What's wrong with FLOPPY, Doom9?

[palesi]

I wonder why you are so stubbornly against floppy. It's a piece of computer history and i think it's great to still find it nowadays: it's one of the few things that has survived the neverending process of computer evolution. Early computers didn't have Hard Disks; and HDs would have never existed without floppy. And do you seriously think that computer devices manufacturers will ship their drivers in USB memory sticks, rather than CD-ROM or floppy? And what about when your computer screws up and you need an emergency disk in a non-windows environment, do you think you will just be able to plug in a USB drive, and BIOS will support it? And what about backwards compatibility?

Maybe you just lost some important work because you kept your floppies in bad condition. And then they say: floppies suck.

[vorbis]

hear hear
floppy disks still have some use for rebooting a computer and for drivers. Also for storing project work in our college, they're essential as we don't have either cdr writers or zip disks

[wmansir]

Nobody is taking your floppies away. These new computers just don't need them. They can boot off USB memory sticks just as easily and boot of CDROM with many advantages (speed, capacity, durability, non-writable OEM discs).

[auenf]

i have been operating without floppy for at least 2 years now.

if i need to transport files, i either burn to a RW, or copy it to my Nomad Jukebox 3.

if i need to use a boot disk, i use a CD.

im glad to see the back of the floppy, it had its time in the sun, but all those general failures are enough for me.

btw, the G4 at work came with a floppy drive, USB tho.

Enf...

[bb]

Originally posted by auenf
im glad to see the back of the floppy, it had its time in the sun
That's why it has died, because of the exposure to the sun light :D

Why floppies are outdated:
- storage capacity much too low (use USB stick, ZIP drive, CD-R/RW instead)
- much too slow
- not recommended for use with multimedia files :p

Why nobody needs them with modern computers:
- because you can boot from CDs or even USB devices
- because you get your drivers from the Internet (and burn them on CD)

Why you still need floppies:
- because you have to deal with old, crappy hardware

bb

[auenf]

Originally posted by bb
That's why it has died, because of the exposure to the sun light :D

Why floppies are outdated:

damn, so thats the problem.

maybe i need to buy a new floppy drive then...

Why you still need floppies:
- because you have to deal with old, crappy hardware

acutally, i have old crappy (well, Digital) network cards to put into the old crappy hardware to copy stuff. unless they are not crappy enough to have USB headers on them (i440tx had built in USB controller iirc)

Enf...

[mpucoder]

Someone got his history wrong, the floppy disk came after hard disks. Maybe you meant in the personal computer field floppies came first. But in the mainframe world there were hard drives as far back as the 60's (maybe even further back). They were huge and expensive, so IBM created the 8" floppy for smaller "office size" machines (which took up only about 9 square feet of office space, about the size of a refrigerator)
As for its current usefulness, I have only 2 drives in a cluster of 15 computers. If I get software on floppy, which does still happen (most recently the DataLifeGuard software for hard drives), I use the network to get it to the right machine.
For emergency boot I use CD-ROM, or, more recently, tray mounted hard drives. That is in all except the 2 machines with floppies, because they are "old and crappy" computers that don't support CD-ROM boot.

[Doom9]

@mpucoder: maybe you can *accidentally* spill some coffe over those machines in a way that makes sure to fry every important component on those machines and you'll be rid of the problem :devil:

