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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. "
We keep hearing this. I still see a floppy in almost every computer I deal with. They're a useful tool.
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.
... 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."
As would I but when I enter public libraries or school computer labs these are not allowed due to security restrictions. If I want to move my work from school to my home pc the only way to go is through a floppy or unstable at best email. It sucks an awful lot to find out that the report you e-mailed to yourself did not arrive in your in box when you need to print 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.
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 thought the booting problem was eventually going to bite me in the ass when I pulled the floppy drive out of my PC a couple of years ago. It turns out to be a non-issue. I've got CDRW blanks and know how to burn floppy images as El-Torrito boot sectors (that pretty much every computer these days can boot). It's slightly less convient than the floppy, but it's only come up a couple of times and removing the floppy drive kept my HDD from overheating, so I think it was worth it.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
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
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!).
I guess apple had the right idea a while back when they stopped using floppies
Apple did have the right idea, they just implemented it poorly.
Most everyone who purchased the original iMac went out and purchased an external USB floppy drive as well. The problem was people didn't have a way to reliabley back up their documents since the original iMacs did not come with a CD-RW, but rather with a basic read-only CD drive. This, in my opinion, was a huge mistake. People don't like to have a computer that isn't capable of backing up important data (they could do so via the internet back then, but transfering files at 33.6k is painful, and that assumes owners had an FTP account somewhere).
I think most people don't make backups on a regular basis, but they certainly like the option to do so if they wish.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Odds are good that your floppys sitting on your desk were manufactured over ten years ago.
Even if you buy "fresh" floppys off the shelf today, odds are good that those were manufactured ten years ago. The floppy market saw some revival with the introduction of colored cases, but you can only dress up a lost cause so much. Besides, it's only a matter of time before the competing technologies edge you out that way too.
I don't fault floppies for a 50% failure rate. After all, they were never meant to last for decades, and it's not like there's been enough demand to gurantee that even newly purchased floppys aren't ancient. If fault could be assigned, it's on the lack of retailers / producers to account for on shelf spoilage in their business practices.
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'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.
1) Maybe not among /. 18ish year olds, but most people who had familiarity with computers in the 80's would have. Thats like asking who ever heard of a company called Wang or something. These were HUGE companies.
2) All the people who bought their Alpha desktop systems, I suppose. DEC sold desktop systems for at least 15-20 years. Everything from the MicroVAX, to Multia, to the real horsepower of their multi-processor Alpha desktops. They certainly were selling systems designed specifically as 64-bit desktops ten years ago. I had several of them. The DEC Multia for example was really the Dec UDB (Universal Desktop Box)... so someone seemed to consider them that.
3) Thats just rediculous. DEC was building desktop computers before Jobs et al were even in school. Ever hear of the PDP-8? That was a desktop system in the mid 60's. Designed for the desktop, purchased for the desktop, and used on the desktop as a personal computer.
MINC, GIGI, Rainbow, DEBmate, MicroVAX, MicroPDP, the whole VAXstation line, The whole DECstation line, the whole AlphaStation line, the higher end VT terminals, multia, The InfoServer product... how many more desktop systems ought we list?
You mean to say that you haven't had any crying girls with scratched up CD-Rs telling you they can't retrieve their data? One great thing about floppies was that they could take the abuse. You could toss them in your backpack and they would USUALLY be fine. (Unless you threw your backpack and ran over it with your car...) I see people handling the CD-Rs in the same way, and wonder what the failure rate is like on THOSE. Not to mention the people that leave CD-Rs on their window sills. Mmmmm, the power of sunlight.
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.
Every computer I currently have access to can boot from a CD.
What I do is keep a few recovery CD's around, that have multiple boot images (dos, linux, windows). It is a multi-session RW disc, that has the last session set up with a read/write UDF filesystem, that both the Linux and Windows images can access.
OK, this is getting pretty OT, but who cares of Apple was the first to do anything? It doesn't matter what came first -- what matters is what is best, what is best supported, and what will be the longest lived. Perfect example: the Tivo. The Tivo was first, and is still a great product...however, it's pretty widely held by analysts that they will eventually go away. Every cable and satellite provider in the country will offer a similar product bundled with their service -- Tivo won't be able to compete with the bundled service. Vonage is the same way -- first to market, but the big guys will bundle it and crush them.
