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Farewell To the Floppy Disk
s31523 writes "Those of us who have been in the IT arena for a while remember installing our favorite OS, network client, power application, etc. by feeding the computer what seemed an endless supply of 5.25" soft floppy disks. We rejoiced when the hard 3.5" floppies came out, cutting our install media by 1/3. We practically did backflips when the data CD-ROM arrived and we declared: we will never need any other disk than this! It is with sadness that I report the beginning of the end for the floppy: computer giant PC World has announced it will no longer carry the floppy disk once current supplies run out."
Rather fitting message from /.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I wonder if this means that MS will stop requiring floppies to install a 3rd party RAID controller during the installation.
(I bring this up because I had to install a floppy on a computer I was reinstalling XP on the other day so I could use the SATA drive! I kinda felt dirty after doing that!)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
(-1, Redundant)
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Why spend the first few sentences talking about how unnecessary floppies are, and how happy we've all been to replace them, only to start the fourth sentence with a lament at the demise of the floppy?
Also, this is not news.
Considering that most of the PCs I've run into in the past few years don't even have a drive to read them... perhaps it's for the best.
"This thing does science so hard, you say, 'I've never seen that much science.'" -Sam
> computer giant PC World has announced it will no longer carry the floppy disk once current supplies run out.
Since '95 the quality control on floppy disks has been so low that it hasn't been worth buying them anyway. At one time a SS/DD 5.25" could be used as a DS/DD reliably for five years or more without errors "just appearing". Maybe a patent ran out or QA began paying more attention to HD and CD manufacturing. Whatever it was, though, after '95 the floppy disks which I've bought have an average lifespan of about three months before random errors begin appearing on the media.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
It wants its article back.
For those who still upgrade their BIOS via floppy (which seems to be the last major use), here's how to format your USB key to be bootable: http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/serveropti ons/us/download/23839.html
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
I remember spending many a day playing Kings Quest 3 on an old Amstrad 1640 with a good friend. We got so used to swapping out disks when moving round ol' Daventry that we created a catchy catchphrase - "Pid 3 Ape". First prize for decifering this stupidy easy phrase is a nice warm glow.
We shall miss you, Sir Disk,
I recently found an old 3.5" floppy with some useless, but nostalgic data on it. So, I dug through my box of spare 'parts' and found an old drive. As I went to install the drive in my desktop machine to pull the data off the floppy I realized an important fact: that box has no floppy controller.
In that sense, the floppy has already been gone for some of us for awhile now.
Maybe you should buy some rather than fishing them from dumpsters?
At last Windows allows you to install drivers from a USB-stick instead of having to have a floppy which really knackered my day yesterday!!!
Are 5.25" soft floppy disks anything like my 8" soft floppy disks?
This seems to be more of a call way past the perceived death of floppies. I'm sure like most other people; floppies have been dead to us for years now.
CDR replaced floppies for software installation years ago, but the advent of cheap USB pen drives with massive storage, reliability, and convenience benefits over floppies at an acceptable price was the other shoe dropping.
I have quite a few 3.5" disks from my college days that I should go through and see if there is anything worth saving. By the time I get around to it I might have a hard time finding something to read them.
"Oh, say, can you see by the dawnzer lee light," sang Miss Binney
I am a Dell ESF tech and the floppy is the staple diet of all server systems. Ever try to install Windows 2003 native without even a USB floppy? Kind of hard to install without the RAID drivers.
Vista supports other media on that front, but even today, I see people buy the floppy option on even new PE2950 even if they support USB boot. Floppys are fairly gone from desktop, but even I had to install it for firmware updates to my desktop system.
Today the clouds are dry, and the birds have deaf and mute.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Dell has stopped installing floppy drives in desktops by default now for the better part of two years now.
I think what should be news is that although everyone is retiring the floppy drive and sending all the disks to the bone yard, nobody has come up with an alternative way to flash device BIOS's. Companies for RAID, Network and other devices sometimes still only release a floppy self-writing image file.
How about Vista? Has Microsoft finally learned how to load SCSI drivers and such? So is it "Hasta la vista, Floppy" (as in: farewell), or "Hasta la vista, Floppy" (as in: til the next time I need a SCSI driver)???
Was that ol'pal still alive... I though the burial had been a couple of years ago
Ave Maria
When I can upgrade the BIOS and firmware on every device I have to support at work from inside of Windows, *then* I'll bid goodbye to the floppy. With the wild mix of hardware most IT shops have to deal with, I wouldn't count on it any time soon. In the PC world, we're shackled to the floppy disk because of the low level at which it's integrated into the system, and as crappy as it is, some tasks still require it.
Yes, you can do that with the nifty-keen gaming motherboard on your gaming computer, but my army of Dell Optiplex GX150s and 260s still need me to use floppies (USB sticks aren't allowed in the building for ludicrously retarded "security" reasons).
Haven't used a floppy since... 2000? I bought a 10-pack because I needed one to hold a powerpoint presentation, the other 9 are still sitting on the desk, next to the new computer with no floppy drive.
How else are you supposed to get XP raid drivers loaded?
BTW: Since availability is going to be short, everybody had better stock up now!
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
so does this mean an end to the classic jokes about three and a half inch floppy's?
In 1998 when Apple released the original bondi blue iMac without a floppy drive, the floppy disc was ALREADY so absurdly useless that no computer user needed them. So, I proffer that this story is late by about a decade.
Floppy disks go the way of reels or punch cards, and good riddance.
Non-standard disk drivers and windows installs, requirement - floppy.
That one computer your company has had since the dawn of time that simply sits there and prints data to the screen never being turned off never being replaced because no one really knows how it works but it is "needed".
Geeks will need the sex jokes about floppy drives and hard disks.
I for one am happy to see floppy drives go. I discovered with windows 95 that I am an unfortunate person who ruins 3.5 disks when holding them too long. The floppy had a long and well lived career but it is time for it to step down.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
One day they will be obsolete -- until then theres a couple in my bag for that handy windows driver feature.
I've been trying to stop using them for at least 7 years
D
Nowdays i mostly use them once and then bin them -- I might have to reconsider this practice
It was just their time 5 years ago. Every computer that I've ever ordered, I've ordered without one. When they came with them due to a package deal, I've ripped them out. There are simply much better options available for removable, rewritable media.
Floppy disks were horrible for archiving, their capacity was outstripped by technology ages ago, and they were hardly portable across two different PC's. Small issues with head alignments on the two separate floppy drives caused unreadable disks, and a horrible symphony of noise from the drive. Good riddance to bad garbage!
BSD is dead.
Anyone else ever try to download big files from your school's higher speed Internet connection and then use WinZip or PKZIP to try and zip it up over 40 floppies, only to find when you got home, disk #40 had a bad sector in the readme.txt file and the entire archive was bad?
With as many Word documents I had to rescue for friends from those things with ScanDisk, and as many went bad after 6 months or less, I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Of course, the quality went to hell around the era of Windows 95. Before that, companies actually made good floppies that would last on the order of years.
I have wasted so much time with bad sectors, it is too depressing.
With el Torito and CD-RW's, it is easy to get by without a floppy drive.
just like many other items that no longer justify the space and power they take up.
I don't build pc's with floppies in them anymore but I do keep a few at home or around (with cables) just in CASE some wonky install needs one.
but at this point, I even treat cd/dvd drives like that. they don't get used often enough (for me) to justify keeping them installed in a box. more weight to have to lift (every bit adds up in a chassis) and more air blockage and power consuming for no real return (again, in my case). so what do I do - I use a usb or FW style external drive. connect when I need one, use it, then unplug. (hey do have usb floppy drives, too, btw).
its still not unheard of for MS software to demand it be fed floppies at 'f6 level' (sigh). until at least THEY get beyond that, they will still have a place in the IT shop. but that doesn't mean they have to be INSTALLED in every system, of course.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Should we now have to replace the "Save" icons on all out apps?
Or shall we keep it around as a memorial (and to confuse the next generation)?
