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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"
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 */
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.
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
"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.
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
Amazing revelations to start my morning off with.
I want my 15 seconds back reading your reply.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
You can't double the storage capacity of a CD-ROM with a hole puncher though. ;)
Actually I'll be glad when floppies are completely gone, it drives me batshit when people refer to 3.5" floppies as "hard disks". Argh!
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
Dude, I hate to be the slashdot spelling nazi, but you mispelled the word "yet".
HTH!
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. Now the standard response at this point is: but there're perfectly good alternatives - USB drives, DVD-ROMs, etc. All true, but it's a lot quicker to make a bootable floppy in an emergency.
This is where the serious fun begins.
I had a great reply written up and saved to floppy, just as I was about to post it my floppy died.
- Toby
It sort of makes sense, but it gave me a huge amount of amusement when I was there.
Not as funny as the American who used to phone up our office (in England) and announce his name by saying "Hello, I'm Randy", until it was gently explained to him why it was sending the secretary into a fit of giggles every time he called.
...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?
once apon a time I worked with apple support UK when the iMac was released.
We soon started getting calls about the built in modem not working.
Turned out the modem was set to find a US dial tone and couldn't on a UK phone line.
We contacted Apple head office UK to get a resolution.
Their resolution, tell customers to download a fix from the internet...
via the non-functioning modem.
"No problem we will send the fix via snailmail on floppy disk"
Small problem iMacs do not come with floppy disks...
ERR 411[Max number of witty sigs reached]
The PC world just hasn't caught up with those in the know yet. I haven't even *seen* a floppy for years.
Why is this modded "insightful"?
The arguments and stats are all totally bogus.
It should be modded "crap"
1992 called, they want their poster back.
You wear a helmet when you're driving, don't you? You know, in case there's an emergency.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
In a crisis situation, a moment's distraction is frequently all that's needed for someone to jump a dangerous person from behind (assuming someone else on the plane is coherent enough to do that) or trip the attacker as he/she stomps his/her way through the cabin to point a gun at the person who threw the floppy disk.
Also, I recently built a floppy boot disk with FreeDOS, a SCSI driver, and a firmware flasher to update the firmware on a SCSI tape drive so that it would recognize newer models of cleaning tape so that the drive would actually let me use it.... Saved my backside.
Bottom line: sure, I'm paranoid, but in a pinch, a 3.5" floppy disk can be a real lifesaver... in more ways than one. :-D
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
(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
Hmm, 10 months ago...
I still outfit every computer i build with a floppy. Only 10 bucks, and you never know when it'll come in handy.
Well you never know when 10 bucks will come in handy either.
I walked into the dining room of one of (imho) the nicer old pubs just behind Princes street (on Rose Street, I think?) and asked the matronly hostess to be put on the waiting list for a table. Without thinking, I said "Randy" when asked for my name. I recall looking down at the list for a few moments and noting that her pen was poised over the page but not moving, and then looking up into this poor woman's face to see that all color had left her features. It dawned on me, in that frightening moment of clarity, that I "wasn't in Kansas anymore". I corrected myself and gave my proper name, but she eyed me very harshly from across the room for the entire time I was there.
The problem with going by a name that you don't use much is that when addressed by it, there's this funny little moment where you look around for this other fellow until it dawns on you that, yes, you are the person they're talking to.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R