Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Farewell To the Floppy Disk

Posted by kdawson on from the first-they-came-for-the-Morse-code dept.

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."

2 of 616 comments (clear)

  1. Floppies won't be missed by TheMidnight · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Hey I still have punch cards! by that+this+is+not+und · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When my father first started programming for IBM there was a tiny 'drum' memory that was temporary, a tiny amount of 'random access r/w memory,' a high speed card reader, and a high speed card punch. I think the whole CPU was vacuum tube at that time.

    Writing and running a program consisted of:

    1. Typing out your source code, one line of code per card.
    2. Getting the 'compiler/assembler' program card deck out of storage.
    3. Reading the 'compiler/assembler' deck into the computer and starting it running.
    4. Loading your source code deck as data cards.
    5. The compiler/assembler would churn away and then punch out your object card deck.
    6. Move the object card deck from the card punch 'out' bin to the card reader 'in' bin.
    7. Load your 'object' card deck into the computer and start it running.

    For each pass, and each change to your program, the computer would have to punch out a new 'object' deck. There was no other intermediate storage available.

    I'm pretty sure I am remembering this right. Dad was a programmer a long, long time ago, and I only know this process from him telling it to me.