So -- like I said, first-to-market in this case sounds like no more than a hook for fanboys. I don't buy computer products for their "innovation". I buy the best product available on the market. In this market, innovation tends to imply "bleeding edge". No thanks. I'll wait for a technology to mature...or even for dev shops to find a use for it first. This way, I'll be able to spend 1/3 of the money and use the bleeding edge technology (and by bleeding edge, I'm not talking about systems sans-floppy drives)...think firewire, or even GigE. How much did you spend on that when it first came out? (I know, you don't know because it was bundled with your system...it doesn't matter, you still paid for it) How much did compatible devices cost for your bleeding edge hardware (think DV cams and GigE switches)? Those took about 3 years to become commoditized, about the lifetime of the bleeding-edge PC's...and these things were standard on those PC's -- you had to pay for technology that you weren't able to use until your machine was obselete and you got your next personal computer. Sure, there'll be exceptions...I'm sure that some fanboy used these devices right away...but these early-adopters had to buy overly expensive early-market perhiperals. Most technical buyers don't use this stuff, and your average consumer definitely won't care.
Anyway, don't let me stop you from patting yourself on the back for buying an Apple.
-Turkey
Why packet writing to CDRW's STILL isn't nativly supported by most major OS's is beyond me. CDRW media is dirt cheap, and 400 times bigger than a floppy but making the average user go through extra clicks and disconnecting the ideas of "dropping onto a disk" and "writing TO the disk" is just the stupidest thing.
This is something I don't understand either. I bought like 4 or 5 years ago my first CD-RW drive, Philips CD3660 (2x/2x/6x) and THAT came with Ahead InCD, allowing for packet writing. Just format a disk and you are set. Problem: you needed the Ahead InCD at the other computers you use, too...
One of the nice things was that it actually worked for CD-R:s, too. It just marked the previously written portions as stale and to be ignored.
However, back then, packet writing was like 1/4 slower than just burning standard ISO9660 disk. With 2x speed, this WAS an issue...and now, with 50x speed burners, the ISO9660 is almost as convenient as packet writing. Might start to use it once DVD+R DL media prices go down, though.
I wonder if people will ever come up with a replacement for the floppy disk icon when saving a file in most programs... it will be amusing explaining to kids of the future what that strange blue square icon on the save button is. Is this the first obsolete bit of tech that has been cemented into part of the general computer consciousness?
Warhammer forums
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.
Glad you said that, because I have an honest question.
Does anyone know where a person can learn to *use* an abacus. (Ok, I suppose I could google for that) but is it difficult? Easy once you get it down? Or just increcibly monotonous?
I ask because I work *many* Renaissance Faires and Festivals (Posting this from my booth at The Ohio Renaissance Festival actually) and it has always pained me to resort to "Ye Olde Calculator" for some more complicated percentage off/tax added etc problems.
I've recently come across a fairly nice looking wooden abacus and I think it would just be awesome to whip that puppy out when determining payments for a customer etc.
Any advice?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
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.
Lest we forget TurboTape. You could cut that down to 3 or 4 days or better!
c les/Beyond_the_1541/
Some fun reading
http://www.devili.iki.fi/Computers/Commodore/arti
There are signs that even the familiar 5-1/4-inch floppy disk may eventually go the way of punch cards and paper tape storage methods.
SYS 64738 NO CARRIER
Can you create a bootable CD *and* write back to it?
CD emulation can be a problem, depending upon what you are trying to do.
Never, ever, buy/build a PC that does not have a floppy. MS wants to kill the floppy so they can control what you can boot. They already have the BIOS manufacturers in their pocket (most), and with DRM they will be able to influence the manafacturers to the point that you won't be able to boot Linux.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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)
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 just bought a shinny new Athlon 64 Box and what's the first thing I put in it before anything else? A floppy drive.
I couldn't believe XP wouldn't take a CD or anything else for my SATA controller drivers.
That said they still have ample uses as boot disks (where a CD isn't always practical (and can take longer to make)). The day I can boot from a memory stick is the day I'll get rid of my floppy.
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!
This is an unfortunate situation. I used to work in a college lab, and I would see kids lose all kinds of papers all the time due to the frailty of floppy disks (from final papers to thesis papers). I mean -- if you breathe on a floppy wrong, you'll lose your data. It's not just that it's a low-density media. It's very slow, and very unreliable. Maybe the school's administrators will get the point when enough students lose data.
