SAVE THE FLOPPY 2

[langleymass]

Naturally I am curious as to what everyone thinks, but I am considering starting a new campaign. Maybe I am just a sucker for lost causes, but I think this is quite worthwhile. We need to SAVE THE FLOPPY.

Yes, it's a technology that is at least 15 years old. It's slow and noisy. But the truth is that the floppy disk still provides a combination of conveniences that we simply do not have with other media.

1. Floppies can be injected and ejected with the power off, unlike CD's.
2. You don't need special software or even special drivers to use a floppy, unlike CD's.
3. A floppy does not a need a jewel case, unlike CD's.
4. The floppy can be used on computers that are ten years old if you happen to have them.
5. The drive only costs about $10. The disks are often free with rebates.
6. It uses less power than a CD-ROM.
7. Often 1.44 MB is still all you need.
8. You can write on floppy-disk labels with almost any pen. You can use a Sharpie on a CD, but it often smears.
9. You can put labels on floppies over and over. This is not as easy with CD's.
10. Floppy write-protection is easily switched on and off.
11. The floppy disk still easily fits into your shirt pocket.
12. Floppy drives work well even if the drive is on its side.
13. Floppy drives use less power than CD-ROM drives.
14. Duplicating floppies is easy with just one command.
15. Floppy drives do not use jumpers.
16. Floppy drives take up less space then CD-ROM drives.

Feel free to add more of your own reasons. But I hope you agree that we need to SAVE THE FLOPPY.

 

[MasterRacker]

Actually, you do need a driver to use a floppy, it just happens to be so old and well defined that it's built in to all current OSes. CD-ROM drivers are pretty much built in to any decent OS as well. CR-RW, and CR-R drivers(for writing) aren't yet, but will be in another rev or two.

I'm on the other side of the argument. I rarely have anything worth transporting that would fit on a floppy and I don't even remember using one in the last year. I'm not a hardware engineer but from what I understand PC motherboards can be simplified and cleaned up by the removal of legacies lilke ISA, serial/parallel and floppy buses, interrupts, etc.

I have no problem if floppies fade away.

As a side note, Sony invented the format and they're discontinuing production soon.

[sub]Jeff
[purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

I was not born cynical - I earned my cynicism through careful observation of the world around me.[/sub]

 

[Stella740pl]

I am all for saving the floppy. (I would probably prefer a better version, like ZIP drive, but those were never really widely used.)

From what I understand, they are getting faded away not to clean and simplify motherboards, but to drive the prices up (Sony included).

A floppy can stand handy, as an example, for children to take homework to school (very often nowadays they are expected to be electronic and not printed, depending on the subject and the teacher). The size of the file usually fits on 1.44, and floppy is compact, cheap and fast to record. You can reuse it many times over, and it will still be readable on other drives. CD/DVD, on the other hand, when used in rewritable/not finalized format, is not universally readable; and is a total waste when finalized. Come on, do you really need to spend time and a whole CD (not ecologically friendly, don't you think?) to record under 1 Mb for 1 day only?

Once in a while I use a floppy, too; not everything can be e-mailed somewhere, for many reasons.

 

[chiph]

I just got a new laptop, and it doesn't have a floppy drive -- thinking about it, I realize that I've used a USB memory key for all my sneaker-net needs over the past 4 years.

As a side note, Sony invented the format and they're discontinuing production soon.

Factoid: There used to be a competing 3" format, back in the eighties.

I think Sony is discontinuing production because there's no profit left in them.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
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[MDXer]

Floppies are to easily to damage, heat, liquid, magnetic fields, dust to be a reliable storage source. CDR drives don't cost much anymore and most new computers come with at least CD-R if not CD-RW the answer to CD-RW discs not readable from CD-R drives until finalized is easy Burn to CD-R. Size isn't a factor as my 512MB Flash memory card for my digital camera is a Fraction the size flopies were, and my 64mb USB Flash Memory stick is small enough I keep it on my key ring.

I don't remember the last time I had an important file that I needed somewhere else that was small enough to fit on a floppy.

Shoot Me! Shoot Me NOW!!!
- Daffy Duck

 

[mrdenny]

I haven't touched a floppy disk in years. I don't have a floppy drive a home.