What kind of dope would declare, "we will never need any other disk than this"?
:P
Just sayin'.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Its not dead yet. Just in serious peril.. We will still be using floppies in 10 years.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Boot sequence via toggle switches, to boot CP/M from 8"
I still have a stash of 8" floppies. (At 256KB data capacity, the bit domains are so big you can actually see the data with suitable preparation.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
well, since the first iMac came out ... last time i used a (USB) floppy was around 1999, for installing Windows NT on one of the first iBooks (the orange one), under Virtual PC. as the poor local IT supervisor in our NT/SAP based department at a university hospital. still have the disk!
of course, that does not answer your question.
Nostalgia only extending back to the 5.25" floppy... Youngsters!
Why I remember using 8" floppies. Now where did that 9 track tape drive get off to?
...is almost a year back. They were my backup 5.25 inch floppy disks from 15 years ago. Interestingly, I could only read them under Linux- my BIOS doesn't have FDD int13h support anymore. The motherboard doesn't boot from them anymore (so no DOS) and FreeDOS also uses int13h to read floppy disks.
:)
As a result, I could only run my ancient projects by burning them to CD first, then running them from FreeDOS. Kinda cute too, to see what my code looked like back then *shudder*
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Ah, I shall never forget those words that first gave me so much frustration with MS products.
Not ready reading drive A: ()Abort ()Retry (Y)Fail?
I have to stop and wonder why the majority of the replies show such contempt for the diskette.
Where is the older generation? The one that prides themselves on retaining their 5 1/4 inch drives, along with a couple of floppies?
Does no one spend hours pottering down memory lane with a dusty box of floppies and a disk scanner marking off the bad sectors, trying to retrieve those school assignments?
As far as I'm concerned, technology is only as beneficial as it is convenient. Sure a USB key is faster, and can hold more. But don't underestimate the comfort of familiarity for the hundreds of average joes trying to keep their head above silicon waters.
Let's be more accommodating guys.
I for one am sorry to see our floppy disk overlords go. Not that I use them anymore, but there are many memories. I remember running Ultima on my Apple II from a bunch of floppies and marveling at how much data you could store on such a small item. I remember getting a second floppy drive and thinking life was great. And more recently, I remember finding an Apple II emulator and an archive of old Apple II software stored as disk images. Even found my old high school buddy's shareware game -- still had his "if you like this game, send me $10" message!
A woman won't accept a 3.5" floppy.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Is there even a better way to load your raid drivers than using a floppy disk? If so please let me know LOL. I think they might be around longer especially with most people not wanting to go get ME 2 (Vista)....
I have a big stack somewhere of at least 50 of em. Only computer that will read them now is my mom's 7 year old laptop, after the last internal floppy drive lying around for emergency prposes broke. They've just been completely obliterated by the advent of cheap flash memory.
Humph. Those of us who have really been in the IT arena for a while remember when real geeks had 8-inch floppies.
I bet for a lot of us, we've not handled floppies in several years. And, while my computers still have floppy drives, nothing has been in them for quite a while.
It's way too late in the decline of the floppy to call it "the beginning of the end".
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What's a floppy disk?
I better go stock up on a couple hundred disks before they are discontinued. I still actively use my 486DX2 (I'm such a goddamn retrophile, eh?) and floppy disks are the only way to get data on and off it. I keep game installers on them because it'll only work that way in some cases. Unless I can find a USB controller that is compatible and get a driver for it. Then my flash drive might work. >_> Or... anyone suppose it would be possible to network this machine (DOS 7.1) with an XP box that sits next to it?
It wants that joke back.
once every 2 years this debate is put forth and a few articles are published about it. yet, floppy still stays and will stay.
floppy drives are just there for system recoveries, safe reboots and such.
cd roms and dvd roms cant be trusted to do that - their reader heads are too fragile and can go out of balance with the slightest impact if you are not careful. it is a hard day at work to find out that your recovery disk you have used 1 year ago is not read anymore by your dvd just when you need to safe boot your pc, or some other cds found around the office which were created by the same recorder.
floppy drives on the other hand are just too brutally effective - they are highly unsophisticatedly mechanical that, you can trust it to always work as it is tough to break, and it reads any floppy disk created by any floppy drive.
Read radical news here
How am I going to back up my punched cards now?!
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
How the hell am I going to install Oregon Trail now?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
... Amiga owners!
;-)
With no more 3.5 inch floppies how will they boot into Workbench
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Luckily there are still USB floppy drives available, so even if your mobo lacks a "real" FD controller, you can still read the disks.
I wouldn't waste too much time before you archive them, though; drives are only going to get harder to find, and the media itself that you have stuff stored on ain't getting any younger.
A slight bit of irony, though: years ago, when I first got an Iomega Zip disk, I was sure that it was going to replace floppies completely. (And for a while it seemed like it; there were some Macs in the late 90s that shipped with Zips in place of the FD drive.) So I dutifully backed up all my old floppies onto Zip disks. Not that long ago, when I decided it was time to retire the Zip for good, I went to pull the data off of its cartridges and back them up on CD-R...only to find that the disks were plagued with the "clicks." I had to go back to the floppies to get the old stuff again.
Taught me two good lessons: 1) always roll backups onto new media whenever possible (I should have backed those Zips up to CD-R as soon as I got a disc burner), but more importantly 2) don't ever trust that the new media will be more robust than the old. Even now, I still have the floppies stored along with the CDs (and now DVD+Rs), because I'm not sure which will last longer. Might as well cover all the bases.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Floppies are used to store flight data on the C-17. So, if they do "go away", we in the Air Force will still be buying them... Prob at $50 a crack...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That's okay: any geek worth anything has boxes and boxes of them, unlabelled, to shore up the dwindling reserves. I think I have two cubic feet just of Amiga software from 1985 on 3.5" discs, and I don't even know how much from Win95 backups.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
That was reserved for the truly floppy 5 1/4 disks (or even the eight inch ones I used on Datapoint machines).
I prefer to call the 3 1/2 ones "stiffies".
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
"Those of us who have been in the IT arena for a while remember installing our favorite OS, network client, power application, etc. by feeding the computer what seemed an endless supply of 5.25" soft floppy disks.
The first job I had at Zenith Electronics about 25 years ago had me building a dual 8 inch floppy drive Heath Kit that I had to use. I recall when a single sided, single density floppy for the Commodore 64 cost around $8.00. I had to buy a USB floppy for a system at work because some POS software assumed that data backup went to drive A: and I could not convince the user to use a mapped portion of her hard drive instead.
I remenber several applicatins assuming that drive A: existed.
zenray
I'm old enough to have had to use 8" floppies (RT-11 and RSX-11M). All I can say is good riddance. Between CD-/DVD-ROMs and USB "floppies", I haven't touched one in years. That's like getting nostalgic over a boot loader that you have to toggle in... oh wait...
Thank God! That means I can post that NIB 10 FLOPPY DRIVES!!!! auction on ebay, ?????, and PROFIT.
[INSERT DISK TO CONTINUE]
about
[INSERT DISK TO CONTINUE]
time.
[INSERT DISK TO CONTINUE]
Anybody
[INSERT DISK TO CONTINUE]
remem
[INSERT DISK TO CONTINUE]
ber the
[INSERT DISK TO CONTINUE]
128K
[INSERT DISK TO CONTINUE]
Mac?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Installing Office 95 on a Toshiba laptop. Twenty six (twenty fucking six!) floppies. After it loaded each one the installer would unpack files for about 3 minutes and only then would it ask for the next floppy. It seemed like about 3 hours to install. I also remember screwing up somehow (do you confirm not wanting to continue to cancel? Y/N/Abort) at some point and having to do this twice. Curse you floppy drive!
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Biggest dist ever seen on a floppy? Personally, I witnessed an install of Apple A/UX which came in a MASSIVE set of 50 floppies!
Yes, A/UX. Apple's *first* Unix.