In any case, the death of the floppy has been long and slow. Let's hope it finally dies soon. They're no longer necessary in current computers except perhaps for legacy support.
-Turkey
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
Once you buy a HDTV, you really see the limitations of video on DVD.
DVD is a shitty stop-gap format. I predict BluRay or HD-DVD to overtake it quickly.
Replace predict with hope...
It'll still be decades before a signifigant percentage of the population has HD televisions. Once that hits 40 or 50%, sure some HD format will quickly overtake DVD, but how long do you think it will be before half of us replace our televisions with HD models?
See you in 10 years.
The latest BIOSes are also able to handle booting from a USB memory key as well.
For years, my main desktop PC didn't have a floppy in it (I had removed it for various reasons, and never got around to replacing it). Things like a network, CD-Rs and now DVD-Rs actually did make floppies useless in my house. I only reinstalled the (a) floppy drive, because I grew tired of the hole in the front of my computer. I was thinking about getting one of those 6- or 7-in-1 card readers that also had a slim floppy drive in them for the sake of saying I had one. I never did get one though.
I've found that floppies are only of use for firmware, or drivers (especially when working with HP servers, as for some reason, the install program always wants to format a disk and install the drivers there). Again, with things like a bootable CD drive, a bootable USB drive, and fuck, booting from the network, I personally don't see floppies having any use anymore, except for legacy reasons. Even my BIOS outright tells me floppies are legacy, so it must be true!
Yeah, its a pain. I can't count the number of times I had to copy it from my hard drive to another floppy. Eventually, I learned to just attatch my document to an email and email it to a web-mail account (yahoo). That, or make three floppy copies of it.
/usr/games/fortune
Your forgot to mention one of the biggest problems om using floppies to take information between 2 computers:
The mechanics of each floppy drive drift differently, thus causeing instances over time where only the computer that WROTE the information can read it...
OR you have to take the same floppy to each computer in the lab to find one that has had a similar enough drift to the original system that it can read it..
BUT so many people last week complained about that computer not reading the floppies of the computer next to it, that the lab tech installed a new drive, which can now read the drisks created in about half the lab machines, but still leaves you in a lurch.
Floppies have NEVER been reliable for use amoung multiple computer.
~Donald
~Donald / Just RTFM
I didn't realize that there even were USB stick drivers for DOS...
That's becuase (atleast on my motherboard), it's a setting in the BIOS.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
Why do you need a CD-R? You keep the BIOS and flashprogram on the USB stick. You only use the bootable CD to boot and load drivers for the USB stick.
It is neater because you have one fixed piece that you can also have other tools on (hard driver diagnistics etc) and one piece that is writable without the hassle of burning a CD every now an then (even if CD-RWs are used).
It is faster as it both boots faster and loads the BIOS file faster. Not many things are slower than a floppy when it comes to IO.
No computers today without USB ports/support are worth putting a new BIOS on (we're talking sloooow stuff).
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
I have an old laptop with CDROM but no floppy disc. The operating system installation (98) is so badly fscked you can't do anything with it, and the bloody thing can't boot from CD - there is no BIOS option to enable it.
I've yet to work out how I'm going to resurrect it...
-- Soruk
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.
Fine, but those systems already carry a floppy so this argumentation is pointless. Those old systems will still carry a floppy when the floppy isn't shipped on new systems anymore. And there are USB floppydrives for making the floppies for the old systems. I bought a USB floppydrive some years back and I use it very rarely (no more than 3 times a year). My point is, you do not need floppydrives for systems shipped today to update bios/firmwares as there are faster and in my view neater solutions.
Life is what happened when Good Intentions met Harsh Reality (the brother of the more infamous Chaos).
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?
Floppies have NEVER been reliable for use amoung multiple computer.
For sufficiently small values of "never", or suficiently narrow definitions of "computer". My experience is that poor floppy reliability is strictly an x86 PC phenomenon.
