News The Floppy is Dead! Long Live the Floppy!

Motherboard SATA drivers. I know a lot that still come with them on a floppy.

 

Now that Vista can see SATA/RAID without the need for extra drivers, I no longer have a use for my floppy

 

Yup - lots of the high end scientific kit in my lab only has a FDD. It's not like it would be that difficult to put even a ZIP drive in or something... but no, we're stuck with only being able to put three files (max) on a disk.

 

I remember the days when my parents owned an acorn A3000. I remember borrowing the game Caonnon Fodder for it, it came on numerous 3.5" floppy's. I decided to copy it, which was a mistake as it took hours of inserting the original disc, then inserting the new disc only for it to copy a few bytes accross (pressing ok in between). Those are the worst memories I have of floppy's.

It was worth it, since it was an awesome game (anyone else get to the last level to find that it was impossible to complete?)

 

Well the company I work for is only 3 years old most of our equipment is HP and all was brought new and all but the most recent set of PC's were provided with floppy drives. it was only with the recent change (october last year as far as i rember) to DX2200 as the standard buisness PC that the floppy drive was dropped.

Im hardly going to roll out 100 machines without PXE booting

however for building the image and certain parts of the sysprep the use of floppy disks is required. especially if your in an environment that uses alot of bespoke software, in my case a financial institution.

 

I had a DLink USB Network port a couple of years back as a free gift with an order for some computer stuff, which had drivers on a floppy disk.
I was going to use on my old laptop which lacks a network port, but it didn't work as the laptop was running Win95.

 

Nope, it did. There were many different sizes Starting with the IBM's 8" floppy.

8" in 1969 - 1.5 Mbits to 1.2 Mbytes
5 1/4" in 1976 - 110 kb to 360 kb
3 1/2" in 1982 - 264 kb to 2.88 Mbytes
3" in 1984 - 360 kb
2" in 1985 - 720 kb

and then we saw the wopping 120MB 3 1/2 Floppy in 1996 and in 1997 saw the 240MB 3 1/2" floppy. The floppy has changed and evolved alot. LS240 was the end of floppys as CDRW and DVDRW have much greater capacitys and cheaper.

 

Those were the days. Id spend ages (SEGA) trying to copy a 10 disk game. so anoying but on the amiga. Same process though, copy a little bit at a time. I wanted Cannon Foder, my mate had it and knew how much I wanted it so he copied it for me. However on one disk he deliberatly did not copy the last little bit of the disk. So id get half way in the game and it crashed all the time while playing. Was not funny on my behalf at the time but is now

 

I remember one time when i was at uni: downloading a game demo or something and using winrar to spread it over no less than 24 floppy disks to take it home

Was still quicker than trying to download it on a 56k modem ^^

 

DXR_13KE - get a Gigabyte board, upgrade the BIOS from within windows, no floppies necessary.

L J

 

yah it seems to a plague on high end equipment, depending on the instrument and such it almost makes financial sense to drop anothr $1K on a computer just so you can have it networked and not have to lug around floppies. I like the waterjet I'm using now as it's fully networked so I can make changes from home and just connect straight to the machine over the internets and change it. Our CNC plasma cutter still has a ticker tape

 

Heh, I thought it would 'see' my Sil3112A set, but did it heck!

Thought the FDD was coming out, until I realised I could download the drivers on another machine, stick them onto a USB pen and it would mount the drive there and then in order to install the drivers.

That's definitely a nail in the FDD coffin. Just 501 more to go

 

I've got a digital camera that writes the floppies and is handy for web work (don't need to shrink images to use them). When I built my nw desktop I put in a LS120 drive in hopes the IDE interface would be faster for reading them.

 

1. What makes you think that everyone is going to update to vista?
For most businesses its a pointless expense.
The comapny i work for sepnds a heck of a lot of money developing its software so that its the best there is, and they have decided its not worth making the software 64 bit compatible for XP64 bit , never mind this Vista garbage. I dont think vista will be really widely taken up for a long while yet.


2. Ditching floppy drives probably wont save very much money at all. I think all the main PC manufacturers will proably be getting FDD drives for <1£. Think economies of scale.

3. What about servers?

 

Seeing as the subject has gone on a nostalgic tangent...


I still feed my Amiga 1200 with floppies on a daily basis:





I use it to run Octamed 4, for sequencing these two circa 1988 S950's (which also store everything on floppies):

 

I think you're missing the point. I'm not talking about upgrading to Vista. I'm talking about Vista on new equipment. In my experience, once a new Microsoft OS is released the supply of the old one dries up pretty quickly, and you have to go with the new.

I think you'll find floppy drives will be costing a little more than that, especially when you add in cables and the labour costs of fitting them. And when margins on computer equipment are as slim as they are, every pound counts. And then, as demand for a component drops, the price goes up. You can still buy 5.25in floppy drives, but you pay close to £40 for the privilege.

Servers are always the last to drop legacy technology, and the last to adopt new. My point is not that from tomorrow or next week, floppies will cease to exist, but merely that the writing is on the wall. Give it a year or so and machines with floppies will be the exception to the rule.

 

how many buinesses are going to want all of there new equipment on vista and the rest on XP?

for a new OS rollout its going to be in UAT for a very very very long time and in the mean time the companys still need pc's that work with XP. most companys have a 4 - 5 year renewal plan on PC's, so come back then when most corprations have got rid of or are about to get rid of there current machines and say that floppy is dead, because then it realy will be. but for now its alive and kicking for a good few years at least.

wow you have a very backwards veiw if you belive that.

The server market is always the one pushing the technology forward. its only after months / years that it filters down to the standard machines.

what was first 64bit CPU's for servers or desktops?

or how about networking? what do you think had gigabit network ports as standard first? servers or desktops?

how about on board RAID? or temperature monitors and alarms on board? cpu throttling? the high power PSU's were seeing more and more of in desktops now a days?

I can go on

all you have to do to see what technology we will have in our pc's in 6months / 1 years time is see what is becoming standard in servers today.

 

Well said TBH.

I cant wait till we get SAS as standard on enthusiast boards

 

I see SAS in a different view to what you do.

To me SAS is a programming language that I use in work to build databases

 

lol its even worse for me!

we have SAS the database program, with the data sitting on a SAS array, which is connected to a server witch is looked over by a 3rd party server monitoring company call SAS!!!