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The Mystery of the Mega-Selling Floppy Disk
osullish writes "People have been proclaiming the death of the floppy for years, yet millions are bought around the world. Who is buying them?"
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Cowboy Neil buys them all and archives inane Slashdot comments, like this one.
I guess people who use them for their synths? It's why friends of mine still have 'em
People in 3rd world countries, I'd imagine.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
In my department, we have no fewer than 72 machines that are about five years old and are in perfect working order for what we need. They are not quite legacy, but at the same time, you can't boot off USB. Optiplex 2xx series, go figure. The best way for us to get a new image on these machines is frequently to use a floppy or a USB floppy on some machines, again, go figure. There are a lot of oddball cases out there, but we probably still go through fifty floppies a year through all the departments.
Source would have been good: http://www.mobile-computing-news.co.uk/industry-news/3989/sony-will-stop-manufacturing-floppy-disks-in-2011.html
Who is buying them?? My Grandpa!!
I heard that scientists were trying to invent a gas, maybe they are using flopppy disks to save the results of their research? Linux would make it easy to create a floppy RAID array cheaply to store gas-related data on?
I know we buy them at my lab-they are necessary for controlling the software of our scintillation counter. That thing (no joke) is running DOS 2.0 under the hood! I'm sure there's lots of industrial equipment in small/noncompetitive markets that has never felt pressured to update. It's the same reason why we have so much $500,000 equipment running unbelievably crappy software.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Sony announced this week they are stopping floppy production soon. Never made /. *sigh*
You mean this article that never made /.? http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/04/25/0635218/The-End-of-the-35-inch-Floppy-Continues
You almost read /. less then the moderators.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
There are probably old procedures at companies that still are written to call for using them as backups or storage of application software and the politics at such companies are that they don't easily allow those procedures to be updated.
I'm a classic computer enthusiast and I purchase 3.5" disks for use with my various Amiga computers. I know many others who do the same although it seems unlikely that our purchases add up to millions. Honestly, I wasn't sure what all the fuss regarding Sony's discontinuation of the 3.5" floppy was about because there are other manufacturers. One of the larger ones is ATHANA International, Inc. who still make and sell 3.5", 5.25" and even 8" floppy disks.
Sony announced this week they are stopping floppy production soon. Never made /. *sigh*
Except for the one story posted about Sony announcing the end of floppy drive production.
It's me. I don't have a DVD or CD burner, so I've been trying to get my pirated material onto other medias.
I just can't figure out why people don't want the latest Star Trek movie on a simple, small, and affordable 720 three and a half inch floppies collectors set!
A lot of old controllers for things like climate chambers and vibration tables still use floppy disks to save their data, and as long as they're not broken, they aren't going to be replaced in a lot of companies. So, we're stuck with them for at least another 10-15 years.
There are about a million XP SP2 users who have SATA disks and keep finding their driver floppy doesn't work when they try their yearly reinstall.
People in 3rd world countries, I'd imagine.
If you read the article:
But what about all the second-hand computers that are donated to the developing world? Could they be even partly responsible for the thousands of disks still sold? Anja Ffrench of Computer Aid International - the largest charity working to distribute recycled IT to Africa and South America - says that they only deal in computers from 2002 and later, meaning that they'll have the USB connection that obviates the need for floppies.
Instead the article argues that some people are satisfied with using 1.44 MB of storage since they don't do music and photography. They also point out the long life high quality machines like oscilloscopes and data-loggers that use these diskettes. As well as the theater industry and musicians that use them for synths and timing MIDI events. That's their explanation but I doubt that people accepting second hand computers are going to be paying money for obsolete diskettes in third world countries. More likely they're looking for someone giving away old stores of the diskettes with drivers on them and reformatting those.
Personally, half a year ago I wanted to add my own hard drive to my XBox 360 Arcade and discovered that no matter how I tried to make a DOS boot compact disc it would not work exactly like a 3.5" floppy DOS boot diskette. I luckily had an old keyboard driver on a floppy that I was able to format and use although I may have had to purchase one if I didn't. Although with the increasing ability of flashing my system's BIOS from the OS, my needs for 3.5" floppies are dwindling.
My work here is dung.
You almost read /. less than the editors
Fixed that for you ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It's Microsoft's fault, If you have ever installed a Microsoft server product and needed to add drivers you know what I'm talking about.
In the last year or so you have been able to do the following on a Server with out a Floppy drive:
Flash/Upgrade BIOS.
Upgrade RAID Controller Firmware.
Load RAID / SCSI Controller Drivers into Windows Server OS.
And this has been replaced with doing to an isolated memory located either on-board or connected internally via SD or USB, but 80% of these are emulating Floppy to boot though.
Less than the mods, even
People are supposed to read stuff on /.? I thought this was just a running contest to accrue first posts and make jokes about bad car analogies, Soviet Russia, new overlords, Natalie Portman, ??? and PROFIT!
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I know of a place that uses floppy disks to move files between the machines on their LAN. And a desktop calculator to fill in Excel spreadsheets.
here in romania, we still have to send our tax delcaration(and some other documents like that) via mail and on floppy disk...theoretically it is possible to send it also via email BUT, i didn't really listen further, my accountant tends to be boring sometimes
You mean the article that was supplied as a link to this article. D'oh.
I guess I have settled in to /. too well.
Rule 1 of Slashdot: Never RTFA
Rule 2 of Slashdot: Never RTFA
we can't all read every story, and it's not like that particular story was linked in TFS... oh, wait...
Numerous Lighting consoles used by theatres and theatrical productions still use floppies. the one specific example is the ETC Express series of boards which while discontinued is still very popular in many theatres around the world.
