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The End of a Floppy Era
An anonymous reader writes This article is an editorial on the end of the floppy and the rise of more portable, more efficient data storage." Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery. Talk about your long term enterprise data storage. Some of those buggers made it thousands of years!
Is the end of the floppy era related to all this viagra spam I keep getting?
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
I still outfit every computer i build with a floppy. Only 10 bucks, and you never know when it'll come in handy.
Your buried pottery broke into millions of peices at the slightest hint of a landslide, in my day we painted our data on the walls of ours caves.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
It's only official if netcraft says it's dead!
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
Right next to VHS...oh wait...people still own and use VHS Players? AND Floppy drives? What's that you say? Even 5.25" Floppy Drives?! Well then the title for this article must have been "The Death of Floppy Drives In Newly Sold PCs" not yet another "XXX is Dead". And if XXX is dead, THAT would be a news story.
At least you can take your pottery with you when an ice age comes! Now, in my day, we had it TOUGH. We had to scratch our data onto our cave walls with the points of our spears. Sunup to sundown, we'd be scratching data, with our pointy-haired bosses standing over us every minute, and anyone who didn't pass checksum got fed to the mastadons.
When is the last time any /.er actually built a system with a floppy drive? Yeah Yeah somtimes WinXP needs a driver for your cool SATA drive but if you don't know slipstreaming then you shouldn't be messing with linux either. I boot all my linux installs from the CD instead of the slow unreliable floppy anyway.
And just when I found a supply of 8" Dysan SSDD floppy disks...
Visualize Whirled P.'s
So what's the new format for booting into DOS to flash my video card BIOS?
They may have been floppy, but they were 8 inches long! Not like these puny kids with their 3.5" ones...
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
and how i love fiddling round the back of my pc trying to slot it in.
Think you can program? Prove it @ the geek challenges
He got a system sold by Datapoint. There was the computer itself, and terminals at various places around the office. They also had a printer room, which had a dot matrix printer for each of the news wire services.
The Datapoint computer had a 10" floppy drive, but the tour de force was the "Cynthia," a 10MB drive with a removable cartridge. At the time, my father couldn't imagine any way they would ever use so much space.
25 years later, he still uses descendants of the transaction tracking software he wrote for that Datapoint system. Of course, now it runs under Windows, on a system with far more than 10MB of storage...
-JMP
"Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery."
Poor Taco. He must feel so overwhelmed by the technology of slash. Maybe that's why there are so many dups.
A new documentary movie coming out, http://www.apple.com/trailers/warner_independent_p ictures/marchofthepenguins.htmlfollows "The epic journey of Emperor penguins across frozen landscapes as they migrate -- single-file -- to a familiar, yet mysterious destination"
Think its off-topic? No, its an ironic post-modern comment.
My life is meaningless...
;_;
Yet another slashdot advertical, this time about cheap generic viagra, tsk!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I haven't used a floppy in three years... So this really isn't a surprise. And as my school gradually got rid of the decent computers and replaced them with 'thin clients' without drives, it quickly is apparent that the floppy age is gone.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
I haven't actually owned a machine with a floppy drive in four years. It's been a similar length of time since I held a floppy disk.
Are PC manufacturers still selling machines with floppies?
That strikes me as a bit bonkers, if so.
I *heart* my SuperDrive.
Martin
To me, there's still nothing quite like a cheap, simple, effective floppy to bootstrap with (e.g. etherboot) in a large computing environment.
What with booting from CDs and ubiquitous internet access, the old "sneakernet" has long gone the way of the dinosaur. I use computers all the time, and haven't touched a floppy in a couple years.
Heck, now that we've working on fingernail hard drives, maybe even those USB drives will be outdated.
Don't ride the bus? Get sued!
The end of the floppy had nothing to do with Apple's mistake of not including a floppy disk drive in the first iMacs (something done too early, as shown by the sales of dongle-drive floppy units to iMac users), and everything to do with the rise of the cheap USB "thumb drive" a few years later.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Amazing revelations to start my morning off with.
They are just handy to do booting related stuff. What if the CDROM is broken? Floppies just work! And USB boot? I havent tried that and I doubt their effectiveness over floppies
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
bearing in mind cd'rs are a hell of a lot cheaper than usb flash drives, and dont need a usb port. also if you use an internal/external card reader and flashcards of your choice, you can also use them in your camera/pda/whatever, depending.
This article was entered as part of an article-writing contest with real life rewards such as a video card or DVD writers. This article is just written by some guy trying to win a contest, not by anyone influential. What he says is true, but obvious.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Floppies work everywhere! What's so unportable about them?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
This article was just another worthless piece of bad journalism in the genre of "The end of X". This guy is ranting like people need to stop using floppies, but thats pretty much already happened. A lot of people I know don't even have floppy drives. Cheap optical media and USB drives have all but replaced it.
/sarcasm
Even at my mom's office, where they are very backwards about technology, they use zip drives over floppy drives.
I'm anxiously looking forward to reading the authors article on the "The End of the A-Track Era"
Advantages of floppies over USB:
* They can be removed without an unmount procedure.
* They are essentially free, whereas I need to get my USB drives returned.
* They don't autorun stuff when inserted.
* Works with Windows 98 (25% of the desktop market)
* They are bootable (handy when debugging a computer)
* Works with DOS (handy when debugging a computer)
For $10, I'll keep my floppy drive, thank you.
I think floppy disks have been dead for some time now. I can't even remember the last time I used one, and I usually just throw out any floppies I find around the house.
Voice your opinion!
None of my computers have had floppy drives for the past 4 years. If I need to update BIOS or anything of the sort, I just do it off of a CD-RW boot CD.
There is nothing out there right now that SOMETHING cant fill the place that the floppy once had, yet I see posts even here talking about "never know when you will need it" Yet I dont need it, it really is wasted space and there are plenty of better things out there that can fill its place as a emergancy boot device, and a storage device.
Does a whole generation of nerd need to move on and retire before people get the hint to stop buying this peice of 70's technology for their 21 century computer???
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Don't be surprised to see floppies sticking around for a little more time. Think of all the countless small companies whose "computer guys" still run around with DOS boot floppies to kick off a Windows installation. Just because MS stopped supporting it doesn't mean it's not still around. I can't imagine why people would want to fuss with LAN Manager config files in 2005 and wait 2 minutes for a system to boot though.
What might happen is a huge jump in the price of media and drives. OKI is getting nearly $500 for a cheapo dot-matrix printer simply because they know people's business processes are tied to multi-part forms and/or parallel text-only printers.
Floppy dependencies are still there. E.g. Win XP requires floppy to install the RAID drivers during Windows setup. So, the flppy is not dead yet.
I found this out recently when I had to scrounge through old computer junk for a floppy drive. Yep, even in 2005, you can't set up XP on my brand new computer (3 months ago now) equipped with only a SATA hard disk in it. Sheesh.
I have a Dell laptop with one expansion bay that can hold a floppy drive, a CDrom drive or an extra battery. I put the floppy drive in once for shits and giggles. I had the CDrom in until I got the extra battery, and since then have used the CDrom only to install a few games. For everything else, I use teh interwebs.
Now that I can download real games (HL2), I doubt I'll have a whole lot of need for my CDrom drive. And if I do, I can always hotswap borrow one from one of my class mates (we all have the same laptops).
Boo to physical storage, hooray for internets.
www.olin.edu
End of an era? Perhaps. May we forever in fondness remember our Tandy 8 inch floppies, containing a MASSIVE 500 kilobytes (!!) .... for they freed us from bondage, relegating tape-based storage to the depths of time.
..Me-oh-my times have changed.
But has Netcraft confirmed oh god my life is an empty shell and I have no meaning or purpose.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
The floppy's been dying for about 7 years now. It's death will continue to be slow and agonizing.
On a personal note, the next box I build will not have a floppy drive considering that the most use I've gotten out of my current one was a disastrous encounter with dd.
Great, just great. Now what am I going to do with this $42.95 uber-space-making disk notch-cutter I just bought on EBay?
Cogito Ergo Sum
I suppose someone is next going to tell me that I need more than 640k of RAM... Shucks, I thought that was enough for anyone!
Another article declaring the death of the floppy. Haven't we seen these before? Isn't it OBVIOUS that there's better solutions? Duh. Unfortunately for most IT geeks, the floppy will be part of our job for the forseeable future.
In the ideal world, all your PCs that you administer will boot off that fancy USB keychain. Software that insists on doing a media check no longer exists, and the floppy disk is merely a wall decoration.
In a real IT environment, you're ineveitably stuck with machines that are accesible ONLY by floppy. Want to boot that PII machine? Better find a floppy. I set up several HPaq laptops about a year ago. You'd think by now they'd have USB booting working, right? NOPE. The BIOS was set to boot off USB, I popped in my bootable flash drive, and... nothing. I booted a desktop to be sure, yes, this flash drive is bootable. I never pursued it because I had several workarounds (one being the removable floppy drive) but it goes to show that this bane of technology known as the floppy disk will be around for quite some time.
Last month I received a software package distributed on DVD. A forward thinking company, right? Then what's this floppy disk for? That's right, they have a floppy that's needed to install the software. It uses strategically placed bad sectors to verify that the floppy disk is genuine and lets you install the software. Good thing this brand new Dell PC still has a floppy drive, or I couldn't install it.
Sorry folks, the floppy may have outlived its usefulness in the user realm but in the IT realm, we get to hang on to them for quite awhile.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
,,you still need a floppy drive to update a Bios.
What have we got in terms of removable media though?
CD? certainly cheap, and at a guess 50% of computers now have them, but they are BIGGER than what they're replacing. Probably not as durable for day-to-day usage, either. FAIL
DVD? Well a much better replacement option than CD, were it not for the fact that probably only 10% of comnputers have them. Less durable that CD, with compatability issues still lingering on older equipment. FAIL
ZIP? Dead. Dead
USB memory sticks? Probably usable by 95%+ at least. Most are compatible alternative (well the ones using standard mass storage drivers anyway), but there are price issues. The cheapest ones are an order of magnitude or two more expensive than floppys/CDs/DVDs. Higher capacity ones (650MB-4.7GB) are A LOT more expensive than the alternative replacements, CDs and DVDs.
