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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."
(-1, Redundant)
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It wants its article back.
Are 5.25" soft floppy disks anything like my 8" soft floppy disks?
so does this mean an end to the classic jokes about three and a half inch floppy's?
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)?
There's a silver lining: the poor reliability of floppies is what taught me my good backup habits.
The !silver lining is that because of their poor reliability and the stress it's caused me, whenever I see floppies (or tapes) I throw them to the ground and stomp them to bits. Even if they're not mine.
Boot sequence via toggle switches, to boot CP/M from 8"
A woman won't accept a 3.5" floppy.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
What's a floppy disk?
It wants that joke back.
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.
Yes, Vista does not require install from Floppy. It will support CD/DVD and USB now.
Ok, so do I invest in 2.5 gigs of memory, or do I use an unused teac and floppy.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
[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?"
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.
Floppyless installation, aye? I've heard that they applied for a patent...
Nobody who still has a stack of 8" floppies is reminiscing about those newfangled 5.25" floppies.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I want to use both sides of my CD to store data.
God spoke to me.
You can't do THIS with CDROMs and DVDs. Pfft. A sad day indeed.
Does this mean that the Dell-heads will stop telling me that "No floppy drive" is a valid a reason not to switch to a Mac?
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
*pSig = NULL;
It's just pining for the fiords.
Ode to the floppy -
the only thing that stores more
with a hole in it.
That's not a bug, it's a feature to make sure you don't copy that floppy.
Miss a period and they go wild.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Oh COOL, I can upgrade everyone to Vista. They won't need a floppy disk, but their printers and half of their applications won't work... And the computer will need twice as much RAM, a faster processor and a new video card. THAT's a better solution than a $15 floppy drive...
There was a 112-floppy release of slackware at one point. I put it on my 386, carting the same floppy back and forth from the internet machine.
I am trolling
It is seriously not trivial. The steps required are arbitrary and complex. The whole thing is very poorly designed. Or you have to use some dodgy bit of third party software. Until Windows fixes this it just won't be ready for the desktop.
How to annoy people. Tell a person with one computer all about slipstreaming ;0.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
USB floppies are trickier than you think. The main problem is that the data interface for a floppy is only accessible when you open the shutter, but when you plug in a usb cable and spin up the floppy, the cable tends to either damage the media or get pulled into the disk, causing it to jam.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
In South Africa the 3.5 inch disks were nicknamed "stiffies". This led to a certain amount of hilarity when some South African people talked to us in the UK about them.
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
You had me at 'really'...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.