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The End of the 3.5-inch Floppy Continues
JoshuaInNippon writes "In a brief press release buried within Sony Japan's website, the company announced that it would be ending sales of the classic 3.5-inch diskette in the country in March 2011. Sony introduced the size to the world in 1981, and it saw its heyday in the 1990s. Sony has been one of the last major manufacturers to continue shipments of the disk type it helped develop, but had ended most worldwide sales in March of this year. The company's production of the 3.5-inch floppy ceased in 2009. Sony noted demand, or lack thereof, as the reason. The company's withdrawal is one of the final acts in the slow death of the floppy era."
How can an "end" continue? Surely an "end" is a point? Another example -grumble- illiteracy -grumble- Slashdot editors -grumble-.
I needed the anouncement of the floppy disk demise as reminder that it is not already dead. Bought my last disk at least a decade ago....
How hard is it to actually operate an obsolete system with something vaguely like the original parts? It's in an awkward gap: too obsolete for modern mass-production to be willing to sell you, yet too complicated for you to DIY it. This makes for an odd gap of basically unmaintainable infrastructure. If you want to maintain infrastructure based on pen, paper, and the abacus, you're good. And if you want to stay on the current state-of-the-art for technology (or within a few years of it), you're also good.
But there's this weird gap in between. What if you want to play Nintendo games on a CRT fed by an RF adapter? Better either stock up on a bunch of legacy parts that were made before they stopped mass-producing them; or: find some way to ramp up your DIY tech to be able to produce that level of part; or: manage to implement something close enough in software so that your emulator is good enough.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Those things still weren't dead?
Ever tried to get a driver for your HD controller into Windows during setup?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
that it doesn't take this long for all other non-solid-state storage to die.
The day when hardisk crashes and unreadable disks are things of the past is long over due.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
I know how they feel. There's also a lack of demand for my 3.5 inch floppy...
It didn't help that with the growth of rich content, and growing sophistication (i.e. software bloat), that typical files sizes have reached or exceeded 1.44 MB. Figure Fry's today had a 32 GB thumb-drive on sale for $59.95. That's 22,756 "1.44 MB floppy disks", in a form factor that's less than 1/10th the size of the floppy. I recently found a cache of old disks, and I'm wondering what would be an environmentally friendly way to dispose of the little space wasters???
RIP FDD :(
Reasons I like floppies:
1. Give-away-able - if I want to give someone a file, I can hand them a floppy with it on. No, not every circumstance involves having Internet access and not every document should be sent across the tubes. Nor does everyone who I want to give something to necessarily have a computer on them for me to slot my USB key into.
2. Long-life - most of my floppies from the '80s and '90s are still readable. Can't say the same for hard drives, and certainly not so for CDs/DVDs a few years old. IME a floppy is much likely to be readable in any floppy drive than a CD/DVD in a random CD/DVD drive, too.
3. I just drag-drop; no fucking burning/converting/e-mailing/something else process!
3. Everything boots from them. USB booting seems to be hit and miss on many motherboards, and software to support USB booting is more scarce.
I can't wait for the mainframe to finally succomb to market realities and die - the mainframe has been on the verge of extinction for my entire career in computing, which started in the mid-80's...
To borrow a line from Monty Python, "(It's) not dead yet!"
Ken
Yes, it's extremely unreliable and prone to failure and data loss. Yes, the storage space is pathetic. Yes, many modern computers don't have a drive to use it. But there are still some cases where it can be better than the alternative: when you need to record something very fast, very cheap, and very small.
E.g.: college. Professors and instructors are still stuck in the 80s and demand students give a "physical" copy of their work, rather than accept it by e-mail or online CMS. The typical college student, naturally, would not bother recording the work on a physical medium until 2 minutes before class. CD recorders are just a tad slower than floppies, and besides, colleges don't like upgrading their computers that often, so even today many labs and libraries have computers with a floppy drive but not a CD burner. So floppy to the rescue.
And, of course, any sysadmin stuck with legacy hardware that can, in lieu of a hard drive with an OS, can only boot off a floppy.
Flash keys are far better for personal data storage of all but the largest data sizes, to both CDs and floppies, but unfortunately even the smallest data-size flash drives are too expensive to use as a discardable medium, akin to a CD or floppy. Still waiting until small-sized flash drives sell for less than $1 a piece, so we can record something on them and give away without consequence.
Maybe this is a good place to ask if anyone knows where I could get a 5 1/4" floppy drive with a usb attachment. It's no problem finding them in 3 1/2", but I need a 5 1/4". Also, do any modern motherboards support two floppies? I have a bunch of 5.25 and 3.5 floppies that I need to archive, and the last 2 pc's I've encountered only supported one floppy drive installed - no a: and b:.
What if you want to play Nintendo games on a CRT fed by an RF adapter?
All cartridge-based Nintendo consoles that have RF output also have composite output, except for the Japan-only original Famicom and the rare top-loading NES. The front-loading NES, as well as all Super NES, N64, GameCube, and Wii consoles, has a composite video output.
or: manage to implement something close enough in software so that your emulator is good enough.
In that case, you still need to ramp up your DIY tech in order to make a cartridge reader so that you can copy your Game Paks to the PC to make ROM files for use in an emulator. Retrode doesn't support NES yet.
This seems to be true with technology in general. Railway museums are a good example of this; the steam locomotives with their more-or-less blacksmith level technology have a better future as working exhibits than 1930s-era diesels. The restoration of the Flying Yankee streamliner required a great deal of effort to recreate the long-out-of-production injectors for its obsolete diesel engine.
As another example, the Seattle Museum of Communications has several working telephone switches representing a variety of different switching technologies. The most recent of these is a Western Electric #3 ESS, a small computer-controlled analog switch that was built in small quantities and was obsolescent when it rolled off the production line. It has a variety of proprietary chips that will never be made again, and spare parts are extremely scarce since most of the #3s built were scrapped. Contrast that with the 1920s-era panel switch, a Rube Goldberg contraption for which parts could be fabricated by any competent machine shop.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html ... but you need a 5.25" drive to attach to it. It acts as a controller/interface.
