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.

 

[jrbarnett]

My biggest gripe with the floppy disks is that there's no easy way with operating systems to have operating system Emergency Repair disks created on media other than floppy disks, therefore for the moment floppy drives are certainly essential on any mission critical systems.

No point having the data saved to the hard drive unless the hard drive is readable.

John

 

[Sympology]

lionelhill :
Tape recorder, are you mad? At least with the floppy you don't have to spend hours setting the volume right (unless of course you were posh and had a Sinclair Tape Player) and after 20 minutes......damm it crashed. Turn the volume down a little and try again....oops to much...and again...arrghh nooo it's chewed up my tape and it was BASF as well (Break the sound barrier!).
Still at least you could get 30 games on a C90!

Apologies to:
a) Most people outside the UK and
b) Anyone aged under 25 as this was completly meaningless.

Anyone aged 35 from old blighty now has a fond tear in their eye.



Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[chiph]

Tape drives -- I remember those from my Apple ][ and TRS-80 days. They sure sucked -- I learned not to use the C-90 tapes because they stretched too easily. The guy at the record store always looked at me strangely when I asked for C-30 tapes (wouldn't hold an entire album, but would hold 4 programs).

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[Sympology]

Ahh and remember the c10 and c15 "Computer" Tapes. Cost about double a c30 or c60! But of course the Lord of The Rings didn't fit on those, until "HyperLoad" came out, not that was fast. Only 10 minute to load a game. What more could we ask for?
Now for real nostalgia (put your pop up blockers on)

http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/storage.html

Only the truly stupid believe they know everything.
Stu.. 2004

 

[MasterRacker]

Trash-80 with a tape drive.....damn, I thought I had successfully repressed those memories.......

[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]

 

[Mike2287]

I did repress those memories until I read this thread.....

Man I'm getting old!

 

[jmd0252]

Talked about repressed memories, what was the first portable pc, you can remember??

 

[Dimandja]

The problem with CDs is that few people know how to record on them.

There is no uniform procedure for this. The medium is too complex for what it does. Try explaining CD/DVD/DVR/CDRW.

 

[dennisbbb]

Bottom line, a real computer guy will have a floppy drive around, like a mechanic will have his toolbox.

As for the rest, they wouldn't know how to use that floppy anyway, much less creating a bootable flash drive or a bootable DVDrom to fix his/her PC.

So supplying them with a floppy drive is useless just as giving them the mechanic's toolbox is useless.

 

[Stella740pl]

"they wouldn't know how to use that floppy anyway"???

I met those who don't know how to attach a file to an e-mail message, those who have no idea how to record CD, but most of them can save their Excel/Word document to a floppy and take it wherever necessary on foot (or save as a backup).

 

[bosk00]

In answer to jmd0252. How about the osborne

Alan
Senility at its finest

 

[dilettante]

The problem with CDs is that few people know how to record on them.

There is no uniform procedure for this. The medium is too complex for what it does. Try explaining CD/DVD/DVR/CDRW.

Or "finalizing" a disk, or "formatting" a disk for packet writing, or the many incompatible packet writing schemes, and the list goes on.

This of course is precisely what Mt. Rainier was meant to solve: to make CD-Rs/RWs into viable replacements for the floppy disk.

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.

I'm sorry, but in my experience that is just plain wrong. I run into numerous headaches because of improperly created CD-Rs/RWs where people have tried to do "drag and drop" writing, which invokes some vendor's proprietary packet writing scheme. While the disk may read on THAT machine, and maybe on 50% of the machines out there (if they are using Windows and Roxio's software) but the rest of them can't read the darned things at all. Then try taking it to some other machine that supports standard CD-ROM formats (ISO-9660, etc.) but isn't a mass-market desktop that might have Roxio's or Nero's products available.

For that matter, Mt. Rainier addressed CD-RW media as much or more than it did CD-R media.

The general idea was to put the media smarts into the onboard drive intelligence as much as possible. This produces a fairly good cross-platform and cross-vendor solution.

But I assume that market ignorance kept this from being a widely clamored-for feature. As a result nobody can count on such drives being commonly available, nor can they assume support in various OSs (nor ever expect any, in somewhat of a vicious circle).

 

[lionelhill]

... I wasn't serious about the tape drives, you know!

I'd love floppies if they worked like they used to, but I don't know if it's declining manufacturing standards, or just that the drives get old and dirty and don't get the dust shaken out of them by the occasional use nowadays. Maybe it's just rose-tinted specs. In the last couple of years, I've had problems finding drives that work reliably in the machines I have to use.

 

[jrbarnett]

I'm on the operational tasks rota for my organisation. One of the tasks on the weeks I am on is to update emergency repair disks for the servers (2 copies of each server's disk). There are a couple of servers which always fail to just update the previous one so I need to reformat an existing disk on that machine even though its only been used in that machine.

As I save it to the hard drive of the machine as well it gets backed up on tape that evening, but to do a system recovery, the floppy disk version is required, Windows setup can't use the version on the backup tape.
I hope Microsoft will address this in the next version of Windows, as the floppy drive is definitely going the way of the Dodo.

John

 

[jsteph]

...and speaking of Windows addressing certain things that seem to only accept floppys...when will they stop defaulting the 'Have Disk' dialog in the 'Add New Hardware' wizard to the floppy??!! This is in XP Pro, and I haven't had 'new hardware' come with a floppy in at least 5 years!!

At least they finally got rid of the maximum 'Quad-speed or higher' option on the CDRom Performance tab...
--Jim

 

[dilettante]

Well, considering Win XP was released in late October of 2001 it may not be as bad as it seems.

In a way it's funny. I'm not a huge fan of what Longhorn is being trimmed down to, let alone what it was supposed to be when early announcements came out. It was (and to a significant degree still is) going to be an OS that wil force a lot of hardware upgrades.

But from the (corporate) user side, there was a whole lot more complaining about the foot-dragging by Microsoft on getting NT5 out the door. This despite the under 4 year gap between NT4 and NT5 (Win2K) release dates.

There is plenty of Longhorn talk, but I don't hear anywhere near as much "come on Microsoft, get it out onto the market" noise. Then again Windows Server 2003 isn't quite so old and perhaps addressed many pressing issues fairly recently.

But... that's a whole different thread.

My point is that XP isn't exactly "new.

 

[chiph]

jmd0252 -
I believe the first "portable" computer was the Tandy 100.

It had a 3 or 4 line LCD and a full-sized keyboard. A friend's girlfriend had one in college (it was ancient, even then) that she used to submit public-record stories (property bought/sold, building permits issued, etc) to the local paper because it had a built-in 300 baud modem.

Chip H.


____________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please read FAQ222-2244 first

 

[jmd0252]

There are some more mature boys and girls around,, the Tandy,, and the osborne,, it would be wonder if some had working machines around somewhere.

 

[damber]

http://www.computerhistory.org/

A smile is worth a thousand kind words. So smile, it's easy!

 

[bosk00]

If anyone is interested in the osborne, here is a link.

http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html

Released in 1981 by the Osborne Computer Corporation, the Osborne 1 is considered to be the first true portable computer - it closes-up for protection, and has a carrying handle. It even has an optional battery pack, so it doesn't have to plugged into the 110VAC outlet for power.

Alan
Senility at its finest