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."

Old Archives

[adambha]

I recently found an old 3.5" floppy with some useless, but nostalgic data on it. So, I dug through my box of spare 'parts' and found an old drive. As I went to install the drive in my desktop machine to pull the data off the floppy I realized an important fact: that box has no floppy controller.

In that sense, the floppy has already been gone for some of us for awhile now.

Floppies won't be missed

[TheMidnight]

Anyone else ever try to download big files from your school's higher speed Internet connection and then use WinZip or PKZIP to try and zip it up over 40 floppies, only to find when you got home, disk #40 had a bad sector in the readme.txt file and the entire archive was bad?

With as many Word documents I had to rescue for friends from those things with ScanDisk, and as many went bad after 6 months or less, I say good riddance to bad rubbish. Of course, the quality went to hell around the era of Windows 95. Before that, companies actually made good floppies that would last on the order of years.

Good bye and good riddance

[pyite69]

I have wasted so much time with bad sectors, it is too depressing.

With el Torito and CD-RW's, it is easy to get by without a floppy drive.

Nah

[nurb432]

Its not dead yet. Just in serious peril.. We will still be using floppies in 10 years.

What about 8" floppies!!!

[mspohr]

I still have a stash of 8" floppies. (At 256KB data capacity, the bit domains are so big you can actually see the data with suitable preparation.)

Re:Sadly... Good!

[toomz]

True, but was it a sudden lack of Quality Control, in '95 or a sudden proliferation of devices which cause some serious electromagnetic disturbances near the desk? (i.e. cell phones)

Old-school

[Ancil]

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.

Those of us who've been in IT for a long while remember when the OS and power application lived on a floppy, because the computer didn't have a hard disk.

Re:Windows installer requires them

[mikkelm]

One would think that if you have a slipstreamed install, you could just rip the offending drivers from the driver.cab cabinet file on the CD so that it won't have any alternatives.

A: & B:

[Mogster]

So will A: and B: become directly usable by other storage devices under MS based OS's?
I'd like to see USB storage devices mount to one or the other by default. Particularly under XP if E: is mapped to a network share and a USB is put in it also mounts to E: meaning the share has to be unmapped for the USB to be accessible.

Or is MS's next (post vista) OS going to finally do away with the letter system altogether

Hey I still have punch cards!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I did approx half of my CS degree with punch cards. Luckily in those days code density seemed to be higher. I did a compiler on less than 2000 cards. Perhaps the media forced people to be frugal. Tripping and dropping a box of 2000 cards, then having to put them all back in order is an ordeal that the modern CS student does not have to face. At least you could spot the geeks... they carried a punch card box and a slide rule.

I well remember moving to 8 inch, then 5.25 inch floppies. My wife made me a few shirts with extra big pockets which could take a couple of 5.25s.

Even with all these fond memories, I prefer CD.

No replacement, but most don't care.

[Kadin2048]

I think you have a good point -- there really isn't anything that's the exact match for a floppy, in terms of cheap, ubiquitous storage -- but I think the demand for it has decreased to the point where people will only miss it occasionally.

I used to keep stacks of floppies sitting around, mostly ones conveniently sent to my home by the kind folks at America Online, to give to people when they needed some document or other. I rarely got them back, and it was understood that discs just sort of circulated around, like some sort of valueless currency. When you needed one, you just looked around until you found one (that looked disused) and did whatever you had to do.

Email has really replaced floppies. Not just email as a service, because obviously email has been around for decades, and floppies didn't decline in popularity until the last few years, but near-universal access to email, with the capability of receiving nontrivial attachments (greater than a few K but less than a few MB), and always-on connectivity. Before you had that, giving someone a floppy with a document was the most convenient method. Now, email is by far easier. If I was working on something, and needed to give someone a copy, using removable storage wouldn't be my first thought: instead I'd just send it to them.

The kind of removable storage you're talking about is only necessary for a few cases, either where the file is too big to be practically attached to an email, or the person doesn't have an email address (rare, these days) or other internet access to receive it. So in those cases, CD-R or CD-RW are made to suffice.

Overall, mini CDs or business-card CD-Rs would be a good candidate for replacement (and it's really not hard to put them in a little vinyl sleeve to keep them from getting scratched; 5.25" floppies didn't last long outside a paper sleeve either), but the market for them is just so limited that the economies of scale don't exist to make them as cheap as floppies were.

Floppy disk reliability

[sshore]

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.

Floppy drives are rarely used and have outside air continuously drawn through them while the computer is on, collecting a significant amount of dust. When they're called into service again, the vibration of operation drops the dust and debris into the disk, and the full-contact readwrite head ensures that the dust is ground in nicely.

Back in the days when floppy drives were used daily, there wasn't opportunity for this amount of dust to build up.