Timely article, I just spent the better part of last weekend scoring boxes and boxes of old Mac floppies from storage and setting up an old SE/30 so I can migrate 800K floppies over to 1.4M ones so anything interesting (like MacPlaymate and other rarities; Rumor Monger NetBunny, etc.) can be rescued from the old disks. I was bummed when I figured out my shiny new Sony USB floppy drive can't speak 400K/800K, just the 1.4M, hence the migration of data. Now if I can just find a working SCSI hard drive I'll be set...
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
I hope someone finds this information useful.
Calling Ric Romero! Hey buddy! We've got a great new BREAKING NEWS story for you! Write an article about the, "death of the floppy disk." It's ground breaking!
Well actually, by your defenition now there's no difference... didn't you read the artical?
- My english doesn't suck. It's just inovative.
(Mind you I still have my 5.25 in disk in my frankenstein PC, mainly because I've nowhere else to put it. The disks I have from the start of the 90s are still readable though).
While the lose of something like a supply of floppy disks doesn't seem that bad from a PC standpoint (after all, PCs become obsolete fairly quickly), there are a lot of pieces of musical equipment that continue to use floppy disks, that are still desirable pieces of equipment.
# q80
Here are just a few:
http://www.vintagesynth.com/akai/mpc2000.shtml
http://www.vintagesynth.com/emu/emulator3.shtml
http://www.vintagesynth.com/misc/sequencers.shtml
So will A: and B: become directly usable by other storage devices under MS based OS's?
I'd like to see USB storage devices mount to one or the other by default. Particularly under XP if E: is mapped to a network share and a USB is put in it also mounts to E: meaning the share has to be unmapped for the USB to be accessible.
Or is MS's next (post vista) OS going to finally do away with the letter system altogether
ACK NAK RST
you insensitive clods!
... on all new computers. I've been seeing 3.5" flash drives now being sold, I just hope they catch on and become the new "floppy replacement".
I'm all for USB and thumb drives and whatever, but the flash all-in-one 3.5" flash drives make a lot of sense in terms of being able both to read and write from the media.
I don't see why modern technology can not come up with a pocketable 99 cent storage medium with capacity of around 128MB, but so far there is nothing else with a feature set of a floppy.
I well remember moving to 8 inch, then 5.25 inch floppies. My wife made me a few shirts with extra big pockets which could take a couple of 5.25s.
Even with all these fond memories, I prefer CD.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
disks carried all of 128KB of data - a huge improvement of punch cards and paper tape though...
Woo, giving my age away here.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Double Density 5.25" disks will NEVER die!!!!1!
---
CAPTCHA of the comment: contents
What? You don't still have a stack of 8 inch floppies?
IIRC you could rig up a floppy drive, so long as you were willing to solder 20 pins next to the sound chip.
Or if you were capable of walking to CompUSA and buying a $20 Imation USB Floppy drive. (It even came in Bondi Blue.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A woman won't accept a 3.5" floppy.
Oh, so many ways to turn that around:
1 - A woman wouldn't accept *any* floppy. Bring on the hard disks!
2 - While the 8" floppy may be larger, it only contains 256KB of "data". These specimens are clearly evolutionarily inferior.
I want to use both sides of my CD to store data.
God spoke to me.
I needed a floppy recently. Needed to update firmware for a chip (on an embedded system, not a PC) and the manufacturer's supplied utility only runs under DOS. The only way we knew to get a minimal DOS up and running was to make a copy of an old PartitionMagic boot floppy and add the utility to it. None of our Windows machines at work have the ability to make boot floppies anymore.
Bootable CDROM might help, but we need write access to store the last serial number written. Next solution would be to create a dual boot between DOS and Windows. Ick. Floppies are just handy to have.
But the industry has spoken - if Grandma doesn't need a floppy disk anymore, then no one else needs one either. (just try finding a new laptop that has both serial and parallel ports, apparently no one needs these anymore either except for deluded engineers)
> A woman won't accept a 3.5" floppy.
You just need to orient it vertically.
I still use floppy disks from time to time, and have been for 8 years now. Only a couple months back did a floppy start to contain errors.
Whenever I mention that I still use floppies, I get people hating on it, claiming how unreliable and small it is, etc. I've barely had problems with them. It makes me wonder what people do to their floppies. Many are being careless with their floppies, I'm sure. As for the size, most of the time I don't move big files, so it's not an issue. Most people who need to share massive amounts of data a lot are most likely movie/music pirates.
The CD-ROM isn't a good replacement, as it doesn't work like a HDD. You have to burn and erase them every time, which takes time and is annoying. I gather that this is why Iomega ZIP disks were so popular back in the day.
Now USB Flash memory sticks are used instead. I didn't have one until a couple months back, when a buddy gave me one. They're useful, but I can't help but worry about this read/write limit that people mention, so I use it sparingly.
With this in mind, copying files from/to my laptop (which doesn't have a floppy drive) was a pain until recently.
For those not familiar with the parent company of PC World, the former Dixons group, this is the third time that they've pulled this stunt. That is, with great ceremony, announcing that they are to stop selling a technology that is (supposedly) becoming long-in-the-tooth and obsolete, and getting lots of attention from the press, who use it as an excuse to describe the (supposed) passing of a particular technology:-
(1) Death of video recorder (i.e. VCR) in sight
(2) Dixons to end 35mm camera sales.
In the case of the VCR, their announcement was misleading at best, and more likely just a pack of lies. Dixons.co.uk (and the large-format Currys stores) *still* each sell a wide range of standalone VCRs, over 2 years later. (Visit dixons.co.uk and search for "video recorder").
IIRC the high-street Dixons stores (now called "Currys.Digital", ugh) still sold them long after the supposed phase-out date. I don't know about the 35mm cameras, but even if they were telling the truth in that case, it was a nice publicity stunt for them. Even more so for the floppy discs; you're stopping selling floppy discs and you felt the need to make a big announcement about it?!
Of course, the intention behind these announcements- besides the straight publicity- is to give the impression of Dixons and PC World as hi-tech, cutting-edge type places. When in fact they're mediocre at best; sometimes competitive, but just as often overpriced- particularly for more humble items such as USB and Ethernet cables, staffed by salespeople who like to pretend they know more than they do, flogging overpriced warranties and with a poor reputation. Online shopping is much cheaper, and with a better selection.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Alas, I have no dvd burner, so I'm still stuck with CDs.
... how do you stand it? And what do you carry your backup sets around in, a wheelbarrow? :)
... another hard drive. I don't know what the magnetic tape people have been doing while the hard drive engineers have been working, but they really haven't kept up very well.
Good god
Do your back a favor; you can get a DVD+R for less than $30 these days. (I have heard that DVD+R is better for long-term storage than -R, although it's a moot point these days because even the cheapest drives burn both.) Which is painful, because not that long ago I paid almost $500 for one, but I guess that's technology.
Not that backing up a modern hard drive to DVDs is even particularly fun; it's getting to the point where the best backup media for a hard drive is
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...of friends telling me they've "lost their hard disk" somewhere on their way to meet up with me to work on our project.
remember, the original iMac is the first machine that didn't have a floppy drive. It drove people nuts, but still, lots of people with their Beige G3 weren't using it at all.
Mac OS X does not support floppies (Specifically, internal floppy drives, USB is fine). There is a wonky driver avail to do it, but still...
"I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary." Through the looking glass and what
I've seen some stupid stories on Slashdot, but this is a top 10 for sure. I can't believe people argue about something like this. Get a life! Find something to do! Morons!
And for the record, I've used every type of magnetic media since reel-to-reel tape. I too still use floppies. But still, this is a DUMB story!
Hang on a minute; after some searching, it looks like even our favourite website picked up those stories (via the BBC):-
(1) "The UK's largest retailer of electronics is phasing out VHS VCRs." (Note that as I pointed out then, Dixons' "discontinuation" of the VCR took place before DVD recorders (*not* playback-only devices) and HDD-based PVRs had taken off.
(2) "Digital Cameras Force Film Off Dixons' Shelves"
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think you have a good point -- there really isn't anything that's the exact match for a floppy, in terms of cheap, ubiquitous storage -- but I think the demand for it has decreased to the point where people will only miss it occasionally.