3.5" floppies, particularly 720k density, are very reliable on non-PC systems (well, leave out early Macs, which weren't reliable in any way). Certainly better than CD-R's. Amigas have been particularly good in this regard; their native format trades speed for reliability. However, hooking PC-type drives and reading PC formatted floppies on an Amiga delivers the same disappointing reliability as a PC, while Amiga drives can read/write PC format with good reliabilty, so it is not just the extra redundancy in the Amiga Filesystem; the drive hardware also plays a part. It seems to me that when software started coming on CD's about 10 yrs. ago, PC floppy drives got hit by excessive cost-reduction and their reliability tanked.
Now that floppies are becoming yet-another USB peripheral, people can shop on perceived quality vs. price, rather than having some PC OEM decide for them. People who actually use them will pay extra to get something decent, and the majority who don't won't buy them at all. So the floppy's reputation for reliability should improve in its fading twilight.
You see a similar phenomenon in the automotive world. The sign for a railroad crossing shows the outline of a steam locomotive, the icon on a headlamp switch could heve come from a Model T, the low oil light shows a 19th-century oilcan, and so on. The shapes of things change, and the shape of things to come is unknown, but the shape of the first thing of its kind is unchanging and iconic.
I'm completely, 110% with you on this one. USB-serial works on some stuff, but there are specific applications where it does not work well. Plus, from a pure hack point of view, serial is the most useful interface out there, IMHO. I can put together a device based on a micro, controlled over the serial port, very, very quickly. No user interface to design, no nothing. For application-specific, one-off hacks just to get the job done, it's an excellent control/telemetry connection. You can pretty much use echo, cat, shell pipes and redirects, and /dev/ttyS0 to do all of your control and logging. This one is one of the applications USB->serial usually works pretty well, but if you bastardize the flow control lines to do other stuff, then things start to fall apart rather quickly, in my experience.
USB, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass to build even simple devices for. Part of this is my lack of experience with it, I'm sure, but it's a far more complex communications link than serial. Of course if I had a USB-serial library to compile into my micro of choice, then maybe...
I remeber when a 10 year old OS was a reason not to upgrade. Maturity and all that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You make a compelling argument, but you're missing some key points. First, CD's are only unreliable when they are constructed poorly using cheap materials. I believe that Kodak CD's using formazan are guaranteed for 200 years. There are many other quality CDR's on the market that will last as long as any other media. Buyers just need to do their due diligence and be leary of spindles of CD's that are $0.08 a piece.
Your reliability argument loses when you bring magnetism into the discussion. The differential in resistance to magnetism ishuge when comparing a floppy to a CD. But what about when you talk about other magnetic media -- like a hard drive. Put equal amounts of magnetism next to a hard drive a floppy and the hard drive wins. Conventional wisdom would tell us that it should lose data first, because it's a far higher density media, but it doesn't because it's better shielded. My breathe-on-them-wrong comment wasn't meant to be read literally, but it really did have to do with magnetism. If you put a student's floppies in a carrier in their backback with anything magnetic (a pair of headphones), that floppy stands a high probability of corruption. Perhaps you don't have the same experience as I do -- I saw students lose data on a regular basis. Another user just pointed out how sensitive floppies are to different disc drives internal mechanicals.
You also mentioned that the floppy's only limitation is the size. Speed is a huge issue here. They're slow as all hell. Even when we moved to higher density technology (such as folpptical's, LS-120's, and even Zip disks) -- they were still slow, and plagued with reliability problems taboot. (FWIW, due to the "click of death" -- we had to can all support for Zip disks...what a horrible technology).
Finally, you're coming at me like it's me who is killing the floppy disk with my words. It's not me, it's the OEM's. They've already done it, they're doing it now, and they will continue to. An OEM picks a chipset. That chipset supports booting from USB and ATAPI. The OEM throws in a USB memory stick, and deletes the floppy drive, saving $6...or the OEM puts an extra $10 into the system and ships with a burner. It doesn't matter. It's done -- the article points this out. However, it's not like your existing floppy drives are going to just vanish in a puff of smoke when these things are declared dead. You can use them for as long as you want...I don't care. They are a relatively ancient technology, and one of the few that has not been improved on in 20 years. Compare this to other old storage technologies. The hard drive is nearly 50 years old, and the concept has not changed. However, they have been consistently improved and aren't going anywhere. The floppy has been replaced. When you buy your next computer, chances are high that it will not need one.
-Turkey
I always flash my Asus motherboard directly within Windows XP.