Portable HD? Great capacity, compatability, capacity/price ratio, but an even higher minimum price than the thumbdrives.
All other options just have no real benefits over the alternatives listed above and/or have a pathetic tiny market share.
Why did the industry fail so horribly in coming up with a cheap and easy floppy replacement? Perhaps there's just far less need for it now that so many PCs are connected via the internet or local LAN.
Is it "Floppy is dead" or "removable mass media is dead"?
All comments about floppy disks aside, that has to be the worst-written article I have ever read ever. Did no one else notice the appalling style?
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
There can be no argument, cave wall wins - bah people talk about DLT and Harddisks and floppies.. all amature stuff!!
Think about it.. cave wall paintings have survived thousands of years, and in alot of cases, survived with only minor data loss (bat shit, wind, rain etc)
And I now your thinking, what about offsite storage/backup (Incase something happens to my cave) No problem, just find another cave and paint away!
Now, to write an export script to convert my Word and Open Office documents into cave wall format!!
Sure you laugh, LAUGH ALL YOU WANT, I'll have my cave when the magnetic and optical world falls!
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
I honestly couldn't finish the article because of those unnerving spider ads on the side.
Freak me out, man.
(Firefox at work doesn't come with ad blocker by default.)
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
The floppy is indespensible. Current "supposed" solutions are to use a bootable CD because not every computer supports booting off a USB device. Actually, to be honest some laptops I manage here that are a little older than 2 years don't support USB booting. This can be complicated by old CD/DVD drives that sometimes have trouble reading burned CDs. Then there are network boots which are far more trouble than they are worth--talk about using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. There just isn't a universal solution that works for all of my needs. For example, the other day a Intel 875-chipset based Pentium 4 went bonkers. The user somehow managed to destroy the XP installation. When I went to go restore off our ghost image, the system would not boot off a CD/DVD, nor would it boot off the USB thumb drive. Furthermore the USB keyboard/mouse wouldn't work to allow me to edit the BIOS settings. So what did I do? Got my trusty PS/2 keyboard/mouse out and old floppy and restore the machine. My point is that there are reasons for keeping this stuff around. Sure the majority of the users out there may not need it but if you support computers then having an old floppy, ps/2 keyboard/mouse, and a key other items is necessary.
And then I realised I do not have one at work (dell) or at home (home made).
If I need to read off a floppy, I do have a laptop with a usb floppy (old). But who gives me disks? if someone tries to give me a disk, I say, just email me the bloody thing, 1.4 mb uncompressed files, or zip them up (or tar them ffs).
Network/Email killed the floppy more than usb drives. I use usb increasingly for files that won't fit on CD.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
If you discount the Windows-based BIOS updaters (which I don't fully trust anyway, I don't like the idea of some other extraneous process being able to pre-empt the BIOS flash) then aren't floppy disks the only viable solution to flash motherboard BIOS?
There's also plenty of other things that still require floppy drives/disks - e.g. Memtest, various hard drive low-level diagnostic tools, etc
In a world where a single Word document can take up 700Kb (ie, half a floppy disk) without being more than a couple pages or having graphics, probably close to 1/2 of all floppy disks are bad out of the box and even more die after only a couple uses, and there's almost ubiquitous networks and Internet access, why is this surprising?
The fact that other media is finding a niche is, I think, only correlary. A box of 10 floppies costs, what, $10 still at Best Buy? Do they even sell floppies at Best Buy anymore? This transition would've occurred much sooner if companies would've stopped selling flawed and essentially lemon disks years ago, when the technology allowed from the transition away from such things.
Sometime around the year 1999 would've been a good time to simply stop providing them in a PC (and including a 16Mb USB CF card in its stead, with easy-access USB ports on the front). The cost to the manufaturer would've been defrayed in both increased sales ("Ohh, free technology!") and having to not spend $10 or so per machine for the next 4 (5? are they still installing floppy drives in new PCs?) years.
Aside from a couple disks I've got floating around which I use as bookmarks for magazines and books I'm reading, I've not seen a floppy actually being used as such in years.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This just in: The 8" Floppy Disk is Dead!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Why? Because my dad stop using them six months ago, and switched to USB drives. This, from a guy that wanted a 5 1/4" drive on his Pentium II last year! So, if not even my dad uses them anymore, they have to be dead.
My karma is in a nose dive
Most of their new Oscilliscopes still use floppies to store screen shots. Most of their Oscilliscopes do not support USB drives. Unlike a new computer, the useful lifetime of a lab instrument is measured in decades. Floppies will be around for a while.
Speaking of lab instruments, my new Stanford Research SR620 Time Interval Counter requires either an Epson MX80 printer or an HPGL plotter (either RS232 or IEE488) for simple hardcopy output, and requires and analog oscilliscope for a real time video display.
Here are just some things I can think of:
..."Insert disk 2 of disk 30, press any key to continue"
...Ahhh the memories.
* Getting those special hole punchers and converting those 5 1/4" 360KB floppys to instant 720KB- Instant double density!
* Buying a special pack of 10 x 3 1/2 1.44 SONY (We're talking branded!!) for $15. - bargain!
* Those cool programs that you could execute and make your floppy [drive] play a tune by it issuing commands to the seek mechanism of the drive. (eg. Happy Birthday, Silent Night, etc etc)
*
* OPERATING SYSTEM NOT FOUND...Insert Disk to Continue
YAY.. Lets Jump on the bandwagon and Only Use "NEW Tech" and get rid of all our floppys.. My Brand New SATA hard drive.. and Win XP.. oh wait.. you mean winxp does not have sata drivers?? Looks like i should have held on to that floppy drive just a bit longer...
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
From TFA:
Do yourself a favor: Dump your floppies, go to Wal-Mart or any computer store, and buy a USB drive. There's no reason not to.
Show me an USB drive that every computer can boot from, including the ones that wasn't made in the last couple of years...
For rescue disks, nothing beats floppies. CD-ROM drives are in just about every computer now, but the lack of a CD-RW burner (or a CD-R and an infinite supply of discs) in most computers still makes it fail when compared to floppies.
USB drives may be nice if every computer you come across has an USB controller and recent drivers, but I'm not sure fitting memtest86, tomsrtbt and a DOS boot disk on the same USB drive is easy, and if I need to have one with each, they quickly become way too expensive comparet to floppies.
I last used a floppy about a month ago. A dodgy RAM module kept crashing the machine, so I downloaded memtest86. And rather than go look for someone with a burner and paying for a bland CDR, I just overwrote one of the old driver disks I already had in the drawer.
And when someone comes over and goes "oh, I just gotta have that file", I'll happily give him a floppy with the file on. No way I'm going to give him an USB drive. Here a CDR would be an option, except again the need to find someone with a burner.
I have a floppy drive on my 2 PCs at home. I have rarely used it, except to use Norton Ghost. Unfortunately, Norton Ghost will only run when booted from floppy. I looked into it a little and it appears to be because of some kind of weird CD-ROM detection issue with Windoze. If I am correct in my understanding, that raises the question as to why Norton doesn't use, say, Linux as part of a bootable CD to do ghosting/cloning of drives rather than relying on PC-DOS to do it.
There are web sites on how to make bootable CD-ROMS for Windoze, but I have never been able to make a bootable CD for Ghost. The only bootable CDs I have read about for Ghost were not able to clone disk drives, but were used to restore Ghost backups.
What does netcraft say?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
What more portable, more efficient data storage? There is no mass-market replacement for the floppy, and it drives me mad almost daily. CD-RWs are not truly rewriteable in the same way as a floppy, and DVD-RAM is too expensive, too bulky and not nearly pervasive enough to be a viable alternative.
USB Keys are not a proper alternative as they come as a single device that people carry around with them, and not as disposable media. And Zip / Jaz drives were too slow and never really caught on. Damnit, where are my MO minidisc drives - small sexy, rewriteable and reliable.
Working in a school, it really becomes an issue when kids want to take work home to a machine without internet access. I'm sure hundreds of other people have similar problems, and I'm absolutely baffled as to why this gaping hole in the market hasn't been filled.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
From the article:
Who really wants to carry a bunch of square discs around with them all the time?
I'd like a square disc. Or two.
People are willing to pay good money for a retro cassette drive for their computers right now to gain points with the geek crowd.
Wait a minute; I'm going to sell my "crap box" full of floppy drives on eBay for the retro crowd. I'll soon be a thousandaire. Or at least a hundredaire.
hi mom!
I can certainly hear the death knell ringing in the distance, but as with all legacy equipment, the floppy will never quite die. In repairing computers for the past ten or so years, I have been required to use a floppy with, paradoxically, increasing frequency. Boot cds are wonderful, but many times older equipment (the stuff that fails that I'm being asked to troubleshoot) just cannot handle them; some require a floppy to due to the nonexistent bios booting option; others are of great use simply because old software, well written, will never pass away. Surely those of you who do data recovery and forensics have loads of such tools at your disposal?
Floppies have served us well, and at least some of us will be using them for some time to come.
the floppy era was supposed to be gone in 1998 (iMac). Part of the problem is that there is no replacement for floppies that's as cheap and disposable a media. the other problem is that too much stuff still depends on floppies.
we need a media that's not a USB flash drive. we need a media that will go inside the computer and won't stick out akwardly, and something that's dirt cheap for small capacities and a decent price for higher capacities.
how about a disk about half the size of a floppy, in a square shape, a little thicker, and with no flimsy plastic, designed to go in your pocket. something like a compactflash card, only the disk would go all the way into the computer instead of halfway like the CF cards.
wow now that i think about it camera memory cards aren't such a bad idea for a floppy replacement, but there would need to be one standard and there'd need to be slots on all computers.
The floppy is dead. Long live the floopy!
Floppy Drive: Happy Anniversary, Apple.
