Farewell To the Floppy Disk 616
s31523 writes "Those of us who have been in the IT arena for a while remember installing our favorite OS, network client, power application, etc. by feeding the computer what seemed an endless supply of 5.25" soft floppy disks. We rejoiced when the hard 3.5" floppies came out, cutting our install media by 1/3. We practically did backflips when the data CD-ROM arrived and we declared: we will never need any other disk than this! It is with sadness that I report the beginning of the end for the floppy: computer giant PC World has announced it will no longer carry the floppy disk once current supplies run out."
Windows installer requires them (Score:5, Informative)
(I bring this up because I had to install a floppy on a computer I was reinstalling XP on the other day so I could use the SATA drive! I kinda felt dirty after doing that!)
Sadly... Good! (Score:5, Informative)
Since '95 the quality control on floppy disks has been so low that it hasn't been worth buying them anyway. At one time a SS/DD 5.25" could be used as a DS/DD reliably for five years or more without errors "just appearing". Maybe a patent ran out or QA began paying more attention to HD and CD manufacturing. Whatever it was, though, after '95 the floppy disks which I've bought have an average lifespan of about three months before random errors begin appearing on the media.
BIOS Upgrades... (Score:5, Informative)
How is this new news? (Score:4, Informative)
I think what should be news is that although everyone is retiring the floppy drive and sending all the disks to the bone yard, nobody has come up with an alternative way to flash device BIOS's. Companies for RAID, Network and other devices sometimes still only release a floppy self-writing image file.
Not for me (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, you can do that with the nifty-keen gaming motherboard on your gaming computer, but my army of Dell Optiplex GX150s and 260s still need me to use floppies (USB sticks aren't allowed in the building for ludicrously retarded "security" reasons).
Re:Windows installer requires them (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I haven't had a floppy in any of my PCs for at least 5 years. For the odd time I needed a win98 boot floppy or such, then I have floppy images on several bootable DVDs (there's lots of them out there if you're too lazy to do it yourself or don't know how).
However, I still have an old floppy drive (and a trusty LS120) somewhere on a shelf, for the odd time it might come in handy (rescue data, reflash a BIOS from dos - although I prefer to do that from a hard disk as floppies are unreliable, and things like that).
nostalgia (Score:3, Informative)
Not ready reading drive A: ()Abort ()Retry (Y)Fail?
Re:Windows installer requires them (Score:1, Informative)
No matter how you have slipstreamed it, if the RAID driver isn't signed, it still won't pick the integrated one if it thinks it has a better match in its default drivers (which bluescreen on the reboot into GUI-mode setup on the particular chipset in question), and there's no way of overriding that except the actual floppy disk process, so you still need a floppy for that.
8 in floppy (Score:3, Informative)
The first job I had at Zenith Electronics about 25 years ago had me building a dual 8 inch floppy drive Heath Kit that I had to use. I recall when a single sided, single density floppy for the Commodore 64 cost around $8.00. I had to buy a USB floppy for a system at work because some POS software assumed that data backup went to drive A: and I could not convince the user to use a mapped portion of her hard drive instead.
I remenber several applicatins assuming that drive A: existed.
Who cares what PC World says? (Score:5, Informative)
I hope someone finds this information useful.
Re:1998 (Score:2, Informative)
People who actually needed one went with the much easier plug-a-USB-cable-in solution. At the time, an LS-120 that could read and write regular floppies was only a few dollars more than the early USB floppy drives, so people without big network pipes wound up with something that was useful for system backup, too.
The rest of us got cheezy SCSI-II USB bridges to plug in our SyQuest and tape drives....
Re:Windows installer requires them (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Noooooo! My 486! (Score:3, Informative)
The network stack for dos has been available free from Microsoft for years.
Basic Netbios & IPX/SPX are pretty easy to setup. (Surely I wasn't the only one to play Doom and Duke Nukem 3D on a LAN.)
TCP/IP is also doable but is quite a memory hog; you'll definately want to setup a custom boot sequence to boot with or without network support.
I'm not sure how well DOS networking plays with domains, and active directory; it *used* to work against NT server 3 and 4, but I've never tried against 2K or 2K3. (I've networked DOS 6.22 to Windows 2000 server, but not in a domain configuration.)
