Slashdot Mirror
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!
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."
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.
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.
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!