Apple: Floppy Drive, we broke up seven years ago.
Floppy Drive: Well, that doesn't mean we can't still go out.
Apple: Well, actually it does. That's what breaking up is.
From the adjacent replies in this thread it appears that DOS is at least USB bootable from thumb drives.
When will Windows be bootable from USB? Why isn't it now? Is there a solid technical reason or is it the same reason there's no print command from Windows Explorer? The inflexibility of boot devices relative to technology on Windows is kind of appalling.
I cede boot flexibility to the Mac world completely. You've always been able to boot into Mac OS from any darn connected drive -- 1394, USB, CDs (dunno about OS X on CD, tho).
...eComStation was introduced to the OS/2 market. :-D
Ok so no more floppy...
Msoft, Dell, HP & others: Please stop distributing software that will only autoextract onto them!
Msoft: please let us use usb fobs to install drivers during Windows installations.
Industry & Manufacturers: please develop and conform to some standardized usb-boot bios extension.
If I had a dime for every time I had to transplant a floppy drive I'd have a sandwitch.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
I still have two 8 inch floppy disks from college.
All my C/PM Z80 assembler projects, including a few interesting M/PM utilities that I wrote to help recover crashed terminal sessions. DS/DD, 360kB.
I am sure that the data has all been lost to bit rot over the last 20 years. They have not been stored very carefully.
But could anyone explain why they insist they can only be loaded from a floppy and not some other media, I have always found that curious
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
Floppies are still usefull for loading computers either by copying the CD source to the HD first or for Imaging a HD. What About HD Diagnostics? Do you really want to have to create a bootable CD everytime you want to do this? I think floppies are still easier to use for alot tech and loading issues, just because you can't use them as a long term data storage anymore, doesn't mean they are dead, there usage has just change from a mainly user role to more of an admin/tech role.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
This is the only thing left. You can boot from USB now etc. etc. But when installing windows, and you need to load the driver for say, your SATA controller. If windows would load USB Generic Mass Storage Support in the setup for the benefit of the F6 option that would fix that.
Most BIOS upgrades can be done in windows. However the "boot disk" ones can be adapted for USB flash drives.
"I believe we will soon arrive at the end of a floppy era..."
Anyone hear of Apple? They stopped the flop back in '98 or so.
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
Why did I use one this morning? Maybe because they are quick and simple to use. No climbing behind the computer and screwing with the USB port to put in the thumb drive. No finding a space jewel case for a cd from the massive spindle so it won't get scratch on my way to work. Just stick it in copy the files and eject. Quick and simple. I know the transfer rates are slow, but I work with documents not stolen media files and the floppies are plenty fast for them.
It's not like we have a lot of choice anyway. With so many suppliers cutting out the floppy drive from Laptops and PC's, my stack of floppies don't even make nice coasters (unlike those beautifully failed CD/DVD burns).
Works for me. It's not easy to create a bootable image, but there are utilities to help you (I think it was called BootCD), which also allow you to add a few essentials. Then burn and boot away...
1 Floppy - 1.44 MB , costs 16 Rupees
1 CD-R - 640 Mb , costs 12 rupees (upto 32)
1 DVD-R - 4 GB , costs 60 rupees
My vote went for CD-R because not everyone here still has a DVD ROM drive (like my 5 year old home PC).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The article claims that a 3.5inch floppy holds only 1.44 megabytes of data. That's true only if you format them in the standard MS-DOS format (and we'll ignore the rather weird definition of 'megabyte' used to quote the size). But the physical limit of the diskette is two megabytes - that's why they are sometimes called '2MB (Unformatted)' - and with better software you can get closer to this.
You can increase the number of tracks (concentric circles) on the disk, or the number of sectors per track (reducing the gap between each sector). Floppy drives are rated for 80 tracks but can usually manage a few more. There is the 1.72 megabyte or so format used by Microsoft for installation floppies, which is readable by standard DOS and Windows with no problems. Although DOS supports it, the 'format' program doesn't, so you will need to get fdformat or 2MDOS (see below).
A step further is to install a driver like 2M (search for it on Simtel's MS-DOS archive) which lets you format floppies up to 1.92 megs or so. I think some of these formats are understood by Linux but I'm not sure. Sadly, since 2M is a DOS driver it won't work with newer Windows versions. The included 2MDOS driver patches MS-DOS's format program to let you format floppies in 1.72 megs and other reasonably-large sizes, which are then readable by all DOS and Windows versions without the need for extra drivers.
2M also includes 2MGUI, short for '2M-Guiness', which claims to hold the world record for fitting the most onto a floppy. It will format ordinary quad-density floppies nearly two megabytes. (Bizarrely, it also manages to get about 1.1 megs on a double-density floppy, which is more than the theoretical limit.)
Note also that later model IBM PS/2s included an octuple-density floppy drive, giving 2.88 megs with vanilla DOS or OS/2 and nearly 4 megs with clever format programs, but this more expensive hardware never caught on. Perhaps the floppy controller in your clone PC nowadays can handle an octuple-density disk drive, I'm not sure.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Why would you do that? CGA's just fine.
We would have to RTFA to do that. You must be new here.
A number of years ago, I had my new computer built with a floppy drive so I could finally get my novel-in-progress and a bunch of old papers and such off floppy and onto a modern storage device. Then, I knew, I'd start work on the novel again and be able to read my papers and wax nostalgic over my old papers. Alas, the lovely box of floppies is still in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and I'm not working on the novel and all the papers are completely useless.
Floppy disks are kool and can be recycled as beer coasters, table levelers, frizbees
... an portability. SD-Cards with 10 different speeds, USB-Sticks 1.1 an 2.0, Sony MemStick, MemStick Pro, MemStick DUO, MemStick DUO Pro, MicroDrives, MMC-Card, CF-Card Compact Flash I, Compact Flash II, TransFlash, SmartMedia-Card... Some of the versions of the media have malfunctions in these reader, but do their job in the other one. Some readers are good in r/w SD-Cards, but have their problems with the MemStick and so on.
Sorry, but in the past everybody used the same kind of Floppy, and no one had problems with incompatible drives or medias.
For a long time i hoped that DVD-RAM (with medias cased in a caddy) or the magneto-optical (M/O) drives became a new standard, dropping their prices with a higher market share. But the industry is not able and willing to work for the cusomers, the industry - or better every single company - works for the shareholders.
However, I do not see the floppy leaving anytime soon. They are still widely used by students who do not have a primary machine and want to keep a physical artifact, or people with unreliable net connection who still do sneaker net. Many cannot yet afford a usb drive, or it is too easily lost or stolen, so the expense of $5 for 14 MB of storage, which is much more than they need, is more reasonable than $20 for 128MB of storage. I think that as this generaion grows up on the internet, and if Yahoo and Google provides drag and drop online storage, then we will see even public computers go floppy free.It may even be that usb drives supplant the 3.5" floppy in the same way the 3.5" floppy supplanted the 5.25" floppy. It can't be that long until 128MB is sold for $6.99 at walmart.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I just wish the motherboard developers would leave the floppy ports off.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
"Floppy nothing. In my day we etched our data into pottery."
Well, you must be young. In my day, before pottery was invented, we had a lot of wives (those of us who could afford it), and taught our many children all that we wanted to remember. Pottery breaks. Writing on pottery is new-fangled and unreliable.
For serious data storage and reliable backups, having lots of children is the best.
It'd be just ducky if we could get reliable USB drives. No, I'm not talking flash reliability, I'm talking replacing the cheap plastic case that won't last more than two weeks on my crowded keyring before eroding away. I killed three of them in two months, then gave up on the USB flash always with me concept. I even tried the USB necklace idea - what a godawful nuisance.
I'd like to see an aluminum case USB to xD flash or similar device that is no larger than my car security fob
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
And no one can read the pottery because the original RFCs are lost. Yeah, the Rosetta Stone helped in some areas, but others remain a mystery.
I believe the following experience sums up most people's dealings with floppy drives:
I bought one for $10 in 2000 for a computer I was assembling. Over the course of three years, I probably used it less than a hundred times. One day, I really needed it for some video card BIOS flashing and found that it no longer functioned.
Was it my hundredth use that finally did the drive in? Or was it a result of not using it for long periods of time? I'm sure manufacturers don't worry too much about quality because they know I'll always be willing to fork over another $10.
If thumb drives aren't bootable on your PC's motherboard, and you want to install a BIOS update to make them bootable, then how do you run the BIOS update?
Went to install Windows XP Home on a couple of SATA hard drives configured as a RAID array. Guess what? Can't install extra drivers without one, as the Windows XP installer wouldn't use anything but the floppy drive for additional drivers.
There have been a wide variety of floppy disk dimensions, styles, formats and copy-protection mechanisms.
We shall remember the disk which is spelt with a k.
Pixels keep you awake!
Personally, I've not used a floppy really since I was in college.
Professionally, there are still a couple of uses. One, being, that fried computer ghost rebuilds still want a bootable ghost floppy. Secondly, as long as there are people who don't trust those new 'fangled' network thingies...we're still stuck with them at some point.
--pete
How long is the ubiquitous Save icon going to remain a floppy? It's so archaic now.
"Joan of Arc, up top!" - Ghandi, Clone High
Most of computers have access to the net. Even devices without drives often do. And most of them have access to WWW. Now just keep a "floppy webpage" where you can easily upload/download your files...
The problem is most of available software solutions are cumbersome if you want to upload more than 1 file (and those that aren't, need to be installed locally, say, FTP client with HTTP GET/POST capablity).
Any suggestions about good remote file storage software?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
My swanky new Athlon64 box running Windoze XP needs a floppy because I still have to boot into friggin' DOS in order to flash my BIOS.
Even the newest motherboards require this. Some motherboards don't require a bootable floppy, because they have a utility built into BIOS that will read the new BIOS binary... off of the floppy in drive A:
Are there any motherboards that can read the updated BIOS image off of a USB drive?