I used to keep stacks of floppies sitting around, mostly ones conveniently sent to my home by the kind folks at America Online, to give to people when they needed some document or other. I rarely got them back, and it was understood that discs just sort of circulated around, like some sort of valueless currency. When you needed one, you just looked around until you found one (that looked disused) and did whatever you had to do.
Email has really replaced floppies. Not just email as a service, because obviously email has been around for decades, and floppies didn't decline in popularity until the last few years, but near-universal access to email, with the capability of receiving nontrivial attachments (greater than a few K but less than a few MB), and always-on connectivity. Before you had that, giving someone a floppy with a document was the most convenient method. Now, email is by far easier. If I was working on something, and needed to give someone a copy, using removable storage wouldn't be my first thought: instead I'd just send it to them.
The kind of removable storage you're talking about is only necessary for a few cases, either where the file is too big to be practically attached to an email, or the person doesn't have an email address (rare, these days) or other internet access to receive it. So in those cases, CD-R or CD-RW are made to suffice.
Overall, mini CDs or business-card CD-Rs would be a good candidate for replacement (and it's really not hard to put them in a little vinyl sleeve to keep them from getting scratched; 5.25" floppies didn't last long outside a paper sleeve either), but the market for them is just so limited that the economies of scale don't exist to make them as cheap as floppies were.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Floppy drives are rarely used and have outside air continuously drawn through them while the computer is on, collecting a significant amount of dust. When they're called into service again, the vibration of operation drops the dust and debris into the disk, and the full-contact readwrite head ensures that the dust is ground in nicely.
Back in the days when floppy drives were used daily, there wasn't opportunity for this amount of dust to build up.
One strategy to improve floppy disk reliability these days is to pop in a "sacrificial disk" and do a few operations on it before putting in the actual disk you want to read/write. Another alternative is to use a positive pressure case with an air filter on the intake.
This may sound weird, but is it possible to update BIOS via a HDD?
I have this old 'slim' laptop without its external CD/Floppy combo drive, and it simply doesn't boot from USB at all.
I also have a small unused 2.5" HDD, so I'm wondering if it is possible to 'burn' the BIOS image to it (via USB enclosure from another PC), then connect this small HDD and let my laptop boot from it?
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
You can't do THIS with CDROMs and DVDs. Pfft. A sad day indeed.
Even in Windows Vista, you still need a floppy disk to back up your logon credentials so that you can recover encrypted files if the OS fails. There is still no way to back this up to a disk file so that you can burn it to CD-R then delete it.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I still make use of floppies, booting off the media to flash bios' or whatnot.. or create bootable images to then port over to boot CD's.
But I rememmber the days before the CD-Rom when floppies were pretty much your only option. I carried 50+ floppies in a hard plastic case in my service bag, but they kept on going bad and were just too unreliable.
So I progressed to carrying around with me a Colorado tape backup 250 which had a parallel interface. I would load up a tape with all of my service utilities and take it to customer sites.
I then moved up in the world to get an Adaptec 16bit ISA SCSI card with bios, and I had a 60meg SCSI laptop hard drive. I could plug the card & drive into any computer and it would boot the system as usual fromt the C: drive and then I could access the SCSI drive as drive D:.
Then I was finally able to get access to a single-speed burner at a customer site and burn a service CD with all the OS install floppies on it, oh what a wonderful day that was to have Windows for Workgroups 3.11, DOS 6.22, QEMM386, Windows 95, network drivers, and everything else I needed on just one CD. I came out with revisions on a pretty frequent basis based on the year and rev: Service 95, service 96a, 97a, 97b... then it became a 2 cd set.
Then with the internet age, around the same time as my CD rev's started: Computers had been sold for years with modems in them (usually 14.4 baud) and AOL was mailing floppy disks to everyone. I could then go to a customer site, if I needed a driver I could usually round up an AOL floppy, install it on some computer and then dial out and get the driver I needed. I remember that nobody ever needed to purchase floppies, becaue they would get new AOL floppies in the mail every week and they would just reuse them...
That was the only time I ever had an account on AOL.. JRHelgeson@aol.com.
Ah, the good old days...
Joel
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
That's an argument that nobody makes. Sure, optical media can become scratched or warp if mishandled, and they're not truly archival. But floppy disks are notorious for becoming unreadable 5min after you've copied files onto them. For every unreadable CD burned by an 'out of balance' burner, there are probably 100 floppies that died because of the phase of the moon.
I discovered with windows 95 that I am an unfortunate person who ruins 3.5 disks when holding them too long.
... I have to ask. How does that work? Do you produce some strange magnetic field or something?
Okay
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
*pSig = NULL;
what about all the data generated over the last 30 years that is stored in formats that are obsolete, on media that are redundant...how will we read a report written in 1980 on the comuters of 2080?
I mean, researchers and scholars can still read, for example, vatican documents written in latin from 1000 years ago without extreme difficulty
But I'd be royally fucked if I needed to read a school essay written in word* and saved to a 5.25" Amstrad Gem formated floppy
With so much uncertainty, won't someone please think of our children
echo $SIGNATURE
It's just pining for the fiords.
This is news? Seriously, have you gone laptop shopping lately? How many of the models did you see with floppies? My Toshiba from 2001 didn't have a floppy drive (just an external DVD). My new Gateway doesn't have a floppy drive. My tower has a floppy drive that I installed for the sole purpose of disaster recovery back in the Win2k-to-XP transition days.
Most new computers don't have floppy drives. They were obsolete when I was A+ certified in '03 and they're obsolete now. Let's grow up and move on.
I'm not a datacenter operator, but don't most rackmount servers have RS232 ports? I would think those would be more useful than a PS/2 keyboard, as long as the BIOS supports it (and I'd hope any self-respecting server would). I'd rather deal with serial lines and a serial switchbox than full-on KVM, with VGA and PS/2, for a whole rack's worth of 1Us.
It drives me nuts that they've gotten rid of serial ports on some low-end consumer boxes; I would hope that they're not taking it off of server mobos, particularly ones that are designed for headless operation, since it ought to be the natural choice for a "local console." Heck, get rid of the graphics chips and VGA before you get rid of RS232!
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Even the article mentions that worldwide demand last year for floppy disks was 700 million units.
That's a heckuva lot of floppy-ness. What's even scarier (to old-school me) is that there are hard drives (admittedly still experimental, but still...) that could hold all of that data now.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I have read those stories soooooooooooooooo many times, but it just never happened. The CD-R/W, DVD-R/W, LS120, USB Stick, ... none of those devices ever replaced the floppy drive even tough every company said "Throw out your floppy disks!"
Besides... most of the BIOS upgrades are floppy drive dependant. Some companies do support floppy-less BIOS upgrades (dell for example) and some other companies flash the BIOS in Windows (HPQ for example). Everyone else has to create a DOS boot disk.
"Before that, companies actually made good floppies that would last on the order of years."
Hmmm, all that good Beagle Bros. Apple software.
Let's hope they'll stick around for a while - there are many instruments that write floppies that have a much slower life cycle than PCs.
But I have to agree with other posters: finding drives and media that actually *work* has become harder and harder. The drive in a 1999 Intellistation (Pentium Pro) is the best one around and all the ones in newer PCs have croaked or give me nothing but grief. I guess it's a case of "you get what you pay for" at prices between 5 and 10 bucks for the last few years.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
This is going to be interesting for exam takers. My law school, and later the California State Bar exam, allowed laptops with ExamSoft software (http://www.examsoft.com/). For each exam you turned in one disk and kept for yourself a backup disk with your answer (the data was stored encrypted); there was also a tertiary backup stored on your hard drive in the event both floppies were bad. For the CA State Bar, with its two essay blocks and two "performance exams" over a two day period (with the multiple choice multistate exam on a full day in between), with no overlap and the disks vanishing up to Sacramento, using USB flash drives for that would be fairly expensive. (Of course, it costs $500+ to take the exam, plus getting a hotel room next to the testing site etc., so the cost, relatively speaking, isn't that great, and they'd pass the costs along to the test takers in any case...)
