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?"
XP Users (Score:5, Interesting)
There are about a million XP SP2 users who have SATA disks and keep finding their driver floppy doesn't work when they try their yearly reinstall.
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
I modified all my synths. I found that most have a IDE header inside and you can slap a hard drive on it (was made for a ZIP drive) so instead of having 80,000 floppies that fail the 3rd time you use them all my maps and samples are on the hard drive..
I love older E-mu gear, at least they were smart and made them hackable.
Oscilloscope (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose I could also replace the scope. Newer ones can connect to a host PC via USB, or offload to a thumb drive, or be network-attached. The specs on newer ones are, obviously, a lot better, too. But, really, why spend many thousands of dollars on new equipment just to get around using a floppy drive?
Re:Not so legacy hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly, many machines that _should_ boot off CD when selected in BIOS don't want to cooperate with (properly burned at slowest speed/good media, yadda yadda) CD/DVD booting.
I keep a Smart Boot Manager
http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html [sourceforge.net]
floppy for those, and they'll often boot from CD/DVD when selected in the Smart Boot Manager (which can also be loaded to hard disk) menu.
Why? Beats the shit out of me, but it has worked on many machines over the years.
I still have to use them on rare occasion... (Score:4, Interesting)
Since the former was easier, that's what I did.
Re:Floppies (Score:1, Interesting)
True. I've used medical lab equipment (hematology and chemistry analyzers) which ran its software directly from a 3.5" floppy. I was bored one day and pulled the disk out and dumped an image of it. Turns out it was running 'EDOS' (embedded DOS?) with Intel binaries. Never did much with it, breaking a $15,000 machine and getting fired didn't seem worth it.
Airplanes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who'd be wasting money on outdated technologies (Score:3, Interesting)
and in response: our government lab banned the use of flash drives for networked PCs a couple years ago. now, if I want to move data from a lab PC (or piece of equipment like an oscilloscope) to a networked PC, I use floppy. Sure, PC to PC could be done by burning a CD. But then I start to collect a nice pile of coasters. Most data consists of text files that zip nicely, and disk spanning still works like it used to. 7zip even makes a nice command line executable for running off the scopes. CD burning is also tediously slow, and repeated multi-sessioning to reduce the coaster count makes CD loading even slower. CDRW is an option, too, but it feels like those write even slower than floppies.
Basically, anything under 5MB that needs to move from off network device to networked device, I do by floppy disk. That covers 90% of my file transfers.
Re:Floppies (Score:5, Interesting)
I wrote a real-time data acquisition system about 10 years ago. It was written to run on DOS. Why? One, and only one reason: under DOS, you have complete control of the hardware. Total, utter control. There's no OS that's going to interrupt with housekeeping, respond to network packets, check to see if there's another thread that wants a slice, or other crap. Only one thread executes at a time (unless you work really really hard to allow that to happen). For instrumentation that cannot tolerate a 20, 50 or even 100 ms pause every now and then, this is vital. DOS, crappy though parts of it are, has a lot of support in the embedded / instrumentation market. It isn't a lack of pressure to update so much as the ability to do exactly what you want, no questions asked, with the hardware. Worked great. As far as I know, that system is still in operation.
More recently, I've written a different real-time data acquisition system, under Windows 98. Almost as much control of the hardware, but not quite. There were gremlins I never figured out that were stealing segments of time every now and then.
And just this year, I ported that second system to Windows XP. Holy crap. Still haven't had time to chase down all of the HUGE number of timing problems now. If W98 drivers were available for the fast modern hardware required for the current project, I'd have stuck with the older OS.
City of Los Angeles Still Uses Floppies (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
Last time this came up on slashdot, someone brought up this handy little device that looks and acts like a floppy drive (to the controller) but lets you use usb sticks instead:
http://www.floppytousb.com/ [floppytousb.com]
This should work on all the synths, CNC machines, sewing machines, etc.
Medical equipment (Score:4, Interesting)
We need standards, good ones too. For Linux, too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
What about something like this?
http://www.memorysuppliers.com/smartdisk-flashpath-smartmedia.html?CAWELAID=327820619 [memorysuppliers.com]
Stick a SD card into a floppy shaped device that your drive can read like it's a real floppy. The drive can still read floppies, and there's no evidence for the warranty people.
Re:We need standards, good ones too. For Linux, to (Score:5, Interesting)
Supporting old stuff means tougher standards, higher compatibility. Floppies were a pretty terrible standard, but they lasted forever basically because nobody could ever agree on a new standard. SuperDisk LS-120 was late, plus didn't catch on. But. Old phones work fine on today's network.
Mobile phones? Pre-GSM ones don't work in the UK (and presumably other countries), they turned off the old network.
Landline phones? The ones that only do pulse dialling don't work with most "Press 5 to do X" systems.
Cars work with today's gas and roads.
No they don't -- many old cars required petrol with added lead.
Old televisions work with today's services and electricity.
Many countries have switched to digital TV.
Old stuff often only works if some parts are upgraded. Your old TV works (with a digital converter box) and your old car works (if you add a special chemical to the petrol).
Old Linux binaries can be made to work (I assume you're referring to problems with shared libraries?). It probably helps to know what system they're supposed to work with. It might require some technical knowledge.
If old closed-source stuff doesn't work, good luck fixing it.
Re:Floppies (Score:3, Interesting)
That $500k may have been the price when it was new in 1992.
But if you try to sell it now you might get 79 cents a pound for it.
Who is buying them? Anyone who hasn't heard(of)HxC (Score:3, Interesting)
Painstakingly hand-made in small numbers [atari.plof.pl] for now, if that's not a project to be spread from high-volume automated production lines by the likes of Seeed [seeedstudio.com], then what is?
Re:Some hardware needs them (Score:5, Interesting)
i wonder, how much space do the drive see?
do it only see the first 1.44MB of the SD card?