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
The floppy isn't dead yet. True, for daily data storage, the floppy is obsolete (and has been for quite some time). The truth is that the floppy is such a basic low-level form of data storage it'll still rear it's 1.44 mb head for a while.
Just last year I built my gaming machine. Athlon, sweet machine. I wanted to activate the RAID... But Windows (Gaming machine) didn't have the SATA RAID controller... So the only way to load the device driver was, you guessed it, floppy.
I know a lot of places use the floppy for flashing the BIOS. In some cases, they've also written Windows software to do the same thing, but that leaves users of other OSs out in the cold, which leaves floppy as my preferred flashing mechanism.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Here's a grab-bag of ideas for the next death-of article for an author lacking inpiration
- Null-modem cable
- cdroms (everyone has dvd's now!)
- CRT monitors
- Modems
- Pick old-tyme key combo: CTRL-ALT-DEL/PrtScrn/ScrLck/SysRq
- Centronics printer cables
- Pick a non-Ethernet Layer 2 technology: ARCnet, Token Ring, ATM, LocalTalk, FDDI
"In my day we etched our data into pottery. Talk about your long term enterprise data storage. Some of those buggers made it thousands of years!" And still alive? Geez, dont post about floppys, just tell us how you managed to live for that long! :-)
I wanted to install Windows on my new hard disk, plugged into a PCI SATA card.
The Windows CD didn't have drivers for this card.
I had to copy the drivers to a floppy.
Even though I had two CD-ROM drives, and a USB memory stick, Windows still insisted the only place it could get the drivers from was a floppy disk. It's the only time I've used a floppy disk drive this year.
Okay. It's a rare problem, but little things like this will mean that the floppy disk drive will have to remain for some time.
Seriously, I built myself a new PC last year and although I put a floppy drive in, I've not ever needed it. But it's really nice to know that it's there for emergencies.
Yes, it's nice to have a floppy drive in case of some sort of emergency. However, a USB floppy drive is a better idea. You can share it between multiple machines. It usually stays powered down and stored so that dust doesn't get into it. And since it isn't plugged in most of the time, it should last a lot longer.
When you only have one machine, the internal floppy drive might be more cost effective (well, ecept for electricity usuage which I know is minimal). However, when you have multiple machines including laptops, having a single USB floppy drive is very cost effective.
Also, the less stuff you have in a machine, the easier it is to troubleshoot it. (Depending on what is wrong of course.)
I've had a only a USB floppy drive for over 3 years, and I think I've only really used it to clean up/out my old floppies.
the original iMac was considered revolutionary when it didnt include a floppy drive - quoting business week interview of Steve Jobs from May 25, 1998. Floppy has been dead since 1998. "Q: Why did you decide against including an internal floppy drive and opt for a slower modem? A: You know, you've got to do the right thing. Just take the floppy: People aren't thinking clearly. Nobody's going to back up a 4-gigabyte drive onto 1-megabyte floppies. They'll use a Zip drive -- but they're too expensive to build into a consumer product. Besides, hardly anybody backs up anyway, so why build cost into every system? The second reason for a floppy is software distribution, but a lot of software now comes on CD-ROMs because it's better and cheaper [the iMac includes a CD-ROM drive]. "
I love responding to my own posts.
I just realized I haven't tried booting off the USB drive, seems like that should work. It's still kind of a pain to find a windows98 system that is capable of making a bootable DOS removable drive. Unless there's some utility for XP that allows this? Off to google I go...
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Here is why it isn't dead. 1. Unlike CD's it is easier to use and you can write to it with no large OS installed. 2. EVERY computer works with one. If you have any old computers like we have at work who know's what they support. Some don't have CD's, some don't support USB drives and some have 2 USB1.1 ports in the back. The floppy is always in the front. 3. There are several programs in XP that ask you to insert a floppy. Backups for one. My new Maxtor 300gb 1 touch 2 drive asked me to put in a recoverable floppy. 4. my last job ran 2000 and most USB drives didn't work. They had the machines locked down so you wern't alowed to install drivers. We would routenly use floppy's to transfer CAD files and wor documents. 1.44 is fine for a few files. Drag-and-drop takes a few seconds; the CD usually requires opening a sealed package, launching some program, selecting the files(sometimes they HAVE to be on your computer, not on the network), then writing. 20 clicks later you have 1 meg on a CD that can't be used for anything alse. 4. Just transfered a new BIOS to burn to one of the units we sell to a Linux machine with a floppy! My USB drive doesn't work on that machine and I don't have the time to make it. The floppy just works. I HATE FLOPPYS!
BTW, I don't think mastadons were carniverous. It must have been the sabre-toothed cats you were thinking of.
The amazing thing is not that floppies are finally dying, but that they managed to live on so long thanks to Microsoft. The reason for this is simple, people at work do not trust their computer or their server because of poor quality software. The pathetic part is that the software has not improved but hat a new media of distrust has become cheaper. In fact, I'd say things have gotten even worse in the Windoze world. Floppies and now USB devices are used because people do not believe their computers will remember their work and don't have easy or reliable ways to move their work to their home computers.
I moved to Linux in 1998 and have not lost a file due to file corruption or hardware failure since. The ext2 file system is redundant enough for hardware failure to have always been gentle and recoverable. Journaling is even better. Having live CDs for boots instead of a central registry to prevent booting is also helpful. More importantly, free software makes running a "server" with secure access to the internet much easier so I can move data from home to work and from work to home anywhere in the world. I stopped using floppies almost immediately because it was easier to make a network backup and I knew data would be there later.
This is a tremendous contrast to places I work where M$ still rules. There, computers still come from big vendors like Dell with floppy drives, the "servers" still routinely lose data, it's difficult if not impossible to move data around. In places like that, conscientious employees still need portable storage. So we get articles like this, extolling the virtues of USB devices.
"IP" paranoia and viruses have made things even worse in the Microsoft world. Email was one way to move things around, but many companies and ISPs are routinely blocking attachments of useful size. Others have outlawed USB devices even cameras and cellphones. They do this because they are afraid of viruses infesting their networks and to keep their valuable IP from leaking out. If they had reasonable software, they would not have to worry about viruses. The other part is a futile substitute for trust. If you can't trust your employees, your information will walk out with them in one way or another, regardless of what you do. A lack of trust does not guard against gullibility and soon the same companies will be implementing Microsoft's new dissapearing ink Word Docs and other pointless lockdowns. Stupid is as stupid does, and it all makes things more difficult for those with a clue and a care.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Umm well I know where I am floppies are still used. The reasons are one their cheep, two their reliable and three because portable. Actually magnetic media in general has it's place still. I have a "old" pc that needed a floppy. Their dead useful for somethings, I do like ZIP drives better because their just a tad more convienent and the come in USB, SCSI and other 'old' formats.
about secretaries having a nice set of dual floppies on their system.
Many old computers and some servers I administers have their usb ports tucked round the back so plugging in a usb drive would be a real pain.
Its a fact of life that these are going to be around for a while. the longer they are, the more likely I will have to do some kind of emergency repair on them by booting off a floppy disk. To create that boot floppy I need a workstation that also has a floppy drive. That is why floppy drives will stay around for a lot longer
I guess this stymies my plans for a floppy raid5 file server array mounted in a home made 19" rack!
Life is so unfair!
Article reads like an essay written by a bored high school student for English class. It says nothing new or interesting. Ho hum.
/. articles.
However, it's still notably better in terms of grammar, punctuation, and redundancy than most
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The floppy is the only easily writable medium today that you can reliably boot a PC from. USB storage is still not there yet. CD/DVD/etc is not writable in any HDD/floppy-like sense. That is the reason why countless utilities (BIOS iupdata, HDD diagnose, ramtest, disk-imagers, desaster recovery, ....) are available on floppies.
Until something as compatible and universal as the floppy is around, removing it is just plain stupid. I am quite anoyed at the people that have predicted the death of the floppy again and again for several years now.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unfortunately for most IT geeks, the floppy will be part of our job for the forseeable future.
:)
I haven't had to use a floppy at any of the sites I've worked at since about 2001.
Want to boot that PII machine?
No. I haven't seen one for years.
A forward thinking company, right? Then what's this floppy disk for?
It's to show you that the company is not forward-thinking. I'd love to know what kind of software works like that -- what happens if the floppy develops a bad sector?
Sorry folks, the floppy may have outlived its usefulness in the user realm but in the IT realm, we get to hang on to them for quite awhile.
Where 'we' is you.
I agree that there are probably zillions of sites around the globe that use floppies. I don't agreed that it is difficult to avoid such places
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
NOTHING is as cheap, easy, quick, AND portable as a good ol' fashioned floppy.
Porting a few simple files (like Powerpoint presentations) from my computer to the one in the room with the hokey network issues. Nothing beats a floppy in this common scenario, when all the factors above are considered. NOTHING.
...the first time I saw a "Don't Copy That Floppy!" poster, back in 1992.
I stole it.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Who is going to admit they have a mini-disk, a 3 1/2 inch floppy? A few might not be ashamed to say they have a 5 1/4 inch floppy, but a real man is going to say he has an 8-inch floppy.
I put my hard drive in her CPU, then it started banging around, but when it was all said and done I pulled out a floppy.
Remember when taking Viagra or Cialas, if your erection last for more than four hours seek immediate medical attention.
I built a computer this year and because I read on slashdot that floppies are dead I didn't buy one.
My computer worked fine, until I wanted to flash my BIOS. The only way my motherboard could be flashed was by creating a boot disk with thier custom exe file.
I had to buy a $10 floppy drive to flash my BIOS.
I still need them.
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
maybe someday they'll both finally, really, be dead and we can all breathe a sigh of relief....
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like 95% of the time a floppy is needed on a PC, its needed to boot the PC in an emergency, or add a driver. I don't know how many PCs out there will boot from an external USB floppy.
