Slashdot Mirror
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.
(-1, Redundant)
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
> 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
It wants its article back.
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?"
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.
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).
so does this mean an end to the classic jokes about three and a half inch floppy's?
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.
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.
I have wasted so much time with bad sectors, it is too depressing.
With el Torito and CD-RW's, it is easy to get by without a floppy drive.
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)?
Its not dead yet. Just in serious peril.. We will still be using floppies in 10 years.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Boot sequence via toggle switches, to boot CP/M from 8"
I still have a stash of 8" floppies. (At 256KB data capacity, the bit domains are so big you can actually see the data with suitable preparation.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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?
A woman won't accept a 3.5" floppy.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I bet for a lot of us, we've not handled floppies in several years. And, while my computers still have floppy drives, nothing has been in them for quite a while.
It's way too late in the decline of the floppy to call it "the beginning of the end".
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What's a floppy disk?
It wants that joke back.
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."
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.
"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
[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.
I hope someone finds this information useful.
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.
So will A: and B: become directly usable by other storage devices under MS based OS's?
I'd like to see USB storage devices mount to one or the other by default. Particularly under XP if E: is mapped to a network share and a USB is put in it also mounts to E: meaning the share has to be unmapped for the USB to be accessible.
Or is MS's next (post vista) OS going to finally do away with the letter system altogether
ACK NAK RST
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I want to use both sides of my CD to store data.
God spoke to me.
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).
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
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).
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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
That's an argument that nobody makes. Sure, optical media can become scratched or warp if mishandled, and they're not truly archival. But floppy disks are notorious for becoming unreadable 5min after you've copied files onto them. For every unreadable CD burned by an 'out of balance' burner, there are probably 100 floppies that died because of the phase of the moon.
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.
It's just pining for the fiords.
Ode to the floppy -
the only thing that stores more
with a hole in it.
This is news? Seriously, have you gone laptop shopping lately? How many of the models did you see with floppies? My Toshiba from 2001 didn't have a floppy drive (just an external DVD). My new Gateway doesn't have a floppy drive. My tower has a floppy drive that I installed for the sole purpose of disaster recovery back in the Win2k-to-XP transition days.
Most new computers don't have floppy drives. They were obsolete when I was A+ certified in '03 and they're obsolete now. Let's grow up and move on.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think I might have some eight-inch floppies somewhere. No, I'm not boasting; the young guns might not realise that they're what we had before five-and-a-quarter inch floppies.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Miss a period and they go wild.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Floppy Disks are far from dead. While they are not needed by most people, there are a lot of cases where you need one for power-user reasons or fixing glitches ("X.dll not found"). I had to go out and buy a floppy drive just a few months ago so I could flash my video BIOS (curse Nvidia for turning off the temperature sensor!) because I needed to write a backup and CDs couldn't do that. Floppys are not going to die until there is a cheap, writable , bootable replacement. Small hard drives could replace them in time, but not yet..
Great Intellect...
http://capsoff.org/
http://www.anticapslock.com/
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.
My Computer Science class is requiring that I submit program assignments on a floppy disk. She's not flexible about it, in fact she's very strict about even how to attach the disk to the paper (binder clip), using the proper cover sheet, and so on, or get a huge fat automatic zero.
I understand adhering to requirements. But floppy disks?
I guess the real lesson I'm learning so far is that some people will force you to use stupid old methods or standards or media because they said so and for no other good reason. Might as well tell me to submit it on five-and-a-quarter, it would the same inconvenience at this point.
I think most people miss the point of floppy disks, which was a really cheap way to give someone a file and never need the floppy disk back. Now, it seems to be true that, to transfer a file, we've got a couple choices: 1. email it if it's reasonably small -or- 2. burn it to CD / copy it to a flash drive if it's not I say these are the only two options because let's face it - how many end-users even know what an FTP site is, let alone where one is or how to use it? The problem with no floppies is that: 1. Burning a CD takes longer than copying a file to a floppy disk and most Word/Excel/etc. docs are still smaller than 1.44 MB. 2. Emailing sucks. I'm sick of having some yahoo (in the same company with a shared drive no less) email messages with 1 MB attachments to everyone, instantly creating 3 copies (assuming only 1 recipient): -The original, -In their Sent items, -In the receipients' inbox then deleted items folder. After a while, tripling the data usage for a single file is a pain, especially when users' PST files are 1-2 GB. 3. I'm not giving you my flash drive. Yes, you can borrow it, after I review it for a lack of my Quickbooks file that I just transferred to my accountant, but you're not keeping it. This means that I have to plug it in, review the contents, remove some of them if needed, transfer your file, click on the little "eject safely" button, let you borrow it and you have to remember to return it. No thanks. Just let me whip out a blank floppy and throw the file on there and give it to you. 4. I agree with the very first post. Over the weekend, I installed a Dell PE2950 that failed 95% through dell's installation assistant CD, while using the OS CD, using 3 different OS CDs. Using the same CD, I booted, pressed F6 to load the SAS drivers, and found out there wasn't a floppy disk in sight. Finally found one, but I don't see Microsoft's setup saying "insert floppy or USB key to browse for the drivers". Anyway, just all MHO.
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
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.
Life is too short to proofread.
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.
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.
Another of Jobs' projects, the original NeXTcube, also came without a floppy drive. Instead it had a cutting-edge but oddball 256MB magneto-optical drive. Too bad disks cost about $100 and pretty much nobody else used them.
I remember that at the time Jobs disparaged floppy drives as "1970s technology," and I thought: Yeah, and keyboards are 19th century technology, but I wouldn't want a computer without one. Eventually he caved and by 1990 the NeXTstation had a 2.88MB floppy drive.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
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