seriously, how can you ask what's wrong with a floppy when the question should be what's right with a floppy. 1.44mb is hardly enough for anything these days, and in fact for many people it's a lot faster to email a 1.44mb file than to put it on a floppy and read it at another place (provided that you can even read the disc, no other means of data transfer has screwed up that often in my PC career which has been going on for over a decade now). Modern PCs can boot from CD, ZIP, Network and USB so there's lots of options. In fact, I have personally tested the Dell machines I bought for my workplace and they boot up just fine using the USB powered ZIP-250. If I get a product that has drivers on a floppy but not CD I go to the manufacturers homepage to download more recent drivers and to write a letter of complaint (and next time I'll by a product by a company that's more into supporting new technologies). Floppy drives are legacy at its best. It's not because we didn't need it anymore that there are still floppy drives in many of today's PCs, it's that the owners of these machines are backwards oriented and fail to make use of modern technologies. PCs today are full of outdated crap that slows our machines down and takes up valuable space on the ATX connector plate where we could have more useful items like more USB ports, SPDIF ports, etc. My two PCs even have legacy free mainboards (as far as Abit was willing to go with that.. maybe next time they will dump the floppy connector as well), and in the end I not only have PCI ports up the wazoo, I'm also one of the few who can connect 6 USB devices (USB2 even on my latest MB) without having to mount any breakout devices, additional controllers or anything quite like it and I can throw 2 Firewire connectors in the fray to top that.

But, maybe you'll understand this: Do you still use mpeg2avi or Flask to make your DivX stuff? No? Why not? You've dumped something old and trusted for something new and fancy... because the new and fancy is better.

Last but not least I distinctively recall booting Linux from a CD-ROM.. so much about needing a floppy for alternative environments. In fact I think I saw instructions on how to boot Linux from a memory stick in one of the recent c't issues. And since modern MACs have no floppy drives anymore I suppose they have alternative means of booting as well. Legacy has keept us in the dark PC ages for too long, it's time to throw all that overboard.

[The Edge]

I aggree. Did you ever install Win95 or Win3.11 from floppies...?????
Terrible. I suppouse in 10years time when we have solid state harddrives and we will be having this conversation all over again. As is the computer industry.
But the floppy is old hat. It's demise is long over due.

Edge

[jggimi]

Well, in order to create a bootable cd-r with Nero, I still need a diskette drive. And, I still use diskettes, on 2 rare instances. Usually, it's required when a BIOS update or some other patch is downloaded in "diskette" form. For my home PCs, the OS CDs are not bootable, being upgrades, so I need the diskette drives to initiate OS install.

[markrb]

For the cost, used about $5, I will stick a floppy in all of my machines. I only ever use it to redo my OS drive. I use it to boot and create a bootable drive or start up my my restore program. After that it has little use for me, but this is enough to justify the cost. I could kill it in the bios when I don't need it, but it doesn't hurt anything. It's on it's way out, but there is no clear succesor. At one time people thought the Zip drive would be this, but it has not caught on enough.

Mark

[wmansir]

Speaking of Booting linux from a CDROM, has anyone tried the Knoppix distro? It's a fully functional KDE desktop enviroment, bootable from 1 CDROM that contains just about any package you need, including Open Office. If you have more than 128MB of RAM (I think) you don't have to touch your harddrives at all, in fact they are mounted read only by default. This makes it a great way to try out linux, or show it to your friends.

Unfortunatly, you need a recent machine to run it because most of the content on the disc is compressed. This also makes it run and boot slower than an actual linux install would.

It worked great on my AMD 1.2GHz w/ 512mb ram, booting in about 2 minutes. That's not bad considering it has to auto-detect all hardware and settings. My onboard network card was detected and configured my connection automaticly, and both my SB Live and onboard sound was detected and configured (when I forgot to disable the onboard).

I tried it on my old P200MMX w/ 64mb and it took about 15 minutes to boot and needed to put a swap file on my fat32 partition. Even when it was running it was basicly unusable in the KDE enviroment. Still, for any modern machine it is a great way to check out linux.

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by jggimi
Well, in order to create a bootable cd-r with Nero, I still need a diskette drive. And, I still use diskettes, on 2 rare instances. Usually, it's required when a BIOS update or some other patch is downloaded in "diskette" form. For my home PCs, the OS CDs are not bootable, being upgrades, so I need the diskette drives to initiate OS install.

