The Death of the Floppy Disk 1049
vook writes "Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life. "
Article text for your convenience (Score:2, Informative)
ATLANTA - Long the most common way to store letters, homework and other computer files, the floppy disk is going the way of the horse upon the arrival of the car: it'll hang around but never hold the same relevance in everyday life.
And think about your breathing, say some home computer users. The march of technology must go on.
Like the penny, the floppy drive is hardly worth the trouble, computer makers say.
Dell Computer Corp. stopped including a floppy drive in new computers in spring 2003, and Gateway Inc. has followed suit on some models. Floppies are available on request for $10 to $20 extra.
"To some customers out there, it's like a security blanket," said Dell spokesman Lionel Menchaca. "Every computer they've ever had has had a floppy, so they still feel the need to order a floppy drive."
A few customers have complained when they found their new computers don't have floppy drives, but it's becoming uncommon as they realize the benefits of newer technologies, Menchaca said. Almost all new laptops don't come with a floppy.
More and more people are willing to say goodbye to the venerable floppy, said Gateway spokeswoman Lisa Emard.
"As long as we see customers request it, we'll continue to offer it," she said. "We'll be happy to move off the floppy once our customers are ready to make that move."
Some people may hesitate to abandon the floppy just because they're so comfortable with it, said Tarun Bhakta, president of Vision Computers outside Atlanta, one of the largest computer retailers in the South.
At his store, the basic computer model comes with all necessary equipment, but no floppy.
"People say they want a floppy drive, and then I ask them, 'When was the last time you used it?' A lot of the time, they say, 'Never,'" Bhakta said.
But plenty of regular, everyday computer users don't want to let their floppies go.
"For my children, they can work at school and at home. I think they're a pretty good idea," said shopper Mark Ordway.
"I just want something simple for me and my husband to use," said Pat Blaisdell.
The floppy disk has several replacements, including writeable compact discs and keychain flash memory devices. Both can hold much more data and are less likely to break.
Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around.
"There's always some nostalgia," said Scott Wills, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Georgia Tech who has held on to an old 8-inch floppy disk. "It's a technology I'm glad to be rid of. I'd never label them, and I never knew what any of them were until I put them in and looked."
In a sense, it's amazing floppy disks have hung around for this long.
They only hold 1.44 megabytes of space -- still enough for word processing documents but little else. By comparison, CDs store upward of 700 megabytes, and the flash memory drives typically carry between 64 and 256 megabytes.
And it's been a long time since floppy disks were even floppy. They used to come in a bendable plastic casing and were 5.25 inches wide, but Apple Computer Inc. pioneered the smaller, higher density disks with its Macintosh (news - web sites) computers in the mid-1980s.
Then Apple become the first mass-market computer manufacturer to stop including floppy drives altogether with the release of their iMac model in 1998.
"It's not officially dead, but there's no question it's a slow demise," said Tim Bajarin, principle analyst for Creative Strategies, a technology consulting firm near San Jose, Calif. "You had a few people
It may not be too many years before floppy disks are joined by DVDs. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (news - web sites) recently predicted the DVD would be obsolete within a decade.
Re:Again (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
Get a USB key (under $30). Let me know next time you need a floppy disk.
Until most computers have a USB port on the front (every computer I use regularly has them on the back; I even use a few machines that are old enough not to have USB at all), floppy disks are more convenient for small units of data transfer. Anything much larger and CDRW is more convenient.
Also, you can't boot of USB keys, so a floppy drive is pretty much essential for the purpose of running stuff like memtest86.
Re:It's about time... (Score:2, Informative)
Its probably the fact the drive is only used once in a blue moon. So when you do, it dumps a whole load of dust and dirt on the floppy.
But in answer to your question: yes, but I get more like 75% (or maybe I'm just unlucky).