What will replace MS-DOS boot disks? Since recent versions no longer run DOS natively, I've had to use my old 98 boot disks multiples times across various jobs. So why would floppies be 'dead?' I know that there are CDs that can do similar/the exact same stuff, but when its the same data that used to be on floppies, its a waste of 700MB. I don't know how easy it is to make a USB jumpdrive bootable, but there still seems to be a niche (albeit a small one) for floppies.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
Back when hard drives were a very expensive luxury, many systems relied on floppy drives for working storage. The drives were expensive ($500), but they worked reliably. Bad floppy disks were rare. Normally, you could expect every disk in the box to be error-free and durable. Bit rot was unheard of.
Today, the drives and media are of such poor quality that they are almost useless. Hooray for Capitalism!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
An editorial is simply someone's opinion, and in this case a non-technical person with an opinion. The editorial should not have made it on slashdot. I wasted valuable time reading it because I assumed there was some value, being as it appeared on
Burn the floppy image to RW as el-torrito bootloader, then boot from CD. The system won't know the difference.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
A company I work with uses floppies for shipping invoices. They're sent with packages between their locations, and used to load the inventory information for the shipment. I can't imagine them going to bulkier CDRW's just to move around a 100KB zip file of data, and USB keys would be horrendously expensive for the task. (The keys sell for about the same price as the shipping contents themselves!) Maybe someday RFID will be a suitable replacement, but we're not there yet.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I was in the PC shop today for my weekly routine visit and someone was asking a salesman for some floppies to which he replied "we don't sell those anymore and haven't for a long time".
I can't remember the last time I saw floppies for sale but it certainly was a while ago.
He announces an idea that Apple put into practice seven years earlier and thinks he's gonna win a contest.
Ah the fun with modern computer cases with deep floppy slots.
"Can I use your computer? I need to download a network card driver, my net is down."
"Sure, no problem."
4 minutes later "Ok, got it. Just saving and I'm done." *Plang* "You don't have a floppy drive?!?"
"No, I don't. Here's a screwdriver if you want your floppy back."
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
So I still need to boot an MSDOS (win98) floppy for this because burning a CDR with dos and the bios file would be too much.
But for booting from USB to be useful you would still need 2 PC's, one to prepare the USB stick to boot the other one. An USB storage device is meant to be dynamic. If you are going to keep an USB stick for rescue purposes you should consider a bootable CD, it would be much more cost-effective.
It's the sound of Slashdot at the bottom of the barrel ...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
You also failed to mention email. It's easy to get an email account (and free) and you can transport small files (under 2-4 MB, whatever you consider small I don't care) instantly. Anyone can use this medium without hassle. Email is the final nail in the floppy coffin.
Now you can't email large backups or media files to many people because of hard set limits on attached files. However, there are lots of alternatives that should be considered which are better for such functions anyway.
The problem with this thinking is that one assumes there is one replacement to a floppy. The floppy was so ubiquitous because it was the ONLY means of transporting data for a while so you HAD to have a floppy. Nowadays, there are dozens of different types of replacements. You don't need one specific type. I've transported files via my camera, a thumb drive, a hard drive and via email. They all just carry files in one form or another.
All of the ideas you mention, thumb drives, hard drives, CDs, etc fill different niches, and fill them very effectively. There is no one all encompassing storage medium any more, yet all of these mediums are relatively compatible with most computer systems.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
And it is still used now for the very same purpose. Mainframes have no USB or CD, only tapes and floppies as removable storage. But, of course, floppy drive in PC is an anachronism.
Believe it or not, but Apple Sweden lost its chance to be a supplier to the Swedish government a few years ago because Macs did not contain a floppy disk unit.
The brain dead bureaucrat did not even grasp that even portable Macs back then had Superdrives, letting its user store some 5.000 times more data on a DVD-disk, than a stupid floppy.
Sadly, Sweden is one of the most Microsoft friendly countries in the world.
This had better be a blog post. And editorial worth of compensation, it is not. Had there not been a paragraph later in the article describing graduation from high school and taking college classes, I would have assumed that the author was no older than 15.
The garbage that gets posted these days. Sheesh!
"I wanted to Raid 0 two drives "
Translation: I don't care if I lose all the data.
There are still thousands of PCS that were installed in the 90's in industrial applications (such as factory/process automation) that cannot boot from CD or don't have a CD drive. These need a floppy for emergency reinstall and rescue.Upgrading these PCs is expensive and time consuming.
These systems also use use floppies to transfer files because many cannot be on corporate networks due to security and other reasons. Transfering data to office systems for further analysis still needs floppy drives!
Boot into Safe Mode.
Try to access your CD.
Yes, I know there is a way to do that in Windows 98 (and apparently it's directly supported in 2000 and above), but most end users don't.
Until the BIOS directly supports CD/DVD drives (and I don't know why the industry doesn't make that effort), the floppy will continue to be critical for system repairs.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I still use my floppydrive at home and at work. Examples? Okay:
- Keepass can use a floppy to store the security key
- etherboot floppy (in combination with thinclients)
- save configurations
- bootdisks, for those BIOS's that can't boot from cd
- ever had to fix a laptop that had a fdd, but the customer/friend/whatever left the cdrom drive at home?
I could probably come up with more examples, but these are the ones i use. I think it's overkill to switch to a more conventional storage method, like compactflash or an usb stick when all i need is a few kb free space, or when i simply can't use anything else.
I hopped on board the USB flash drive bus fairly early, and am quite glad I'm rid of floppies. First was a pair of 64's. Then a 512. Then a 1gb. I currently tote around a 4gb SanDisk Cruzer Mini. Handy buggers, and the Cruzer Minis are very small profile and will not block adjacent USB ports like many of the other large capacity drives do.
The only disadvantage I run into occasionally is that the large capacity drives are almost always USB 2.0 "high speed", and register on the USB bus as a powered device. This means you can't plug them into the USB ports on a keyboard, or you'll get a low power / device disabled warning. It's fairly common to run into a computer with say, the keyboard in one port and the printer in the other built in port, so you have to unplug the printer to plug in the flash drive. Annoying if you're trying to grab a test image off the flash drive to print.
It'll be nice when they make those flash drives able to detect when plugged into an unpowered hub and can kick it down a notch to 2.0 "full speed" and still work.
Speeds on USB2.0HS ports are quite nice, easily getting 8-10mb/sec write speeds. Now if OS X could just get fixed so it can boot off USB, I'll make this bugger bootable too, and that will rock...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
They had the chance to create the Floppy disk replacement for the 90s/00s, but noooo, they had to keep it in esoteric music players that would never see mainstream attention.
USB Keychains are great, but their ideal purpose is for transient data, as you're hardly going to be laying down a wad of cash each time you need 256MB of storage on the go, when you can just erase the stick you already have. CDs and DVDs are great for their long-term storage abilities, but the fact that they need to be placed in a protective case of some sort, along with the large diameter of the medium somewhat limits their transportability. The price of the RW variants prohibits the purchance of them in bulk, along with the fact that you can't just use them like you could the old floppies; despite the massive penetration of the devices, not everybody yet has a CD burner, let alone a DVD burner.
If we had MiniDisc, we could have had a nice replacement for the humble old floppy - the medium comes with its owm protective covering, and it's less bulky than the 12cm discs.
Le sigh.. perhaps with "Universal" Media Disc, Sony shall see the error of their ways (not that I particularly like Sony or anything...).
Oh, by the way, I don't have a CD drive, so I am going to need that on floppies.
Thx!
I remeber when i had to use a boot disk when i had Win98se. First you started up and nothing but a blinking cursor showed up, and you wonder if somethig went wrong. Then it would say Windows is starting up, 3 years later it would ask you if you wanted to install CD-ROM support, if you did you would have to spend another lifetime at a black screen.
I had to mount my floppy drive to get Win2000 installed on a Serial ATA drive. I'd like them to die but they're not quite dead yet in my world.
The PC world just hasn't caught up with those in the know yet. I haven't even *seen* a floppy for years.
I would say more modern PCs ship with floppy drives then plain old CD drives. Nearly every PC ships with at least a DVD drive or a CD-RW.
I REALLY want to kill my floppy drive. I hate it. Floppy disks are so incredibly unreliable. They are corrupted on the whim. Hell, even putting a floppy next to a cell phone can provide sufficient magnetic field to erase its contents.
However, I just built a new set of servers for my company, and we had to put floppy drives on all of them. The BIOS on the motherboard we used supported booting to a USB device, but if you didn't want to boot to it, it wasn't recognized. In order to load the SATA RAID drivers for Win2k3, we had to have a FDD in the machine. It sucks. Also, recently, I made a customization of the Ultimate Boot CD and I needed every friggin' floppy disk that I wanted to put on there, because there's no easy (and free) way to make an image of a boot floppy without using the actual disk. I had copies of all the compressed images, but since they were compressed, I had to copy them onto a floppy, then re-create a non-compressed image using FloppyImage. (There are commercial programs out there, but who wants to pay $30 for WinImage to create 5 images when FloppyImage is free)
So what's the solution? Will motherboard BIOS manufacturers just standardize the practice of putting NON-BOOTABLE USB support in the BIOS? I can fit every image to every floppy disk I ever owned onto one 512MB USB drive. What does it take?
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Actually the hole in the case makes a nice cooling vent.
I still have several hundred floppies and I've found that over half of the ones 10+ years old are unreadable. Even many 5 that are only years old are unreadable.
01/20/09
This works a treat. Although RUNT uses USMDOS by default I managed to format a flash drive ext2 and get rid of the DOS emulation. Mine runs sendmail and apache and throws up a static page saying the webserver is broke while it continues to collect mail for my users. Very handy ;-)
Although my machine will boot from a USB device I've found it's a lot faster to put the boot files on a business-card sized CD.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
try here.
a id.htm
http://unattended.msfn.org/intermediate/drivers/r
1992 called, they want their poster back.
Not quite. My asus board still requires a DRIVER for my SATA/RAID... which is a bit retarded, as windows xp (duck) has its own drivers but they're not detected on boot. So, by Hitting f6 and loading it my drivers (will not detect hd with out it) it still yells at me stating windows has its own...
