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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."
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.
> 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
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?"
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.
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).
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?
"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 hope someone finds this information useful.
People who actually needed one went with the much easier plug-a-USB-cable-in solution. At the time, an LS-120 that could read and write regular floppies was only a few dollars more than the early USB floppy drives, so people without big network pipes wound up with something that was useful for system backup, too.
The rest of us got cheezy SCSI-II USB bridges to plug in our SyQuest and tape drives....
Of course it should be possible to network that machine to the XP box.
The network stack for dos has been available free from Microsoft for years.
Basic Netbios & IPX/SPX are pretty easy to setup. (Surely I wasn't the only one to play Doom and Duke Nukem 3D on a LAN.)
TCP/IP is also doable but is quite a memory hog; you'll definately want to setup a custom boot sequence to boot with or without network support.
I'm not sure how well DOS networking plays with domains, and active directory; it *used* to work against NT server 3 and 4, but I've never tried against 2K or 2K3. (I've networked DOS 6.22 to Windows 2000 server, but not in a domain configuration.)
You can run a DOS file server as well, but that eats even more memory. Other than that I found that there were occasional stability issues in some cases when doing large file transfers (large, lmao, ok ok...transfers in the 10's of megabytes).
cheers,
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).
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.
Nah, in 1998 CD burners weren't in my college's computer labs. They had CD readers, but those handy US flash drives weren't really around back in 1998. I actually sunk some money into an external zip drive because I could connect it to all the computers that I had access to, and it would work with little hassle. Highspeed college downloading in the computer labs wasn't that useful when you had a 1.44 MB storage limit. Oh, you could chat til midnight fine, but getting downloaded warez'd games off those computers was a chore. It wasn't until 2002-2003 or so that WinXP and desktops with USB drives and CD/DVD burners really became standard for my work computers. On the lan, you don't need USB drives, but it is very helpful to have 512MB of easily carriable storage. Of course for those that download anime and such the 4.5 GBs of DVDs just don't cut it, I have to lug around my external 300 GB HD for that kind of storage. I'm just waiting for the day that we have 1 TB of removable easily to transport storage.
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
Did you ever try and mount a floppy on System 6 or 7 or MacOS 8? There is a reason that Apple abandoned floppies early on. They were unable to build hardware and software capable of handling them. Over all three versions of that OS and on many different machines I never had a better than 50% sucess rate at mounting a floppy. Failure to mount it often crashed the OS completely.
Floppies have remained very functional and reliable on every other major OS and standards adherent hardware.
Apple wants you to think you did not need or want floppies to hide their inability to cope with them.
Its odd though, I recall the AppleIIGS handling 5.25"s quite reliably. Something happened along the way.
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).
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
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
I wouldn't worry about the read/write limit (actually it's just an erase/write limit; reading doesn't wear out anything) unless you plan on using it as a swap disk 24/7 for a couple of years straight. Most flash memory chips are guaranteed for at least 1 million write cycles; you'd have to write to the same block of memory over 270 times a day, every single day for ten years to wear out that block. And some flash chip firmwares and drivers are designed to spread out the wear among all the blocks, so if you only use a fraction of the capacity (like it sounds like you would) it should last many times longer than that. In normal use, USB ports will probably be replaced with some new incompatable port long before you get anywhere close to the write limit.
USB thumbdrives are bootable.
I'll join in the Old Fart Chorus (kind of a geek barbershop quartet?) by saying I kept one stack of cards for each language I coded in in college, Cobol, Fortran, PL/1 and Assembler. I never copied the JCL cards, but I remember that we had to run our non-Assembly code at "Class X" which gave us a decent 4 or 5 hour turnaround, but Assembler had to run at "Class Z" which realistically meant at least 24 hours. The joys of ABEND debugging, keypunch machines (you knew you were coding when you heard the bits being chewed out of the cards) and coding sheets (I still have a pad of COBOL and a pad of general purpose sheets).
Geeze, the Geek equivalent of "When I was a boy I walked to school in the snow uphill both ways"...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Personally, I just leave a sacrificial disk in the drive when I'm not using it.
I have 25+-year-old Commodore drives around here somewhere; I haven't looked at 'em in a decade, but I'll bet that they, too, have sacrificial disks in them at this very moment.
The nice thing about my scheme is that whatever dust would fall to the bottom of the drive falls on the disk; you spin the disk every now and then, the dust gets trapped inside the disk; you pop the disk out, boom, the drive is already clean and ready to go.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Wow, you certainly have an interesting perspective on reality.
ZIP disks WERE poised to take over the floppy market, as an alternative to LS120 and Syquest cartridges.
CD burners DID come out at around the same time -- but back then, a Sony Spressa 2X read / 1X burn was worth $2500 and blank CD-Rs worth worth $20 each (figures in Canadian dollars). CDs were also quite finnicky back then, and SCSI controllers for the burners weren't exactly cheap, either (you needed something like an Adaptec 1542, worth about $250).
ZIP was -much- cheaper, and in fact, in much more widespread use where people needed to share large files (i.e. print media). The drive sold for about $250, required no special controller, and 100MB cartdiges were $20 each... about the price of two boxes of decent disks.
So, your first 600MB with a CD burner back then cost you roughly $3000, while your for 600MB with a ZIP cost you roughly $350. That's $2500 worth of media-savings -- and back then, a gig was a LOT of data -- you'd have to make before a CD-burner would pay for itself.
Finally, for some end-user perspective -- just before the ZIP drives came out, I bought a fast 1GB harddrive for $1350 (again, Canadian dollars.. ISTR thinking that was around $950 US at the time). I thought that disk was going to be big enough to store all the data I'd ever generate.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Those of us who've been in IT for a long while remember when the OS and power application lived on 80 column cards.
(OK, I don't, but my boss tells me about it all the time and I have screwed around with the manual punch machine we still have)
SYS 64738
BTW, in Finnish, a floppy is literally translated as "lerppu" and only refers to the 5.25'' kind. The 3.5'' disk is called "korppu" which makes a nice rhyme, and literally means "cracker" (the kind you eat). Unfortunately this has led to a number of drives ruined by some kids inserting actual edible crackers into the drive ;)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.