I store all of my really sensitive data on floppy. Who would ever think to look there?
My wife's POS laptop requires a floppy so it can boot Puppy Linux from a USB stick, you insensitive clod!
Hard drive controller is dead, BIOS doesn't support bootable USB, so it's the only way.
She just wants to surf the net, and it does that fine!
I've got a semi-old (ca 2001) digital oscilloscope. There are only two ways to pull data off it: export a screen shot to a printer via a parallel port, or export to 3.5" floppy (screenshot or raw data). So, I've got a couple of floppies lying around. Can't say I've actually bought any in many years - I just always seem to have a couple lying around. Maybe I ought to just to make sure I've got a supply for the future.
I suppose I could also replace the scope. Newer ones can connect to a host PC via USB, or offload to a thumb drive, or be network-attached. The specs on newer ones are, obviously, a lot better, too. But, really, why spend many thousands of dollars on new equipment just to get around using a floppy drive?
How would YOU make secure backups? TAPES? We aren't made of money here!
The answer is simple: the government :-D
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I have a lot of information on 3.5" disks. Tax returns dating back to the 80's. Archives of papers that I wrote in school. Old programs that I wrote since I was like 7 years old. Sure, I could convert them all to a few CDs, but do I really want to spend all that time? I also have quite a few 5.25" disks (and one computer with a working drive). I've got Windows 2 on low density 5.25" (like 5 or 6 of them). I'm too lazy to convert them to CD/DVD, yet consider them too important to just "throw away". Sure, I'm not buying new drives, but I still do use them occasionally...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
I have AOL and Windows 3.1 disks all over my desk, always ready for use as a coaster under my coffee.
Can't remember the last time I bought one, though. But if anyone needs a coaster, I am happy to sell you some.
The most recent example was for trying to install SCSI/RAID controller drivers on my Win XP machine. The *only* ways to install them, that I've been able to find, are by floppy disk (also required me to buy an external floppy drive) or by making a re-configured Windows install disk and re-installing my OS.
Since the former was easier, that's what I did.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Windows XP still needs a floppy if you need to install specific drivers on install process, like SATA drivers.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Just yesterday I had to explain to a female co-worker of mine about flash drives and how they were better than floppies... She was amazed, also at how cheap they were.
The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start. The term was a hangover from its precursor, the 5¼-inch floppy, which had a definite lack of rigidness about it. However, its smaller successor held 15 times as much data.
1) so, what is the proper term for this then? "hard disk"? ARGHHH
2) 15 times as much data in a 3.5"? ARGHHHHH
ok, fine, i didn't stop reading. i only continued reading, but irritatedly.
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
Lots of older motherboards can only boot of floppies, not of USB sticks. They need floppies with FreeDOS to boot for the occasional BIOS update, firmware flash and other similar maintenance. Memtest86+ is another popular stuff to boot on a floppy. And some antique mother boards can't even reliabily boot CD-ROMs requiring a floppy boot-loader.
Installer of older versions of Windows XP can't use drivers on anything but floppies. Vista's installer is the first able to use other media.
As long as such older machines are around (and they will be even longer around in 3rd world) there will be a small discrete demand for floppies
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Maybe we should talk to this guy.
Brand new computer controlled machine tools being sold today, using floppy drives:
http://www.americanmachinetools.com/cnc_milling.htm
Just ask google... "Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200 for Floppy CNC mill. (0.29 seconds)"
G-Code is kind of a CLI for machine tools. Remember Logo in the 80s? Well, theres only so many ways to design a language to do Cartesian stuff. Being vaguely text like, you can figure ten bytes per line. Figure maybe twice as many non-cutting operations as cutting operations. Gaze upon a machined part, perhaps a hard drive case, whatever, and contemplate most jobs will have a couple hundred cutting operations. So, you're going to need hundreds of cuts times about 3 to account for non-cutting lines (config, comments, etc), times about ten bytes per line of G-code, figure 15K file per part. An easy fit on a floppy drive.
Now something really complicated, like a turbine or fancy rims for a ghetto car, that might fill a floppy disk.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Right from the article.
The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start.
Really come, it's been around long enough everyone should have peeked behind that little window and seen the disk actually is a floppy little piece of plastic.
Been a while since we heard anything about Natalie Portman, thanks.
Multi-head embroidery machines use them. The last shop I worked for had around 20,000 containing design files for clients, saved over the years.
If you read through the comments the article will be pasted all through it because of all the questions from people who did not RTFA. So as long as you are not first, it is cool :)
Most Yamaha Disklavier pianos and theater light boards use floppy. I've used usb-to-midi on my electronic piano for a long time, but many owners still use floppy to record and playback. Lots of traffic about floppies on Disklavier boards recently. Also computerized light boards record cues to floppy. Theaters can't afford to replace them so often.
Sadly there are still many lighting companies (including mine) that use lighting consoles that still rely on floppies for saving shows and fixture information. Why would they want to buy a new 15,000 dollar console when we can just go to the flea market and get a crate of un-reliable old floppies for 5 bucks!
I've not had to use one nor needed one since 1998.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Sometimes you need a good boot disk that will load DOS, and run Ghost on it. In my experience, making bootdisks on floppies is a lot easier than trying to use CDs or USB flash sticks. Every boot disk image I find is made for floppies, and while I can modify the image and burn it to a CD, every boot disk utility I've seen still requires me to write the image to an actual floppy disk, then burn the CD off that. www.bootdisk.com has some great utilities, but this is the exact process that all of the images from that site require. Believe me, if I could skip the whole floppy disk step, I would. If there is another way to do it, it probably requires some expensive software to write the floppy image directly to the CD. The other option, creating a boot disk from absolute scratch, is not within my skill set. My kung-fu isn't THAT good. This means that for the forseeable future, I'm going to need floppy disks.
