Farewell To the Floppy Disk

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."

Re:Windows installer requires them

[DarkShadeChaos]

I second that, as well as being the easiest method of updating the BIOS (which happens more often than not on my DFI Lanparty nf4 sli-dr expert).

1998

[Myopic]

In 1998 when Apple released the original bondi blue iMac without a floppy drive, the floppy disc was ALREADY so absurdly useless that no computer user needed them. So, I proffer that this story is late by about a decade.

Re:Windows installer requires them

[ditoa]

I wish Microsoft would release an application which automates integration of SATA/SCSI drivers so a floppy isn't needed during install. This can be done manually (although it is annoying complex) or with Nlite however an official tool would be great. I am surprised their deployment tools does not include an Nlite type application in all honesty.

Re:Windows installer requires them

[Midnight Thunder]

I second that, as well as being the easiest method of updating the BIOS (which happens more often than not on my DFI Lanparty nf4 sli-dr expert).

Given the abundance of USB-Flash keys, I would hope that most modern PCs can be booted off USB devices.

Needless arrogance.

[Annoymous Cowherd]

I have to stop and wonder why the majority of the replies show such contempt for the diskette.

Where is the older generation? The one that prides themselves on retaining their 5 1/4 inch drives, along with a couple of floppies?

Does no one spend hours pottering down memory lane with a dusty box of floppies and a disk scanner marking off the bad sectors, trying to retrieve those school assignments?

As far as I'm concerned, technology is only as beneficial as it is convenient. Sure a USB key is faster, and can hold more. But don't underestimate the comfort of familiarity for the hundreds of average joes trying to keep their head above silicon waters.

Let's be more accommodating guys.

Beginning of the end????

[gstoddart]

It is with sadness that I report the beginning of the end for the floppy

I think we're at the middle of the end at a bare minimum.

I bet for a lot of us, we've not handled floppies in several years. And, while my computers still have floppy drives, nothing has been in them for quite a while.

It's way too late in the decline of the floppy to call it "the beginning of the end".

Cheers

buzz off - we will always need it

[unity100]

once every 2 years this debate is put forth and a few articles are published about it. yet, floppy still stays and will stay.

floppy drives are just there for system recoveries, safe reboots and such.

cd roms and dvd roms cant be trusted to do that - their reader heads are too fragile and can go out of balance with the slightest impact if you are not careful. it is a hard day at work to find out that your recovery disk you have used 1 year ago is not read anymore by your dvd just when you need to safe boot your pc, or some other cds found around the office which were created by the same recorder.

floppy drives on the other hand are just too brutally effective - they are highly unsophisticatedly mechanical that, you can trust it to always work as it is tough to break, and it reads any floppy disk created by any floppy drive.

Not too late.

[Kadin2048]

Luckily there are still USB floppy drives available [tigerdirect.com], so even if your mobo lacks a "real" FD controller, you can still read the disks.

I wouldn't waste too much time before you archive them, though; drives are only going to get harder to find, and the media itself that you have stuff stored on ain't getting any younger.

A slight bit of irony, though: years ago, when I first got an Iomega Zip disk, I was sure that it was going to replace floppies completely. (And for a while it seemed like it; there were some Macs in the late 90s that shipped with Zips in place of the FD drive.) So I dutifully backed up all my old floppies onto Zip disks. Not that long ago, when I decided it was time to retire the Zip for good, I went to pull the data off of its cartridges and back them up on CD-R...only to find that the disks were plagued with the "clicks." I had to go back to the floppies to get the old stuff again.

Taught me two good lessons: 1) always roll backups onto new media whenever possible (I should have backed those Zips up to CD-R as soon as I got a disc burner), but more importantly 2) don't ever trust that the new media will be more robust than the old. Even now, I still have the floppies stored along with the CDs (and now DVD+Rs), because I'm not sure which will last longer. Might as well cover all the bases.

Re:Windows installer requires them

[Directrix1]

Instead of just stating triviality, you could actually back up your claim with a link or two explaining how. Not that I give a crap, since I just use Linux, but obviously there are plenty of people oblivious to this triviality.

Re:1998

[MojoStan]

In 1998 when Apple released the original bondi blue iMac without a floppy drive, the floppy disc was ALREADY so absurdly useless that no computer user needed them.

I disagree, especially for typical iMac users in 1998. Remember, this was before CD burners, USB keys, and home broadband were mainstream. If you ever saw an Mac computer lab in those days, you'd have noticed an ugly external USB floppy drive hanging off every iMac.

I thought Apple dropped floppy drives at least a year too early. To move data to another computer, I remember Mac fans saying: "Just e-mail it to yourself." This was unnecessarily inconvenient in the days of home dial-up internet and before good web mail clients were available (for other computers).

So, I proffer that this story is late by about a decade.

I'd say about eight years.

Floppies more reliable than CD/DVD ?!