Guess I gotta hoard some drives and floppies for my ancient data recovery and preservation projects soon.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Figure Fry's today had a 32 GB thumb-drive on sale for $59.95.
True, a USB flash drive is good for carrying your own files around. But floppies, CD-R, and DVD-R have the advantage of being so cheap they're disposable, which lets you give a copy of a file to someone else.
How hard is it to actually operate an obsolete system with something vaguely like the original parts?
A bit like maintaining a classic car, I suppose: a combination of using old replacement part stocks, and (occasionaly) newly fabricated parts where it doesn't hurt the overall look & feel. Or hurts the owner's taste...
If you're careful with your classic [whatever] and don't use it everyday, such old stocks can go a long way. And there's always the option to take 3 halfway broken ones, and make 2 working ones out of those.
So many failures...Betacam, CD, Hi8, miniDV, HDV, DAT, S/PDIF, AIBO; (some in collaboration)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Sony can't fit a decent rootkit on a floppy...
How hard is it to actually operate an obsolete system with something vaguely like the original parts?
You don't - either recycle it or set up a time capsule for it. I'm sure you have better things to do with your time on Earth.
Technology falls behind - get used to it. What if I want to keep writing my letters in a mechanic typewriter? What if I miss New Coke? Unless I can afford my own metalworking shop / chemical plant / brewery AND have the time to spare, I'll have to roll with the times. As for nostalgia, you may well have an objective appraisal of the newer stuff. It's not like Doom beats the snot out of Halo ;)
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Damn, how will I continue to make Goatse Rescue Floppies?
It does feel weirdly like living on borrowed time, though. It's something that, apparently, nobody can make anymore, but you can straggle on because at some point in the past they made a whole lot of them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you take a soldering iron, and you create a hole in it, it doubles in size!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Great examples, thanks! It's something I think about periodically, which seems to relate to different kinds of steady states. There are some things that, at any reasonable point in the future, we can expect to recreate if we need to. But there are other things that are very dependent on the precise current conditions, which sounds uncomfortably chaotic. If you take "what 100 smart people could recreate in a year if they had to" as our safe fall-back position, there's increasingly a really large gap between the current state-of-the-art and that safe fallback.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sony: Oh yes we can... oh wait. No we can't. That is right. So rootkits on our floppies at all. No sirree. Wouldn't fit see. Yeah.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Due to copyright law, nobody can sell you a slipstreamed XP disc but Microsoft, and Microsoft would rather sell you a copy of a new operating system that needs more CPU, more RAM, and more battery power, and has less support for the applications and peripherals that you already use.
Although the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts $1.00 in 1988 at $1.87 today, the real rate of inflation is much higher. From a popular perception standpoint, Wal-Mart's low prices are masking the double-digit inflation in healthcare, education, and housing (prices are still historically high relative to wages). From a BLS calculation standpoint, BLS pulls dirty tricks like considering only rents instead of home purchase price, considering that houses in West Virginia are equivalent to houses in Arlington, Virginia because they're in the same Census Metropolitan Statistical Area, and considering that an actual DVD player price should be adjusted down 50% because it's technologically superior to a VCR.
Shadowstats.com, which uses pre-Clinton formulas to compute CPI, now has a free calculator. Without a subscription, it requires Photoshop to measure the bar heights, but I've measured that $1.00 in 1988 is over $5.00 today.
512MB USB thumb drives can be had for $3.99.
And that's compared to a 3.5" floppy disk. To try to add some fairness, I avoided a comparison with 5.25" floppies in 1982, which were $1.50 then.
When new formats are introduced, there is a discontinuity in prices. It makes for a sawtooth graph. You're cherry-picking the edge of the sawtooth and whining about it.
I know one industrial laser I used to program boots from a floppy - a 720K floppy to for good measure. Best get a box in I advised them. Don't work there anymore thank goodness
Same thing happened with the original Apollo flight tapes/video. NASA is the only one with the machine that can still read the stuff and I think original slow scan video might be impossible or nearly impossible to read now due to technology missing.
As I remember, just a few years ago you needed a floppy to upgrade some system's bios.
and these days we are becoming more and more dependent on large corporate production facilities that end up becoming "to large to fail".
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
i wonder if there should be some kind of public domain requirement for obsoleting stuff like that. Basically, when production is shut down, all specs and production processes are handed over to some archive in human readable form.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Apple dropped the floppy in 1998, that was 12 years ago. Even the comments from PC users so far, right here on Slashdot, seems to indicate that a lot of technical people haven't used a floppy disk in nearly a decade.
The floppy is dead, and so are the parallel port, the serial ports* and Adobe Flash**.
* FTDI makes reliable USB-to-serial cables with drivers for the three main operating systems so stop bitching about the lack of serial ports on new computers.
** Mwahahaha!
Bought? Were you working in the purchasing department of AOL?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
E-mail isn't helpful if you happen to be away from Internet access at the time you want to send the file. Nor is it helpful if the file is a computer program; many e-mail clients delete computer programs from e-mail attachments because they can't tell your legit program from a worm.
Yeah, but beware of the myth of the 'parts car'. The same components tend to wear out on all examples of a series. My neighbour bought two 'classic' cars - one supposedly the 'runner', and the other as a reserve of spare parts.
Since he was not really good at car repairs, I was round his place every weekend, (he WAS good at sharing his stock of excellent wine...)
Guess what - whenever something broke on the 'good' car, the equivalent on the 'parts' car was just as busted...
due to scientific instruments, for which it's not uncommon to have 20-30 years lifetime, and as others have pointed out due to industrial equipment with similarly long lifetime. In CNC mills for example, replacing a part of the controller is not as easy as it sounds: it's a triple redundant machine, very conservatively tested for safety.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
And iirc, CF have all its logics in the reader, not the card.