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
that was what... The original iMac punched the 3.5 drive right in thier floppy disk....
Author was at LEAST 14!
I took the floppy out of my last computer that had one on Monday and tossed it in the trash, good riddens. Talk about unreliable and limited capability data storage...
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
No offense, but I think you mean 75 MHz Pentium 1.
I know these have saved me a hell of a lot of time and trouble.
Bâshrat the Sneaky's Driver Packs
Oh, and don't forget this:
RyanVM's Windows XP Post-SP2 Update Pack (A new version is supposed to be out this Friday.)
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
When I built my last computer I decided to forgo the floppy drive, however when I went to load my RAID drivers during Win2K setup, I discovered that Microsoft, in it's infinite wisdom, will only take RAID or SCSI drivers off a floppy. There is no option to browse any other media.
In any case, I hooked up a floppy during setup and then tossed it in the closet when I was done.
I certainly hope that in future versions of windows we won't be forced to use obsolete media.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine." -- RFC 1925
Back in the day, before Apple so cruelly snitched our floppy drives from us:
We certainly couldn't fit 90 seconds of high quality audio on them!!!
I bring you... the iFloppy.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
I wish they would make flash drives the new standard, they are relatively cheap and flash SD/MMC / Compact flash cards are cheap enough that it would be easy to drive flash/SD card prices down really fast if everyone adopted them. What I think is the major problem is lack of bios support and standard case layouts for frontside USB ports / using CHEAP USB drives/media to boot to dos, floppy is still econical and portable to computers that lack USB ports, CDROM is write only, the floppy hangs on by a thread simply because it is read/write and you're most assured any older hardware you need to boot to dos from will have floppy support in the bios.
I was just reminiscing about that pain in your hand from using a hole punch to double side a bunch of five and a quarters. Doesn't quite work with DVDs.
The article looks like it was written by a tenth-grader (though the author claims to have graduated from high school). It's just a list of the obvious flaws and obsolescence of floppy drives.
But they're not totally obsolete. When most people have computers that can boot from a USB drive, floppies will be obsolete. Not before that time.
So to me the floppy still has a place in modern computing.
The floppy will inddeed disappear, along with RS-232 and Centronics parallel ports. C'mon people, it WILL dissapear someday but VEEERY slowly. This is not the first article about it, and is not the last one.
I propose that, from now onwards, everytime we see an article about "The demise of the floppy disk" or "The end of the floppy disk era" on slashdot, we treat it as a dud.
My only regret is that the floppy will go away without a suitable replacement. As some other posters have said, it was too bad that as the time was ripe for a replacement to be picked up, too many choices (ZIPs, JAZZ, Bernoillis, superdisks, LS-120, et cetera) were available, so neither one became the de-facto standart.
The floppy is dying, long live the floppy!
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
You're right. It's Slashdot comment fanaticism. I hope that no one reading what I wrote will start a war. Maybe George Bush will read it and use it as an excuse to invade Iran. Nothing like another war to make his friend's and family's weapons stocks go up.
--
If your gov't chose killing as policy, expect others to choose the same.
I create a Ghost floppy and then pop it in when Ghost asks for it. That way my backup cd's can boot it for me.
So I guess it depends on software a little too. Floppy drives are still used for utilities sometimes.
Boot.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
Had to download the SCSi RAID BIOS for a Dell, and it extracted onto two floppies.
I don't know what the f*ck this guy is talking about, it shouldn't take f'ing 7 paragraphs and pages of blather to be that wrong... I'm not even going to read the whole thing, since that would mean I spent valuable floppy BIOS upgrade reboot time reading something telling me what I'm doing is not really happening.
True, the floppy is dead. I do not have a floppy drive in my new computer.
But how do I update the BIOS without a floppy?
Hopefully motherboard manufacturers will realize this issue.
Works like, insert floppy to ghost. disk loads NIC drivers. network comes up and then load the
Have you tried to get machines 3+ years old booting off a USB fob? lol good luck!
I would say most of the people who dont "believe" in floppy drives dont repair PC's for a living. OR else have much better tools than I.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Floppy progressively loses its usage for personal use, but in the IT industry, it's still much used. I don't know anybody spending all the day configuring routers or simply setting up some labs without using floppies. Why ? because when you're building the network, by definition you don't have network access. And using a USB stick to copy a 20 kB file is simply overkill (not counting the fact that it is awfully difficult to plug anything in a USB socket without looking at it). So in those environments, the floppy is simply the best method. Moreover, you can give it and not expect to get it back, while you would never do it with your 1 GB USB stick.
Believe me, many people who configure switches, routers, etc... still use floppies a lot ! I still use mine several times a week, sometimes tens of times a day, and it was hard to find a notebook with a floppy drive these days...
willy
I've got an old laptop that doesn't have a USB port, and a few of my other computers don't have them either, some of the computers at my school either don't have ports or (for the newer ones) can't recognize USB drives correctly without a few reboots, and if there's no convenient USB port on the front you have to turn it around and look at the ports on the back to find it. Anyways, floppys are great for "rescue" disks if you can't get into the BIOS (passworded, can't flash it, whatever). I don't think you can boot off USB. There are so many things you can't do with USB, especially if you work with older computers or organizations that refuse to upgrade (It was good in 1995, it's good now!)
---
(_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Please help him
(> <) spread and take over the world.
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Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
I still have to use floppy disks daily to get programs from my computer to the CNC mills in the machine shop.
We just bought two new mills with floppy drives...
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Motherboard makers seemed to be slow to recognize that USB flash drives and devices could have easily replaced the floppy. Supporting booting from a USB device was so sporatically and poorly implemented that few people realize that their motherboard offers that capability.
That capability wasn't even advertized with my MSI motherboard, until one day, when I had a printer that contains media card readers was both on and had a flash card in it, and the computer would not boot because it said invalid disk. It took me a while to realize that my motherboard could actually boot from a USB device.
Also, while many MB makers have found ways to updating the BIOS from within Windows, few, like MSI, still haven't figured this out yet, and require a clean boot to a floppy disk before you can perform an BIOS update.
Windows is also to blame, as in some cases, it still relies on a boot to a floppy for some recovery and installation issues. Microsoft could have ended the floppies long life simply by forcing MB makers to use USB boot devices and ending floppy support in Windows XP. Apple has never looked back from dropping floppy support all those years ago, and OS X boots happily from firewire drives (if not USB as well).
Finally, while USB flash drives have dropped in price and gained storage space, they are doing it quite slowly, and the price still isn't as attractive as a box of floppy disks. Offer a cheap $5 128mb usb drive, and that should end any economic debate about the merit of the floppy disk.
There is little reason to keep the floppy, except because of poor hardware and software design. All those boasting the need to keep the floppy are only proving that the PC industry has been very slow to drop legacy technology because of poor adoption of new technology.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
(note this isn't flamebait as a general statement toward PC users. Its just that people like this could never install Linux and Mac users have had no floppies for so long theve forgotten they existed)
You know who I'm talking about the ones that call copying to a floppy or installing a program "downloading". The ones that don't seem to know you can save word files to the hard drive and use a new disk for every memo. The ones who come into a store and ask for a 5MB floppy because there 5MB file wont fit on their floppy or who while staring at the IBM compatible disc's ask if you have any HP discs for there computer. The one that don't know you can attach files other than pictures to an Email.
Note I've personally met all these people
As long as these people are around and uneducated we will still have the lingering technologies such as floppies, serial ports, PS2 ports, joystick ports and parallel ports
Well there ist still one reason for having a diskette drive, updating your BIOS.
Unless you have a socketed BIOS chip in a DIP, (always a wise idea), you have to boot your computer to DOS to update your OS.
Yes my numbers are estimates, but think about what you're saying.
What use is a CD-ROM drive as a floppy replacement? 0% efficient - you cannot write with it. I'm talking about the %age of computers with CDRW drives. I think in that case that 50% is a very reasonable guess.
On NEW computers we're probably talking 95%+ having a CDRW capable drive, but you have to consider the existing userbase.
Dead? As in obsolete? Obsolete is just a word. Get over it. Floppies will not die until the last person who ever puts on in a PC decides it's not worth it anymore. There is no debate and frankly if you're losing sleep over this issue maybe it is you that is obsolete.
If a Commodore 64 is what it takes to get you where you're going than a Commodore 64 is still a viable machine, if your needs are fulfilled by a floppy than a floppy is still viable storage.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
cold dead tand-em playing hands.
Does this mean I can finally throw out my disk doubling tool? Of course, I'm talking about the hole punch I used to notch my single sided 5.25 diskettes to make them "double sided"...
lets you boot from any damn device selectable by keyboard, unlike my slackware box with its firmware bios flash problem.
My files have got so largeand/or their architecture so complex that I burn to DVD (Not even CD-ROMs have enough space.)
Hopefully that will last me for a while...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Somebody tell MS to update thier F6 procedure when trying to install XP or 2k03 on newer hardware. The F6 option STILL only wants stuff on a floppy!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
The system BIOS is fixed in memory at F000:0 upon boot. It's a ROM. The CMOS is nonvolatile RAM.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It wasn't a bad article, but do we need to be reminded three times that floppies only contain 1.44 MB of data? And how many /. readers were enlightened to hear about the availability of jump drives?
An interesting read but it's a little pedestrian.
Of course I'm talking about the ever popular NT Offline Password Reset Utility ??? I mean who hasn't cracked a box with this? I used it all the time as a computer tech when people brought in their computers(verified they were theirs) and had to have fixed what little Johnny had done. Of course, little Johnny always thought he was a leet hacker on a Walmart special HP with a whopping 28.8kbs modem.... Whoo hooo.... ahhhhh memories. They usually found good porn though!
Death of the floppy indeed!
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Hmm, 10 months ago...
If you get the BIOS update in an image form (instead of some program for writing the disk), you can burn it to a CD and use that.
If. Too many BIOS publishers distribute updates only as "some program for writing the disk", and Roxio 4 can't make a bootable CD from a floppy image but only from an actual floppy disk. Where is good floppy disk emulation software for Windows and for Wine under GNU/Linux?
