppy alternatives, while being a bit more reliable.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I have kept in my collection for the past few years only one floppy disk, a Windows 98 Emergency Disk with a couple extra tools on it, which I used to boot computers in order to install Windows from non-bootable CDs. I lent that disk out to someone down the hall in my college dorm while helping to diagnose a corrupt hard drive, and he never returned it.
Fast forward to last week when I wanted to install Windows on a screenless laptop (I had stepped on it about two years ago) which had previously been running Mandrake Linux. Not having the floppy, and not having a bootable version of the Win XP install CD, I had no way of running the install program. I searched the house to find that I truly no longer own any floppy disks. I also searched Google and couldn't find a simple bootable DOS CD image I could burn.
Does anyone know where I can find such a thing for future emergencies? I currently don't have a single bootable CD except Mandrake and Redhat install CDs, and I'd like a DOS alternative as well for setting up Windows systems without a floppy.
Forget Google. Better Web Stats.
128MB USB drive for $13 with free shipping.
Now let's see you get 100 floppies for $13.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
DATA, on the other hand, is proving to be a pain in the ass. It'd be SO simple to just zip it and dump it to floppy
The Tektronix TDS380 scope dumps wavforms to 3.5" floppies in CSV format,
then you can trot them up to the office to crop the dataset to get a nice graph for the report.
gewg_
OK so I haven't used a floppy in years and they're terribly unreliable, BUT it you can still run an entire linux distro off of one http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
OK, have you tried to install Windows XP on a computer with only SATA drives and no floppy?
XP doesn't have any SATA drivers, and the only way Microsoft has seen fit to present extra drivers to the normal install is through a floppy drive. Nothing else works. Another CD? nope. A USB key drive? sorry.
The only way around this that I've found is to "slipstream" the drivers into the normal install on CD. This involves a complicated process of ripping the content of the original XP install CD, hacking into various files, modifying the directory structure and rebuilding another bootable CD-rom from the result.
It cannot be done unless you have access to another computer with a CD burner and the right software (that can produce a bootable CD), and if your version of the XP medium is provided by a third party vendor like DELL or IBM, chances are even this process won't work.
In other words it makes installing Debian on the same machine a walk in the park in comparison.
Search google for "slipstream SATA drivers XP" if you want to know the gory details.
You say that, but have you looked at the size of some of those documents you're printing? Some of them can get upwards of 50 MB per page. And those fancy smancy laserject printers can print 100s of pages a minute. What's the bandwidth requirement on that?
The floppy disk has been dead for a while now, it just hasn't been buried yet.
Question everything
The Death of "The Death of" articles. How is it newsworthy that something is no longer getting used much?
I'm not trying to be flamebait, isn't news usually about up and coming stuff, not down and going stuff?
Question everything
How exactly has linux been playing "catch up with the flurry" of CD-RW designs?
There is exactly TWO. The first is through ATAPI/MMC by the way of the ide-scsi driver (but more recently without the extra layer, which usually falls to userspace utility cdrecord.
The other way is by the experimental support for Mt. Rainier in the kernel, which is specifically for CD-RWs.
As far as hardware interfaces go... there isn't any. Either the device speaks SCSI or ATAPI/MMC (or MMC raw, but only cdrecord cares about the distinction). The drive itself contains the firmware and the hard logic to make it all work.
Any additional user-space complexity is primarily to achieve higher thorughput and reliability, not because of the complexity of controlling the medium. If the drive supports burnfree, a CD-R can be written with a very small subset of the protocol with few, if any, conditional branches.
SCSI has been around for almost as long as the PC floppy. I imagine the base protocols will still be around in a decade. Since each controller is almost universally bundled with a boot ROM that enables easy access to it's functionality through the BIOS (or OpenFirmware or whatever), it is on no less footing then the lowly floppy as far as universal, low-level access is considered.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
1) Read/write is transparent. The burning step for CDRW is terrible; you should be able to directly open, save, and erase files just like any other drive. Then you don't need to copy files to your harddrive to work on them and then back again when you're done; that eventually invites confusion. The most prevalent network transfer protocols require separate download/upload steps.