Still, for that particular problem, the floppy was a fairly elegant solution. The answer files were a couple of hundred kilobytes at their largest, the media was basically disposable and low-cost enough to be, as was necessary, single-use...
geek. lawyer.
As a penniless compsci uni student, we used to buy the single density 720KB disks, then drill a hole in one corner of the disks to make them double density 1.44MB disks. The 720s were just lower quality versions of the same disk.
I shall miss thee dear floppies.
I've got an old 486 laptop that I managed to shoehorn Slackware Linux on board. There was no USB ports or CDROM drive that I could use to do the install. So I went out and bought a box of 3 1/2" floppies - probably the last I'll ever need. I put the boot and root images on two of these, and installed the OS using a parallel port zip drive to deliver the application packages. The zip drive makes a much better sneaker/backup net for my old machines than floppies; I went out and got a bunch of internal IDE zip drives which I intend to install on all of them (not a priority, because I've got network to all of the machines except the laptop - so I offload backups across the net instead.
All of my remaining 'hand-me-down' machines are pentium 3 or better now -- so I probably won't have to resort to floppies ever again, unless I decide to start an old computer museum (not likely).
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Those days you can even update your BIOS from Windows !
My motherboard is a 2 years old MSI and I can update the BIOS from WinXP.
Don't most recent motherboards support flashing via Windows? That way you can use whatever, seems to be less risk of bricking the board. What does EFI use for updates?
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
Has Vista finally lost its dependency on the floppy disk drive?
I was slightly annoyed when I found that I had a SATA card that wasn't supported by Windows. This meant that I needed the driver disk to install windows to my SATA drive. I was shocked that the only medium Windows XP could use for the driver was a floppy disk! It mean tthat I had to find and plug in a floppy disk drive, and find a damn working floppy disk. Not having used a floppy disk drive for several years, this was really really hard.
Apple abolished the floppy disk drive in 1998. SGI abandoned it some time in the 1980s and that was before CD-ROM was introduced (The OS was installed from tape).
And BIOS updates! Boy, was I pissed when I wanted to update the BIOS on my brand new HP DL140 1U server last month only to find out that the update comes on a floppy image. Normally I'd temporarily install an old floppy drive for such thing, but this is 1U so uses some slimline drives and hence does not have a normal floppy drive header. So... had to make a bootable CD. I don't even think a floppy drive is an option for this server. WTF are they thinking?
It is almost embarrassing, as a PC user, that floppy disks are only just now in their final death throws. Floppies and DOS. God, I'm sick of utilities that still use DOS. What a piece of crap "operating system" (if you can even call it that), DOS is/was.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
You can't have a battle of wits against an unarmed opponent.
...PC World's existing supply of floppies is projected to last until sometime in the mid-23rd century.
Miss a period and they go wild.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Q. Why can 3½" floppies hold more data than 5¼" floppies?
A. They're smaller.
Floppy Disks are far from dead. While they are not needed by most people, there are a lot of cases where you need one for power-user reasons or fixing glitches ("X.dll not found"). I had to go out and buy a floppy drive just a few months ago so I could flash my video BIOS (curse Nvidia for turning off the temperature sensor!) because I needed to write a backup and CDs couldn't do that. Floppys are not going to die until there is a cheap, writable , bootable replacement. Small hard drives could replace them in time, but not yet..
Great Intellect...
Almost all 5.25" disks I have used could store 1.2MB, not only 1/3 of 3.5" disks.
Oh BTW, I binned most of the AOL ones. They wouldn't reformat. Wondiws XP doesn't seem to be able to format a 720K floppy.
Squirrel!
http://capsoff.org/
http://www.anticapslock.com/
Haven't actually used one in more than three years, though - and haven't used it more often than whenever I need to read nostalgia files since I got a CD burner (SCSI, even!), in 1999...
To me the best thing about flash drives is that they work almost EVERYWHERE now. There are drivers out there for Windows 95 ("B" version and up), Windows NT, and even DOS! Ok, here's a link. They will work on my Mac, Linux and even the eComstation (that's OS/2) demo CD I tried!
I used to think Iomega would rule the world with their Zip drives, but the prices of the disks always remained insanely high and the disks and drives were not as reliable as they should have been. Also, I don't think I ever saw anybody other than Iomega produce zip-compatible drives. Probably patents and BS.
My Computer Science class is requiring that I submit program assignments on a floppy disk. She's not flexible about it, in fact she's very strict about even how to attach the disk to the paper (binder clip), using the proper cover sheet, and so on, or get a huge fat automatic zero.
I understand adhering to requirements. But floppy disks?
I guess the real lesson I'm learning so far is that some people will force you to use stupid old methods or standards or media because they said so and for no other good reason. Might as well tell me to submit it on five-and-a-quarter, it would the same inconvenience at this point.
It's about time, I hate floppies. Especially when my asshole friend unplugs the floppy drive in my tower and plugs the cable into another floppy drive sitting on the inside of my case that has a floppy in it. Took me too long to figure that one out.
when you had to switch off write-protection on your new software before installing it, because it would write over itself to prevent multiple installs?
So if anything happened to the first install, you had to re-buy the program.
They havent' managed that with CDs yet.
As a republican I feel it my responsibity to manufacture criminals. People need punished!
I recently was shopping for parts to build a new computer. I find it crazy that so many motherboard manufactures have removed AGP slots and one of the PATA ports even though there are lots of high performance gfx cards and PATA devices out there but they still leave floppy, parallele, RS232 and PS2 ports on the boards. I'm sure those parts are cheap but they take up valuable space for far more useful things.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Dork of a lecturer requires our code be submitted on a floppy disk. Shame none of my computers (macs and pcs) have floppy disk drives, and none of the Uni computers have floppy disk drives. I submitted it on a flash drive with a note saying that Floppy Disks died years ago. He gave me D. Fucker, you'd think given that he got a free 256Mb flash drive...!
Too bad you still have to spend a fortune on VMware to handle those floppy images. Would you rather spend $35 for a USB floppy drive or $300 on VMWare?
My Dell laptop does it that way.
P.S.,
This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
WTF??? IIRC, a 5.25" ( double sided ) floppy held 360k and a 3.5" floppy held 720k.
If you go back further to single sided floppies ( like the apple II ), you had 180k on each side. Heck I remember kits that made it so you could punch the other side of the 5.25" disk so you could write on both sides on the Apple II.
1.44MB floppies came out later on when High Density floppies were around, and we briefly had 1.2MB 5.25" floppies as well.
You never saw a reduction by 1/3 in any of those calculations...
=D
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
What, you think hardware makers are going to start including USB disks in the box instead of floppies? Could be but every version of non free software that requires a floppy for device drivers is going to be that much more difficult to install as it becomes harder to find floppy drives and motherboards that have the header for them.
Onward moves the upgrade train.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think most people miss the point of floppy disks, which was a really cheap way to give someone a file and never need the floppy disk back. Now, it seems to be true that, to transfer a file, we've got a couple choices: 1. email it if it's reasonably small -or- 2. burn it to CD / copy it to a flash drive if it's not I say these are the only two options because let's face it - how many end-users even know what an FTP site is, let alone where one is or how to use it? The problem with no floppies is that: 1. Burning a CD takes longer than copying a file to a floppy disk and most Word/Excel/etc. docs are still smaller than 1.44 MB. 2. Emailing sucks. I'm sick of having some yahoo (in the same company with a shared drive no less) email messages with 1 MB attachments to everyone, instantly creating 3 copies (assuming only 1 recipient): -The original, -In their Sent items, -In the receipients' inbox then deleted items folder. After a while, tripling the data usage for a single file is a pain, especially when users' PST files are 1-2 GB. 3. I'm not giving you my flash drive. Yes, you can borrow it, after I review it for a lack of my Quickbooks file that I just transferred to my accountant, but you're not keeping it. This means that I have to plug it in, review the contents, remove some of them if needed, transfer your file, click on the little "eject safely" button, let you borrow it and you have to remember to return it. No thanks. Just let me whip out a blank floppy and throw the file on there and give it to you. 4. I agree with the very first post. Over the weekend, I installed a Dell PE2950 that failed 95% through dell's installation assistant CD, while using the OS CD, using 3 different OS CDs. Using the same CD, I booted, pressed F6 to load the SAS drivers, and found out there wasn't a floppy disk in sight. Finally found one, but I don't see Microsoft's setup saying "insert floppy or USB key to browse for the drivers". Anyway, just all MHO.