One strategy to improve floppy disk reliability these days is to pop in a "sacrificial disk" and do a few operations on it before putting in the actual disk you want to read/write. Another alternative is to use a positive pressure case with an air filter on the intake.

Re:Still no working replacement

[Dogtanian]

floppies were never reliable

I found them pretty reliable if you looked after them; the 5.25" discs on my Atari were almost 100% reliable. Had some minor problems with a few floppies on my Amiga, but that was probably because the drive was too close to the TV (or I was using old, worn discs).

My neighbor put his resume on 3 floppies and went to Kinko's to print it on nice paper. All 3 were bad.

Floppies in the past 5 (well, probably closer to 10) years have suffered in reliability because they were ruthlessly commoditised, prices cut to the bone and beyond. No-one wanted to pay much for a technology which- by that time- was relatively ancient, very low in capacity and totally lacking in glamour. Falling manufacturing costs can only go so far if you have to retain design compatibility- particularly with a mechanical device- no matter how obsolete the tech, and I'd guess that there's still a price limit below which you can't produce a reliable drive.

I liked floppy discs, but the reason that the 3.5" 1.44MB floppy survived so long was that no-one came up with a truly universal successor (the Zip disc had some success in its day, but never became "standard"). Guaranteed bootability, universal support, etc... made it a near-essential even in the face of more advanced technologies that would otherwise have killed it far earlier; but you can see why no-one wanted to pay much for one.

I would say that its day was over, but people were saying that 2 years back. Truth is, despite PC World's attention-whoring announcment, the floppy won't die suddenly, it'll just continue fading away.

Not dead

[bky1701]

Floppy Disks are far from dead. While they are not needed by most people, there are a lot of cases where you need one for power-user reasons or fixing glitches ("X.dll not found"). I had to go out and buy a floppy drive just a few months ago so I could flash my video BIOS (curse Nvidia for turning off the temperature sensor!) because I needed to write a backup and CDs couldn't do that. Floppys are not going to die until there is a cheap, writable , bootable replacement. Small hard drives could replace them in time, but not yet..

Now let's get rid of CAPS LOCK too...

[x2345235234423]

http://capsoff.org/ [capsoff.org]
http://www.anticapslock.com/ [anticapslock.com]

USB flash is everywhere!

[linebackn]

I really like USB flash drives these days, and this is coming from someone, who back in the day, wrote a floppy disk formatting program to get more than 1.4 megs out of 3.5" disks.

To me the best thing about flash drives is that they work almost EVERYWHERE now. There are drivers out there for Windows 95 ("B" version and up), Windows NT, and even DOS! Ok, here's a link [toastytech.com]. They will work on my Mac, Linux and even the eComstation (that's OS/2) demo CD I tried!

I used to think Iomega would rule the world with their Zip drives, but the prices of the disks always remained insanely high and the disks and drives were not as reliable as they should have been. Also, I don't think I ever saw anybody other than Iomega produce zip-compatible drives. Probably patents and BS.

News to me.

[Skreech]

My Computer Science class is requiring that I submit program assignments on a floppy disk. She's not flexible about it, in fact she's very strict about even how to attach the disk to the paper (binder clip), using the proper cover sheet, and so on, or get a huge fat automatic zero.

I understand adhering to requirements. But floppy disks?

I guess the real lesson I'm learning so far is that some people will force you to use stupid old methods or standards or media because they said so and for no other good reason. Might as well tell me to submit it on five-and-a-quarter, it would the same inconvenience at this point.

Try telling my Uni...

[hejog]

Dork of a lecturer requires our code be submitted on a floppy disk. Shame none of my computers (macs and pcs) have floppy disk drives, and none of the Uni computers have floppy disk drives. I submitted it on a flash drive with a note saying that Floppy Disks died years ago. He gave me D. Fucker, you'd think given that he got a free 256Mb flash drive...!

Why Floppies are better than email

[dsstao]

I think most people miss the point of floppy disks, which was a really cheap way to give someone a file and never need the floppy disk back. Now, it seems to be true that, to transfer a file, we've got a couple choices: 1. email it if it's reasonably small -or- 2. burn it to CD / copy it to a flash drive if it's not I say these are the only two options because let's face it - how many end-users even know what an FTP site is, let alone where one is or how to use it? The problem with no floppies is that: 1. Burning a CD takes longer than copying a file to a floppy disk and most Word/Excel/etc. docs are still smaller than 1.44 MB. 2. Emailing sucks. I'm sick of having some yahoo (in the same company with a shared drive no less) email messages with 1 MB attachments to everyone, instantly creating 3 copies (assuming only 1 recipient): -The original, -In their Sent items, -In the receipients' inbox then deleted items folder. After a while, tripling the data usage for a single file is a pain, especially when users' PST files are 1-2 GB. 3. I'm not giving you my flash drive. Yes, you can borrow it, after I review it for a lack of my Quickbooks file that I just transferred to my accountant, but you're not keeping it. This means that I have to plug it in, review the contents, remove some of them if needed, transfer your file, click on the little "eject safely" button, let you borrow it and you have to remember to return it. No thanks. Just let me whip out a blank floppy and throw the file on there and give it to you. 4. I agree with the very first post. Over the weekend, I installed a Dell PE2950 that failed 95% through dell's installation assistant CD, while using the OS CD, using 3 different OS CDs. Using the same CD, I booted, pressed F6 to load the SAS drivers, and found out there wasn't a floppy disk in sight. Finally found one, but I don't see Microsoft's setup saying "insert floppy or USB key to browse for the drivers". Anyway, just all MHO.

