The Mystery of the Mega-Selling Floppy Disk 558
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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The Mystery of the Mega-Selling Floppy Disk
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Thus spake the master programmer: "Time for you to leave." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sony (Score:5, Informative)
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 [slashdot.org]
You almost read /. less then the moderators.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Informative)
in the lab:
oscilloscopes, network analysers, pulse generators etc.
One possible explanation... (Score:5, Informative)
Not According to the Article (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Lighting Consoles (Score:4, Informative)
Re:3rd world countries (Score:4, Informative)
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)
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Informative)
These systems are less then 5 years old as well !!!!
XP install needs then (Score:2, Informative)
Machine tools? (Score:5, Informative)
Brand new computer controlled machine tools being sold today, using floppy drives:
http://www.americanmachinetools.com/cnc_milling.htm [americanmachinetools.com]
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.
Re:XP Users (Score:3, Informative)
Mod this guy up. There are lots of issues like this that keep me using a usb floppy drive. Some software still use floppies for license disks.
Stitch files (Score:1, Informative)
Multi-head embroidery machines use them. The last shop I worked for had around 20,000 containing design files for clients, saved over the years.
Entertainment industry (Score:1, Informative)
Sadly there are still many lighting companies (including mine) that use lighting consoles that still rely on floppies for saving shows and fixture information. Why would they want to buy a new 15,000 dollar console when we can just go to the flea market and get a crate of un-reliable old floppies for 5 bucks!
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:3, Informative)
No reason not to use it.
Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures.
Re:I still have to use them on rare occasion... (Score:4, Informative)
DriverPacks are your friend: http://driverpacks.net/ [driverpacks.net]
They have a very nice tool that slipstreams (among others) mass storage and network drivers into Windows installation media. I've used it for XP and 2003 and have found that DriverPacked install media will pretty much find your storage controller even on recent machines.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:3, Informative)
Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures.
Bigger != Better
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:4, Informative)
Re:One possible explanation... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I have a lot on 3.5" (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:One possible explanation... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:One possible explanation... (Score:3, Informative)
My Amiga 500 didn't come with a hard drive. And yes it is strictly used for gaming, so everything's booted off floppy.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:3, Informative)
"Except that your cell phone probably takes better pictures."
Probably not. Cellphone cams have tiny sensors and tiny low-quality lenses that don't correct for sencond- or third-order aberrations. The resulting image is usually a low contrast, distorted image image with color fringing, coma and veiling glare. That 640x480 image, taken through a relatively high-quality optical system, most likely looks much better than your typical cellphone image, no matter what the relative resolution is on paper.
Floppy? Bring on the death of the CDROM. (Score:5, Informative)
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...
Re:Hah (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:3, Informative)
in the theatre:
Lighting control desks normally use them for letting you save lighting plots (most also have hard-drives for normal use). Lighting plots are a tiny amount of data that easily fit on a floppy.
Most are just DOS PCs with a digital desk and DMX connections to the dimmer packs and other gear.
I would like to be able to use a USB key, but that's more because I don't have a floppy drive for my laptop so can't get the data onto it to edit.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:3, Informative)
So despite all of our lab tools, we did not contribute a cent to this mysterious floppy market in TFA.
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Informative)
Sinple.
1. DOS is REAL-TIME. If you need to precise timeing and access to the hardware DOS gives that to you.
2. Scripting? Filesystem? who cares on a small devise. You may not do anything with the filesystem at all. You may just write the data out to the serial port on some devices.
Development Tools? DJGPP works fine. Borlands old tools are available for free. No problem and actually not complex.
"Why not run a stripped-down Linux or BSD with restricted userspace tools?"
Can you find me one that will.
Run in 256k of ram.
On an 8086.
and support Real-time data acquisition?
You can get 8086 embedded controlers for dirt cheap.
And the nice thing about DOS is that it is completely known.