Re:not yet. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
Floppies will die only when... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
All the BIOSes I've used in the last few years have allowed me to boot from "other" devices (USB keys and hard drives,) and booting from CD-ROM has been available for much longer. I haven't used a floppy now in a year or so, and I don't even bother sticking them in the machines I build anymore. It's just $10.00 I don't need to add to the cost.
Re:It's about time... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:not yet. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Again (Score:3, Informative)
Before a couple years ago, I put them in machines but didn't use them. In fact on the rare instance when someone gave me a floppy disk, it never worked because the drive was full of dust.
Basically it came down to having to buy a new floppy drive every time I needed to use a floppy (about once a year or so). Sometimes I could just vacuum them out. Finally I just gave up and told people to email the stuff to me or put it on my FTP server.
Windows installs from bootable CD (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:1, Informative)
DVD's came were released in 1996. The format didnt take off until 2000. In fact, popularity didnt exceed VHS until a couple years ago.
That's 6 years from introduction to widespread use. About the same as for CD's.
I'm reckoning Blu-Ray will have to deal with the same time frame or worse (multi layer DVD's can store HDTV, plus u have to wait for cheap HDTV).
Re:Great, next one in line ... (Score:3, Informative)
You seem to have missed my first sentence... (Score:3, Informative)
The first company to ship and popularize Sony's revolutionary 3.5" hard-case floppy drives and disks...
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
I would assume any OEM that was scrapping floppy support would have a BIOS that could handle USB boot.
The sooner slow, unreliable, huge 3.5 inch floppies are completely scrapped the better.
Post USB they have become an archiac format long past their use by date.
The only thing I'd miss (Score:4, Informative)
Currently AFAIK the only choice is that, or a full CD with all the ports.
Wish there was a CD image for an FTP install you can download so you don't need three or four hours to download the ISO...
=D
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Informative)
-matthew
What about apps that must boot from a floppy? (Score:3, Informative)
I finally bought a laptop at the start of this year and it came without an internal floppy drive. OK, I said, I don't really use one all that much. What could possibly go wrong?
I hit my first snag that evening when I was trying to use Partition Magic to generate my dual-boot partition (Linux). PM cannot repartition the drive opon which it is running, so I needed to create a floppy set for booting off of and partitioning from. With no ready method to do so, and no easy way (at that time) to generate a bootable CD, it was back to the BestFutureCircuitFry store to get a USB external floppy
I must admit that the floppy is almost never used, but it's nice to have it around when needed. I make use of it when working with paritions or ghosting drives. Without the external floppy, it would be difficult to do either.
It is my opinion that, unless an OS comes with the ability to create a bootable CD with the same ease that one could previously create a bootable diskette, then the diskette will not be devoid of value or usefulness. Until Bill has a "create emergency boot CD" option alongside (or in place of) the "create boot Diskette" option, then MS-Windows will still require the occasional use of a floppy drive.
I also know that it's possible to create a bootable USB key, but it's not easy enough yet (for the average user), and most people don't have a box of USB keys around like they would a box of diskettes or a spool of CD blanks.
Now, what to do with my cases of 5.25" floppies. And the two 8" Elelephant disks that I have, since the IMSA got donated.
This is pretty ironic... (Score:3, Informative)
Last week I needed it. And I discovered that it was broken.
I was trying to install, of all things, Win95 with VMWare to test something. Since the disc isn't bootable, I had to use the floppy drive just to put dos on it first. First I had to *find* a copy of dos...luckily a coworker still had a set. Then I discovered the drive was busted. And for some reason, VMWare wouldn't acknowledge the new USB floppy drive as "B:". Lots of cursing and threats, and finally got it working by *networking* the floppy drive off my Linux machine, which I couldn't spare to swap the drive from.
In short, it's 2004, and not only are floppies *not* completely removed from my geek life, neither is dos!
The only upshot is that I could play nibbles.bas again.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:1, Informative)
Re:As soon as I can... (Score:3, Informative)
You can, there's more to it than that though - for many higher end RAID controllers, you can save and restore the array configuration to... a floppy. This is from the RAID array BIOS program.