Rawrite is your friend. Get rawrite for windows and you can rip an image from any floppy and use it to create a bootable CD with Nero. :D As far as patches in "diskette" form they are rare now and will only be more so. What Windows needs are loopback devices like linux. Then you can treat files on your HD as separate file systems. So you could for instance create a 1.44Mb fat32 file system in a file. Mount it as a floppy. Have a program that wants to write to a floppy write to it. Then take that file and use it in nero to make a bootable CD. There honestly is no reason for floppies any more. We need to replace it with Zip drives or the like. And the 250Mb ones at that. Right now Zip is the current default defacto standard asside from floppy. There was the Super Disk but it caught on even less than the Zip drive. Over the last decade of using my zip drive I have never had a disk go bad or loose it's format. I don't have to go rummaging through a pile of disks to find the right one for a class. It is all on one. Zip disks are great. And though Iomega is the only manufacturer they are not overly priced and there are lots of disk manufacturers.

[TheXung]

I haven't had a floppy in my system for 4 years. I realized that my time was important to me and fiddling around with installing things from floppies was wasting my life away. I mean if you have nothing better to do then go ahead and use your floppy. Basically you can cope without a floppy pretty easy once you get use to it. Most OSes have bootable CDs and if they don't, then you're using really dated stuff.

If I need to transfer things, I just burn it. In fact, if a machine doesn't have a burner that I want to get stuff off, for small files, I just throw it up onto a server somewhere, large stuff, it's worth the time to rip it open and temporarily install one of my extra burners. A little practice and you can do it pretty quickly. and burners are so cheap these days; wait for the right sale with right rebates and they go for free or $10.


Also for storing project work in our college, they're essential as we don't have either cdr writers or zip disks
Does your college not have a network with a file server? Mounting a drive is pretty easy once you learn all the ways of doing it. Even without a file server, you could just set one up on your machine and transport all of your work to and from your machine. Or does your college not have a network either?

[palesi]

Do you still use mpeg2avi or Flask to make your DivX stuff?


mpeg2avi, yes.


No? Why not? You've dumped something old and trusted for something new and fancy... because the new and fancy is better.


But you just said that PX3 was back...

[ReTroAcTive]

how the hell will i boot my disk manager?
dm is one of the best disk tools and i have no usb stick cause they are like way too high priced. i could buy a floppy drive and about 100 3.5 disks for what ide spend on one usb mem stick.
i have a version of win95 on floppys and they still work and will do a clean install in about 73mbs.

[vorbis]

of course we have a network, we aren't that backward :devil:
what i meant was transferring project files to or from home.
they're liable to freak if you tried to ftp or telet a college machine directly from home.

[Joe999]

Originally posted by wmansir
Speaking of Booting linux from a CDROM, has anyone tried the Knoppix distro?

I was just about to post a similar message on seeing this thread. I only took a look at Knoppix a couple weeks back, but I love what I've seen. Aside from how cool it is running an entire operating system off a CD, or seeing Debian with an invisable install/configure, I keep seeing more and more things it's going to help me with. My favorite is the assurance that I can probably use this at school if I ever need to do some last minute editing. I'd much rather just run in and use OpenOffice than sit around trying to remember where everything is placed in MS word.

Another neat thing about Knoppix I noticed is that xine comes installed and did great with a few DivX files I threw at it. Nice if I ever found myself somewhere with two cd drives and no permission to install software on their system.

Knoppix does suggest one use for a floppy, thowing some better fonts and themes onto it for Knoppix use. OK, I don't know if that would even work, let alone fit well enough to be usable, but it could be fun to give a shot.

[Doom9]

@vorbis: if not ftp or telnet.. what about sftp & ssh? My school explicitly allows that and I use it to test *nix programs from my Windows environment at home. Furthermore, any file that you can put on a floppy disc can be emailed ;)

@palesi: yes, PX3 is back but did you see me reactivate the mpeg2avi guides? Unless mpeg2avi reaches GKnot levels that's not going to happen.