2) The media is physically robust. Unlike CD's, a protective case isn't critical for floppies. Floppies do not start flaking out after being scratched a number of times. They're easier to transport and share -- I can put them in a backpack and run around all day without the flimsy plastic case breaking. And the fact you can write on them with a normal pen increases usefulness too: labelling is really helpful for yourself and essential for sharing.
And unlike USB drives, floppies have a standardized size, so you can stack them and store them in standardized cases.
3) The media is cheap, which facilitates sharing. USB drives cost lots of money; to give your data to someone you can't just hand them a spare drive. Floppies, even the older high quality ones, are cheap enough to give away.
With cheap media, you can afford to use a labelled disk as a unit of classification -- you don't need to fill up the disk to get your money's worth. USB drives can't do this (yet).
Expensive drives inside computers paired with cheap disks is much better than expensive combined disk+drives that can be swapped between computers. A good universal physical medium should be usable on all computers; it's not like the act of transferring files is something that only the rare person with a usb stick wants to do. You should only have to have a cheap disk to transfer files; you should not have to invest in a special drive.
To transfer files I once had to go around knocking on doors, looking for someone with a USB drive. This is ridiculous. (I am more likely to have a spare floppy, or only have to go knocking around for a floppy!)
4) Media reading/writing is (was) universal. CD drives are universal, but not always for writing. USB is pretty good now, but it can be a pain to find the plug in the back of the machine; I've also had weird OS hangups on certain systems (esp. older windows). Networks aren't always available in all environments -- especially figuring out which server or transfer protocol to use that will work for your particular situation.
Universality was definitely a bane of Zip drives and other floppy replacements -- a media type is useful only if everyone else has it.
5) They're dead easy to use. The CD burn step and usb issues were mentioned above. Further, network transfers are a pain. I've had the most annoying experiences just figuring out how to network transfer a file from one computer to another. Maybe you can upload/download via ftp -- if you have a server around, and you even know what ftp is? Maybe use email -- which requires extra space in someone's mailbox, and through web interfaces is often even clunkier than ftp? And the login steps are definitely extraneous. Store on a network drive -- if you have a server available nearby? Computers still can't universally detect each other's presence and sling around individual files without depending on some remote server. The easiest and most common way to transfer files I've observed on campus is to have an AOL IM signon on each computer, then use its file transfer mechanism. This is ridiculous. If files still fit on floppies this situation would be so much easier.
Obviously, it's possible to solve the peer-to-peer transfer problem via better and more universal pr
-Brendan
you can not take my floppy disk away. its the only thing that still works and doesnt run on microsoft.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car
Yes, and just like horses, I'm sure our government (I'm Canadian) will keep our RCMP using floppies, because that's just how our government works!
Let all those who have ever lost their work on a $1 college bought floppy disk rejoice! Ive got my trusty 128mb, jump drive, and i love it. and it works with any *modern* system that has a USB port. Needs win98 drivers (bleh!)
Your BIOS should lready support this.
Since Linux kernel 2.6 doesn't fit on a floppy, there's no way you can boot Linux off a floppy either.
Kernel 2.6 distros (such as FC2 or RHEL4 for example) include boot disk images for USB and firewire drives.
installing BSD from a boot floppy can only result in an undead technolich that will take over the internet with its unholy powers of the grave?
Seriously... good riddance. Hopefully Serial-ATA will take IDE along with them, and their little BIOS too!
# shutdown -h +5 Adding a 5.25 inch floppy disc drive to the server
(in addition to the 3.5" one)
I did that three months or so ago...
My Karma isn't excellent, damn it! (And
... you insensitive clod!
