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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 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.
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.
Its not dead yet. Just in serious peril.. We will still be using floppies in 10 years.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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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.
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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.
I liked floppy discs, but the reason that the 3.5" 1.44MB floppy survived so long was that no-one came up with a truly universal successor (the Zip disc had some success in its day, but never became "standard"). Guaranteed bootability, universal support, etc... made it a near-essential even in the face of more advanced technologies that would otherwise have killed it far earlier; but you can see why no-one wanted to pay much for one.
I would say that its day was over, but people were saying that 2 years back. Truth is, despite PC World's attention-whoring announcment, the floppy won't die suddenly, it'll just continue fading away.
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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.
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.
From a technical standpoint, Minidisc is exactly that.
Unfortunately, Sony has pretty successfully killed their own format.
They're too afraid of piracy, to actually sell decent products. Instead they always offer too little, too late.
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