As for bootable CDs.. before I dumped my floppy drives I created a couple of bootdisk images which I safely keep on a CD.. and if you need to make your own Windows bottable CDs (slipstreaming and such) the bootcode can be found for download on the net.

[TheXung]

Good ole email

[ppera2]

What is wrong with floppies?

For me, using floppies in last couple years is real nightmare. Quality of disks is so miserable, that I can't believe that it happens. Average lifetime is 3-5 insertion in drive.

I have some old disks, over 10 years, and they are still very good usually.

It is so bad, that I boot machine from CD when can't boot from HD.

Much thing gone, and goes in history. Beeing sentimental is not useful. Of course it should not be forgotten - I hope that museums will have it.

[Mango Madness]

agreed, technology must move forth from it's beginning. But it must always remember it's beginnings.

[auenf]

Originally posted by Doom9
My two PCs even have legacy free mainboards (as far as Abit was willing to go with that.. maybe next time they will dump the floppy connector as well), and in the end I not only have PCI ports up the wazoo, I'm also one of the few who can connect 6 USB devices (USB2 even on my latest MB) without having to mount any breakout devices, additional controllers or anything quite like it and I can throw 2 Firewire connectors in the fray to top that.

speaking of 'legacy free', dont get me started on the half hearted attempt abit did, but i will spare this board from a lot of useless typing ;).

Enf...

[Buddy]

The last floppy's I bought was about ten years ago. I have about more then hondered. They still work fine. The amount of time you people use to make a one time bootable cd for bios or other updates.... Well I'm allready finished with the job with the use of one floppy. Big data files I'm writing on cd or rw. But for small files, and there are still a lot, the good ol flop. :D

[Doom9]

@auenf: we should start a petition so abit will do it right next time ;)

[theReal]

I'm wondering why nobody mentioned the one case where you actually still need a floppy:

Loading additional adapter drivers on installation of Win2k and WinXP (you know, press F6 at the beginning of installation process, then load your SCSI/IDE drivers from floppy).

WinXP doesn't ask you where you want to load the drivers from, it only tries drive a: and when there's nothing there it quits (and you can't install Windows on the SCSI/additional IDE drives)

I know there is a way to integrate these drivers in the bootable OS CD-ROM (just like you can integrate Service Packs), but this is hard work and a lot of fumbling around just for a few kilobytes of driver data. I rather still have a floppy drive installed (it's still the same one that came with my first computer in 1994 :D)

[px3]

Originally posted by Doom9
@palesi: yes, PX3 is back but did you see me reactivate the mpeg2avi guides? Unless mpeg2avi reaches GKnot levels that's not going to happen.


px3 is really back, but not with the intention to code an "all-in-all-in-all-out-of-the-box-thing"..

my major intention is to enhance the fastest encoder avail.

is there really a need of "reaching GKnot levels" or even others ?
IMHO the only answer could be no.. there's only one thing everybody want's: a fast and reliable program to transcode mpeg to avi... disregarding minor bugs, m2a is the answer =.-)

but this discussion is an philosophical one.. =:-)

@doom9: from my point of view, you'll never be confrontated with the need of reactivating the m2a guides.. these levels won't never be reached.. =.-)

Regards,

PX3

[masken]

I remember when I loaded that DTP application on my Amiga 2000 before I got a harddrive. It was like 40+ diskettes, and once loaded I wouldn't shut the thing down until my project was done :D

Iomega was on it's way a while ago with ZIP drives through OEM's. Too bad that didn't happen. Say what you will about ZIP drives, but they still contained 70 times more data than a floppy and was a hell of alot faster ;)

There's still no replacements for the old floppys though, and that's too bad. We still need a rewritable media that's cheap and non-fragile. CDRW's just won't do.