Clearly these purses are being bought by the bucket load. http://www.fractalspin.com/x/product.php?cat=13&page=1&productid=156
I didn't read all the comments to see if someone mentioned it...
But in a the metal manufacturing shop that my father runs all of there presses, breaks and other equipment with some computer controls, like for pre-sets and settings use floppy drives. Equipment that costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars per piece. It's not like they have a lot of pressure to upgrade. =\
If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough.
It's me. I've been buying those millions of floppy disks. No. I don't know why. I just like them. You got a problem with that?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Who is buying them?
Skeet-shooting geeks.
www.eFax.com are spammers
You forgot the beowulf clusters of Cowboy Neil, you insensitive clod! Of course, I have to ask myself, "Does it run Linux?" And is it powerful enough to play Crysis?
SSC
Big vessels have to carry GMDSS, which are multi-channel safety and distress systems to be used in case of fire, man overboard or piracy. They have to be able to run for hours on battery power in case of power failure and to be super reliable. An important part of the system is the Sat C terminal, such as the Sailor DT4646E, which are pretty nicely built and sturdy flat screen PCs with 640k RAM, running DOS and a terminal program for Sat C communications from flash memory. They use 3.5" disk drives -- with a proprietary connector and selling for $150. And this is precisely the less reliable part of the terminal, since the floppy is always inside the drive (for saving messages) and the heads are exposed to the salty air and have to be cleaned (and replaced) often. But the things are still running (always on) after may many years.
Bob.
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
My company still buys loads of 3.5" floppies to send monthly data updates to our legacy customers. Since we charge them $X,XXX per year for the subscription we don't want to drop support. It would cost most our customers $XXX,XXX to upgrade to our newer product which supports USB drives and SD cards, so it will be a while before we stop buying 3.5" floppy disks. Our bigger problem is our slightly newer legacy products which use ZIP disks, since the drives and disks for those are getting harder to find in bulk.
Step 1: Setup multiple dummy corporations to buy up all of the world's floppy disks. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit!
Good point! xD
WHERE ARE THE DISKS FOR MY SUPERDISC DRIVE?! 120 mb bitches! I bought that shit, and 3 months later I couldn't find disks for it. The CDR became affordable right about then.
Most airplanes (A320, 737,...) still use a floppy drive to update the Flight Management System database (waypoints, routes,...). These updates are done twice a month. The data fits on about ten floppies, I think, it's just text and numbers. Some newer types use CD-Rom drives, but technology moves slowly in the airline world. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if it costs lots of money for certification just because it happens to be for an airplane.
I'm guessing the correlation between using floppies and using IE6 is very high.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
i still keep an old boot diskette from the early windows xp days as backup. It often saved my ass while repairing older computers for older clients. I can argue that an new computer would be better than that 8 years old Pentium, but they don't care. For them it's often a kind of typewriter/calculator and nothing more. And they don't want to spent to much money for a replacement as long as that machine stays working. Repairing those is actually a very good side job to earn some extras so i won't try to convince them...
Netbooks are no valid replacement, because the screen and the keyboard is to little, others are to expensive.
They must be like Chia pets.
I've never known anyone to actually buy one, yet year after year they keep selling them so SOMEONE must be buying them.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
It's hard to come by better retro high-tech coasters these days
I know for a fact that a lot of banks have their account transfers for Businesses on 3.5" floppy disks. They can't even repair the machines anymore that write the disks
- In Memoriam: Jeroen de Bruin (1972-2004), bye bro
The teachers where I work simply refuse to use the cameras I've just bought them. Instead, they're sticking with these
What they don't know is that the new workstations don't have floppy drives... >:-)
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
He wanted an external floppy drive for his new computer for christmas. I tried talking him out of it to no avail.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
well duh, it's the hackers that are buying them.
I know I've "decommissioned" a few floppy disks in my time by turning them into Christmas decorations. One particularly slow December at an employer we did the entire tree and most of the streamers strung across our office ceiling. I doubt that there are still enough people doing this to reach the kind of numbers cited in the article though.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
'nuff said.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I work for "the government" and we don't use floppies. In fact, I haven't seen a single one since I've worked here.
We still have to buy them as we have to do some of our backups to floppy for some of our gateway products/appliances and with each backup needing 3 or 4 of them, well you get the picture. What we need is a floppy to usb drive converter, that way I can throw them all away. Also Dell still has drivers that need to load from floppies on older servers. One of these days we can all live a floppy-loss kind of life. But not in the immediate future.
To add to all the specialist gear that people are mentioning we can add theatre lighting desks.
The smart lighting desks are basically just DOS based PCs with a funky set of peripherals.
If I need to save a lighting plot or configuration I use a 3.5" disc.
I'm sure they will have USB disc support eventually, but lighting plots don't take much space so there is no real pressure. It'll probably happen when people can't get new disks.
Paul Leader
6.4 MB per day
2.3GB per year
--
4.6GB per DVD
1 DVD per 2 years
--
1$ per DVD
0.50$ per year.
Seems even more economical.
I am shocked at /. for posting such an enormous error.
We still have a number of test systems in our plant which are still running DOS software. These machines are typically legacy hardware. In some cases the software cannot run on Windows because of various incompatibilities; so, migrating to newer hardware requires a software re-write (which we are working on, slowly). Because of this dependancy on legacy software and legacy hardware we still have to use 3.5" floppies on occasion.
Hell, I still have a box of 2S/DD (360kB) 5 1/4" floppies in my desk -- we only retired that machine late last year.
