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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 */
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.
So what's the new format for booting into DOS to flash my video card BIOS?
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.
To me, there's still nothing quite like a cheap, simple, effective floppy to bootstrap with (e.g. etherboot) in a large computing environment.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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"?
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
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.
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).
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
Not if you own an ASUS motherboard. All 3 of my Asus Motherboards can be flashed in windows with there handy "ASUS Update" Utility. It goes on the internet and finds the newest bios for your motherboard and from a click of a button backs it up and installs the new one. I don't know how "smart" it is to do from windows but worked fine for me on my Asus PII 350MHz and my Athlon 64 system.
The days of floppys are slowly deminishing. Heck I can boot my system off a USB Thumbdrive or a flashcard (connected through my printers flash card reader) if I wanted too. The only systems with floppy drive is my Pentium Pro and the floppy doesn't even work. I was looking at my pictures and noticed I still have the floppy cleaning thingy in it from like 2000.
Oh and out of my 50 some disks I bet you about 10 actually work.
Solosoft.org - Your Online Resource to Nothing
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.
...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?
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.
You know mastadons were herbivores (barring the occasional insect they get with their foliage), right? You might have gotten trampled by one, or gored by one of their tusks, but not eaten by.
Unless this was some sort of ice age factory farm, where they fed even herbivores with the remains of other animals...?
You know, this is not common knowledge, but that's how the Mad Mastadon epidemic started way back when.
They had to cull the herd, but didn't realize how extensive the disease had spread. Turns out every Mastadon they had had contracted Mad Mastadon disease. Hence they were all killed. This is why Mastadons are extinct.
Too bad.. Mastadon burgers were amazing.
Live forever, or die trying.
The PC world just hasn't caught up with those in the know yet. I haven't even *seen* a floppy for years.
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
1992 called, they want their poster back.
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
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
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.
Hmm, 10 months ago...
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?
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.
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