CompactFlash is parallel ATA in a different form factor. A lot of early SSDs for PCs were CF cards plugged into a wire adapter (Google cf ide). The electronics for a USB CompactFlash writer and a USB ATA enclosure are almost identical, except that the CF writer will have more robust hot swapping. You're thinking of SmartMedia and xD-Picture cards, which really are just a NAND flash chip on a package. And CF isn't perfect either; I've lost a writer to bent pins.
I'm not too sure if my floppy works. I think I remember replacing it around three years back, haven't actually tested it yet.
I hope someone continues to make niche-market media formats, even if it's only on a special-order basis. If I had a museum piece or industrial computer that used these I'd hate to rely on disks made in 2009 two decades from now.
Sure, the shells can be re-used, but the media can go bad over time and the paper or cloth that contacts the media should not be re-used if it is the least bit dirty.
Anyone know where I can get a new blank Recordio platter?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Given Sony's forays into drm, I think eliminating yet another means of copying is the real reason.
You can build from scratch, like the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust did.
Granted, it takes some time to re-create a class of main line locomotive that went to the scrappers nearly 50 years ago, but the second one should be quicker to build!
SEE the engine,
WATCH Jeremy Clarkson shovel coal into it!
Top Gear Race to the North
As for computers
Colossus (reconstruction)
Manchester Baby (reconstruction)
Pegasus (original)
How about Commodore 64s and Amigas? I know I've hoarded some good old floppies. There must be a market for known good NOS floppies.
So now Slashdot stories are reduced to Viagra plugs?
I still remember as a 15 year old *ahem* downloading from alternate sources a copy of windows 95, then copying it to 25+ floppies and installing it. Painstaking, brutal fear of some error. It worked though.. Then when I buy a computer in 2003, and of course have no floppy drive in it (Configured on purpose that way) imagine my suprise when the only way to reinstall XP onto my sata drive is via FUCKING FLOPPY.
I'm still using them to install my raid drivers as I am forced to load Windows XP before I confirm the upgrate to vista to finally install Win 7 upgrade.
It's funny that a generation will grow up where the save icon is a device that they have never seen in real life.
You can also emulate HW with a decent effort nowadays. Take an CPLD with few 10000 gates, throw 2 DACs in the output and buy an signal source and an IQ modulator. I am pretty sure that iff you have a CRT with an RF input (e.g. a television - which I btw dont own for 11years) and you are into it (which i am not)then it will be not so difficult to simulate the whole signal path up to the output (given anybody attached it to a Network Analyser).
Why can't the manufacturers use bootable ISO9660 images? To update my LSI RAID card I have to boot to floppies? GAH!
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
If you miss New Coke, you can buy it at any shop in America. If you miss Coca-Cola Classic, you're going to have to wait for Passover.
KDE still shows a freaking 1440-KB 3.5" drive in the places in Dolphin.
He must have made a poor selection with his parts car. The best parts cars are retired long before they wear out significantly, preferably from a rear end collision that will leave most of the parts subject to wear intact.
...to capture screenshots from my oscilloscope. If the lab I work in didn't have PCs with floppy drives then I'd have to resort to taking a picture of the oscilloscope screen with a digital camera. The oscilloscopes are very high quality Agilents and the cost of replacing them would be very high.
Damn, now I have to use CD's as coasters. I find their reflective properties highly annoying.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I remember the headlines... and the general reaction here at the time. Didn't happen. :)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Cameras as well. Any decent wood shop could make a bellows-camera given some leather, wood and glass. A smart watchmaker could probably keep repairing mechanical pre-1950s small-format cameras like early Leicas forever. But the electro-mechanical cameras from the 70s-90s are in this awkward stage as well. Nobody makes them anymore or shows any sign of starting. When one breaks, the only solution is to cannibalize another one for the circuit boards and proprietary parts. So you have a situation where very old film cameras will last forever and be fixable, or you can use a new digital camera, but if you happen to be a fan of the very very nice film cameras that were made in the 70s and 80s, the supply is dwindling and when it's gone, there will literally be nothing that can be done. It's economically impossible to make the parts for them ever again.
I bought a bunch for a dollar at a thrift store and used them as nerdy coasters.
Even if you can read it, you cannot rebuild it so easily.
:).
There are so many dependencies and inter-dependencies.
Say, we get nuked to stone age, even if you knew how to build everything, to rebuild something like an Intel chip fab would be extremely difficult. If the pure silicon crystals have been destroyed, you will need to grow from the small seed crystal to big wafer size. That takes time. Next who can supply you the pure water, the filters, the other consumables?
Just rebuilding the Apollo "rocket to the moon" stuff would not be easy. Lots of the _unwritten_ knowledge has been lost - not everything is written down or can be. I won't be surprised if the records of what have been lost have been lost too
"Rebooting" a high tech civilisation will take many years.
We also have a very fragile civilization. With all the "Just-in-time" operations you can be ruined by one uncooperative volcano in Iceland. Just "interrupt the blood flow" for a while, and everything goes poof. Hopefully the leaders of the various nations know that so they don't get any stupid ideas and send us to stone age.
I remember the headlines... and the general reaction here at the time. Didn't happen. :)
It's funny, because I just bought a 50-pack yesterday for $7. I was worried I wouldn't be able to find them in town for a decent price. I was very surprised to have five different options: 25-pack for $4, 50-pack for $7, 100-pack for $13, 30-pack Maxell for $8, and 100-pack Sony for $20. This tells me that there is still some demand for them, though I guess it pales in comparison to the dozens and dozens of CD-R and DVD-R brands and variations available at the same store. I remember about 18 years ago when I was buying hundreds of floppies because they were the cheapest backup solution that didn't require investment in a tape drive. How times have changed. Now, get off my lawn.
P.S. Thanks for the tip on scraping shadowstats.com!
The Floppy isn't going to die until WinXP is no longer the most installed OS in business environments, and Server 2003 is no longer used.
It is still the only supported method to inject drivers into the install process, and many SATA and RAID controllers do not have native drivers on the CD because the OS is so old.
