The Mystery of the Mega-Selling Floppy Disk 558
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the i-keep-mine-in-a-metal-toolbox dept.
from the i-keep-mine-in-a-metal-toolbox dept.
osullish writes "People have been proclaiming the death of the floppy for years, yet millions are bought around the world. Who is buying them?"
Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
I know we buy them at my lab-they are necessary for controlling the software of our scintillation counter. That thing (no joke) is running DOS 2.0 under the hood! I'm sure there's lots of industrial equipment in small/noncompetitive markets that has never felt pressured to update. It's the same reason why we have so much $500,000 equipment running unbelievably crappy software.
Puppy Linux from a non-bootable USB BIOS (Score:1, Insightful)
My wife's POS laptop requires a floppy so it can boot Puppy Linux from a USB stick, you insensitive clod!
Hard drive controller is dead, BIOS doesn't support bootable USB, so it's the only way.
She just wants to surf the net, and it does that fine!
It is a floppy (Score:3, Insightful)
Right from the article.
The truth is the 3½-inch, 1.44 megabyte floppy - the disk that made it big - has always defied logic. It's not floppy for a start.
Really come, it's been around long enough everyone should have peeked behind that little window and seen the disk actually is a floppy little piece of plastic.
Re:I have a lot on 3.5" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:XP Users (Score:4, Insightful)
Of 10,000,000 XP users less than 100 of them knows what slipstream is or has the skills to even do that. It will not happen, you can barely get a windows user to not click on every popup, you think you can get them to slipstream SP3 into their XP install Disc?
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually there are some good reasons to use DOS for something like that.
Modern OSs are great and have all sorts of functionality that a lot of devices just don't need. They also have a lot of code and services which can cause you issues.
DOS is great for any device where you need a realtime single tasking OS.
You can do all you development on a PC and use PC debugging tools that you are used to using.
You see lots of CNC machines and such that use DOS for that reason.
Or look at it this way. Does the device you use work? Does it do what you need it to do?
If so then the software isn't crappy. Nothing sucks more than you replace a piece of software that works but isn't pretty with pretty bug ridden software.
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Insightful)
...crappy software.
Would you really rather have that $500,000 piece of equipment running DOS 2.0 move to Windows Vista?
When was the last time your DOS 2.0 machine needed a security patch, or rebooted itself randomly, to for that matter did anything unexpected?
Simple... yes
Outdated... yes
Crappy... not so much.
Re:It is a floppy (Score:3, Insightful)
So that alone shows that the article was written by an idiot.
Re:I know (Score:3, Insightful)
Until they try to restore the backup.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:3, Insightful)
1.It may not be using the standard floppy disk controler interface and may not be able to support that particular gizmo
2.Are YOU going to be the one to tell the boss that the really really expensive piece of equipment has failed and that they cant get warranty service for it because of an unauthorized third party modification just so you dont need to keep floppy disks around?
3.What do you do about things that actually come on floppy disk (for example the manufacturer may ship new firmware on floppy that you insert and have the machine read). Yes you could reinstall the disk drive for those rare occasions (or find a way to make the floppytousb device work with a USB floppy so you can read the disk you need to) but that's a lot of work.
Re:Floppies (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember, these were made in the late 90's early 2000s. Floppy disks were CHEAP, a box of 10 would run you $10 if not less on sale. A meager 16MB card would cost $100+ easily. So you could go with a camera that required $100+ memory cards to use, or went with one that used common floppy disks that at the time, everyone had. No messing with serial cables, parallel cables (or if you were lucky, USB) transferring data. Just eject the disk from the camera, pop it in your PC, done.
They literally were the fastest, cheapest storage media around, and damn trivial to transfer data off of. Later versions used a CD burner to record mini CDs for the same reason - flash media was freaking expensive (though by then, a 128MB card could be had for around $100, but the CDs costed $10 or less). And you didn't have to put up with USB 1.1 speeds.
NOwadays we scoff as we buy 8GB cards for $10, but prices have seriously plummeted only in the past few years.
Re:Floppy? Bring on the death of the CDROM. (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
I don't think so. Many people still do backup's on disk; it's a far cheaper medium than flash, and I'm guessing that people feel it's more reliable than online access to content or stored data.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Insightful)
(Side note: This is why I read Slashdot. You have to wade through the muck but there're still nuggets of pure gold here and there.) Sorry ... on topic now:
1.It may not be using the standard floppy disk controler interface and may not be able to support that particular gizmo
Well, if you RTFL (I know, I know ....) then you'd have seen this:
The device connects to your existing power and data (ribbon) cables.
The soundless drive emulates your existing floppy drive to act as if the floppy drive was never removed. This drive will replace most any existing 720k/1.44MB capacity IBM format floppy drive or your money back. Do away with the painfully slow and obsolete floppy disks. Not only will this device work in PCs but, it will also work in machinery or devices that still use floppy drives. This device completely replaces the universal floppy drive of computerized system. If you are not certain this device will work in your equipment, then just ask! 1 Year Warranty. This device also emulates NON IBM type drives (TEAC, etc) and can also be setup as a DRIVE 0, DRIVE 1 configuration
Back to your points:
2.Are YOU going to be the one to tell the boss that the really really expensive piece of equipment has failed and that they cant get warranty service for it because of an unauthorized third party modification just so you dont need to keep floppy disks around?
I agree this is a good thing to consider. It may not always be a good idea even if it works. Definitely a YMMV solution.
