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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!
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
Back in the middle of 2003 I bought myself a new machine and decided to forget the floppy drive. I haven't regretted the decision once.
East Coast Brewers
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."
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.
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
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
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
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
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).
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.
Besides, the big thing with CDs/DVDs is portability. They're just too big.
A possibility would be mini (8cm) CDsDVDs I guess. But MiniCDs are too small capacity-wise. MiniDVDs are rare, and both have compatability problems fitting into several players.
CDs/DVDs certainly have their place, but large-scale floppy replacement is not that place.
...and I wouldn't bother buy any now. Your 5 year old scratch floppies are probably more reliable than the fresh new (!?) ones you can buy in the shop.
As an OS installation engineer, I tend to use floppies a lot to prototype network boot scenarios - it's a lot quicker to work directly on the A:\ drive than keep cleaning/rewriting a CDRW. Anyway, as I have found out to my dismay, at least 40% of new floppies (in this case brand name, recently bought from a large computer store) cannot be formatted or have serious write errors. I can only guess that as a dwindling market, far eastern manufacturers are trying to squeeze as much profit out of them before the demand dries up altogether.
-Jar.
Together, We Can Make Slashdot Better. I Do NOT Mod ACs. - Check Me Out
USB drives are replacing the floppies in one of the last places that floppies are widely used: public education. On a per MB basis, floppies are already more expensive than USB drives. It is just that most do not need the capacity. These drives will likely replace the floppy as soon as the cost is below $.10 a MB, or a 128MB for around $10. Nearly every middle and high school kid has a phone, so a USB drive attached to the phone will not be a big addition.
Removable media cannot be dead because we do not yet have ultrapersonal portable computers. I see geeks carrying usb drives now in the same way we were carrying floppies when i was a kid.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Floppy will be around for a while.
For my part i will never order computers without or even server as a matter of fact without them, unless they stop making the hardware.
A floppy is useless for the regular home user since he burns is data on cd on put it on a usb stick but for troubleshooting, it's always good to have a floppy handy.
but how do you save the original bios image to a cd? yes i know some motherboards will still boot after a failed flash, but not all will.
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
The media is a lot cheaper, and support is near universal.
I bought a 512MB USB drive for $70 last year. That is approximately 13.6 cents per megabyte. NewEgg has a few floppy disks. The ten pack costs $6.50, or 65 cents per disk, or 45 cents per megabyte. This is over three times the cost of a USB flash drive per megabyte. How is a floppy disk cheaper? Also, how many computers do not have USB drives anymore? Talk about universal support, the majority of computers have USB and a version of Windows or MacOS that support these drives out of the box.
The floppy is dead and will not be missed.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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.
Right you are. Floppies have been "obsolete" for at least a decade, in the sense that they're too small for any useful data exchange. But as long as the IBM architecture remains the model for commodity computers, people will continue to have floppy drives. You may go for years without using yours, but when you need it, you need it bad.
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