Once XP & 2003 is gone the floppy will go with it.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
If you are one of those people that feel the need to hang on to 20 - 25 year old systems, not by requirement but out of novelty, then you have to accept at some point it just becomes obsolete, period. You might be able to rig something up for a few more years of use, but you eventually have to accept the fact you can't use your old NES or Amiga or whatever. Them's the breaks.
If you require the use of 25 year old tech for business purposes, then you are definetly not staying innovative and most likely will find it hard to compete in the market from companies that invest in new technology and innovation. If you can't realize you need to constantly re-invest in technology to stay current to avoid situations like this then you are not making valid buisness decisions and don't deserve to stay in business. In most cases, legacy = cheap and companies can't always rely on the cheapest options to stay in business.
If you still want to play NES-era video games there are many other modern alternatives. The Wii, for instance, offers extensive support of all legacy games made by Nintendo and other competitive systems. If you don't want to pay for old games then there are a slew of NES emulators available for almost any device with a screen and some form of input (including touch screen cell phones). I have also seen $20 products sold at a mall kiosks that have 100 NES and Sega games built into a controller. There is still a demand to play old NES era games, and the industry has designed solutions to allow you to play those games, its just the original hardware that is obsolete.
In the computer industry, its all digital, and digital survies the era's. While floppies have become obsolete the data stored typically is not. People who are in a position where they cannot move forward using floppy disks should back up all their data and move towards modern storage devices like USB flash drives, or network storage devices. Moving forward it will be a lot less important about what "mechanical" device hold on to data, but more about how easy it is to transfer to new technology when the old technology reaches end of life.
I just don't feel concern for people wanting to use 20 year old digital technology. Unlike the car industry which is actually a collectors market, I don't see any compelling reason to hold on to slower, bigger, crappier technology particularily when I can still access the digital content on newer technology. When I can wirelessly download a NES game for $2 for a few hours of nostalgic game play, that is good enough for most people. Spending hours or days trying to rig up an old NES system to work is just not worth it. If I need a part for an old car, I can most likely machine it. But when my C64 kicks the bucket or I cannot use it because I don't have the right cables or display, so be it.
BTW, my 4 year old nephew still uses my NES system and the reason is that I thought the RF adapter option was crappy and obsolete back in 1985 so I bought the RCA connection cable. I can still use the NES on any modern Flat Panel TV. Sometimes its just about wisely investing in technology in the first place which makes it last through the generations, its not always about getting the cheapest or default options and hoping it lasts.
I bought a new gigabyte mobo about 18mo ago, and it has several issues I have had to just put up with - many of which are happily fixed by a firmware update. Only, it seems I need a 3.5" floppy drive to do that...and I haven't had one of those in at least 10 years.
I stopped using floppies not by choice but because the quality of floppy drives dropped so badly that putting anything on a floppy if you could even manage to format it was like accepting an IOU written on an ice cube. No this isn't all my opinion, I read in reputable journals about this sort of unreliability being caused by cheap parts in floppy drives. So in short, the poor old floppy didn't die of old age. It was murdered! Hehe.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
nuked to stone age is maybe a bit extreme example, as then just having clean drinking water can be enough of a issue, never mind rebuilding a phone system. But right now, even keeping a less the 50 year old device working is near impossible thanks to no info about some of its parts. Small batch IC are the ultimate technological black box, basically.
found some old floppies on a back shelf somewhere, and want to see if there is something on them? good luck finding the exact computer that did the writing, with a drive that works. At the same time we can read books that are several 100 years old.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
There's going to have to be at least one manufacturer kept alive. People need floppies for things like CMOS firmware upgrades and booting legacy systems.
But Windows 7 still asks for A:\ ! What will I do now?
Imagine my surprise when my new PC, purchased a couple of months ago, came with a floppy disk containing a "Multimedia Driver" for its _keyboard_. (Of course, no floppy disk drive included.)
And there's always the option to take 3 halfway broken ones, and make 2 working ones out of those.
That's some fuzzy math. .5x3=1.5 working machines.
The "various nations" that would "have stupid ideas" and decide to "[nuke us] into the stone age" just so happen to already live in a weird spot where they're in the stone age but they have AK-47s.
The two manufacturers I'm certified by (HP & Toshiba) refuse to let you tattoo most of their motherboard with anything but a floppy. I haven't the foggiest why, but such is the case. Because of that, I actually use them often enough to carry a USB floppy drive in my standard toolkit.
A small comparison of interest:
Windows: Public School. Mac: Private School. Linux: Homeschool. Assembly: Unschool.
i wonder if there should be some kind of public domain requirement for obsoleting stuff like that. Basically, when production is shut down, all specs and production processes are handed over to some archive in human readable form.
There is. Or at least, there is supposed to be. And strangely, around these parts, most everybody cries out against it and would rather it disappeared.
It's called a 'patent'. Of course, there are some limitations - the language around patents require a clear, exact description of the invention, and somehow, source code doesn't fall under these constraints, even if most patents nowadays are software patents.
But the idea of what you are looking for *exactly* matches the point of patent!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Except for that one part that is in the rear end that you just must have :)
Karnal
Was about 5 or 6 years ago. I put it in the floppy drive of a horribly annoying coworker and made sure it was set to boot from the 3.5" first. I was getting payback for some crap he had pulled on me. After an hour of him cussing and not being able to figure out why his computer wouldn't boot, I walked up, ejected the disk, and walked away. Damn, that was satisfying.
Revenge is a dish best served cold, and with a side of twisted satisfaction.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
This will end piracy!
I just had to order a ten pack of refurb floppies for a customer who maintains bank ATMs. None of my suppliers had new ones in stock and the USB floppies won't always work. Seems like a lot of small banks still use them.
It's not like Doom beats the snot out of Halo ;)
Someone hasn't played enough Doom....