They seem to multiply at exponential rates. I'm constantly throwing the damn things away yet more and more keep showing up in my desk drawers. Worse, some people seem to get incredibly attached to them. Maybe it's the pleasant purring they emit when nestled snuggly in a floppy drive.
Some people at work seem to adopt them. I say there can't possibly be any data of significant value in 1.4mb, but these floppy analogs to cat ladies just can't bear to get rid of the disks.
I can't wait till a Klingon warbird shows up and we can simply beam the lot of them to their storage holds.
Natalie Portman is starting to get a little "droopy" if you catch my drift; she's starting to resemble Carie Fisher. (Like me...getting old sucks.) We need a new babe to drool over.
I nominate the cutie from Caprica. No not the Cylon girl - her blonde friend.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
i am currently supposed to be backing up my work data to disks, for some reason. i have a drawer full of unlabeled disks that i hope i will never have to go through.
One of the commercial accountancy software packages found in the UK prompts its user to make regular backups of the data to floppies for archiving purposes.
Gosh darn legacy equipment (CNC seems big one). I'd like to see a device for legacy systems which would connect to a standard floppy controller, and also have a USB port, and mount an image file off the usb drive. Then the usb drive could be connected to newer hardware and the image file could be mounted in software instead of the USB floppy foolishness.
I've also seen floppies used to move around licences for Alan-Bradley software (for PLC systems), complete with a complement of unreliable USB floppy drives. The licences can be moved on floppies, can't be moved on "removable media" (how most usb flash appears), but can be moved on usb hard drives (appear as fixed). You can mount a Truecrypt image located on usb flash, as a "fixed disk" and copy licences on/off. As well it provides an easy method of backing up licences. They are moving to an online activation licencing scheme now.
Some scopes and other equipment use them. I'd rather use RS232 when available instead of floppy.
Good riddance to floppies. My life would be complete if I never have to use one ever again.
Who buys 3-1/2" floppies? The same people who buy Polaroid film. OK, not exactly the same people, but in real life, people and companies don't throw out stuff that is working perfectly well, and they keep buying the consumables for a long time after the product is supposedly "obsolete."
There's a consistent, strong tendency to overemphasis the new stuff, because it's how companies make their money, it's what makes for interesting articles in the trade press, and personal career advancement is better served by expertise in Windows 7 than in MS-DOS. But don't think for a minute that MS-DOS is not being used anywhere in your company.
People will say "that's five years old, do we really need to support it?" You point down the hall to the room where some PC-AT is still in use, and the reaction is, "Oh, sure, isn't it awful, I can't believe we have those museum pieces lying around, but that's just because our company is no good. NOBODY ELSE has them." Wrong, everybody does. If there's some manager who thinks they don't, it just means they don't know where it is.
There is still a market for new typewriter ribbons, compact cassette tapes, and vacuum tubes. When a billion dollar market becomes a $10 million dollar market, it doesn't necessarily become unprofitable. Heck, my dad once bought an old cylinder photograph that wasn't working. There was still an outfit that was still making replacement needles and diaphragms and other parts for them.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
my king dom for a mod point!
The school board my wife teaches in, only accepts marks submitted on floppy disk. The software they use is ancient and they never change their procedures. Schools are having a hard time keeping computers with floppies running for teachers to use.
Nothing better has ever been invented for flinging at your roommate.
some hardware's firmware(BIOS) require floppy disk option for updating firmware = 5%
Microsoft Windows XP and Servers always requiring the use of floppy for loading storage device driver during an installation setup = 95%
Should Windows become obsolete in 3 years the need for floppy drive will completely die out.
and in response: our government lab banned the use of flash drives for networked PCs a couple years ago. now, if I want to move data from a lab PC (or piece of equipment like an oscilloscope) to a networked PC, I use floppy. Sure, PC to PC could be done by burning a CD. But then I start to collect a nice pile of coasters. Most data consists of text files that zip nicely, and disk spanning still works like it used to. 7zip even makes a nice command line executable for running off the scopes. CD burning is also tediously slow, and repeated multi-sessioning to reduce the coaster count makes CD loading even slower. CDRW is an option, too, but it feels like those write even slower than floppies.
Basically, anything under 5MB that needs to move from off network device to networked device, I do by floppy disk. That covers 90% of my file transfers.
Ironic that this question should be asked again now, when only two days ago Sony announced they would stop manufacturing them next year.
I re-installed Windows XP for someone recently, and it required a hard drive controller drive to be loaded before partitioning. That driver could *only* be installed from a floppy disk. Way to look ahead Microsoft!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
as a career resource center i see people bring in floppies all the time. many non highly technical people still use the floppy despite how the techies feel about the nearing obsolescence of floppies. Some people still dont know what a flash drive is. there is a requirement on all our PC's that a system must have a flopppy drive due to the still very high popularity. I would say half or more people bring in their digital documents via floppy disk. Some people just dont keep pace with technology. there is a lack of education in the general public about the benefits of using a flash drive over a floppy or even what a flash drive is.
Back when I worked on digital camera firmware in 2004, our Taiwanese manufacturing partner asked us to make sure our USB interface worked with Windows 95, claiming that a significant number of their mainland customers were still using this ancient OS. Maybe they're still buying floppies too.
But will it blend?
I recently had a shocking meeting in the office of some folks from the Recreation and Parks Department, and was disturbed to see that the computers they were using not only were running Windows 95, but which had only 3.5" drives. The presence of several disks laying out on the desk of one employee and a disk storage unit on the desk were definite indications of daily use. Oh, and the highly paid, union protected, pension equipped employee was an excellent multitasker. He was able to both play solitaire during the entire meeting and give his full attention to the important business of doing his job. If you were wondering why one of the world's biggest cities is approaching total failure, there's a few reasons for you.