You can run a DOS file server as well, but that eats even more memory. Other than that I found that there were occasional stability issues in some cases when doing large file transfers (large, lmao, ok ok...transfers in the 10's of megabytes).
cheers,
Another publicity stunt from the Dixons group (Score:5, Informative)
(1) Death of video recorder (i.e. VCR) in sight [bbc.co.uk]
(2) Dixons to end 35mm camera sales [bbc.co.uk].
In the case of the VCR, their announcement was misleading at best, and more likely just a pack of lies. Dixons.co.uk (and the large-format Currys stores) *still* each sell a wide range of standalone VCRs, over 2 years later. (Visit dixons.co.uk [dixons.co.uk] and search for "video recorder").
IIRC the high-street Dixons stores (now called "Currys.Digital", ugh) still sold them long after the supposed phase-out date. I don't know about the 35mm cameras, but even if they were telling the truth in that case, it was a nice publicity stunt for them. Even more so for the floppy discs; you're stopping selling floppy discs and you felt the need to make a big announcement about it?!
Of course, the intention behind these announcements- besides the straight publicity- is to give the impression of Dixons and PC World as hi-tech, cutting-edge type places. When in fact they're mediocre at best; sometimes competitive, but just as often overpriced- particularly for more humble items such as USB and Ethernet cables, staffed by salespeople who like to pretend they know more than they do, flogging overpriced warranties and with a poor reputation [ciao.co.uk]. Online shopping is much cheaper, and with a better selection.
Re:1998 (Score:3, Informative)
Nah, in 1998 CD burners weren't in my college's computer labs. They had CD readers, but those handy US flash drives weren't really around back in 1998. I actually sunk some money into an external zip drive because I could connect it to all the computers that I had access to, and it would work with little hassle. Highspeed college downloading in the computer labs wasn't that useful when you had a 1.44 MB storage limit. Oh, you could chat til midnight fine, but getting downloaded warez'd games off those computers was a chore. It wasn't until 2002-2003 or so that WinXP and desktops with USB drives and CD/DVD burners really became standard for my work computers. On the lan, you don't need USB drives, but it is very helpful to have 512MB of easily carriable storage. Of course for those that download anime and such the 4.5 GBs of DVDs just don't cut it, I have to lug around my external 300 GB HD for that kind of storage. I'm just waiting for the day that we have 1 TB of removable easily to transport storage.
So 1998 ! (Score:2, Informative)
Mac OS X does not support floppies (Specifically, internal floppy drives, USB is fine). There is a wonky driver avail to do it, but still...
Re:1998 (Score:0, Informative)
Did you ever try and mount a floppy on System 6 or 7 or MacOS 8? There is a reason that Apple abandoned floppies early on. They were unable to build hardware and software capable of handling them. Over all three versions of that OS and on many different machines I never had a better than 50% sucess rate at mounting a floppy. Failure to mount it often crashed the OS completely.
Floppies have remained very functional and reliable on every other major OS and standards adherent hardware.
Apple wants you to think you did not need or want floppies to hide their inability to cope with them.
Its odd though, I recall the AppleIIGS handling 5.25"s quite reliably. Something happened along the way.
Re:How is this new news? (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody? Nobody but me apparently. h0 h0 h0. Seriously though, everyone but you has already figured this out. It's a bit of a PITA but all you need to is use vmware (or similar) with an OS that can read your self-extracting-floppy-making image. Write to a virtual floppy file. Now take that floppy image and use it as the basis for a bootable cdrom - I do this on CDRW so I can reuse the disk.
Voila! Boot from the CD, as far as it knows it's a floppy, and it appears on drive A: (if you don't already have one) so even if the flash program is really stupid it still works. I've done this on two different machines so far.
They got a mention on /. too... (Score:5, Informative)
(1) "The UK's largest retailer of electronics is phasing out VHS VCRs." [slashdot.org] (Note that as I pointed out then [slashdot.org], Dixons' "discontinuation" of the VCR took place before DVD recorders (*not* playback-only devices) and HDD-based PVRs had taken off.