The AK-47 itself gets as close to stone age as it possibly can. It made mostly out of wood and stamped parts and has really loose tolerances and is as mechanically simple for a weapon of that class to be. Given good plans I bet the first gun foundries capable of producing interchangeable parts could turn them out. That is mid-1800s tech. The ammo would be trickier than the gun itself but late 1800s tech could manage the ammo.
Er... did you or he really think that wasn't the case? Parts cars are good for things like an engine to rebuild while you get the life out of the runner, or parts to act as patterns. You seldom get consumables that are any damn good unless the parts car was involved in a wreck.
Anything that isn't popular enough to spawn third-party manufacturing is going to have a few hen's teeth components that are next to impossible to replace. Even something pedestrian like early 70s Ford pickups; the cab gets some rust and 'settles' on the frame, this puts a little more stress on a fibre joint in the steering column. And good luck finding those joints even ten years ago - that put quite a number of good cheap work trucks in the weeds as 'not worth it'.
Aww man, how am I supposed to make a backup copy of the internet now...
problem is, patents do not cover everything. Heck, a large number of the IC used in early stuff is probably not under patent in any way, or if patented, only parts of them are. For the most part they are probably undocumented, or if they are documented, the documents are sitting in some corp archive somewhere, long forgotten after multiple buyouts and mergers.
and my issue with patents are not the basic idea, but how its being applied the same for everything even tho different areas have different speeds of innovation. IMO, in the time period a physical process can be developed and made use of, multiple computer processes can be developed, used and made obsolete. Therefor the period of time that may work for a physical process, will be overkill for a computing related patent.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
To create large numbers of those bullets requires a factory or two, a fair bit of infrastructure - and the gunpowder and metal become consumables.
;). They're also using bow and arrows in some of their wars too (judging from some recent pics).
In contrast, the humble machete was involved in killing millions in Africa. Reloading is pretty simple with the machete
Don't get me wrong, a gun would still be useful to have, but better be pretty selective on your targets.
I was trying to fix a Celsius 440 workstation for a pal today who only makes a few hundred dollars a month walking dogs. He needs something to play DVDs on, so I was trying to get the DVD player to play smoothly on a P3 with 128MB and an old SIS AGP with 4MB. Pretty sure it needs a bios update but can't find a floppy to do it. I had to tell him it's a no go without a floppy, so I he's going out for a walk to try and find one. I don't have the heart to tell him that I think the floppy in the beast is dead...at least it's not making that all too familiar but not missed horrible groaning noise on boot. I used Mubi to put Ubuntu on his XP dinosaur, and that helped just a tad. Didn't DVDs play smoothly back in the P3 days?
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
I still have a box of 8 inch floppy disk in shrink wrap.
You mean like how patents are supposed to work?
Good luck with that.
I still haven't found an external drive for reading my old 5.25" floppies.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Have you thought about this? Every program out there uses floppy image as the "save" button, but most of the teenagers right now never saw a real floppy disk. We need to replace it with something.
I needed a floppy on Friday. I actually have a box of them, but I didn't have a drive anymore.
Long story short I was updating the BIOS on an old Shuttle XPC
(Last ditch effort to get it to run reliably before throwing it out the window).
After a failed flash, the machine was effectively "bricked" until such a time I could get an actual floppy drive installed to to a recovery boot.
It seems the only way for this old hardware to recover from a botched BIOS update was to boot from a real floppy.
I tried countless USB sticks formatted as floppies and even an actual USB floppy drive all to no avail.
The Shuttle XPC in question is now in the dumpster.
It's called a 'patent'. Of course, there are some limitations - the language around patents require a clear, exact description of the invention, and somehow, source code doesn't fall under these constraints, even if most patents nowadays are software patents.
If the requirements for a patent included that the patent application provide a complete set of rules for actually implementing the patent, then they'd be much more useful.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
and computers based on the Intel architecture are not the be all and end all of computing.
In the last ten years, the mainframe business has been rejuvenated to the point where a major FORTUNE 500 company is mostly sustained by mainfrmae sales (IBM). Contrary to the opinion of the "anything that can't be done in VB/Mono/SQLServer isn't worth doing crowd " mainframes will be around for a long,long, long time.
You're in a jam trying to reinstall Windows 2k03 or XP on some old hardware that needs some crazy special driver using the F6 floppy option
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
I currently volunteer at a student based non-profit shop that mostly sells computers and computer parts. 21 years ago, we started as a shop selling pretty nothing but old 5.25" floppies and we made tons of money doing it. We even had a rivalry with another non-profit shop who could sell the things at the lowest price so we had volunteers doing 400km drives just to get floppies at a lower price than the competition.
At the moment, parts are crazy-ass cheap and webshops drive down the margin to nearly zero. Making money was a lot easier back then and PCs costed small fortunes $2000 was normal.
Nowadays, we still have some tangible memories left: some old 5.25" floppies and a copy of MS-DOS 4.0 still in the original box.
We also have an unsold copy of Windows Vista. We decided to add that one to the collection too.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
If you require the use of 25 year old tech for business purposes, then you are definetly not staying innovative and most likely will find it hard to compete in the market from companies that invest in new technology and innovation.
Says who? The reason 25 year old systems stay in place is because they work, a lot of work has been done with them. What is the point of switching to Microsoft's latest version of Sharepoint if your purpose built business software (which you counted as a capitalizable cost) does everything you need it to? If it is easy to expand? If you use it to innovate? IBM makes a lot of money catering to these sorts of shops. IBM IS this sort of shop.
After all, I am strangely colored.
floppy makers did try to upgrade them to keep up with new advances. like the 128mb super floppy drive. and even zip drives had a short run. but when cdr came out they just couldn't compete with a more reliable media. now where up to bdr that hold pretty much the same as a hard disk per disk. floppys still had there place in the office and school but with wifi becomeing common and sd cards being smaller and holding alot more media and lasting longer floppy's lost all there usefulness.
To avoid Windows from waking up hard-drive from standby over and over i
have all EventLogs on A:
(i love the retro sound of floppy still doing useful work)
Yes, these logs will eventually be lost.