It will be the end of the floppy era when microsoft puts SATA drivers on their fucking installation disk.
Hmmm... I just considered installing a 5 1/4" floppy drive again. Got my IBM PC working again and that way I can get some software on it again - just until the IBM PC is part of the local network....
(need to install minix for that)
I agree with the author that Floppy Disks should disappear - they are antiquated. However, they come in handy quite often...usually when your computer crashes or has some sort of virus problem or if you need to install hardware. It is the only way that I know of to transfer files from my old Gateway PII to my new PC. Just the other day, I was estatic that I had installed a $7 floppy drive because I had unearthed some 12 year old floppy disks from my college days. I was able to recover old papers and resumes and pictures. It was a nice experience. My complaint about the floppy is that it isn't reliable. Data gets corrupted very easily. Disks can't be read. Bootable flash drives are the new floppy!
I like the new Floppy + Memory Stick Drives.
- MemCard Floppy Drives
They fit right in the drive bay, and basically can accept about every current form of memory media.
As a network admin, floopy drives are nothing more than a security risk. Now if I could just get rid of boot CDs and USB thumbdrives . . .
If a machine frequently wants to reformat floppies that worked on other computers, the drive is very likely out-of-alignment.
Part of the author's problem with floppy disks is actually a problem with old floppy drives that don't work properly anymore.
Are these ones like the one you saw?
http://iase.disa.mil/iaposters/
btw, some of the print-quality files are enormous, so keep browsing limited to the pdf versions to avoid (rapid) slashdotting. Maybe a kind soul can post a torrent of all of them if too many people hit it?
No really, I really need more "news" articles from /. about how, woe, the end of the floppy is nigh!
Do you see what I did there?
I still have a use for floppy drives :)
I hate having to leap on the keyboard to decide which OS to boot to on my desktop, so I have a grub boot floppy that has Windows as the default, and grub on the hard drive with Linux as the default. I want windows, I push in the disk, I want linux, I pull it out.
Stop being a poser and use a real OS.
Which "real OS" supports my paid-for flatbed scanner, a Microtek Scanmaker 4850 that was purchased before I had any idea of wanting to switch to FreeBSD or GNU/Linux?
Frankly there's simply no purpose to a floppy anymore.
A floppy drive is a device to store a real-mode operating system and a BIOS update program. What other device is compatible with the self-extracting-to-floppy-disk BIOS update programs that BIOS publishers distribute?
Yeah, but try getting [an 8cm CD] in a slot-loading player
Nintendo's next video game console is codenamed "Revolution". Its slot-loading optical drive will accept both 8cm and 12cm discs. If a game console's optical drive can do that, why can't PC drives?
If a device can be all 5, it can replace the floppy.
Oh, and at least as fast and as reliable as a floppy, but that's the easy part.
I don't know of a single complete solution, but between bootable CDs with boot-floppy emulation, a CD burner, and virtual-floppy device drivers I can do almost everything without a floppy. USB solid-state devices do the job for most people even though they don't boot on older computers. Sadly, most virtual-floppy drive device drivers can't take over the A: drive letter in a running MS-Windows system, but it's extremely rare I really really really need A: in a running Windows system anyways.
As far as I'm concerned, the floppy started dying with the first LAN; writable, bootable CDs were another nail in the coffin; and nearly-universal ability to use USB solid-state drives have done the rest. Give me bootable USB and the ability to map anything to A: and we can remove floppies and the associated support from from most new computers, motherboards, and cases, turning that $149 PC low-end into a $144 PC.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You can put a naked floppy in your pocket, easily. CD you can't. Because it's bigger.
The problem here is quick, easy, cheap, AND portable for small data transfer.
Much of media has, frankly, too much storage to be considered for small common tasks that require that. If I got a few huge tar files of some huge application, then sure, I'd go for a CD-RW or a DVD. But I don't need a gig of memory and a burn process just to port some C code over to another computer. The only method for small transfers that compares to floppy is email, but on computers with bad or no networking, what's the best?
If flash mem prices and capacities go down, I'd say that, hands down (since those things are pretty damned cool). Otherwise, it's the floppy.
A 128MB USB stick costs about $25 which is about the same cost as a floppy disk drive, plus 100 floppies and a damn sight more convenient.
And a damn sight less bootable when troubleshooting older machines.
Damn, forgot to preview.
Parent's title should read
Bootable, Writable, Portable, >1.44MB, and A:
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A floppy can go in your pocket naked without a problem.
:-)
A CD (if it'll fit in your pocket) is open to scratches, bending, etc. Stick it in a case to protect it and it just becomes laughable big for 'portable' media. When looked after properly yes CDs last longer than floppies, but that's just not reasonable a lot of the time.
So, your notion of a safe place to store valuable media is inside your pockets, instead of in a locked drawer, transmitted across an encrypted network, or safely transported in a locked briefcase?
Do you keep your reports for your boss crumpled up in your pockets for 'safekeeping', too?
Besides, the big thing with CDs/DVDs is portability. They're just too big.
Right. You'ld rather stuff 600 floppy disks in your back pocket, right?
But MiniCDs are too small capacity-wise.
If miniCD is only 10% of the size of a full CD, it can still store about 60MB, as opposed to 1.44MB for a floppy. But maybe you were just talking about pocket room. Face it, you'ld have room in your pockets for miniCDs if you took all those crumpled reports and broken floppies out of your pockets once in a while...
--
AC
You also failed to mention email. It's easy to get an email account (and free)
It's not free; it costs upwards of $100 per year for a dial-up Internet access account if you want to be able to access your e-mail where there isn't already a broadband connection that you're authorized to use.
Anyone can use this medium without hassle.
Unless you're away from a network, as described above. Or unless you're trying to copy a NIC driver or a modem driver.
dir /a /s > lpt1
(take out /s if you only want the current directory printed)
"The solution is to get a motherboard which properly integrates the SATA controller into the system chipset."
I believe (I could be wrong) that this has more to do with the "mode" of the SATA interface. If the SATA interface is in "legacy emulation mode" (or something like that), the hardware presents the SATA ports to the OS as traditional ATA devices (primary/secondary, master/slave). This limits available features (I'm fuzzy on the details) but maintains the best compatability. In "native" mode (there's some four-leter abbrev I forget), all the legacy IDE/ATA baggage is jettisoned and the OS sees the SATA ports for what they are, but the OS also has to have knowledge of and drivers for same to work.
I know on the Dell OptiPlex's we get, we don't need drivers for the one mode, but do for the other.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
First off, let me just say I hate, I hate, I HATE floppy disks. Nothing would make me happier than to see them all burn in hell. But it aint happening soon. I manage computer labs at a large university, and the friggin floppy is still the storage medium of choice of a large percentage of our students. Until generation Y--or are we up to Z yet--realizes that they suck, we'll have to keep supporting the damn things, and fishing the metal covers out of the drive when they break off the disk.
We tried buying computers without internal floppies and just getting a few external drives, but they didn't take the hint. We're replacing those this year, and the new machines will all have floppies. Contrary to popular belief, most kids are not very tech-savvy. They may know how to operate MP3 players and Playstations, but that's about it. Certainly there are exceptions, but they're a minority.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I use them to store firewall configurations for LiveCD firewall distros, like SentryCD.
A little while ago I was reinstalling windows 98 on an ancient laptop for a friend of mine. I had to download the driver for the pcmcia nic on my desktop machine, and downloaded it directly to a floppy disc. Ever since then, anytime I try to download something to some other path on my hard drive, Firefox complains there is no disc in the drive and I have to hit cancel several times until the message stops popping up. The actual download happens just fine, to the path I want. And then at the end of the download the No Disc pop-up comes up several more times.
I'm quite certain it's deliberate, there's a conspiracy to get rid of floppies, I just know it!
Surely I'm not the only one still using floppies to "reliably" boot a computer with problems...
..whatever new techniques we have.
I mean, not every computer can boot from a CD or from a LAN or
I find that a floppy is still the best way to boot and begin troubleshooting a computer...especially when there's a virus around the corner.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
The last computer I created about a year ago and I left out a floppy drive. I went to install windows XP Pro and of course my SATA RAID drivers were not included. Unfortunately that means it could not find a drive to install on. The only way to install those drivers was to have a floppy with those on it. To say the least, I was pissed. I had waited for a week for all the parts to come in and 3 couldn't even start to do anything with it. When Microsoft decides to allow you to install these drivers from another media I'll happily dump the floppy. That's the only thing I use it for.
While the floppy may no longer be useful in a "consumer" PC world (and I even have my doubts about that), it is still very much alive and well in the industrial PC arena, and in many electronics labs, just like RS232, RS422, and RS485 serial ports.
This is because good ole' DOS (yes, as in MS-DOS, PC-DOS, whatever DOS you want to call it, complete with command-line interface) is still used in many embedded and dedicated-system applications that work just fine without the bloat and instability that Windows would add.
Example, from my own lab: Programming and servicing many makes of Motorola 2-way radios. I could not do so were it not for a DOS-based system which has no ability to network at all. Many of the Motorola radio service software packages won't run on Windows, mainly because they were written long before Windows was in force and Motorola has chosen not to re-write them. Also, most such programs require direct control of the serial port, something that Windows versions above (I think) 95 do not allow.
Transferring radio data files from my archives to the programming computer is best done with -- you guessed it -- floppies. This includes transfer of files to older (pre-Pentium) portable systems for programming or service work in the field. Again, floppies are incredibly useful for such.
I want to add here that I've grown very tired of supposedly knowledgeable people arbitrarily deciding, just because they think a given technology isn't "very friendly" or that its "usefulness is now gone," that everyone else should kowtow to their "advice" and stop using said technology immediately. If Mr. McCollum truly does find floppies something he's come to "loathe with a passion," then he certainly has my permission to stop using them.
