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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 second that, as well as being the easiest method of updating the BIOS (which happens more often than not on my DFI Lanparty nf4 sli-dr expert).
The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
I second that, as well as being the easiest method of updating the BIOS (which happens more often than not on my DFI Lanparty nf4 sli-dr expert).
Given the abundance of USB-Flash keys, I would hope that most modern PCs can be booted off USB devices.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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."
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?
That's right! It doesn't seem silly at all when you think about it. My mom's a writer and routinely sends manuscripts, articles, etc to different publishers. One particular publisher insisted that she send a printed copy, refusing email attachements, CDs or any sort of soft copy, citing that 'the paper medium has been proven to be much more reliable than digital, yada yada..." Ridiculous, what a bunch of luddites I thought.
I was already thinking of asking giving them a piece of my mind about that when it occured to me even I couldn't even open my old 1990s files anymore. Not only were some of them in Iomega Zip disks, they were in old proprietary formats. (Well, that's another topic altogether.)
Another case more to the point: About a decade ago, my family decided to cobble together some sort of "time capsule" to be opened in about 50 yrs. It had several items including some files on 3.5 floppies. My dad asked me how were my grandkids supposed to read those things by then?
I guess the moral is, I shouldn't have been tied down to any (digital) storage medium, arrogantly thinking it'll always be the standard.
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.