Oddly, floppies are great for debug and making code changes during the boot process. There are times when you do not have access to the disk or console (yet) and still need to know what is happening. Redirecting standard error to a file on a floppy has saved my bacon more times that I can count. It is also good if I need to "inject" new code into a system that is barely booted up. (no network, no disk access) Burning a CD/DVD for a 12K shell script seems a waste to me. I know I am probably a special case though. I don't buy millions of them, but when I buy new test systems, they must have a floppy drive.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Aircraft navigation equipment still uses them. Pilots load data into their older GPS systems with them. The navigation equipment is still up to date but updating to CD or USB input would cost $10,000 to $15,000. So, pilots get dozens of floppies and spend an hour or more a month updating their navigation data.
KolibriOS http://www.kolibrios.org/ fits on a 3.5" disk. That accounts for the floppy at my house.
Windows XP needs RAID drivers and I can only get them loaded via floppy. Honestly, I have never researched alternate methods for loading drivers at the Windows XP install. Is there a better way?
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
I didn't have to install Windows 7 via 3544 floppy disks???
What better way to get your manifesto home after slaving away all day at the library?
While you're mourning the loss of the floppy, I'm waiting for the death of the CD/DVD. They're big, they scratch, they're not optimal for read/write. More and more of our devices are mobile and CD readers are both large and heavy.
Digital distribution and flash media replace the necessity for the CD. Of the 3 CD/DVDs I've bought since 2005, two were Apple OS upgrades and one was a video game. The video game is now available on Steam. The OS upgrades could be easily transferred and sold on flash media, or sold online and transferred by the user either to DVD or flash media, as to their preference.
Right now, the CD/DVD format is enjoying the same obsolesce, yet pervasiveness, the floppy enjoyed circa 1999. They'll be (practically) dead soon enough...
Just bought a box of floppies last week. Had to do a firmware update on a system. Update could only be run from DOS. System doesn't support booting from USB, and the firmware update was to fix a bug that prevented booting from CD. Floppies were my only good choice.
If you have a company in Romania, you have to submit your tax statements to the local IRS ("Finance administration company" would be a rough translation).
You have to do this at least 4 times a year (even 12 times a year, if your business is quite big). Each time, you have to provide a floppy disk with some information, which you give to the clerk together with your tax paperwork. 4 times a year X ~ 750'000 companies in the country = a minimum of around THREE FUCKING MILLION FLOPPY DISKS EACH YEAR !
This has been going on for at least 10 years, so you can figure out how many floppy disks were bought just in Romania.
Personal rant: the collection mechanism is so absurd and retarded you wouldn't believe it. The paperwork is printed by using software provided by the finance ministry, which seems to be designed to break every possible ergonomic rule (think different sized buttons, one green and one purple red, adorned with Microsoft Office clipart). You input your data into this software, which writes *something* on the floppy disk. I got curious one day, and looked at what it writes: ONE LINE OF TEXT. No kidding. One entire floppy disk for ONE LINE OF TEXT. Ah, and you can't use one floppy disk for the same statement, they have to be separated. And when you submit your papers and floppy disk, normally worn floppy disks can't usually be read (offices are dusty, floppy drives get clogged frequently) and you have to get back with a newer one which will finally work in the old floppy drive.
As I said: 3'000'000 floppies each year, sheesh...
Others have already pointed out that this was covered on Slashdot, but I'm not sure how you even managed to post in this story without noticing that the link to the Slashdot story about Sony announcing that they are stopping floppy production was the first link in the summary.
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I had to go back to using them for coasters after I broke the coffee cup holder on my computer.
Dell still distributes bootable driver updates that have to be downloaded, copied to floppy, and then installed from the boot floppy. I end up doing this a couple of times a month.
Probably other OEMs do this too.
I work for a company that produces a specific type of medical equipment, and since I do all the support and service for units sold in the USA, I still have to support units with floppy drives, which are still as new as 5 years old. Even on units less than a year old, I still need to use a floppy drive to run some diagnostics on them because the single-board computer won't boot from USB. Also, memo to USB flash drive manufacturers: please make more of them with write-protect switches on them!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The IBM Sure-POS system is extremely old and and extremely popular and features registers and controllers that have to be reloaded via floppy disk. Wal-Mart, Kroeger and Supervalu all use that system in at least some of their stores/banners.
Well, it's kind of like the manual that comes with your car. Everyone has one, but no one reads it until they're broken down on the side of the road. Much like Slashdot, it's not very useful except to tell you stuff that you already knew. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
And those that insist I send them faxes instead of emails in 2010?
Supporting old stuff means tougher standards, higher compatibility. Floppies were a pretty terrible standard, but they lasted forever basically because nobody could ever agree on a new standard. SuperDisk LS-120 was late, plus didn't catch on. But. Old phones work fine on today's network. Cars work with today's gas and roads. Old televisions work with today's services and electricity. But try to run some old BINARY. Chancer are better if you are using a closed-source OS. Unfortunately, stuff just lasts longer than technology, or tech-people, would like. People enjoy using the stuff they have paid for, sometimes with sacrifice, they expect it to work, fix it if broken, etc, and they are right. Lots of stuff lasts decades working. Computer stuff generally doesn't, and somehow we techies find it great and laugh at people when they want old computers and programs to work, as if we actually liked it when it happened to us. We have old stuff that we would like to be more useful too. There are old programs that sometimes cannot be replaced easily, but the environment and hardware for them is somehow basically nonexistent. Yes, recompiling and recoding works - but why does Linux always have to rely on that, and other systems less so, having better binary compatibility?
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1,808 disks beats 4,994 miles of punched paper tape.