I've got a USB drive for moving files or email for moving files. Anything that won't fit on my USB drive gets burned to CD. If you want to fit the CD in your pocket, they do have those little 100 something meg CDs that fit in the little track of the cd drive. AOL used them for a while. They were't so usefull as a frisby.

Reason 6 and 13 were the same. Your list is down to 15, sorry.

Most hardware vendors now charge extra if you want a flopy drive because most suppliers don't make them any more.

Factoid: There used to be a competing 3" format, back in the eighties.

Not that long ago the Fry's Electronics in Woodland Hills, CA still caried 7" flobby disks. No drives, but they had brand new disks, and people were still buying them for legacy systems.

Hell most new machines that I've seen can boot of a USB thumb disk for BIOS upgrades and what not.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

(Not quite so old any more.)

 

[pmonett]

I must admin that I have very little use for floppies. They are good for one thing only : putting a boot disk image to use when the OS is broken.
But then, Lord am I happy to have one !

Just one remark : you can put a 1MB file on a CD-RW, which is less ecologically threatening. However, if you're using a PC, you're an ecological disaster anyway, what with all the poisons and toxic chemicals used to make the electronic stuff we so rely on now in the workplace (and at home !).

Pascal.

 

[jsteph]

Moving forward, floppies must GO. The original post only compared to CD, but CD's aren't what killed the floppy--it's USB drives. And USB sticks are a boot option on all new machines, at least since about 2003.

Floppies are horribly unreliable. As small as they are capacity-wise, you'd think the drives would have huge margins for alignment errors, but they don't.

I can't tell you how many times I've had a disk that reads perfectly in one drive but not another--yet that same other drive reads disks that it wrote just fine.

Yes, if you have older machines in your shop that don't support USB or you should save a boot disk. Otherwise, it's an old, legacy white elephant.
Jim

 

[MasterRacker]

Jim, When I was still using floppies, I noticed increasing error rates. My theory at the time was, since profit basically gone, the manufacturers were saving cost by reducing quality control.

[sub]Jeff
[purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

I was not born cynical - I earned my cynicism through careful observation of the world around me.[/sub]

 

[sostek]

Floppies will save your butt if you're rebuilding a server thats around 3 years old and has a RAID controller on it.

 

[dilettante]

Odd, we still use floppies on a fairly regular basis.

They are most commonly used for small data interchanges where email is considered insecure and "secure email" runs into software compatability issues.

We have not had any serious issues with reliability either.

CDs might be an improvement, if only we had more machines with CD writers (for some reason the box jockeys have managed to keep this a "premium feature" for big shots' desktops unless you kick and scream with a long list of justifications). The other issue is that users seem to be very unreliable about creating CDs when they DO have a CD writer. Often they'll use (or mis-use) some packet-writing scheme and produce a CD nobody else can read.

Flash keys remain too costly to use as a "throwaway" medium, and many of them still require driver installation on Windows 2000 (let alone the Win98 some data exchange partners are still using). They are also subject to being destroyed by the USPS, especially when electron-beam mail sterilizers are used (anthrax scare).

Is everyone else posting here concerned with their own personal and home use of removable media?

The real "floppy killer" for us would be if Mt. Rainier drives became ubiquitous (including read capability on nearly all CD-ROM drives out there), and one of the mini-CD form factors got cheap - making shipping comparable to flopyy shipping. Full size CDs still add extra complications for shipping, though I admit this is much less of an issue than in the past.

Now to get people to stop wrecking CD-Rs by labeling them incorrectly! Offset "heavy" tape labels, permanent marker bleed-through... sigh.

 

[MasterRacker]

If you're in a consultancy working with clients that are still running legacy technology, you're not going to get away from floppies for a while.

If you're working "intra-corporate":

1. There should be no sneakernet period. Between e-mail and shared folders/access groups, files should not need to be put on removeable media.

2. Any MS based corporation that's not 100% Win2K or higher by now deserves any problem they experience, period.

Writable media is a security risk. You have no idea what kind of IP someone can take home in their pocket. From a security standpoint, the more control/limits you can place on removeable media the better.