Now how am I supposed to install OpenBSD?!
(please finish this statement)
Spiral out. Keep going...
Unless things have changed I remember needing a floppy drive to install XP with a SATA Hard drive. It was used to upload the drivers for the drive. Have things changed now?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
So floppies won't be making a comeback? I guess I can pitch my 5.25 of Oregon Trail.
Computing superstore PC World said it will no longer sell the storage devices, affectionately known as floppies, once existing stock runs out.
I also plan to stop making floppies available to my clients when I run out. I only have about 3 boxes of blanks on hand so, at my current burn rate, this could be an issue as soon as 2107.
Fortunately Fry's still sells floppies... I've had to buy three in the last year. Found one at Best Buy (in their "Homebrew" section) and twice went to Fry's. Best Buy was something like $30, Frys was $10. All the windows machines I've built recently have used RAID drives (RAID0 for myself, RAID1 for my mother and fiancee), and the requirement for a floppy had to be the most annoying problem of installing XP. I guess Vista won't have that problem, but I still need to maintain my XP boxen.
What's a floppy?
This description is a bit long, but it does eventually get to the point, I promise! I just installed Norton Ghost 2003 on my Lenovo x60, chose the option to backup hard disk, asked for some usb drivers, and Ghost rebooted itself into DOS mode, as it should. But instead of Ghost, I was greeted by a simple "Missing Operating System" message...
Inserted the Windows XP CD meaning to run diskpart and bootcfg... not so much, it told me that I didn't have any hard drives installed..
I don't have an SATA plug-in for the laptop hard drive... the X60 doesn't have a cd rom device (built in).
Fortunately, I have an old USB disk drive lying around - and, you guessed it! A 3.5" floppy or two. (this one happens to be a setup disk for Win 98... but who's counting)
So yeah, made a boot drive, booted off the Windows XP installed on the laptop, ran bootcfg, and we're good to go!
So, not totally useless!
...Except that, I guess, there's a good chance that you won't find a DOS that will recognize the USB HD adapter. In that case, you'll have to try the same trick using a spare IDE drive, then use ghost or g4u or something to copy *that* image onto the 2.5 HD.
I haven't seen these coming on any computer any more since 1999. Oh, you must be using PC's! Really, the G4's came with a ZIP drive instead of a floppy and I haven't used any floppy's since I got my CD burner in the late 90's of the past century ($250 for a SCSI external Plextor at 2x,1x,8x)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Enjoy your stay. Next up - firewire and USB.
Better hold on to something...
Love,
Steve
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
In the year 2000...
Does this mean Symantec software will stop asking me to create emergency repair disks on the A: drive? Please, please, please?
I've been using them to make me a fleet of Federation Starships! All I need now are hundred miniature warp cores and I can rule the alpha quadrant!!!
Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!!
their information just fades away.
VMware Server is free...
While the floppy is not common as it used to be, it is supported on every OS, and the 3.5" goes back over a decade, making it the optimal form of media for small amounts.
Why anyone would want to get rid of the floppy is beyond me. It is small and somewhat durable (unlike CDs). The hardware is very cheap, and a new floppy is even cheaper. USBs are not ubiquitous, and not all OSes support them. Remember, most people are not using the most recent versions of OSs.
The floppy will fade on its own one day, but declaring its death is just cheap showmanship. If the news meant anything to you, it means you recognize how good the floppy is too.
Have you read my journal today?
it really is sad when floppies are still readable long after CDs are lost.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Vista comes on one DVD-ROM or 4 CD-ROMs, so even latter Windows propeller-heads can enjoy feeding the beast! Perhaps Longhorn will reach Windows 95 levels (25+ disks).
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'll share some of my past rants about floppies.
Here's one on Userfriendly.org.
A statement to be thankful it's going away.
I can't find all my old rants, they're not all indexed.
I've done my best to avoid putting them into newer systems with one exception, when building a computer for someone else I used to put 5.25" drives from the junk pile in just to be a jerk. They would ask me if they needed that drive. I would say no. They asked if it was good for anything, I would say no. They would ask why I put it in their system. I would say because I have extras. They would ask if I would take it out. I would say no. Hey, if I'm building them a free computer they can take what I give them, if they pay me I'll leave crap like that out.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
To be honest I've never tried. I use it mostly with my newer Macs, which won't boot from floppies (IIRC: System 8 and later were too big to fit on a 1.44MB disk, even in their most minimal configurations, and most Macs without internal FDs won't boot under System 7, which was the last one that you could slim down far enough). I think that the elimination of the ability to boot into System 7, and thus use floppies as a recovery mechanism, was one of the things that actually allowed Apple to get rid of the floppy drive so early. Everything was already designed around booting from CDs. (That, and Macs don't have an upgradeable BIOS.)
I assume on a PC, that you'd be at the mercy of the BIOS, and whether it had a boot-from-USB option. (I'd hope that if the manufacturer omitted an actual FD controller that they would offer this as an option; it's a bit of a Catch-22 if they don't...)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I have several older machines that need this "extremely" low density form of data storage. I'll another buy box of floppy for them and if I don't use them than I can use them for museum pieces.
Or, in this case...
a -here)!
The Floppy is Dead!
Long Live the (insert-soon-to-be-obsolete-portable-storage-medi
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Problem is guys,..
:/
Booting from a USB key is easy in the bios but I'll be damned if it's easy to make the key itself bootable, you can do it under 98 easy enough (install VMWare and 98 just for USB keys, pah!) or use a HP tool which works on some USB keys (not all)
It's a sham! Vista and XP should have a right click and format as bootable for USB keys darnit.
On a similar note, how many fellow slashdotters would REALLY like to "install" their ISO's to their USB keys or USB hard disks?
I hate downloading a 600mb iso of Ubuntu, burning to CD then live installing to my laptop, it's so antiquated!
Why can't I "burn" the ISO image to a USB key - even if it means I need a seperate partition for data on the key and lose 600mb?
I hate installing from slow optical drives, seeking non stop and burning the head motors out on my DVD rom in my laptop.
This goes for installing XP and it goes for all kinda of bootable CD's - I REALLY wanna put that bootimage on removable storage.
Back on topic though, flashing the bios and pressing F6 in XP is impossible (in some cases) without a floppy or a heck of a lot of fiddling around
I remember it like it was 21 years ago...
I got a Peripehral Expansion Box for my TI-99/4A. No more cassettes! I was ridin' high with SS/SD floppy disks. My first box was by a company named Bonus.
EVERY single one failed after another, eventually. I was kind to my disks, but they failed miserably.
Later when I had a 1.2 meg floppy for my PC, I could read & write my own disks, but nobody else could read mine.
Cut to 21 years later, I bring out some old 3.5 inchers, and almost none of them read. But, some may have been Amiga formatted as the poster above said. Oddly, when I brought out the old Amiga 500, none of the Amiga disks failed. So maybe it was my drive.
They won't be missed. Thumbdrives all the way.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of older devices, such as oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers, which only have a floppy to save data. Replacing/upgrading one of these with new may cost from a thousand or so up to several tens of thousands of dollars.
Perhaps out of the mainstream, but not completely dead for probably 5 or 10 years.
Just this week, I was getting a couple dozen PCs ready to be installed with an OS. Most of them had no RAM or Hard drives, so those were the first things to be installed. These were Compaq desktops circa 2002, so I figured I would bring the BIOS up-to-date on all of them before installing the OS.