I've encountered plenty of corporates which keep a box of floppies around, primarily to bootstrap windows (prior to 2008/vista you had to load storage drivers from floppy if they werent in the default install) and to perform bios updates...
Also at least one place includes floppies in their monthly stationary orders, even tho noone has used them in years. Someone who works there was telling me how he has to throw out all the unused floppies to stop them filling up the stores.
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I had to buy a box a few months ago for just that purpose. I think I'll keep it around for 5 years or so, just in case.
That's what she said.
(Am I doing it right?)
...
Your point about the binary is precisely why having the source code is preferable to a compiled application.
If every app had it's source code distributed with it's binary, being locked in to old platforms would rarely happen.
With the source code, and some following of basic standards that have been around forever (like POSIX) it's not terribly difficult to get pretty much any app to work on pretty much any platform
1) Buy lots of floppies. 2) Wait for production to cease. 3) ???. 4) Profit$$$
I used to try to format 3½ floppy disks with bigger capacities, i.e. 2.88 MB. Used to use a cool DOS application, which can show information for every sector, i.e. is it formatted, damaged, etc. Took me 30 min or more to watch it try to format and maybe fail.
Now I have 16GB and more USB sticks which take under 1 min to format to ext4.
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I still see boxes of floppy disks in the office supply cabinets of big companies. I suspect somewhere high up in corporate purchasing they have a supply purchase schedule that still says that every month they need to restock their cabinets with some large number N. Eventually in a corporate cost-cutting move someone might go through the list and trim it. Then again, they might try, only to have it come back that someone IMPORTANT needs those floppies and no the company can't stop buying them.
Legacy hardware still in use all over the world?
I work with lots of body shops and everyone who still has one that works seems to prefer the Sony Mavica
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica#Digital_still_cameras_with_storage_on_3.5.22_floppy_disk
They only want 640x480 size pics because they have to upload them to the insurance company's and often anything bigger will cause problems.
They buy lots of disks cheap, take the pics of a car and put that floppy disk in the file folder(hard copy file) rather then printing them all out. Back in the day they use to put the negatives in the file
Injection Molding machines that I've worked with (Engel/Arburg/Battenfeld/Demag) often use floppy's to store particular settings for specific molds.
However, alot of newer machines are being outfitted with USB and network ports aswell, to allow larger collections of settings or remote operating from where ever you can acces the network.
As much as I like open source, I think that's a pretty bullshit argument. Most applications are not "following of basic standards that have been around forever (like POSIX)", and practically you will have much better luck if you find statically compiled binaries than some obscure source and spend a week just tracking down all the bug-for-bug compatible compiler versions, libraries, etc.
It's much easier to run a DOS 3 binary today then it is even to compile a simple C program something that includes
I laugh at people who dare proclaim the death of the floppy. I remember Wizard of OCWizard.com proclaiming, "never underestimate the power of a floppy" - and he was absolutely correct.
First, most Windows OS's still use floppies for F6 drivers - and in a lot of cases, USB emulators simply don't work.
Second, there are emergency repair disks (again, for Windows) - which can be quite helpful in a pinch.
Third, having a working floppy drive on a system pretty much guarantees access to that system as long as you have physical access to it.
CD's, USB, Firewire and even eSATA can't make the same boast, especially if drivers required for their operation are missing, damaged, or require an OS to load first.
I'll always build my systems with floppy drives in them, whenever I can. It's just smart.
What? Seriously, your mom does love floppy disks. She has been using them for years and she doesn't save much data so she doesn't need an external hard drive. Plus all the media card formats are soooooo confusing, there are like 4 types of SD cards and her CPU doesn't have a slot to stick them into anyway. Removable media cards are also so small that she loses them or can't see them when she doesn't have a bifocals handy. Your Mom loves floppy disks!
I see them being used at the library to make resumes and to store small amounts of info. Saves alot of time over burning to a CD-R
Just another proof that amiga still rules (and atari sucks) and that people still actively need more floppies to copy games !
The second link mentions Sony in the sub-headline.
They have to back all that information up somehow. Its all in .arj format stored across MULTIPLE volumes!
Supporting old stuff means tougher standards, higher compatibility. Floppies were a pretty terrible standard, but they lasted forever basically because nobody could ever agree on a new standard. SuperDisk LS-120 was late, plus didn't catch on. But. Old phones work fine on today's network.
Mobile phones? Pre-GSM ones don't work in the UK (and presumably other countries), they turned off the old network.
Landline phones? The ones that only do pulse dialling don't work with most "Press 5 to do X" systems.
Cars work with today's gas and roads.
No they don't -- many old cars required petrol with added lead.
Old televisions work with today's services and electricity.
Many countries have switched to digital TV.
Old stuff often only works if some parts are upgraded. Your old TV works (with a digital converter box) and your old car works (if you add a special chemical to the petrol).
Old Linux binaries can be made to work (I assume you're referring to problems with shared libraries?). It probably helps to know what system they're supposed to work with. It might require some technical knowledge.
If old closed-source stuff doesn't work, good luck fixing it.
Rule 1 of Slashdot: Never RTFA
Rule 2 of Slashdot: Never RTFA
Yeah, like I have time to read the rules.
... that AOL is stockpiling them in preparation for a large mailing to drum up new subscribers.
Have gnu, will travel.
We have a plate luminometer from the mid 90s (runs windows 3.1) in a lab I am working in. A colleague and I repaired it and made it usable last year.
It has a 3.5" floppy drive. That drive will be the only way we can get the data from it when we make our first use of it in coming days.
----
In short: People who use older equipment for lack of funding are going to use floppies.