[BlueBiker]

That's an argument that nobody makes. Sure, optical media can become scratched or warp if mishandled, and they're not truly archival. But floppy disks are notorious for becoming unreadable 5min after you've copied files onto them. For every unreadable CD burned by an 'out of balance' burner, there are probably 100 floppies that died because of the phase of the moon.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:huh?

[digitig]

I think I might have some eight-inch floppies somewhere. No, I'm not boasting; the young guns might not realise that they're what we had before five-and-a-quarter inch floppies.

Re:Windows installer requires them

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you also toss your atrocious spelling out too? "Disk's" is not plural, it's a possessive or it means "disk is". If you're gonna write "disk's", why don't you also write "year's" or "copie's" ("copy's"?)? And "nowadays" is one word, no spaces, no apostrophes.

Re:thinking of the children......

[owlman17]

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?

That's right! It doesn't seem silly at all when you think about it. My mom's a writer and routinely sends manuscripts, articles, etc to different publishers. One particular publisher insisted that she send a printed copy, refusing email attachements, CDs or any sort of soft copy, citing that 'the paper medium has been proven to be much more reliable than digital, yada yada..." Ridiculous, what a bunch of luddites I thought.

I was already thinking of asking giving them a piece of my mind about that when it occured to me even I couldn't even open my old 1990s files anymore. Not only were some of them in Iomega Zip disks, they were in old proprietary formats. (Well, that's another topic altogether.)

Another case more to the point: About a decade ago, my family decided to cobble together some sort of "time capsule" to be opened in about 50 yrs. It had several items including some files on 3.5 floppies. My dad asked me how were my grandkids supposed to read those things by then?

I guess the moral is, I shouldn't have been tied down to any (digital) storage medium, arrogantly thinking it'll always be the standard.

Re:Nah

[evilviper]

We will still be using floppies in 10 years.

SOMEBODY will continue to use even the most obsolete junk for the next hundred years. That doesn't mean it's not dead...

LS-120 and 250

[Mal-2]

The LS-120 drive (and its successor, the 250) had the potential to supplant floppy drives, though they sadly did not. First, they could read and write ordinary 1.44 MB disks (though formatting them was always a bit dicey) in addition to their own media, and if you had a dedicated "floppy slot" in your case, you could easily adapt the drive, sans faceplate, to masquerade as the floppy drive it was replacing. If you didn't tell anyone it wasn't just a floppy drive, then the seek noise and powered eject were about the only signs something was unusual. I think I bought a 10-pack of LS-120 disks when I bought the drive and never bought any again, but it was very nice for making backups on the fly, considering I only had a 1.2 GB hard drive. The only drawback was that it was ATAPI and did not use the floppy controller, meaning after a CD-ROM I was down to two spots for hard drives. Somewhat ironically, this is now a major advantage as floppy controllers are often lacking and ATA-to-USB converters are plentiful. I still have my old LS-120 in a drawer, and it was working when I put it there. If I desperately had to read an old floppy disk, I'd probably toss the LS-120 into an external USB case and try that before tearing a machine open. I wouldn't trust the two Zip drives in the same drawer to be anything but paperweights.

The 250 drives went even further, by allowing you to format regular floppies to some ungodly (and ultimately unreliable) capacity in the range of 30 MB. This typically left them readable only by the original drive, even other LS-250s tended not to be able to read them. Also, they had just a wee problem with bit rot. But they could still use 1.44 MB disks in the conventional manner as well, and the older 120 MB disks, and their own 250 MB disks. They were just too little too late -- by then, CD-RW had far surpassed them in the bang-for-the-buck department, as well as the raw space department. CD-RW discs (why the spelling change? I don't know) had dropped below $1 apiece by then, and the 250 MB media were still in the $12-15 range. If you didn't think the disc was ever coming back, CD-R blanks were about 35 cents.

Mal-2

Re:1998

[RealGrouchy]

While technically there were some alternatives available at the time, it was far from "absurdly useless."

USB drives were not out yet. CD-R drives were still not common or affordable, much less rewritable CDs. If you didn't have a computer at home that could write to CDs, you couldn't bring in your files to a no-floppy computer at school, or vice versa. (I went straight from floppies to USB/online storage)

Just because a new technology is available doesn't mean that the rest of the world automatically upgrades to it.

- RG>

lab equipment

[Anonymous Coward]

How about all the legacy equipment that uses them? Though usb and various flash cards are finally starting to take off, spectrum analyzers and the like predominantly have a floppy drive on them, and you can's just swap in a dvd-rw. almost all analyzers more than a few years old are floppy based, and even a good number of new ones. These things are 30 grand plus (and by plus i mean 100k and more), many businesses aren't going to get rid of them because "everything has usb." i regularly have to swap files from the analyzer to an older pc, to the network, to my laptop because it doesn't have a floppy. pita.