Hopefully they will just come up with a replacement for saving a file. The idea of "saving a file" is really a throwback to when software was a lot more primitive. It already in practice has evolved into a basic version control system.
There are obvious benefits in using a real version control system instead. Once "Save" is replaced by "Check In", the system can journal every character the user types to disk and a lot less work will be lost. I've yet to encounter a version control system that's actually simple enough for my mother to use, but once one appears the "Save" button could disappear virtually overnight.
The other thing "Save" is used for is file transfer (via email, or floppy, or network share). I'm not sure where this will go. MS Office already has "Send to..." right there in the File menu, but there's a bunch of niggling problems with it:
fish and pipes
Of course, it is not too expensive for my own use, but there are times when I want to exchange data with my classmates (the 'net isn't always usable; we might even meet somewhere without computers around), when it would be convenient to just give him a floppy disk, while a USB drive would be much less convenient, since I probably won't have many spare $30 drives around if the classmate is unable to promptly return the drive to me.
First of all, the floppy disk was meant to die because the CD held so much more data. Then the floppy was meant to die when packet writing came about, because CDs could now be written to piecemeal instead of all at once (albeit this required/requires the target machine to have specific software installed to handle a half-writ CD). Then the floppy was meant to die when booting from CDs became possible.
But until writing a few small files to another medium becomes as quick and effortless as writing them to a floppy, I don't see it dying out.
# cdmrw -p -d
bgformat complete!
# cat < cdimage.iso >
# cmp
EOF on
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Whoever modded this as troll is a moron
I build my latest computer about a year ago from parts, and I decided I had no need for a floppy. All my floppies were collecting dust and I hadn't used one in over a year.
I got a nice new motherboard with SATA and a new SATA hard drive. The motherboard, unfortunately, came with the SATA drivers on floppy disk. When installing Windows XP, I had to load the SATA drivers from floppy disk. I tried burning them onto CD, but it didn't work. So I had to rip out the floppy drive from my old computer and connect it to my new one temporarily while I installed the drivers.
That was quite annoying. This was the only thing I needed a floppy for on my new computer. Either they should start including SATA drivers on some other medium and/or the Windows XP installer should learn how to load drivers from USB or CD (it may be capable of this, but I couldn't get it to work).
I hope I don't need a floppy drive to set up my next computer, because I no longer own one. USB keys are great. I have a 32MB one I got as a freebie, and it's enough for most files I care to transport. Anything larger is usually not a frequently-edited file, so I can safely burn those to CD.
Almost. The OS is still 32bits
Not entirely true. Panther (10.3) does make some 64-bit functionality available to applications. The next release will have more extensive support.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Your points are fairly well-reasoned, but you totally lost me on this last statement:
:)
"Apple isn't innovative. It's a marketing machine. And you got sold on the hype."
My conclusion is either:
1. You have patchy understanding of what Apple has done in the last five years, and its material affect on the entire industry
2. Innovation doesn't mean what you think it means
I'll accept that sometimes Mac fans will give Apple too much credit, but you've gone to the other absolute extreme here.
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
who is "they"? I compared "virii" with "hacker" because Those in an authoritative position don't neccessarily get heard. I think the US media has a lot of influence over general American word usage. Of course you may defer to The Oxford English Dictionary or some such as the ultimate authority, but I expect you will continue see and hear the word, "virii" for some time(as annoying as it may be)
I wish this wasn't AC! I know there's a point to be made hear, but I can actually understand the sentence above. http://www.mit.edu/~pinker/tli.html STEVEN PINKER, a psycholinguist at MIT and director of its Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has a new book on how language works: "The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language" (Morrow). He argues that language is not simply a cultural invention taught by parents and schools, but a biological system, --an instinct-- partly learned, and partly innate.
...still have uses. I routinely use mine to download pictures off my digital camera. I find a Flashpath (a kind of smart media reader/writer in a floppy shell) a more convient way to transfer data than my other options.