Why, you ask? Well, RAID BIOS can talk to the int 13 device, but not a CDROM or the like. Therefore - no USB, no CD-xxx, no DVD+-xx, just good ole floppies. (There's no OS running at this point, so no drivers to load - your OS is on that RAID controlled stripe set anyways)
And if you're ever playing around with array configurations and screw something up, or the gods of electricity hiccup during a configuration change, you'll be very happy that you backed up that config on a floppy.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Informative)
Heck, my SGI Indy from '93 can boot off a TFTP partition on the net. Very handy for a diskless workstation. AFAIK, the Mac can do this also.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:4, Informative)
The floppy is still a very common method of transfering documentation between the home PC and a school PC. While the USB drive does hold more information, one can't assume that people or institutions will update their hardware to include USB ports. This will become a bigger problem though with PC's shipping without the floppy drive as a default configuration. I just sent my son to 6th grade and he requires two floppy disk. I've seen the hardware the school is working with and USB is not as common as the floppy drive. The floppy drive may be dying, but it will be a long slow death due to situations such as this.
Re:Again (Score:2, Informative)
Hey, I have a CD-R with memtest86 on it.
Because it's now a boot option in knoppix.
Hooray Knoppix!
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:2, Informative)
BladeCenter HS20 (8832) BIOS update on Linux [ibm.com]
BladeCenter HS20 (8832) BIOS update on Windows [ibm.com]
These updates flash the BIOS from inside Linux or Windows (i.e., no rebooting into DOS or using a floppy).
Because it's incorrect... (Score:1, Informative)
Three things are killing the floppy... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Bootable CDs are filling the niche for system recovery. Used to be I always had a boot floppy with me to recover systems. Now I carry a bootable credit card CD with a lot more tools on it.
3. Floppy quality is going down. The last box of floppies that I bought, I threw away about 30%! Not only that, I've noticed that they don't seem to hold files like they used to. I write a file on floppy, check it two weeks later and the file is unreadable. I format the floppy and come up with 200k of bad sectors when previously there were none.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
USB flash drives (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Informative)
If you're updating your BIOS, you'll probably want to make a backup of the original BIOS before you flash the new one. Without a floppy drive, where are you going to store the backup? Last time I checked, DOS-based BIOS flashers didn't include the ability to write the backup to CD.
Re:The only thing I'd miss (Score:3, Informative)
Dead but still necessary (Score:4, Informative)
Windows XP, installs, for instance, STILL have to laod driver extras (RAID, SCSI, etc) from a floppy at boot -- even if the computer in question doesn't have one.
Companies such as Dell often package their driver and BIOS releases only onto floppy disk images; it's damn near impossible to pull out these files and install them from the hard drive or CD. That drives me nuts, but it happens.
So I keep a couple of old drives, cables and all, hanging around in a box, and I plug 'em in to the desktop systems when needed. Luckily my laptop has never needed one... I'd feel just plain silly going out and buying a USB floppy drive these days.
CD-R is not designed for packet writing (Score:1, Informative)
You can fake random access for reads, by positioning ahead of what you want and throwing away the blocks that you didn't need. That doesn't work for writes.
CD-ROM is a kludge on top of audio CDs. It works fairly well. CD-R is another kludge on top of that, and it works OK if you stay away from some of the trickier bits. Packet writing is yet another layer of kludges on top of that, and it's a miracle if it works at all. Way too much cruft.
It would have been nice if Philips and Sony had shown more foresight when they designed the audio CD. A more flexible, general purpose design would have helped, even for audio purposes: longer running time with lower quality mono or shorter running time with higher quality would have been useful options. But the processing power was just not affordable back then. Most of the work was done by hardware, with room for only one format for the data on the disc.
The CD-ROM is a flawed design. But we wouldn't have it without the audio CD. Only a high volume consumer device like the CD player could have dropped the price to the point where adaptation for computer use was reasonable. And CD-Rs would not have taken off unless they were backwards compatible with audio players - making audio discs is still a major use for burners.
