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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. "
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.
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I already have it, and for quite some time. It's a MSI motherboard with AMI BIOS. I'm pretty sure that all modern BIOSes have this option.
Dells without floppy drives can boot from USB, either USB floppy ( ironically enough,) or USB dongle, or USB external hard drive (such as Lacie)
I would assume any OEM that was scrapping floppy support would have a BIOS that could handle USB boot.
The sooner slow, unreliable, huge 3.5 inch floppies are completely scrapped the better.
Post USB they have become an archiac format long past their use by date.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
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
The sooner slow, unreliable, huge 3.5 inch floppies are completely scrapped the better.
The floppy is still a very common method of transfering documentation between the home PC and a school PC. While the USB drive does hold more information, one can't assume that people or institutions will update their hardware to include USB ports. This will become a bigger problem though with PC's shipping without the floppy drive as a default configuration. I just sent my son to 6th grade and he requires two floppy disk. I've seen the hardware the school is working with and USB is not as common as the floppy drive. The floppy drive may be dying, but it will be a long slow death due to situations such as this.
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.
and its been in macs since the blue g3 towers. its those subtle things that apple does that few people know about, but can make the user experience sublime (like auto-switching ethernet ports, so you never need a crossover cable). Target mode is an amazing tool for recovering a busted ass system (or data theft, for that matter), and open firmware (letting you boot up from an ipod, external firewire drive, blah blah blah) makes it even cooler.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
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.
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)
Google is your friend, search for Bluetooth to serial dongle.
Bluetooth natively shows up as one of several com ports to the computer. If you got REALLY happy, you could have one for the pyro, one for the scale, one for the datalogger.
Then you leave the laptop in the shade, within 30 feet of the pits and it talks to the datalogger when the driver brings the car in.
Serial connectivity with no add'l cables!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Why? If it gets fried, it's not going to boot anyways.
A BIOS flasher saves the original first. This way if the flash fails, you can attempt again with the original. BIOS is read from flash on boot - after that, it's memory resident. If you misflash a BIOS, you're fine until you hit "reset".
You'd be a fool to flash a BIOS from a bootable CD-ROM.
The worst part is that the serial port is (ironically) one of the hardest to offload to another interface. The tight timing on the serial port means you can't have a lot of stuff between it and the processor. For instance, PC-Card serial ports tend to fall over a lot when you start pushing a lot of data through them. Also, since I work with a lot of headless equipment (heck, even our switches have serial consoles on them!) I'd hate to lose the serial port. I also agree that the Parallel port is mostly useless these days (even the days of parallel ethernet are gone) and I wouldn't mind seeing a few more USB ports (why do laptops only ship with 1 USB port?!?) and a serial port in its place.
I read the internet for the articles.
What about BIOS updates or virus recovery? Can you boot from a USB dongle? That is where floppies (still) come in handy. Unless you have a Mac (which can boot off just about anything with a "System" folder on it). floppies make good quick and dirty boot devices.
Actually most newer computers can boot from USB jump drives, USB drivers, and even old systems and boot from CD. You don't need a Mac either. My WinTel P4 system can boot Zipslack off my 512mb jump drive just fine. Its actually just an option in the bios to enable boot from other devices. My last AMD system had this option too thought I never tested it with USB.
Oh and while no one uses them anymore, you can also boot off zip drives and all those odd little discs too.
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
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.