News The Floppy is Dead! Long Live the Floppy!

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/01/31/the_floppy_is_dead/

 

Read that in the paper today, yay!

Have only used a floppy disc a very minute amount of times the past few years and only for installing drivers. Although most OSs can use USB pen drives to install drivers I've come across a fair few computers where the USB ports don't work (b0rked or default drivers not working) so floppy is the only alternative so tbh its not 100% dead.

Hopefully these n00bs in schools will realise how outdated floppy is. I remember being a kid in year 3 holding the floppy without touching the metal part, like a precious diamond. Now its a football

 

i luv the part on "the save button still looks like a floppy" lol. homage indeed.

i do still use the floppy quite abit... most important is RAID driver during windows install on my DFI board. others probably some misc. stuff i use from the office coz the 15yr old system still use floppies...

good gawd...

 

I rearlised floppys were utterly out of date when I worked out that my internet connection was faster than you could read from a floppy. Still very usefull though as you can get dos on one and use it to fix the MBR quite easily on older pcs.

 

I remember when the floppy drives were actually floppy... those big ones that made good frisbees (although cds make better ones) ah, those were the days.

 

5 1/2 inch floppies ruled! bring them back damnit!

 

Ah well. It had to happen some time.

My local PC World hasn't sold FDDs or floppy disks for at least six months. I remember because I needed some a while back and had to go on a multi-shop disk hunt.

Ambivalence is the order of the day here, I think.

 

This doesn't mean the format's dead. It's just dead amongst enthusiasts; we've no common/regular need to use one anymore.

Yet, only saturday at work (Jessops) someone asked what format to bring a picture in on, so that it could be sent off for a biiig print.

"So, do I just bring the picture in on a floppy disc?"

And I guarantee at least once a month, someone will come in asking, 'Do you take pictures from floppy discs?'.

My answer from now-on will be one of;

"No, no-one takes floppy discs anymore -- PC World don't even sell them." or, "No, the 90's called -- they want their format back!" or maybe just a look of disgust. I'm undecided as of yet...

The problem is businesses. Some (I swear it's the council workers mainly) still seem to rely on the damn things! Need their heads feeling, tbh.

 

Where I co-oped we still had a copy of windows 3.1 on floppys. and i'm pretty sure i have a copy of windows 95 on floppys. i have a drive in my computer but its not even hooked up.

 

same here with the RAID drivers, I use a RAID 0 system on my main pc and have to use a floppy to install that during install, that is about the only time I ever use the drive though so it will be nice to have no need for it, will just need to get another blanking plate for that slot now hehe

 

I think my family might still have it's copy of windows 3.1 and office on it's many floppy disks.

I put a floppy in my system just in case I needed it for drivers or anything like that, but I've never used one since moving to XP.

 

I hope that one of the big memory companies like Corsair or Kingston reinvents the floppy so it becomes a media that we will sall want to use again. I think 250GB Floppies would be awesome. Who would need the HDD then?

 

its like VHS. Do people really still use floppys and VHS????

My hate towards floppys was that my files would be currupt all the time. So easy to destroy data on a floppy.

I have not stored anything on a floppy for a very long time. Even college work was not stored on a floppy. My college 8 years ago had 100MB zip drives in every PC. Everyone had zip disks to store files on in college back in 99.

And now its USB memory sticks as they are as cheap as chips. 4GB for £20 aint bad.

 

The only time ive used a floppy in say the last 5 years would be for running memtest (which is now in the grub boot loader) and for sata drivers but i now prefer to use nlite, which i think can do raid drivers as well as sata but i may be wrong on that.... the last time i went to install windows (the normal way) the drive wouldn't even work

 

I use my floppy drive biannually for my reformat and reinstall of XP but besides that, I never use it. It's actually very rare that I even use my cd drive anymore because I mainly burn to dvds and my dvd-rw reads and burns just as fast as my cd-rw. Besides, half the time I have to remove my FDD and remove all the dust from it to get the damn thing to work anyways.

 

I still have my DOS 5.5 discs flying around somewhere here. And I still remember me and my friend playing Dune2...
I'll never let you down Floppy! N-E-V-E-R! At least I'll put a nail through you and find a nice place on my wall for you.

 

Lots of people still use VHS

Especially those with young kids.

ZIP disks were fun while they lasted. Way too damn expensive though. Last I checked, they're still ten bucks a pop, and a full bill for a JAZ disk (1GB). Impressive, considering you can buy a terabyte worth of DVD-Rs *and* a burner for that same $100.

 

I recently had to sort out an old Cel 333 and used one of my boot floppies to fdisk and format it before installing 98SE. But to transfer some driver downloads I had to burn a CD-RW, mainly to install the 5.2Mb 98SE drivers for my pendrive.

Main problem with floppies, 1.44Mb is just not enough. And I have several boot floppies in case one turns out to be b0rked.

 

Who remembers the old 8 inch floppies? The drives on my dad's CAD station were the size of a VHS recorder.

I hope this means motherboard manufacturers will stop releasing flash utilities that require DOS. Having to make bootable CDs to flash a BIOS is so tedious.

 

the only times i will need it will be when i need to format my pc or update the bios on some machines... can you update a bios with a pendrive?