I wrote a small bat file that formats and then tests for bad blocks by
filling half the disk with files. And then fill it completly, removing the
first files to finally test the other half.
My server running NAT DNS-server File-server DC++ Folding uptime is a
year soon, no floppy-problems.
FloppyFormat+Test.bat :0 /f:1.44 /a:2048 /V:A /f /r /L %%j in (1,1,32) do fsutil file createnew a:\%%j 2048 >nul /f /r
echo n| format a:
@dir a:\>nul
fsutil file createnew a:\0 1396736 >nul
chkdsk a:
@del a:\0 >nul
@dir a:\>nul
fsutil file createnew a:\z 1396736 >nul
for
del a:\z
chkdsk a:
@del/q a:\*
@echo.
@echo PRESS ANY KEY TO RUN FORMAT+CHKDSK AGAIN. Press Ctrl-c to Exit.
@pause>nul
goto 0
There will still be Teac and NEC, assuming they don't both purchase parts from Sony in their construction. From NEC's support site, the FD-1231H, FD-1238H, and UF-0002 are not EOL'd, and Teac sells 5 different drives. Although Sony is discontinuing their line, I expect the FDD to survive another 2 decades, or at least until there is a FDD controller to MMC adapter.
Floppy disks are so reliable that the kind of people who still use them are using ones they bought ages ago, I have never had one fail.
They are great for installing drivers during windows installation. It will be sad when they are gone.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
Some of many more reasons:
1. There's a large industrial and scientific base using floppies because they rely on non-upgradeable DOS, Win 3.x, Win9x and WinXP proprietary/custom software and custom hardware combination. Many of them still use ISA bus motherboards and this is why there is a thriving market for ISA bus equipped so-called "industrial" motherboards.
2. USB sticks are so small they are easily lost, misplaced and mixed up with your colleagues'/coworkers' identical ones.
3. USB sticks are so small that one cannot adequately label them. Therefore it's hard to base a comprehensive versioning, roll-back or complete backup strategy (e.g. rotating grandfather-father-son strategies) on USB sticks.
4. Most current USB sticks don't have a write-protect switch and thus are an easy target for viruses, trojans and rootkits when inserted in a random PC. Many of my colleagues' and students' sticks get infected when they go to service bureaus or their friends to print decent color copies of their work. In turn these sticks infect their own desktops, laptops, even their colleagues' PCs, in case these are inadequately protected.
5. As a previous commenter said, USB sticks are not give-away friendly. Last January I searched the whole local market for 32/64/128 MB and cheap (under say 2-3 euros) USB sticks in order to provide my 16 students (which still didn't have email accounts) some Excel templates and teaching notes. In addition, the students would use the same stick during the semester to collect the experimental data from their labwork. The cheapest stick I could find was 7 euros, requiring a total budget of 112, which I can't afford. Giving away CDs (700 MB) for 1 MB of data for me is a perversion and an overkill, and since the lab PCs are not equipped with CD-R drives I cannot reuse them for multisession writing either.
I could go on and on an on. Just think: Have you ever seen any new desktop motherboard, from any manufacturer, not featuring a floppy connector? What does this fact tell you?
I concur to the already mentioned opinion that the Floppy-to-USB converter market will soon thrive.
So does a 3.5 inch floppy become a 5.25 inch hard drive?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
I need to get around to transferring my floppy disks to some fresher medium while I still have access to a drive.
Oh wait...look at all that dust in there.
Where are my disks anyway?
There may be much better technologies out there, but backward compatibility has significant value. Say you have a multimillion dollar manufacturing machine, like a large five-axis gantry mill, that takes programs on 3.5" floppies or by RS-232 port. There was a time you could buy a cheap off-the-shelf desktop or laptop to interface with it. Now if you want something with a 3.5" floppy drive or an RS-232 port you need special hardware, often scavenged from antiques. Soon you'll have to spend a bunch of money to replace the control on the machine, not because it can't do it's job, but because you can't talk to it anymore.
As with your locomotive example, WWII planes are at a technology level that can be rebuilt by dedicated enthusasists whereas post-war jet aircraft not so much. Reuilding a jet engine is so much more specialised.
Not quite true. The Flying Yankee had been the victim of good intentions and little planning for a long time. There was no museum for it, when they were trying to save it. You have to buy land and build!!! The Yankee was loaded with asbestos. It has issues to do with the lack of money. I saw it while it sat near a road in the middle of nowhere during one of the many phases of inertia in the restoration process. I think that it sat for at least a 10 year span with nothing concrete occuring. Steam railroading also requires logistical management which is very hard for museums to muster. The age of steam in the museums is coming to an end as many outfits including for-profit large scale tourism operators retire the units due to a lack of machining capability.
I read an article about you!
Easy just make a program that throws a dialog asking for a disk labeled rootkit :) Just like the old Adventure Games asking for the disk number N...
So when did PC manufacturers stop actually making floppy drives? How late were Dell or HP or anyone else encouraging the use of Floppies for? The latest I can remember is around 2005ish, but that's not concrete.
Asus had a USB thumb drive that was also a USB floppy drive, 1.44mb of flash was reserved for a floppy image you could load.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
i mention it when its on-topic. That was to illustrate the absurdity of designing an rf modulator instead of simulating the picture of an analog tv on a monitor.
I use floppy's quite frequently, because the generation of lighting control desks before the current one all used them for storage.
Just rebuilding the Apollo "rocket to the moon" stuff would not be easy. Lots of the _unwritten_ knowledge has been lost - not everything is written down or can be
Now here are some scary words. Unfortunately I see this in my day to day work as an engineer in electrical maintenance. Even replacing failed equipment like for like often does not guarantee that things work. The design documentation and code are all well and fine, and quite possibly have excellent documentation, however when the equipment operator notices that something isn't working and fixes it by twisting a few wires together where does this knowledge get documented?
Even in our own lives we can come across minor issues like this. I won't be telling a perspective buyer that you need to turn the kitchen top knob counter clockwise, press down, and only then select your temperature because there's a plastic bit broken inside.