Re:Hey I still have punch cards!

[that this is not und]

When my father first started programming for IBM there was a tiny 'drum' memory that was temporary, a tiny amount of 'random access r/w memory,' a high speed card reader, and a high speed card punch. I think the whole CPU was vacuum tube at that time.

Writing and running a program consisted of:

1. Typing out your source code, one line of code per card.
2. Getting the 'compiler/assembler' program card deck out of storage.
3. Reading the 'compiler/assembler' deck into the computer and starting it running.
4. Loading your source code deck as data cards.
5. The compiler/assembler would churn away and then punch out your object card deck.
6. Move the object card deck from the card punch 'out' bin to the card reader 'in' bin.
7. Load your 'object' card deck into the computer and start it running.

For each pass, and each change to your program, the computer would have to punch out a new 'object' deck. There was no other intermediate storage available.

I'm pretty sure I am remembering this right. Dad was a programmer a long, long time ago, and I only know this process from him telling it to me.

Re:BIOS Upgrades...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I have a four year old Compaq notebook that didn't need any bootable medium to update the firmware. The notebook did not include a floppy, it was just an option. The upgrade process went remarkably well. I'm wondering what happened to that idea.

Re:Still no working replacement

[theLOUDroom]

I don't see why modern technology can not come up with a pocketable 99 cent storage medium with capacity of around 128MB, but so far there is nothing else with a feature set of a floppy.

From a technical standpoint, Minidisc is exactly that.
Unfortunately, Sony has pretty successfully killed their own format.

They're too afraid of piracy, to actually sell decent products. Instead they always offer too little, too late.

Re:Sadly... Good!

[andcal]

Can't help but wonder if the quality of floppy drives hasn't gone down along with the decline in quality of the media.

Steve Jobs first tried to kill floppies in 1988

[PapayaSF]

Another of Jobs' projects, the original NeXTcube [wikipedia.org], also came without a floppy drive. Instead it had a cutting-edge but oddball 256MB magneto-optical drive. Too bad disks cost about $100 and pretty much nobody else used them.

I remember that at the time Jobs disparaged floppy drives as "1970s technology," and I thought: Yeah, and keyboards are 19th century technology, but I wouldn't want a computer without one. Eventually he caved and by 1990 the NeXTstation had a 2.88MB floppy drive.

Floppie quality went to hell in recent years

[Anonymous Coward]

Up untill a few years ago, I used to use floppy disks, but even with new ones, I would end up
with sector errors and other such crap when I got the file home. It's a shame, because I had found
(circa 1980s) floppies, including the 5 1/2 inch ones to be perfectly readable even after 10+
years. The very first IBM-compatable PC I owned had two 5 1/2 floppies and no hard disk in it, and problems, as far as I recall, were pretty rare (usualy caused by touching/damaging the exposed part of the disk). Of course now floppies from a technical standpoint are rediculously out of date, and
have been suplanted mostly by CD/DVD and USB thumbdrives, but suprisingly there are still some
recent peices of software floating around out there that use/require floppies for one reason or
another, and of course, there is the retro-computing scene for which a floppy drive in a PC comes in real handy. :)

Re:Windows installer requires them

[rickb928]

True - as a bootable floppy image, only one partition. Hint #2 - We started out trying to format a 1.2M partition and make it bootable. never quite worked. Then we learned to make the key A: under Windows and let the driver utilities see it as a blank disk. Format-HO! Either assign the key to drive letter A: or run SUBST F: A: in CMD... F: being your key, use the correct designation. I did not follow through on this, but we knew we could mod the imaging CD and add the SUBST so that we could mount a key with whichever RAID drivers were applicable to the hardware, either 360s, 380s, 580s, or Itanium servers. But the client was so anal about security, we would have needed 6 weeks to test the image, and the project was due in 5 weeks.

Re:Windows installer requires them

[ewanm89]

Any one know of a full linux distro still on floppies? I need one to install on an 486 laptop. :-)