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The End of a Floppy Era

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the it-ain't-hard-to-make-jokes dept.

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!

5 of 786 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm by SpooForBrains · · Score: 5, Funny

    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"
  2. New Format by Antimatter3009 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So what's the new format for booting into DOS to flash my video card BIOS?

  3. No logical replacement, though by mrRay720 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"?

  4. I remember... by greenguy · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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?
  5. Re:I realise I couldn't remember if I had a drive by drakaan · · Score: 5, Informative
    until then the floppy is very far from dead, just like the rs232 port.

    <offtopic>Actually, that's now called an EIA232 port, since it's no longer just a recommended standard. Changed in 1991, but since it had been "RS-232" for about 30 years at that point, nobody paid much attention.</offtopic>

    --
    "Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law