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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
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.
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.
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.
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'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?
Oddly, many machines that _should_ boot off CD when selected in BIOS don't want to cooperate with (properly burned at slowest speed/good media, yadda yadda) CD/DVD booting.
I keep a Smart Boot Manager
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html
floppy for those, and they'll often boot from CD/DVD when selected in the Smart Boot Manager (which can also be loaded to hard disk) menu.
Why? Beats the shit out of me, but it has worked on many machines over the years.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
Yes, I have to use them actually. It is the only way to pay multilateral income taxes in Argentina. You have to stand in line at an actual bank for an hour and present the teller with some printed forms and a diskette with the form file (and the money of course). And no, you can't use a flashdrive, electronic transfer or anything else. You have to use a freaking 3.5 inch dikette. It's like going back to the last century. Of course the damned things keep failing every other month so I have to buy more and more.
It doesn't help that the software to make those forms is the old DOS version with some library changes to make it work on windows. UAC sure loves it... (not)
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
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
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.
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.
I'd convert them while hardware was still working if I were you.
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.
well duh, it's the hackers that are buying them.
Tax returns dating back to the 80's.. WHY???
It's a personal liability to have any records that are older than 7 years. Burn those things in a fire or at least run them through a strong shredder.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
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.
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.
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...
the implication being that he not only talked to a female, but managed to amaze her. i for one congratulate the GP on his successes with the female race.
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!
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?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
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.
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!"