It turns out that Compaq engineers were drinking heavily when they designed these, because the bios image will *FIT* on a floppy disk, but the flash program requires a WINDOWS OS in order to run! I now have 20 PCs with no OS that need to run freekin Windows just so I can flash the bios.
The solution was to install windows 2000, flash the bios, then open the case and take the hard disk out and put it in the remaining machines one at a time.
You know what? Floppies make BIOS upgrades easier. DOS makes BIOS upgrades easier. Keep them around just to make BIOS upgrades easier.
Now, ask me about how to get a 20MB network card driver onto a machine when you don't have a CD-ROM. I'll let you in on a secret: It's the SAME FREEKIN COMPAQS!
Hey world,
Do you remember the 8" floppy disk? I've got a partial 10-pack of unused 8" floppies on my desk at work right now. I found them while cleaning up a client's IT room, and they seem to be a perfect condition!
Later,
-Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
Use Linux or OSX, like any intelligent person would.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
They'll be going for $20 apiece on eBay in one year.
so will vista support other media for booting a vista system that doesn't have drivers for the vital components?
And they are also needed to make those useful Rescue Disks.
...or are you just happy to see me?
I had a friend from South Africa bring me his laptop to diagnose a sound problem, some time around when the floppy disk died the first time (1998). The fix was pretty trivial, but it involved reinstalling some drivers. When I asked him for the install floppies, he stared at me and said "This computer doesn't take floppies." Eventually we worked out that while in the U.S. we call all generations of floppies, well, "floppies", in South Africa (and apparently other places as well) they call the 3.5" variety "stiffies". While this is logical, it was still rather humorous when I explained what a "stiffy" was in American slang.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Floppy you are to me
A work of ingenuity
I put you in
You do but spin
Reading data without
Ambiguity.
From your tracks doth spring
Bytes unerring
Except when integrity lost
In that case you'll get toss'd
But every other moment
You'll find me your proponent
For with your solemn aid
My files are portable made
~vga_init
I found a bunch of old floppies, every color imaginable, looking real old ad dirty. A blue one had "pass" written on it. Most of the others had no labels, or crossed out, or gibberish I can't read. I can only wonder what the hell is on all these disks, as I have no way of looking inside them. (laptop only, no floppy drive) Guess I will buy a USB drive, I should have one anyway.
The LS-120 drive (and its successor, the 250) had the potential to supplant floppy drives, though they sadly did not. First, they could read and write ordinary 1.44 MB disks (though formatting them was always a bit dicey) in addition to their own media, and if you had a dedicated "floppy slot" in your case, you could easily adapt the drive, sans faceplate, to masquerade as the floppy drive it was replacing. If you didn't tell anyone it wasn't just a floppy drive, then the seek noise and powered eject were about the only signs something was unusual. I think I bought a 10-pack of LS-120 disks when I bought the drive and never bought any again, but it was very nice for making backups on the fly, considering I only had a 1.2 GB hard drive. The only drawback was that it was ATAPI and did not use the floppy controller, meaning after a CD-ROM I was down to two spots for hard drives. Somewhat ironically, this is now a major advantage as floppy controllers are often lacking and ATA-to-USB converters are plentiful. I still have my old LS-120 in a drawer, and it was working when I put it there. If I desperately had to read an old floppy disk, I'd probably toss the LS-120 into an external USB case and try that before tearing a machine open. I wouldn't trust the two Zip drives in the same drawer to be anything but paperweights.
The 250 drives went even further, by allowing you to format regular floppies to some ungodly (and ultimately unreliable) capacity in the range of 30 MB. This typically left them readable only by the original drive, even other LS-250s tended not to be able to read them. Also, they had just a wee problem with bit rot. But they could still use 1.44 MB disks in the conventional manner as well, and the older 120 MB disks, and their own 250 MB disks. They were just too little too late -- by then, CD-RW had far surpassed them in the bang-for-the-buck department, as well as the raw space department. CD-RW discs (why the spelling change? I don't know) had dropped below $1 apiece by then, and the 250 MB media were still in the $12-15 range. If you didn't think the disc was ever coming back, CD-R blanks were about 35 cents.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Another of Jobs' projects, the original NeXTcube, also came without a floppy drive. Instead it had a cutting-edge but oddball 256MB magneto-optical drive. Too bad disks cost about $100 and pretty much nobody else used them.
I remember that at the time Jobs disparaged floppy drives as "1970s technology," and I thought: Yeah, and keyboards are 19th century technology, but I wouldn't want a computer without one. Eventually he caved and by 1990 the NeXTstation had a 2.88MB floppy drive.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Not a fond farewell, certainly. It's surprising that there are still some saps out there who want them. In terms of capacity these days, they are the absolute pits. Thinking in terms of reliability over the entire history of personal computers, the 3 1/2" is only slightly more reliable than the 5 1/4"/cassettes/paper tape. Software that relies on them or goes to great lengths to support them over flash ram, CD roms, etc...is hopelessly out of date. People who still store information on them are sick and demented. Data that is archived on them is at best trashed or just data you should have stuck in the trash years ago. Good riddance to the floppy drive. If only ink jet printers would follow them.
.. I recently opened a new Dell. All SATA, Even had SATA DVD drives. It had absolutely no standard IDE channels what-so-ever. It had a floppy controller.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
nobody has come up with an alternative way to flash device BIOS's.
Cough.... There are a variety of alternatives:
Some Award BIOSes allow the bios update to be performed from within windows! (I did this recently). It very smoothly.
I also recently encountered a "American Megatrends" (still in business?) BIOS (on a Pentium IV-based system). Its flash program was built into the BIOS... It would search for an image file on EITHER floppy disk or a (ordinary non-bootable) CD.
Frankly, the flash-the-bios-in-Windows option seems pretty appealing. The bios just needs memory to hold two images and the ability to switch between them.
do you see any bootable CD images here? and the BIOS upgrade for my ancient Biostar motherboard (so ancient it runs an Athlon 3500+ in an AM2 socket) was also a floppy image.
I'd love to shitcan my floppy drive... they're cheap, but flaky... and everyone knows about the inherent problems with floppies, but until vendors stop distributing diagnostics and BIOS upgrades on floppy and distribute them on CD images instead, those of us who deal with real-world hardware still have to deal with floppies.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Never heard of them.
Are they important?
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
Speaking of floppies, anyone know where a person can get reasonably high-quality 3.5" floppy disks, like they used to make in the 1980s, instead of the flimsy lasts-less-than-a-year ones you usually find in the store now?
http://outcampaign.org/
3.5" isn't bad for a floppy
i have a collection of vintage synthesizers. although sometimes files can be transferred via midi, midi implementation is not perfect or standardized across these devices from multiple vendors. some of these devices require single sided diskettes to boot, or single or double sided disks for loading sound programs or samples. in fact, just a couple of months ago, i purchased 300+ double sided, double density diskettes for some devices that cannot read high density diskettes. so although you modern-day computer-philes are all agaga over your usb drives, don't forget that hundreds of thousands of devices need floppy drives to be useful, or else they'll end up in your landfill, poisoning your water supply. wouldn't you rather the scraggly musician play his old keyboard instead?
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I happened on floppies (8.25) from 23 years ago at university & wanted to check if they still worked, so I've installed an old 1.2 Mb floppy drive and to my amazement it was ALL still readable (and writable). ... and did it bring back memories! LOL
I did not do anything special to protect these floppies, just threw them in a box & basically forgot about them until about a week ago.
What is the lifetime on these media? I've read recently (on slashdot) that there is a limited lifetime on CD's as well - what would that be?
time time everywhere and not a second to spare
I live in Kenya. Our community has dial-up internet and the school is all networked. People move files from home to work and vice versa all the time.
The USB key has replaced the floppy. Everyone has one. You download something on the network, then carry it home on the USB drive. In practical terms, email is limited to about 300k. A Gig USB drive does wonders.