3.What do you do about things that actually come on floppy disk (for example the manufacturer may ship new firmware on floppy that you insert and have the machine read). Yes you could reinstall the disk drive for those rare occasions (or find a way to make the floppytousb device work with a USB floppy so you can read the disk you need to) but that's a lot of work.
I wonder if one of the USB floppies would work. While it most likely wouldn't, I sort of like the Goldbergian aspect of running a floppy controller -> USB converter -> USB floppy drive emulator when needed. Hehe. In reality, I'd probably go with a floppy cable that supports 2 drives [amazon.com] and run the floppy drive on one and the FloppytoUSB device on the other, just in case.
Nonetheless, this is quite an interesting device. I'll probably pick one up just to fiddle with. I'd love to have the option of USB sticks being available in such odd DOS environment for some clients.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:4, Insightful)
I also use floppies to hand-out resumes,
Wouldn't it be smarter to hand them out on CDs? They're just as cheap (and since you're not getting it back, single write isn't a probleM), and you're far more likely for the person you're handing it to to actually be able to read it.
I can honestly say that if you gave our HR Department a resume on floppy they'd have to scramble to find a machine that could read it. My guess is it's more likely your app/resume would simply not make it to the next round of consideration.
Re:Floppy? Bring on the death of the CDROM. (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite often the write-once nature of optical disks is a positive. Burn an OS install disc once, finalize the disc, and run a verification on a separate computer. You can be reasonably certain the install is "clean", and it can't really be tampered with. But if you instead put that installer on flash media, what's to keep compromised software from later rewriting the bootloader or modifying the installer in some way?
Systems do get rooted, and sometimes reinstalls from known clean media are necessary. If you reinstall from compromised media, you are actually worse off, because you get a false sense of security. Unfortunately most USB drives still don't have a read/write physical switch. Even if they did, I'd be reluctant to use them in some CYA environments; I can prove that my burned DVD of Ubuntu LTS could not have been modified after the disc was finalized. Can you say the same for your USB media? Same goes for backups. I love USB flash for its convenience, but it is actually a disadvantage in this situation.
Re:Floppy? Bring on the death of the CDROM. (Score:3, Insightful)
Flash dies. So do magnetic media. Optical might suck but it's hardy, and it's cheap too! Costs pennies to press out and volume is negotiable. If you need 10k units? Do able. Need 1m units? Do able. I don't think magnetic media has that kind of flexibility.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:2, Insightful)
no, it's a WTF that lab, industrial, and SCADA equipment is built using Windows and then windows updates are not enabled or supported by the vendor that decided to use freakin Windows in the first place. if you're going to use a general purpose processor and software system in a piece of computing "furniture" / "appliance" at least have the decency to use an obscure OS, use a fairly secure OS (freeBSD), or just run on bare metal (no OS).
Re:Floppies (Score:4, Insightful)
We are talking about software here not religion.
But there is FreeDOS which is probably what a good number of these DOS like embedded systems are running. Frankly that is why I didn't say MS-DOS. A lot of people use FreeDOS for this kind of work now. Some use DR-DOS and still others used MS-DOS. Frankly I would use FreeDOS myself unless there is some good reason not to but that is just me.
Please at this point you are just being silly. Linux is overkill for something like a CNC controller or radiation counter.
Plus for many of these applications it just will not work. Educate yourself just a little and you might actually stop wasting peoples time.
BTW if you need something that has a bit more capability than DOS does but still lighter than Linux there are options.
RTEMS will work for realtime systems but it is a lot more complex to set up than DOS but it runs on more CPUs and is general more flexible.
Another option is Contiki http://www.sics.se/contiki/about-contiki.html [www.sics.se]
But again the thing about DOS is simply so many people know everything there is to know about it. It is super well documented and the Development tools are everywhere and well known.
If you don't like DJCPP or the free Borland toolset you still have a ton of options left open including http://www.freepascal.org/ [freepascal.org]
Linux is a great embedded tool when you need it. The thing is for a lot of tasks it is overkill and frankly just will not do the job as reliably and as cheaply as good old DOS will.
So go read up and and stop treating FOSS as a religion and start using it as a tool. And stop being a tool.
Re:Floppy? Bring on the death of the CDROM. (Score:1, Insightful)
I'd like something better than CD/DVD, but for now, they're still the cheapest bulk read-only distribution format. They're big, they scratch, and they suck to write to - but our usage pattern for optical is that we only really use them to transfer the data from them to a hard drive, so it doesn't matter much. Mostly they're still used for audio and video, though, because of all the existing hardware that uses them.
Alternatives: The network requires us to trust someone to NOT backstab us a few years later. Part of that means it'd also require them to let us make non-encrypted backups on the media of our choice that they don't have the power to render inoperative some years later when the next version comes out.
Flash is still several orders of magnitude too expensive to be used as disposable like optical discs are. IIRC, it can't be pressed with data already on it the way optical discs are, and write speeds on cheap flash are still low. (2 MB/sec on the low end, 6 MB/sec on the high end. DVDs are more like 20-30MB/sec). But if someone decides it's a wise strategy to mass produce microsd cards as disposable at whatever capacity can be sold $1/card, yes, they could replace an awful lot of things.
While we're dreaming, I'd kind of like to see tape go away as backup too. Optical isn't cheap enough or high capacity enough, and hard drives aren't reliable enough. Many-layer optical media was supposed to be able to handle it, but the tech development didn't happen as fast as planned :( Stacks of blu ray media still costs many times as much as the equivalent capacity hard drive.