DVD+RW is designed for random access write. So is BluRay. The drives include processors far more powerful than any personal computer from 1980. So we won't repeat the mistakes of the CD. We'll make new ones. The media companies consider the lack of DRM on CDs a mistake, and don't want to repeat it. We need to convince them that any DRM that ties content to a particular object is a mistake. Every time that the media companies get what they want, it fails. Every time that consumers get what they want, the media companies make even more money. Will they ever learn?
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:2, Informative)
No but you can load drivers to a USB stick from it
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:1, Informative)
PBX Systems! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They make nice stopgaps though.... (Score:4, Informative)
Bluetooth natively shows up as one of several com ports to the computer. If you got REALLY happy, you could have one for the pyro, one for the scale, one for the datalogger.
Then you leave the laptop in the shade, within 30 feet of the pits and it talks to the datalogger when the driver brings the car in.
Serial connectivity with no add'l cables!
Re:Modern usage of viruses and virii, and "hacker" (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.bartleby.com/61/81/V0118100.html [bartleby.com]
http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definit
There are, of course, other delitative enumerts but I'm simply to fratnickled to envisiate.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
A BIOS flasher saves the original first. This way if the flash fails, you can attempt again with the original. BIOS is read from flash on boot - after that, it's memory resident. If you misflash a BIOS, you're fine until you hit "reset".
You'd be a fool to flash a BIOS from a bootable CD-ROM.
Re:They make nice stopgaps though.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Informative)
I also run an ftp server for such an occasion, but really most people don't do that... But if a paper's due, I'll fire it off, just in case something goes awry with my ftp server and I need an alternate plan...
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:4, Informative)
Actually most newer computers can boot from USB jump drives, USB drivers, and even old systems and boot from CD. You don't need a Mac either. My WinTel P4 system can boot Zipslack off my 512mb jump drive just fine. Its actually just an option in the bios to enable boot from other devices. My last AMD system had this option too thought I never tested it with USB.
Oh and while no one uses them anymore, you can also boot off zip drives and all those odd little discs too.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:3, Informative)
An EPROM burner will fix that...but only if you have the original contents to dump back into the flash chip.
Some BIOS ROMs are also configured with a recovery area that doesn't get overwritten during an upgrade, so if the upgrade goes badly, you still have a way to get it running again without having to drag out the EPROM burner (which I'll admit is a gadget most people don't have). The code in this recovery area usually has just enough code to load a BIOS image from floppy, flash it, and beep the speaker as it goes about its work. (Some of them were able to use a VGA display on the ISA bus, but most computers nowadays don't even have an ISA bus.)
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:2, Informative)
Not just memory sticks, but any generic Mass Storage device will do. ATA-USB2 drive enclosures work fine.
Recent experience with XP and SATA (Score:4, Informative)
XP doesn't have any SATA drivers, and the only way Microsoft has seen fit to present extra drivers to the normal install is through a floppy drive. Nothing else works. Another CD? nope. A USB key drive? sorry.
The only way around this that I've found is to "slipstream" the drivers into the normal install on CD. This involves a complicated process of ripping the content of the original XP install CD, hacking into various files, modifying the directory structure and rebuilding another bootable CD-rom from the result.
It cannot be done unless you have access to another computer with a CD burner and the right software (that can produce a bootable CD), and if your version of the XP medium is provided by a third party vendor like DELL or IBM, chances are even this process won't work.
In other words it makes installing Debian on the same machine a walk in the park in comparison.
Search google for "slipstream SATA drivers XP" if you want to know the gory details.
Re:Quote from TFA (Score:2, Informative)
I use floppy drives often. From reinstalling my sisters Win98 to downloading a modem driver for a friend at work. Newer technologies may be better for some things, but for now, floppies are simple, universal and more practical for small files.