Michael
Even in Windows Vista, you still need a floppy disk to back up your logon credentials so that you can recover encrypted files if the OS fails. There is still no way to back this up to a disk file so that you can burn it to CD-R then delete it.
You don't can't use "diskcopy" or some other form of disk imaging software?
I was thinking during the recent story about the new amiga OS the fact that such software wasn't common place on the PC, and diskcopy wasn't typicaly used on the PC. In fact, the only reason to use it is to make boot media.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Well, that joke has to be updated now, doesn't it? What's the similarity between women and computers? Only the older models accepts a 3.5" floppy.
I bought a cd-burner and set one machine up with the old adaptec 1542 and drivers and easy-cd software. Then i bought a zip drive to collect data from other machines for backing up on the dedicated 2x cd-writing wonder. The zip drive remains the worst purchase EVAR! It was quicker to dismantle both machines and mount the hd as a slave than to try and copy files to and from the POS zip drive. I haven't been back to my local computer shop that recommended and sold me that crap pile.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
BIOSes, thanks. Really, we're not idiots, we don't need the silly apostrophe to read it properly. Give us the benefit of the doubt.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I use floppys to backup my ICT coursework at school. When all the other kids with their USB devices have gone home, my teacher sighs as he watches me formatting yet another 20p disk.
i'm assuming here that the flashing software is dos based.
/s
if you have a windows 98 box and a windows 98 driver for your external hdd enclosure then it should be possible to do it.
alternatively get an IDE to laptop IDE adaptor and do it after booting from a windows 98 startup disk
either way use fdisk to partition the drive as one big primary partition
then do format :
the hard drive should now boot with windows 98's version of dos, you can now add anything you like to it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
PC World's cessation of floppy sales also got a mention in the UK's free "Metro" commuter newspaper, adding yet more to the years worth of "it's dead already" reportage (eg. BBC, 2003)
While it's true that the more savvy Windows user will have noticed the move to deprecation (if not complete obsolescence) of floppies in the Windows install process, and others that Word documents no longer fit, this hardly means the floppy is dead.
Floppies remain an efficient method of updating the BIOS (and simultaneously backing up the old image), and then there's the potential re-use of machines that can't be upgraded (if only the mainstream press would suggest it): ripping out the hard drive and making a diskless, hence quiet, firewall.
Yes, you can *sometimes* use memory sticks for these, but not everyone is that close to Microsoft's bleeding edge that they necessarily have motherboards with support for it.
That joke's funny again. Could it have it?
Avoid.
PC world are risking become as obsolete as the floppy disk, for much the same reason. The floppy was dead when the world got broadband, and moving small dishes of data no longer required magnetic tape.
Similary, PC world are being bashed by online stores that don't push bundled software on you. (I went in once, there were more ppl making returns than purchase)
Shouldn't it be "I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You could always use the Ultimate Boot CD.
How about all the legacy equipment that uses them? Though usb and various flash cards are finally starting to take off, spectrum analyzers and the like predominantly have a floppy drive on them, and you can's just swap in a dvd-rw. almost all analyzers more than a few years old are floppy based, and even a good number of new ones. These things are 30 grand plus (and by plus i mean 100k and more), many businesses aren't going to get rid of them because "everything has usb." i regularly have to swap files from the analyzer to an older pc, to the network, to my laptop because it doesn't have a floppy. pita.
I admit to have copy/pasted it from some fan site, since I liked the ring. But since I like the sound of your kind correction better, see below:
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
A woman won't accept a 3.5" floppy.
Or, mysteriously, a 300GB RAID5 array. Not even if you push it really hard.
It's more than cost-per-MB; in terms of that, floppies are actually quite hideously expensive and have been for some time. (The last time I bothered to compare was in 2004, but at that point floppies were $130 per GB, while DVD-Rs were around $0.20, you can see a chart here.) The niche that floppies filled, though, wasn't just "cheap storage," but individually cheap (to the point where the value of each disk was basically negligible) disks, and ubiquitously available drives, that were fast and easy to use (no burning to CD), reusable, and physically robust.
I agree with the GGP (parent to my original post) that there really isn't a direct replacement for floppies; instead, their duties have been split among a variety of new technologies. People who still need to move files between computers that aren't networked, can use USB keychain drives. Most people, who are on networked computers, just use email or other network services. Big files or large presentations can be put on CD or DVD; same with backups.
Floppies were unique in their time, because they did basically all of these duties (although, arguably none of them as well as what has replaced them in each case). I doubt that we'll see another technology do as many things as it did; the future is in more specialized tools.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
i can't tell you how many times i would use some old disk to rawrite a linux/BSD installer on, just to find that it didn't work. the first thing they tell you is that you should use new disks with rawrite... but i wouldn't remember that until i had toasted every disc in the house. i am sure many boxes of floppies have been purchased in the middle of the night under those exact circumstances.
floppies have always been pretty much disposable, but having a bootable disk that did something important (NTFS support for dos, NTLDR and NTDetect, password "recovery", emergency virus scanner, you name it) was often what saved the day for your typical IT grunt. i would use rawread or dd to take snapshots of important floppies and stash them on the network somewhere should the need for them arise.
i suppose all of those handy utilities can be rolled into a single live cd now but my liveCD kung fu is significantly weaker than my DOS kung fu :-(
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
In 1991, Commodore released the Amiga CDTV without floppy drive...
Okay, floppies were still useful back then, but then some people feel floppies were still needed in 1998 - the day when they were useless isn't really dependent on when a particular manufacturer released a computer without floppy drive.
Up untill a few years ago, I used to use floppy disks, but even with new ones, I would end up :)
with sector errors and other such crap when I got the file home. It's a shame, because I had found
(circa 1980s) floppies, including the 5 1/2 inch ones to be perfectly readable even after 10+
years. The very first IBM-compatable PC I owned had two 5 1/2 floppies and no hard disk in it, and problems, as far as I recall, were pretty rare (usualy caused by touching/damaging the exposed part of the disk). Of course now floppies from a technical standpoint are rediculously out of date, and
have been suplanted mostly by CD/DVD and USB thumbdrives, but suprisingly there are still some
recent peices of software floating around out there that use/require floppies for one reason or
another, and of course, there is the retro-computing scene for which a floppy drive in a PC comes in real handy.
Just the other day, I got an email purporting to have found the cure for floppy di... oh wait, diSks, floppy disks. Nevermind.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What we need is someone to create a device that plugs into the Floppy port, then provides an external USB port. Suddenly your computer will see the USB as Drive A! Somebody should be able to figure this one out!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for the are subtle and quick to anger.
Jeez,
;)
I said farewell to the floppy disk a *decade* ago. What took you so long?
#6495ED - cornflower blue
Anonymous Coward wrote:
>They had USB... you could just plugin a USB floppy drive if you needed it.
There was also a header connection, on the logic board, and with some sheetmetal
cutting it was possible to wire to it and run a Macintosh floppy drive.
The Macintosh floppy disks used 400k and 800k formats that required multispeed
spindle motors, and WEREN'T playable or recordable on 1.44M drives, but the
Macintosh mechanisms handled all three types. The USB plugin drives only
ever handled 1.44M. They wouldn't read the original Mac 400k or 800k format.
Imation's SuperDisk drive handled both 120MB cartridges and 1.44M floppies, but
that was the last gasp of compatible flexible disks for USB. Zip drives, still common,
are the only modern-ish floppy. I think they're up to 750 MB?
I will never let go of the floppy disk. I love it. You can rescue a lost system off of one. You need them for old computers. And by the way, there was a super-duper-hi-density floppy once that held 2.88 MB.
I didn't really say everything I said -Yogi Berra
If you have a Windows 98 system kicking around, that should allow you to format the USB harddrive and make it bootable with DOS from the command prompt. Possibly with Windows ME too, but I'm not sure as ME's command prompt was pretty crippled.
I have a camera I really like that uses smartmedia. I didn't feel like there was fair warning when they took it off the market. Now there are just a few sellers price gouging for what is left. $100 for 128Mb!