[sub]Jeff
[purple]It's never too early to begin preparing for [/purple]International Talk Like a Pirate Day

I was not born cynical - I earned my cynicism through careful observation of the world around me.[/sub]

 

[pmonett]

I seriously find that Mt Rainier is a ridiculous waste of time since rewritable media and devices have appeared. When it came out, it was justified because RW was not common and CDs were expensive. This is no longer the case.
Mt Rainier will never become ubitquitous because it is a lot easier to burn stuff on an RW, close the session and you are sure that everyone with a CD reader CAN read the disk. Since it is rewritable, you don't lose the disk either.

Pascal.

 

[jmd0252]

Save the floppies what a concept. All of you boys and girls talk like the hard plastic 3.5 inch floppy should be dead,, what about the soft sided 5.25,, or better yet,,, the old standby of O L D E R IBM systems the 8.0 inch. Talk about something that should forever be banned from the world. So since everyone wants the floppy gone, what is the solution, to boot a failing pc, without a working cd drive,, how do you "get it running", so you can begin the diag, and fixing??

 

[EBGreen]

Any machine that is sold now without a floppy drive has the ability to boot from a USB device or CD not to mention booting to a RIS image.

Essentially the question

what is the solution, to boot a failing pc, without a working cd drive,, how do you "get it running", so you can begin the diag, and fixing??

could just as well be:
what is the solution, to boot a failing pc, without a working cd drive,[red] or a working floppy[/red], how do you "get it running", so you can begin the diag, and fixing??

There will always be some situation that will not work with a given technology.

[red]"... isn't sanity really just a one trick pony anyway?! I mean, all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you are good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit!" - The Tick[/red]

 

[dennisbbb]

USB boot disk???

The thing that I find it very ironic is, before we can make a USB device bootable (specifically refering to USB thumbdrives!), we do need to get our hands on a bootable floppy.

 

[mrdenny]

what is the solution, to boot a failing pc, without a working cd drive,, how do you "get it running", so you can begin the diag, and fixing??

Take the drive, stick it in a working PC, get the needed data off the drive. Trash the dead CD rom, spend the $20 and get a new one. Boot of the new CD drive and reinstall the OS.

Nice clean, simple. These days, it's easier to format the workstation than it is to figure out what the user did to break it.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

(Not quite so old any more.)

 

[jmd0252]

Yes,, you are correct,, lots of times the easier thing to do, is pull the drive, take it to a working, machine,, and watch all the drivers re-load, etc, etc esp if it is XP,, or if it is W98, it may not load at all, and W2000, is almost as "tempermental". So how much time and energy have you spent, for not installing a $15.00 device, that while the media, is faulty,, saves you butt, from how many hrs of toil and work? I know,, it is all perspective. I remember buying a copy of Wordperfect for W95, and looking at 32 diskettes, for a install,, hoping and praying, that number 17 was not bad. So the saga of the 3.5 is like everything else,, your own personal opinion.

 

[langleymass]

What inspired this recent post was my doing CPLD upgrades on many servers in a lab. I didn't have an expensive flash drive. Instead, I ended up buring a CD-ROM for an upgrade utility that was only about 300 KB. Of course, I had to hunt down a working CD burner. I also made a bootable CD for DOS 6.22. It was ridiculous that I had to go through all this.

There isn't much question that floppy disk drive manufacturers aren't doing much for quality control. They would rather talk us into buying a more expensive device, even if it doesn't give us nearly as many options.

How interesting that CD writers are still a "premium feature"?

I also haven't mentioned the many problems that occur with CD burning speeds. I often burn many CD's at 2x or 4x just to make sure that my burn can be read by almost any CD-ROM out there. I could burn it faster, but would it be readable by older CD-ROMs? It's a nuisance I wish I didn't have to deal with.

That's the whole point. Why discard a technology just because it is old, especially when none of the replacements give as much flexibility?

 

[lionelhill]

Having run several non-networked scientific instruments, I've spent many unhappy hours cursing and running backwards and forwards with a floppy trying to find two drives in the same room which are both capable of reading and writing from the same floppy. Compatibility my foot!

CDs are great, but it's just a pain on systems where the OS doesn't provide CD writing and we have to turn to third party software [whose idea was that? An operating system that can't operate the system (or at least one of its components)?]

Anyone in favour of hooking up a cassette recorder, Sinclair ZX81 style?