I work at a company where this kind of thing is so endemic that when a few select people retire the engineering department will be set back 10 years.
3D printers are starting to change that (at least for the gears and such).
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Good point. While the early electronic switching systems are entirely gone (afaik), some places still run good old crossbar switches (electromechanical, ie. all relays, solenoids, and switches).
I remember reading something about the old bell electromechanical switches being designed for 40 minutes of downtime in 40 years. Sure the electronic systems are much smaller and more efficient, but something has to be said of the stink and warmth wafting off a rack of relays, and the "just works" part. Not to mention the clickety-clickety-clack factor.
Sent from my PDP-11
Floppies are like those 5.25" and 8.5" flexible disks. Why are 3.5" considered floppies?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So the operating system loopback mounts an ISO or UDF file system when I put in a blank CD-R. But just because it looks and sort of acts like a file manager on a floppy doesn't mean the end user can treat it like a floppy. For example, CD burners have a multi-minute delay between unmounting the file system and actually ejecting the disc. Floppies and USB flash drives don't have this delay.
Until companies and the Government move totally away from Windows Server 2003 there will continue to be a need for floppy drives. WS03 will not accept media other than a floppy - even USB in emulation mode - to load third-party drivers during initial build. Given the numerous RAID controllers and their continual update, floppies will be needed to image or restore WS03 systems.
Yes, drivers can be slip-streamed into an existing disc so the floppy with drivers is not needed, however, not all techs or admins currently working in the market know what slip-streaming is let alone how to do it. In addition, numerous US Government organizations do not allow non-standard MS media due to security concerns, even if the disc is customized within their own environment.
Just adding my two cents about the place of 3.5" disks in the current era of computing. I too thought that the format was dead, never to be seen again, but I was proven wrong this semester at uni. I'm doing a class called "Real Time Programming" which is exactly what you would expect from the title; programming with time demands, etc. We're controlling a model train system, basically so four trains can move around automatically, switch tracks, speed up, slow down, all without crashing. Our lecturer (also designer of the system) decided to ensure that all the students had to write efficient code, decided to use an old 486 as the computer controlling it all. And how do we get our code onto the 486? By floppy disk of course! Lucky I didn't throw out that old drive I had lying around :)
I used them both.
with a floppy disk, you actually have something you can hold in your hand. you can't hold whatever "c:" is. plus, sharing is a breeze! i just give it to someone and it's shared! no need for fancy software or "internets" or any such nonsense. floppy disks are the vinyl records of computing: they will always be better!
This seems to be true with technology in general. Railway museums are a good example of this; the steam locomotives with their more-or-less blacksmith level technology have a better future as working exhibits than 1930s-era diesels.
In fact, the technology still exists to make one from scratch. Sure, it took 14 years, but from what I understand that's mostly due to acquiring funds.
I find this little snippet to be amusing as hell:
On 21 December 2009, Tornado rescued about 100 people who were stranded by bad weather at London Victoria station. On that day, a number of electric trains, which picked up their power from the third rail, were unable to run because of snow and ice on the line. Tornado was to haul a 'Cathedrals Express' lunchtime special service from Victoria; a number of booked passengers had been unable to get there due to the conditions, and so there were spare seats; the train's operators decided to offer these seats to commuters whose trains had been cancelled. Tornado also had an evening 'Cathedrals Express' dining train, and the same offer was again made.
What made 3.5 inch floppy that bad? It was mostly the format. The format when you get format a: , the FAT12.
So, FAT12 "evolved" (!) to FAT16 and FAT32/EXFAT, staring at my Nokia E71's memory card and remembering I had to chkdsk E: /f /r just 2 days ago, I better remind you that horrible format is alive in devices which it was never designed for.
When you notice clever programmers at Nokia etc. try to open more directories rather than putting all files to same dir because it is how that junk format works better, you remember it. Or, when a person loses all their personal pictures just because memory card moved from its place and doesn't have expertise to salvage that junk without getting robbed by greedy shareware (!) authors.
What makes me mad is, we actually PAY for that junk, while buying the device/camera/phone. If I had a option, I would go with NTFS. So, because of journaling, it will work fine for a year or two? fsck it, it would be obsolete that time already. I don't buy the "journaling kills flash drive" either since there are tens of millions of flash drives formatted with HFS+ Journaled happily working for years. All the iPods/iPhones you see runs HFS+ Journaled and HFS+ has a bad habit of always writing B Tree to a fixed place.
I find this little snippet to be amusing as hell:
On 21 December 2009, Tornado rescued about 100 people who were stranded by bad weather at London Victoria station. On that day, a number of electric trains, which picked up their power from the third rail, were unable to run because of snow and ice on the line. Tornado was to haul a 'Cathedrals Express' lunchtime special service from Victoria; a number of booked passengers had been unable to get there due to the conditions, and so there were spare seats; the train's operators decided to offer these seats to commuters whose trains had been cancelled. Tornado also had an evening 'Cathedrals Express' dining train, and the same offer was again made.
There were quite a number of amusing stories of locomotive failure on British steam excursions, especially in the '90s, where the locomotive that failed was not the steam loco, but the diesel which was required by the operating authorities in case the steam loco broke down (and often to provide air braking and sometimes electric heating). I believe this has become less common now.
USB Floppies work, if the server BIOS supports them - the installer leans on the BIOS for device access during the early steps in the install process, so the issue is the BIOS, not the software.
I was assembling parts to build two "identical" machines for use in teaching myself about Windows Clusters under Hyper-V, and I paused when I saw $4.99 floppy drives at the retailer... I thought about it, but in the end, I choose not to because the chassis I am planning on using doesn't have an external 3 1/2" drive bay to hold the floppy drive.
Yes, the MB has a floppy controller, though that is becoming less common these days as well.
