Floppy Disks

[hazmat]

Originally posted by simX
Why in the WORLD would you want to fit something onto a 1.4 MB disk? If it's that small, then you might as well e-mail it, or if necessary, burn it to a CD-RW.

For the Mac, not sure. But they are convenient for certain things. I still find them invaluable for PCs. Not just for emergency situations, but for a lot of stuff. I love knowing I have a well set up DOS boot floppy around. Used to use them at work for laptops with cdrom and network drivers on them.

 

[MDLarson]

Floppies are fun to whip down the hallway!

WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!! *tink*

 

[homer]

CD coasters make WAY better frisbees than floppies. I've made plenty of coasters in my day, trying to make my CD-RW work in X.

Coaster frisbee is fun

 

[mindbend]

I remember when the iMac came out and was blasted by some for its lack of a floppy disk drive. I was also a bit surprised and then thought about it for five seconds and realized how utterly useless floppy disks had become and how they would never disappear if somebody (Stevo) didn't take a stand and say "Floppy disks are dead!"

I immediately burned all my floppies to a CD master and put em in a shoebox in the attic "just in case".

We have only one floppy drive on my biz partner's PC laptop in our office. Otherwise it's three G4s and two iMacs, none with floppies. Whenever somebody shows up with a floppy I want to punch them in the face just for being so out of touch. Could you please join us in the 21st century?

p.s. symphonix, much laughter here

On a similar subject, about a year ago I bought an Apple II at a garage sale for $4 complete with monitor, joystick and disk drive. You know, that old "truly" floppy 5.25" size. I pulled out a box of old-style floppies with some sucky Basic apps that I had written thinking there was no way they'd still work. Sure enough, after 15 years of being in attics, shuffled around, at one point in a damp garage, they worked perfectly. Maybe we should go back to using those?

 

[nkuvu]

One thing I liked about floppies was HAL. HAL Linux, to be precise. It's a flavor of Linux that fits onto a floppy, which is then a bootable OS. I wasn't able to get it to work from a CD, which is a shame. My floppy drive in my Win2K box, after years of neglect, was so filled with dust that it couldn't read any floppy at all.

HAL saved me more than once when I had a problem with my FreeBSD installation...

 

[hazmat]

Originally posted by homer
CD coasters make WAY better frisbees than floppies. I've made plenty of coasters in my day, trying to make my CD-RW work in X.

Coaster frisbee is fun

A couple of fun things to do with frisbees are:

1. Get it at the right angle and throw down really hard at a hard floor, which will shatter it.

2. Put silver (or write) side up in to a microwave oven and set to High for about 3-5 seconds, depending on the strength of the oven. Makes a really cool pattern in the CD.

 

[Izzy]

I myself haven't used a floppy for around 3 or so years...my sis, however, still has to use them to turn in assignments. The other day I had to fire up the 7500 and format a PC floppy for her. I forgot how slow these things really were, it took forever to get this thing formatted...

 

[TommyWillB]

I would have added one more choice to the poll: "I still have floppies and a floppy drive but rarely use either..."

I have a USB floppy drive that I bought for my old G3 because I had a Sony Mavica digital camera that used them as "film".

I guess the only reason I keep the drive around is because I have 100's of old floppies that I like knowing I can still retreive stuff from if necessary... I've burnd a lot of the stuff onto CD, but not everything...

 

[TommyWillB]

Originally posted by RacerX
So what killed floppies? I, personally, feel that it was a combination of capacity and quality. Has anyone else noticed how much more often floppies fail today than they did back in the late 80's (when they cost an arm and a leg). I've used them about a dozen times in the last year and had five go bad on me. That wasn't the case when I first started using computers and floppies were needed for almost everything.

I have more than ten times as many CDs as floppies now, burners are great!

That because you are using old media that has been exposed to too much time/tempature/humidity/light. All of these things take their toll on floppy media. Also the drives get dusty and flaky when they sit around for years.

I have no doubt that CD's too will start exhibitng problems in a few years... We already have 1st generation audio CD's from the early 80's that are starting to disolve. The top layer is sticky, and if you hold them up the the light you can see light through them.... And if you listen real hard you can sometimes hear a metalic sort of digital distortion as a result. So far it is not too bad because the oversampling/error correction fixes most of the problems, but over time it will exceed the capabilities of the CD player.

... and old green recordable CD's are even more fragile. Make sure you keep all burned CD's out of the light or the dye will start to fade.

 

[TommyWillB]

I actually have my very first 3" floppy from 1988. (before that I used the big 5" ones that actually were "floppy")

That one floppy has a full version of Microsoft Word 4, and about 40 of essays from college on it. Mind you this is all on ONE floppy.

Word 4 was cool!

 

[Ricky]

"I think its on account of the fact that floppy disks are utter crap."

LMAO! So true... Sounds like something Dogbert would say.