Floppy Disks

What do you think about floppy disks

  • I use them all the time

  • I wish I had a floppy drive so I could use them

  • They are extinct

Results are only viewable after voting.
Biff

Biff

Thinking Different
I was cleaning out my desk and I came across some old floppy disks. I then thought to myself, "I have not had the need to use floppy disks for a long long time".

Tell me, are floppy disks really dead or are they still a vital part of today's world? When was the last time you used a floppy disk?

Obviously I don't really care about them anymore :)

I also found some 8 inch floppy disks in the bottom of one of my unused junk drawers!!
 
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! :D
 
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.
 
I think capacity and speed killed the floppy. Most files are now over 1.4 MB and CD burners are cheap and reliable. By the time you are done copying a 1.4 MB floppy to your drive you could have copied almost an entire 650 MB CD.

Documents and stuff like that are now sent over the internet.
 
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! :D
Click to expand...

I agree, when people come to where I work to borrow projection machines to do their all important power point, I pitty the fool who only brings one floppy. My rule of thumb is if you use floppies bring at least 3 copies! I keep telling people to not use floppies cause they are small in capacity but even further they are unreliable! They dont listen and when they cant read their PPT off their floppy ause of a bad floppy and they get a bad grade, then they come to me and tell me my machines suck lol.

I havent used a floppy for serious business since I got my G3, 3 years ago! The only reason I still even touch floppies, is because x86 OSes use em :p
 
Originally posted by Biff
I When was the last time you used a floppy disk?
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When I was installing Windoze XPectorant on my PeeWee a few months ago. I had to make six boot floppies. SIX! And with the odds about, oh, 80% that each will fail, well, you do the math. I ended up buying 10 new floppies. Guess what? Three of them, BRAND NEW, were trash.

stupid floppies.

It is pretty fun, though, when people will bring you their PC formatted floppies which PCs won't read, and you throw them into a Mac and it retrieves the data for 'em. :p
 
I know that floppies are very unreliable today. On my Apple IIgs, floppies almost never failed. Now they fail much more frequently. I don't know if the floppies are made with lower quality, but I know that 3.5" drives are very cheap nowadays. I remember paying $400.00 for my 800K 3.5" drive for the Apple IIgs, now I think you can pick up a cheap PC drive for around $15.00 (don't quote me). It may just be the cheap commodity hardware, but then again ZIP drives are cheap to make, and I don't have problems with them.
 
I think that the reason floppies fail so much today is a combination of low quality disks, and low quality drives. For example, would you trust an AU$30 drive? I wouldn't. On the other hand, I trust my burner, and my Zip drive. Apple and Iomega have quality control checks. Well, at least Apple only uses companies that do :D
 
Well, last time I used a floppy was a few days ago, but that was because my mom had me do something on her PeeCee :p
Last time I used a floppy on a Mac, who knows? :confused:
 
I voted that floppies are extinct, but you know how some people are, they keep digging up the past.

Since I teach in a hybrid environment (Mac and PC) I have to use floppies all the time. Other teacher give me documents on floppy, and students bring in floppies with homework all the time. When I bought my G4, I got a floppy drive just read PC junk from work.

Personally though, I hav not used a floppy from my own stuff for about a year. I have ZIPs and CD-R(W)s.
 
I voted "use them all the time," but it's actually like once every couple of months.
I have an Imation Superdisk drive. The Imation Superdisk (which is also becoming extinct, it seems) is the same physical size as a floppy, but holds 120 MB. My wife keeps a lot of her records on Superdisk, and she likes the convenience of being able to add files just by dragging them onto the disk icon.
I just use floppies & Superdisks to access old files that I'm too lazy to burn onto a CD.
:eek:
 
On today's group assignment, I asked my partner to send me what she'd been working on. I began to give my address, but ...
"No, I don't have the internet on."
"Oh. Okay, have you got a CD writer?"
"Yes."
"Well, put it on that CD-RW I gave you."
"Uhh, I don't know how to use it."

I ended up getting a floppy, which failed, and then another. I uploaded it via FTP from a school computer onto my iBook. Then, went on to class to do the presentation.

My teacher took note of my laptop, and said "That's pretty nice."
"Yeah. Apple really know how to build them well." I replied.
"I was looking at getting a laptop. Does it have a built-in floppy drive?"
"No. Apple haven't put floppy drives on their machines since 1996."
"Oh. I wonder what the thinking is there?"
"I think its on account of the fact that floppy disks are utter crap."
 
I HAVE to use floppies. My C instructer requires that we turn in our assignments on floppies. Oh and get this...Compile for DOS. She's living waaay in the past. Grr...:mad: I thought I had finally gotten rid of the damn things when I got my B&W G3. Oh well. Now its a TiBook and I'm back to floppies.
 
I think as Mac users, we're constantly the first to try new things.... first commercially succesfful GUI, first computers with built-in audio-video capabilties, first speech recognition, (insert next Apple innovation here)...

As a result, when Apple says "ditch this for some new technology which is better," we do so. We buy a CD-writer and we enjoy our new stuff...

And... floppies are actually still a part of my life.... not for the usual file transfer.... but it's an easy way to get stuff on my Mac Classic II that I still play with. :)
 
Originally posted by genghiscohen
I voted "use them all the time," but it's actually like once every couple of months.
I have an Imation Superdisk drive. The Imation Superdisk (which is also becoming extinct, it seems) is the same physical size as a floppy, but holds 120 MB. My wife keeps a lot of her records on Superdisk, and she likes the convenience of being able to add files just by dragging them onto the disk icon.
I just use floppies & Superdisks to access old files that I'm too lazy to burn onto a CD.
:eek:
Click to expand...

As well the Superdisk SHOULD be extinct. Horrible medium. Slow as hell. Might as well use a Zip disk.
 
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