They could benefit from a flash to floppy adapter:
http://www4.shopping.com/xPO-JVC-FlashPath-CUVFM40U
While you can still buy them, I don't know if JVC is still making them.
Required reading for internet skeptics
At my local theatre, our light control board (an ETC Express 48/96 4110A1004) uses floppies as its only form of backing up information about the current show, other than using a very old print device, about twenty pages, and half an hour. Levels, cues, submasters, effects, profiles, the patch, etc. We generally use two backup disks, alternating between the two every time a backup is needed. As one of the two is usually archived away, a supply of additional disks is needed. Luckily, I discovered around 30 disks in old boxes in my closet last week, enough to last another 5 years.
They do great for short-term storage, but have to be replaced frequently. Smart money says that at least half of the floppies I have stored on the fridge have reached the end of their reliable life and I won't be able to get my files. So I have to go by new floppies that are at the beginning of the 1st half of their magnetic decay half-life.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
No kidding... I did my internship at a US Govt. lab. We were still using hard-sectored 8-inch floppies for science instruments in 1993. PDP-11/03's no less...
old people
the HxC Floppy Drive Emulator (in SD and USB flavors) which works even on Amiga and accurately down to rendering old-school marvels such as playing music by drive noises.
Painstakingly hand-made in small numbers for now, if that's not a project to be spread from high-volume automated production lines by the likes of Seeed, then what is?
I agree! Now if I could only get this 40 year old FORTRAN payroll program to compile...
"But this one goes to 11!"
All of the Siemens industrial control softwares we use at my workplace use floppy disks for their licenses. It's fairly standard for a lot of control software as far as I've heard. Why they still use floppy disks when a HASP dongle would work? I don't know. Cost?
Dress for success AND excess.
Computers don't run on BINARY...they run off electricity.
When they are running off of electricity they *interpret* binary and *attempt* to perform something useful.
Just like a car - It runs off of gasoline and attempts to perform something useful.
...is the correct term.
No sig today...
You're examples really are not the best.
Cars switched to Unleaded gas. All previous cars needed an addative to use modern gasoline. While this change was many years, ago, it still did occure.
Old televisions dont "work" properly with modern broadcast, this is why we have an intermediate box (such as a Digital Converter Box, Cable box, Satalite box, etc). The old "standard" television broadcast no longer exists.
Classic telephones are the next to go out the door. Classic analog lines are on their way out the doos in favour of VOIP style services.
While I do absolutely agree with your argument, I think the examlpes could have been better.
I know a ton of semi conductor tools that use floppy drives to back up the runs made on them. Considering some tools can see hundreds of runs a week it is probably where a considerable amount of them are going.
I use them to back up my 5TB RAID array...
That is all.
I still sell my software commercially on 3.5" floppies. Honestly I'm just goofily proud of the fact that 1/4 million lines of assembly code builds into an .EXE that fits on one disk with space to spare for the .PDF doc, but more importantly, I bought an old automatic floppy disk duplicating machine ages ago and I love it (mailing out mass updates was used to be a nightmare but now it's a piece of cake). Every robotic CD duplicator I've seen for less than 3x the price is a flimsy plastic toy.
I'll bet I won't be able to get more custom-printed floppy labels any more when I run out (and OK yes they're pin-feed so I can add the version # and copyright year with a dot matrix printer; this is all retro-themed stuff if that isn't obvious) so that's probably when I'll have to switch to using CDs no matter how expensive it is. But shipping 1.1 MB on a (much more delicate) CD is just so STUPID!
Meanwhile I use floppies all the time in day-to-day life ... I have three computers in my office running three different OSes and floppies are what they all have in common. Why mess with what's always worked?
In India, atleast till 2003 you couldnt do without a floppy disk! if you were a student, and wanted to take print-out for your assignment from an internet cafe, you would be armed with a floppy disk! And hoped the darned thing would read. Because downloading stuff by mail would take eternity! I still remember being amazed by a "thumb drive" :)
There are rules?!
I'm Peggy.
I actually go through several thousand per month as I am in the process of backing up the entire internet on them. Of course things change from time to time so I have to go back and back up even more. But I know they are sturdy and reliable so I will keep using them for as long as I can.
my ex-boss bought like 10 floppy drives about 2 years ago (because they were so cheap!).
I bet he's the one buying the millions of floppies.
not only do I have a 3.5 inch drive, I also have a 5.25 inch drive and floppies. I can enforce an incompatibility issue any time I want.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
No they don't -- many old cars required petrol with added lead.
Well, it probably depends on what you mean by old. Your average 15 year old car didn't need lead, and mostly "just works" assuming of course that all the physical parts work. Your average 15 year old software? Much less likely to "just work" even though the code is an *exact* copy of the original.
Heck, with computer hardware we have that problem like ISA cards - used for lots of industrial machinery that itself is fine, but try connecting one up to a modern PC. The one adapter I've found is flaky, the one motherboard I've found with ISA slots is a custom PC build. At least USB to Serial works well or I'd really be screwed.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
fyi: unleaded gas was mandated with the 1975 model year cars, the first year for the catalytic converter. So if your car is 35+ years old, you're driving a collector/antique car anyway and are accustomed to the hassles of making leaded gasoline (or you've changed the valves/valve seats).
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
RAID drivers!!!!
...and frankly it floors me. How can a company be advanced enough to build equipment like that, but not advanced enough to allow for a more modern means of storing data on an external device?
Gods, remember the damn digicams that had full floppy disk drives on them?
Some of the first wave of commercially-released *analogue* electronic still cameras from the late-1980s- including the pre-digital versions of the Sony Mavica- used floppy disks. The recorded pictures were single composite-encoded NTSC or PAL single frames and recorded onto the disc itself in analogue format.