At work I keep a stash of new, unused, 3 1/2" floppies for use when there is no other option (we use a lot of older servers and desktops - older means 5-8 years old), and maybe twice a year it is just easier to use a floppy for some thing (like random BIOS update, server firmware update, etc.)... Typically there are other options, but sometimes the floppy drive option is easiest.
Ken
To deal with the 10,000 years of dark age to follow the end of this Empire, I propose the creation of two repositories of all human knowledge at opposite ends of the galaxy. One on the resource starved planet of Terminus and the other at "Star's End".
And unless we get some sort of mind control mutant that rises to power during this interim, this should solve the problem nicely. Now, where is my calculator?
The floppy will never die where I work! We have tried and tried in vain to replace them but the manufacturing floor refuses to use the shared network space we've setup and trained them on. We've also provided them with USB drives thinking that would simulate inserting a floppy into a drive. We just placed another order for 300 floppies because they die after about a month of use. :(
These are situations that are not really a problem just a bad choice on your part...
As technology goes out of date there is often a grace period where you can Upgrade/Convert your data... You shouldn't rationally expect to keep that system running in full production for ever there is a point where you need to upgrade.
Now if you are a collector then yes you will need a store of replacement parts to keep it going. That is what classic car collectors do.
So if you are in the situation that you need to replace a part for a product that you need to use. Then it is your/your companies own damn fault for not upgrading in a rather generous window that they have.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I should probably buy a new box. I still own and use a Sony Mavica camera that saves to a 3.5" floppy disc.
The lens is awesome, and while the camera only takes photos 680 pixels wide, they are crisp and clean. This camera is great for ebay and other situations where the object is stationary.
I'll miss you 3.5 inch floppy.
DSHD don't work too well with older 3.5" disk drives if they work at all, they usually end up w/RW errors before very long. Usually before the end of their first use session.
Most of the machines that I have that CAN adequately read DSHD 3.5" also have CD-ROM drives, and CDs are cheaper anyways.
I also have a bunch that can only use 5.25" drives w/o EXPENSIVE custom addons for emulating hdds through a physical mechanical hdd or some type of flash memory, however even then they usually appear as a crapload of floppy disks and still have limited total storage addressability but are mostly impractical due to the cost of the available controllers making 5.25" floppies MUCH cheaper in this case.
My next concern would be ATA type hdds as most of my older machines only have controllers for IDE-ATA devices or older SCSI both of which are disappearing if not entirely gone already as well.
(I'm hoarding old 3.5 DSDDs & 5.25" floppies, just wish that I'd saved more of those old AOL disks that they used to send out all of the time... as for quite a while they were DSDD 3.5s...)
or a whole bunch of people sitting around after dark, repacking used casings into new ammo.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
i think she is on a smoke break...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Not just your own, but every PC you might need to fix?
PCs that can't boot from USB are in need of replacement even if only due to being slower than the slowest PC made even three years ago. At some point, you can just replace it with a small-form-factor PC and even the savings on the electricity bill will pay for the replacement.
Including booting DOS 6.22 for flashing the BIOS?
Why boot Microsoft DOS when you can boot FreeDOS?
Just rebuilding the Apollo "rocket to the moon" stuff would not be easy. Lots of the _unwritten_ knowledge has been lost - not everything is written down or can be. I won't be surprised if the records of what have been lost have been lost too :).
Tell me about it! True Story: I was just out of school and working my first job for a California aerospace company one morning in 1986 when the Challenger blew up. It wasn't two weeks before our entire group was in turmoil, because the Air Force had realized that the shuttle fleet was going to be grounded for years and they *had* to replace some critical spy sats in the not-too-distant future. Orders were issued to resurrect the Titan program and build some boosters to get by ASAP.
Enter "forensic engineering" - we had the drawings in storage, but they had been chewed up pretty severely by mice - we were literally piecing them together with tweezers and tape in a scene out of NCIS, and guessing at what was on the areas that were flat missing.
In one memorable instance (the tool for the carbon-carbon exhaust nozzle) we had tooling, but had no idea how to use it - the plies laid in on a spiral, so it was easy to get started, but we had no idea how we were supposed to wedge the last several dozen plies in place. The shop-floor documentation said what to do, but gave no clue as to how to do it! Whoever built it knew things we didn't - but most of the people who had worked on the program were retired, dead, or addled, so we were pretty much on our own. I left before the company figured it out - it's quite possible they had to build a new multipart tool - either that or they finally found an old-timer to clue them in, since the Titan flew on schedule not too much later...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Borrowed time perhaps, but then with old technology the number of interested people goes way down over time too.
The best objective indicator of scarcity is market price. Is there an obsolete technology that is worth more today than it cost originally, in inflation-adjusted dollars? Obviously some cars and comic books are "collectible" in this way. Any technology examples? What would somebody pay for a mint condition Apple ][, or an original arcade game console (Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, etc.)?
A case example would be the Curta mechanical calculator, which has become a hot collectors item due to its uniqueness and interesting history. They sold for $600 fifty years ago, and meanwhile inflation over this period has been around 7.5x. I don't believe these are worth $4,500 today, even in very good condition. Could there ever be a collectible technology, or does demand always fall off faster than the supply of working parts?
You might be interested in Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, an alternate history book that explores that exact topic: AK-47 meets Civil War. And it includes looking at how such a gun might be reproduced with period knowledge and infrastructure.
And if upon reading it you decide you like Turtledove's alternate history style, he's got a 10 book epic I thoroughly enjoyed that kicks off with the South trumping the North early in the war, and continues on all the way through a brutal alternate history World War I and II between the still-present South and North. The first in the series is How Few Remain, if it might interest you.
He has a definite style though, so if you're not a fan after one book, you never will be.
I wonder how long it will take for application UIs to dump the "floppy disc" graphic as a save button. I reckon kids today probably don't even know what the save button is meant to look like!
Nothing like the sweet sounds of a floppy seek at daybreak to really put your life in perspective. ERrrrrrr .. click click.. Errr.
And if Things Fall Apart, which locomotive would you rather have to hand??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
e.g. on an HxC Floppy Drive Emulator...