(2) "Digital Cameras Force Film Off Dixons' Shelves" [slashdot.org]
Vista still requires them to back up credentials (Score:4, Informative)
Melissa
thinking of the children...... (Score:2, Informative)
what about all the data generated over the last 30 years that is stored in formats that are obsolete, on media that are redundant...how will we read a report written in 1980 on the comuters of 2080?
I mean, researchers and scholars can still read, for example, vatican documents written in latin from 1000 years ago without extreme difficulty
But I'd be royally fucked if I needed to read a school essay written in word* and saved to a 5.25" Amstrad Gem formated floppy
With so much uncertainty, won't someone please think of our children
Re:I still like floppies (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Windows installer requires them (Score:5, Informative)
Hint: format the USB key as a 1.2MB floppy. If you ask nice, I'll tell you how. If you ask naughty, go Google it yersef. I did. Took me most of an hour to figure it out, and most of a day to get it approved. Slick.
Of course, WIN Server 2K/2K3 and the F6 floppy idea still rots, but it's NOT impossible.
-rick
Re:Windows installer requires them (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not dead (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Hey I still have punch cards! (Score:3, Informative)
Geeze, the Geek equivalent of "When I was a boy I walked to school in the snow uphill both ways"...
Re:Floppy disk reliability (Score:3, Informative)
I have 25+-year-old Commodore drives around here somewhere; I haven't looked at 'em in a decade, but I'll bet that they, too, have sacrificial disks in them at this very moment.
The nice thing about my scheme is that whatever dust would fall to the bottom of the drive falls on the disk; you spin the disk every now and then, the dust gets trapped inside the disk; you pop the disk out, boom, the drive is already clean and ready to go.
Re:Not too late. (Score:3, Informative)
ZIP disks WERE poised to take over the floppy market, as an alternative to LS120 and Syquest cartridges.
CD burners DID come out at around the same time -- but back then, a Sony Spressa 2X read / 1X burn was worth $2500 and blank CD-Rs worth worth $20 each (figures in Canadian dollars). CDs were also quite finnicky back then, and SCSI controllers for the burners weren't exactly cheap, either (you needed something like an Adaptec 1542, worth about $250).
ZIP was -much- cheaper, and in fact, in much more widespread use where people needed to share large files (i.e. print media). The drive sold for about $250, required no special controller, and 100MB cartdiges were $20 each... about the price of two boxes of decent disks.
So, your first 600MB with a CD burner back then cost you roughly $3000, while your for 600MB with a ZIP cost you roughly $350. That's $2500 worth of media-savings -- and back then, a gig was a LOT of data -- you'd have to make before a CD-burner would pay for itself.
Finally, for some end-user perspective -- just before the ZIP drives came out, I bought a fast 1GB harddrive for $1350 (again, Canadian dollars.. ISTR thinking that was around $950 US at the time). I thought that disk was going to be big enough to store all the data I'd ever generate.
Re:Old-school (Score:3, Informative)
Those of us who've been in IT for a long while remember when the OS and power application lived on 80 column cards.
(OK, I don't, but my boss tells me about it all the time and I have screwed around with the manual punch machine we still have)
Re:Another publicity stunt from the Dixons group (Score:3, Informative)
8" disks are commonly called floopy disks.
5.25" disks - mini-floppy disks. (unless they were the Lisa ones which were Twiggy Floppys)
3.5" disks - micro-floppy disks.
(though micro-floppy was widely used for other formats like the 3 and 2" versions as well.)
Cassette tapes were just Cassttes - or in Commodore speak 'datasettes' (I think Adam cassettes were data-packs).
Then there were the exatron tapes which were stringy floppies.
And the tinly Sinclair QL tapes were micrdodrive cartridges or something like that.
Re:Windows installer requires them (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176 [ngine.de]
Re:Windows installer requires them (Score:3, Informative)
What I ended up doing was just partitioning the flash drive as a hard drive (MBR and all) and using syslinux as the boot loader. It was a pain in the ass to set up, and I don't even know if it's possible under Windows without some obscure piece of special-purpose software. But it worked. And it's a more flexible solution -- because it uses syslinux to boot, I can boot any floppy image I want by just copying it to the hard drive and adding it to syslinux.conf instead of having to dd it over (which is itself difficult in Windows).
Re:I've never called the 3 1/2 ones floppies (Score:3, Informative)