(Something interesting to bear in mind if you find yourself- as I sometimes do- automatically thinking of "digital" and "electronic" still photography as being synonymous).
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
No, not if they need leaded gas.
Not in the US they don’t, unless some old TV maker had a time machine and access to ATSC hardware, or if your definition of an ‘old’ TV includes TVs recent enough to be cable-ready and you have an analog cable hookup.
I can run 32-bit binaries on my 64-bit system just fine. I just need the right libraries, just like with all of the other software I run. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
Instruments usually run on older hardware, since who wants to redo something that worked properly, years ago, unless there is a really good reason to change to a new design (like not being able to get parts for the old designs, any more). Any improvements that do show up will most often be in the form of better sensors, not human or machine interfaces.
Flashing BIOSes in manufacturing...
Because he does not see any reason to change his machine, and it has a floppy read/write unit and only a cd reader. :-)
His machine is a little bit recent it has only 8 years or so...
The previous one was better and faster, it was running CP/M so now he does not want to change for a machine that will be even slower than the one he has now
A friend of mine a few years ago wanted to know what info the magnetic stripe on his credit card had, so he fiddled around for a while experimenting (I think he probably did some research too). He found that it's the same format as floppy disks. He built himself a reader out of an old floppy drive.
With the source code, and some following of basic standards that have been around forever (like POSIX) it's not terribly difficult to get pretty much any app to work on pretty much any platform
Of course it's nice to have the source. But time is limited, and if open-source mandates every user has to know how and have time to modify programs, it will continue to be only for techs. It's much much more useful if the binary still works and nothing *needs* to be changed. Sourceforge is full of people trying to figure out what good is the source code, and just forgetting about it. Unfortunately there's more chance of a user figuring out how to run any program, old or new, on a closed source OS, and I believe that is the single, primary reason open source OS's don't advance much in terms of users -- the users can't figure out how to run programs.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Cars work with today's gas and roads.
No they don't -- many old cars required petrol with added lead.
Old cats DO work with today's lead free petrol. It's not the most efficient, but they work. I happen to have a still working Beetle from 77, and because it's very difficult to find leaded fuel today, I simply put unleaded fuel onto it, and it works...
I have a few electronic claim submitters who still run their practice management under DOS emulation in XP. Due to some type of sandboxing, the DOS app can't write the actual windows drive but can write to a floppy. The few poor people who still have this system need to write their claims to a floppy, then copy the file from the floppy to the local hard disk to send to me via SFTP.
Recently, I had a support call from one of those offices and they were getting errors from my file transfer software saying the file failed CRC check. It turned out they had been using the same floppy since roughly 2006 and it finally crapped out. All they needed was to buy a new one and format it, but I was impressed because floppies did not seem to me to last that long with daily or weekly use. I guess they just got lucky the same floppy lasted four years.
Some lighting consoles use 3.5. It's only newer ones that use usb or have internal hdd, and many of those can cost over $10k-20k to purchase.
If I want to go purchase a TV born the same year I was in the 70's, I should be able to find one with enough effort. If I want to plug that TV in and play some NES Baseball, I could probably get that working as well if done right. Maybe I want to watch Tube on it (Tube - noun - 1. A web based broadcast of visual media. Why can't that be coined?) and I could figure out the right adapters and eventually get it to work well.
If I want to go purchase a hammer born the same year I was in the 70's, I could eventually find one and use it exactly like I would any other regular hammer. Sure, there are new hydraulic-atomic-mega-blaster-hammers out there that might do the job better, but my regular old hammer still does its job because it is cheap and it is perfect.
The problem with cars, tv's, tubes, and Apple is that they all solve a problem their own capitalistic way. Not everybody wins. Except carpenters.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
4000 users using
2 floppies a month to backup who have to
buy 10 floppies to get 1 that actually works
--------
is
--------
80000 floppies a month and
960000 floppies a year which
rounds up to a million.
How many people are we really cutting off?
My IBM3490E-C11 tape drive boots up on floppies you insentive clods!
Admittedly it's only being used as a table until the space is needed and I can get three other guys to help me move it, but if the newer 3490 tape drives bite the dust it can still handle single tapes.
will it shred?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
Hell, i had to use a floppy to install RAID drivers for Win7! The motherboard manufacturers page didnt have just the drivers available for the RAID controller for me to put on a flash drive, and the chip manufacturers site didnt have the correct driver either. BUT the mobo manufacturer did have a driver floppy creator exe. It was a weird situation. AND, of course as soon as i got everything installed and ran windows update it updated the RAID driver...
Wasnt THAT old of a motherboard either, 2004...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
To do a Windows 2003 Server Automated System Recovery (ASR) you MUST use a 1.44MB floppy disk.
Yup, that's right folks, if your server doesn't have a floppy drive, and you need to restore it, you need to install a floppy drive.
A USB key or CD-R just won't do it.
Old cats DO work with today's lead free petrol.
I'm pretty sure that cats aren't big fans of petrol, leaded or not.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
German structural analysis software RSTAB is shipped with license files on a floppy. Yes, in 2010.
At least they are also able to e-mail you the files if you ask.
haxor ma vas rad
Now imagine same process with punch cards. Entire forests would have to be cut down to make enough of these...
--Coder
True. Having recently struggled with something even as recent as Solaris 7, I know it's painful.
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I would guess part of it is that some systems are modular, so changing connectors or storage means that the new iteration of your machine won't work with controller stations that it otherwise would, or vice versa. Also lots of new code additions to deal with USB or ethernet and so forth. It just isn't worth the cost when the current approach works.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Currently, all Electronic Voting Machine from Brazil uses a floppy as the main transport media. This is about half million floppies!
Extremely well said!