The article itself is really comparing apples and oranges in any case. Floppies were never meant to compete with things like USB drives. They were designed for one purpose, and they serve that purpose very well indeed. Heck, I think the fact that they've stood the Test of Time so well speaks volumes for their continued usefulness.
Here's my challenge to the computing world: Find me a DOS version that supports USB hardware, and a USB storage device that can talk to DOS over said hardware, AND that I can boot DOS from if I need to, and I will consider giving up floppies.
Until then, Mr. McCollum has my most cordial invitation (which I'll post to the actual article site as soon as I get home tonight) to take his myopic and repetitive "Floppies are Dead" editorial, and blow it out his Jump drive.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
You had pottery?
Here is where we had to store *our* data...
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/7/4/1
5 megabits can be etched into your fingernail.
-- Stephen.
If anyone knows, is there a way to load the drivers for any Third Party Drivers without using the floppy drive, please let me know . My email is spooky617@yahoo.com thank you for your help
'Hi Cindy, need any help with your C? CUPS? Well, then, how is the GIMP working out for you?'
Not according to BGNL!
You said it yourself. 512MB USB drive $70. Ten pack floppy $6.50. Floppy sounds cheaper to me. It all comes down to how many you need, no?
Anyways, you can give floppies away, or dump them in mailboxes, or throw them REALLY HARD IN THE WALL when you get angry. If you do that with USB keys you'll get broke in no time.
I've pretty much switched to USB keys myself though, but I miss the catharsis that comes from the breaking of storage media.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
Not a problem:
1) Download FreeDOS
2) Check out these articles on DOS and USB:
3) Make that USB Drive Bootable!
Of course, your BIOS must offer proper support -- this shouldn't be a problem for newer machines with pheonix bios.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Here's my challenge to the computing world: Find me a DOS version that supports USB hardware, and a USB storage device that can talk to DOS over said hardware, AND that I can boot DOS from if I need to, and I will consider giving up floppies.
b stick.php
;^)
Google search string: "dos boot usb"
http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm
http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromus
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5735
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=141064
to post a few...
I do this all the time in the engineering lab to run DOS utilities without floppies or hard drives and still have enough room for a decent sized log file collection.
Where should I send the consulting service fee invoice?
I thought floppies were dead until I found out that the Multistate Bar Exam utilizes them when taking the test via a laptop.
USB Floppy Drive, attack!
http://pixelcort.com/
USB keychains have three significant drawbacks: 1) They can be lost/damaged/stolen/forgotten. 2) They generally only work on MS Win2000 or later machines. 3) They may not be permissable in the workplace, or one may not have sufficient permissions to install it. When I need to transfer a file, I use network storage, AKA e-mailing it to myself on gmail. I don't have to remember to carry anything with me, and the data is then available at almost any computer I use. Also it costs me nothing. Obviously it's not a solution for the times I use a standalone network/computer, or a laptop on a flight or subway, but for me that's rare enough that I'd just use a CD/DVD/R/RW.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
If you set up a small XP network using the wizard, it still requires a floppy to move little bits around to other machines in the network. Thumb drives not accepted. Bit of a drag when I brought my wife's new EQ games machine home without a floppy, had to *sheesh* actually netadmin that morning. Waste of good playing time, I could have been up at Noble's Causeway beating up murkgliders.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Thanks. I've been looking for a place to put this:
Article summary: People used to use floppy disks. Now they're old and slow and don't hold much data and break a lot. USB thumb drives are cool, and by cool, I mean totally sweet! The purpose of the USB drive is to flip out and kill people.
My apologies if this article really was written by a twelve-year old. If so, it's a decent article, and it's not your fault that it got posted to Slashdot for jerks like me to ridicule.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You can't write protect a hard drive easily. Running a firewall/router from floppy and physically write protecting it is priceless when it comes to peace of mind.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
thing is while software like burning rom is nice for burning whole cds its not much good for using cds to quickly move files arround and since the switch of common oem supplied burning software to nero few systems seem to be set up for packet writing (nero always seemed to keep incd far more low key than adaptec did with directcd) also the two major systems for packet writing are afaict not compatible with each other.
yeah CDR is nice but for small files it always seems more of a pain than floppies.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
See, the iMacs were way ahead of their time!
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
ever find a random 78 that you'd just love to play? oh, wait, you cant, your grandmother decided that 78's were too old fashion and tossed out her player. Good luck finding another one :)
many bios updates require a floppy. period.
might be a good idea to keep a floppy drive around your house. maybe even put it in that box of stuff you dont have the heart to toss out. never know when you might run across an old floppy with interesting stuff on it. old war dialing results. bbs logs or e-mails. text files. grandma's love letters...
Example, from my own lab: Programming and servicing many makes of Motorola 2-way radios. I could not do so were it not for a DOS-based system which has no ability to network at all. Many of the Motorola radio service software packages won't run on Windows, mainly because they were written long before Windows was in force and Motorola has chosen not to re-write them. Also, most such programs require direct control of the serial port, something that Windows versions above (I think) 95 do not allow.
Ummm, you can network in dos. It's a pain in the tookus and you are limited to about 20 or so shares, but it's very much possible and actually practical in situations that you'd otherwise have to take floppies between systems.
Now whether you can load the TSRs and still have enough memory for your software is another story.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
In order to simplify installation of NT and 2K, I use the unattended installation feature which I believe comes with the developers pack. You can put very basic information like the machine's name, the license key, network id, etc in an answer file ON A FLOPPY DISK (the winnt.sif file), and have the installation CD install unattended for a single machine or on a series of machines.
I have yet to find a way to do this without a floppy drive, though I'd love to do so.
The floppy drive's fate was sealed the day AOL changed from sending unsolicited floppy disks to unsolicited CDs. Nothing is cheaper than free reusable media delivered to your mailbox!
I wouldn't know, as I don't use Nero.
floppys have been dead for years.. yet you still have no other option but to use one if your want install windows on a SATA hard drive, stupid windows installer does not support reading the drivers from cd/usb disk/network/etc.. so it seems its not the end untill M$ get off its arse and add extra support into the installer
There are still machines out there that are running windows 95 (without USB support), and the floppy is the only way to get data in or out of the machine. Also, without a floppy, how could I run my NASLite Server? www.serverelements.com
"Ummm, you can network in dos. It's a pain in the tookus and you are limited to about 20 or so shares, but it's very much possible and actually practical in situations that you'd otherwise have to take floppies between systems.
Now whether you can load the TSRs and still have enough memory for your software is another story..."
Oh, believe me, I know this. The issue, as you so accurately pointed out, is that the software involved is fairly intensive in its memory usage.
I've tried enabling networking with various service software packages loaded. They all crash with the network present.
As for my 'challenge' earlier, I forgot to add one other parameter. Make it all run on a 486-33 motherboard, because most of Motorola's early radio service software packages will not run on anything faster. Even on a 486-33, I have to disable the CPU cache.
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I think I'm on my third floppy drive for this box in 5 years, and the reason is because... I kept getting complaints "your disk won't read on my drive"... it works sometimes. Actually, all the drives worked just fine, until I tried to move data onto someone else's box. If there's a floppy drive on my next box, it's going to be for legacy compatibility only.
If I hand somebody a disc *now* for data that needs to go by sneakernet, it's a CD-R... I burn it, hand it over, and I can stop worrying, it's delivered.
And for those who've noticed, I have indeed changed my mind.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...we used to dream of having floppies. Such luxury! Oh, they were available, but they cost something like $400 for a single drive. So instead, we used tape cassette recorders. We converted the data to sound at around 200 bps (this was on a ZX81 -- others were slightly better), recorded it onto tape, and prayed that it would read back OK -- which it did, as often as half the time!
Unlike the pottery comment, the foregoing is actually true. (Plus, RAM cost about 32,000 times what it does today -- $50 for a 16 KB RAM pack in '81 or '82 vs. the $50 I just paid for a 512 MB SODIMM. And the processor clock is now almost 1000 times what it was then, while the real performance difference is even higher.) I'd say "and we liked it!", but really, cassette tape storage always sucked the big one.
Now, in the post-floppy era, we're back to recording data mainly on another medium designed for sound, the compact disc. In a way, we've come full circle.
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Oh, believe me, I know this. The issue, as you so accurately pointed out, is that the software involved is fairly intensive in its memory usage.
I've tried enabling networking with various service software packages loaded. They all crash with the network present.
There was an old trick one could do on older systems in dos... map some area beyond 640k into conventional memory disabling VGA support. Worked perfectly on a mono herc card and I seem to remember it worked on a VGA card though disabling the graphics. The extra 128k was a godsend when dealing with the need for TSRs and programs that needed almost every once of that 640k. But damned if I could remember the software that permited this trick.
I don't know motorola software well, have only used their pager programing software which pretty much requires a TTL level serial port and a 386. Other software got TTL levels from the paralell port which was far more sensative to timing issues. I feel your pain.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Only if you turn BIOS caching on. If you don't, then it's the actual ROM.
Logic steps in here: get an old system with 640k or 512k of RAM. Where exactly was that ROM going to get copied to? Nowhere, that's where.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Yeah, but your data density sucked.
--- SER
its the end of mine anyways..
viagra just arrived
> But when you look at more modern computers, you see that floppies are truly useless.
This is a bit limited. Sure, it's useless for two new machines, but every new machine I build, for myself or for clients, has a floppy drive because they're still around. If I get a machine with no floppy drive, I can't get data off of old floppies when a customer's dinosaur system crashes and that's their backup medium. If I build one for a client, they can't move data from the old machines they have around the office to the new machine easily. In ten years, you'll be right, but as long as there's a mix of new and old hardware in the field, it's just so much easier to install an FDD and be done with the trouble.
Virg
I am not sure if browser security handles file fields properly on html forms, I have always wondered if you could set via javascript values to point to certain known files.
.exe (and I wait 5 mins for a couple meg file to be sent, only to get a serverside reply about it being executable).
:-)
Since gmail doesn't warn if the extension is
In any event, I usually rename it to a pdf file,and it doesn't know the difference.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com