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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.
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.
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.
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.
Yea, I'm with you. I won't belive it unless Netcraft confirms it!
What "death of floppies" article would be complete without a link to Floppy RAID!
Speak truth to power.
... 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."
No. They're not. Using a floppy disk to store data is like storing your possessions outside under a 6-foot-by-6-foot blue tarp with a rock on each corner--you could, and tarps are readily available, but with so many more convenient, safer, and more capacious places to put your data, why would you?
Get a USB key (under $30). Let me know next time you need a floppy disk.
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)
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...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Of my three computers (1 mac, 1 sony & 1 emachine) only one has a floppy. It's a detachable drive for a Sony laptop and I don't even remember where it is. I've been without floppy drives for quite a while now, and hadn't even noticed it until someone else pointed it out.
Everyone talks about CD-Rs and keychain drives replacing floppies, but I believe the network sealed the fate of the floppy long before keychain drives became popular.
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
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
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!).
What if I need to load an external driver for my SATA / SCSI controller during the installation of Windows 2000 / XP ?
still, its tough when you break a nail or three compiling Gentoo. almost done now though.
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!
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!
So the poison in her tea didn't work, then, eh?
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?
My desktop doesn't have a single bay in use. No floppy, no CD-ROM, no burner, .. Same comment as parent, I haven't missed them yet.
Oh, when I installed GNU/Linux on it, I had a quad-speed CD-ROM attached with a Debian boot CD. After installation, I removed it and have been updating over the network ever since.
Windows never got installed, the price of a license is just too steep for casual use.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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
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...
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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
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.
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?
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.
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