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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 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
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...
Windows 2008 allows you to use USB keys, CD-ROMs, USB floppy drives and other means to get the driver into the OS.
Windows Server 2003 still wants a floppy disk, but there are ways around it - many server mfgs provide "virtual" floppy drives, USB floppy drives are supported, and slipstreaming the driver onto the install media is another option.
Let's not forget that Windows Server 2003 came out about 7 years ago, just because you are installing it today doesn't change the operating system.
Ken
Ends can have beginnings. At least, Winston Churchill thought so. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/24921.html
So presumably ends must be able to continue, or we'd never reach the actual end of the end.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because there are two or three manufacturers of 3.5" floppy disks - there aren't any more manufacturers entering the market, so it is a slow decline. You can still buy 3.25" disk drives as a option for a new PC (+$10) just in case.
It's strange to think that back in the 1990's, we used to think 1.44 Megabytes of storage was extremely generous. Just about every student would have at least one or two solid plastic disk boxes (ten disks each). The most exotic disks would be multi-colored
Now the disk themselves are being recycled into bags and other useful objects
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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???
Skeet.
If you just look at the PC market you're right - floppies have been out of fashion for quite some time, and I don't think I've used one in at least a decade either, although I know some individuals in education who still have all of their crucial data (exams, assignments, custom s/w for their field, etc.) on 3.5"s.
However, where this really could cause problems is in some embedded systems. For some reason a lot of manufacturers of CNC equipment, like VMCs or even embroidery machines, stuck with the ubiquitous floppy for far too long. I know at least as late as 05-06 Haas CNC was still using floppies.
It looks to me like makers of floppy to usb adapters are going to be in for a boon.
The last time I used a floppy disk, it was to strip out the flexible platter inside to use as a UV filter for the solar eclipse
That was in 1999
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
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!
1: CDs are give-able too.
2: Maybe in the 80s they made quality floppies. Anything you can buy today is a complete piece of shit that has a 50% chance of not being readable by another machine 5 minutes after being recorded.
3: Slightly faster than burning, but recording a full floppy still takes some time definitely not instant.
The second 3 which you presumably meant to be 4: how many modern computers even have floppy drives in them? Floppy booting support still sucks, but CD booting is very common on any hardware made in the last decade or so, and next to universal to anything younger than 5 years.
But I do wish we had disposable USB drives. If they now sell 32GB USB drives for $60, why can't they make a 256MB USB drive for $1? It's not like the material cost of a few grams of plastic is higher than a buck, and the manufacturing technology has been around for ages. That to me is the threshhold price of disposability.
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.
Sony can't fit a decent rootkit on a floppy...
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.
Yes, but the beginning of the end, the beginning of the end of the end, the beginning of the end of the end of the end, etc. form a converging series. The point of convergence is the ultimate end point, where all ends ultimately end.
More interesting are intervals like the beginning of the end of the beginning, or the end of the end of the beginning of the end of the beginning of the beginning of the end. Their extremal points (i.e. the set of limits of those series) form a Cantor set in time, unless you have a case where the end of each beginning is already the beginning of the end. In that case the limits are dense in time, i.e. during the whole interval between ultimate beginning and ultimate end you are continuously experiencing both beginnings and ends.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Bought? Were you working in the purchasing department of AOL?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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...
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.
Thankfully most of the motherboards I've purchased in the past few years allow me to load BIOS updates from USB storage. I think that was one of the last major uses for a floppy.
But shocklingly, I've purchased a couple motherboards in the past 6 months that still require a floppy. I was like WTF and had to dig around in a box for a floppy drive. Who the hell still requires a floppy in this day and age? I don't recall what manufacturer it was but I can tell you I'll not be buying another motherboard that requires a floppy to update the BIOS. Thankfully I had a spare box of HD floppies in my drawer, but come on... really? 2010, brand new MB and I had to find a floppy?