[killingspree]

Originally posted by masken

There's still no replacements for the old floppys though, and that's too bad. We still need a rewritable media that's cheap and non-fragile. CDRW's just won't do.

oh come on... i just bought a 25 spindle of 4x CD RWs for 10$... i think that is cheap enough, and at least i don't need faster medium since i'm usually not burning 650 Megs onto one RW, but only a few MB at most 200. and about fragility: if you keep them somewhat well, they don't get damaged easier than floppies. i don't know how often i've wrecked a floppy carrying it to school, by just somehow bending it in a bag.

just my 2 €-cents though
steVe

[theReal]

What happened to that Super-Floppy thing? It was backwards compatible with 3.5" Floppy disks, but it was faster and it could also read and write 100MB disks. Never heard of it again, though...

[TheXung]

What kept the zip and ls120 from taking off was the fact that they were too stubborn to give up charging $10 a disk. Wanna send an album of pictures or clips to family and friends? sure hurts when they don't return the zip disk.

Everyone got too caught up on the idea of a paltry 100 mb being the next floppy when they didn't realize they were being charged up the a$$ for the disks. Give it up, it never made it, the key to a successful media isn't capacity, it's cheapness. If I could make 20 mb usb sticks that sold for $.25 each I would be more successful than zip ever was. . . . if the school would ever stop getting computers equipted with zip disks and get ones with burners instead. No zip disk can ever beat the fastest burners.

And why does a media need to be rewritable? Every year, I wake up for the after thanksgiving day sale and pick up a free 100 spindle of cdrs. I never go through them all every year.

[masken]

@killingspree, what's needed is a media that is supported directly by the BIOS etc.

[mpucoder]

which brings us back 'round to the beginning. Modern computers do support CD/DVD drives in the BIOS for booting and reading (just not the old fashioned MSCDEX way)

[auenf]

Originally posted by Doom9
@auenf: we should start a petition so abit will do it right next time ;)

well, abit would have to almost have to build the chipset from scratch to remove all the legacy from the MAX boards.

Enf...

[palesi]

px3 is really back, but not with the intention to code an "all-in-all-in-all-out-of-the-box-thing"..

OT: then why are you going to support besweet.dll ?

Personally, i'd prefer to keep audio things separated.

[Doobie]

The floppy disk made the personal computer viable, but historical value doesn't mean a thing in the present.

We'd have 500MB floppies now if not for the CD. Floppies stalled at 1.4MB because massive software could be distributed on CD making it unnecessary to push up the floppy standard. The floppy wasn't replaced by the CD because burning CDs until recently was expensive and unreliable -- not to mention that CDs scratch easy and don't find into your shirt pocket.

IBM pushed the 2.8MB floppy standard (backward compatible). There was a push of the LS120 (120MB, 1.4MB). ZIP disks were very popular for a while (a stop gap between small floppies and viable CD burning), but they were no substitute for the floppy. ZIP disks were too expensive and not 1.4MB disk compatible, nor were many computers ever shipped with them built in. The LS120 was the last, best chance to replace the 1.4MB, but too little too late. It would have been cheap if it ever became mainstream.

There are a few times where a 1.4MB floppy is very handy (review this thread for examples). But, these needs will eventually be addressed.

For now, the USB Key is a nice replacement, but too expensive to give to someone nor is it supported by older computers. If you need to give someone software, burn a CD or send it across the Net.

Bye bye floppy, it was nice knowing you.

BTW, most of my old floppies have gone bad.

[The Edge]

Not trying to change the tread subject but $699.00 for a 1Gb USB keychain. (http://www.supermediastore.com/aphan1gbusbf.html) And thats on sale:eek:

Edge

[palesi]

just a few minutes ago i've had the confirmation that we DO NEED floppies...

i was at my uni's "computer lab", and there was this foreign girl sitting on my right, struggling to find a hole to insert her floppy, to save the e-mail she just received from her family abroad.

she told me: <<hey, excuse me, do you know where the floppy drive is? >>. the only answer i could give was: <<i'm afraid there is no floppy drive on this iMac toy>>.

What should one do? BURN a 3kb e-mail? Well, ok, last resort, but THERE IS NEITHER A CD-R BURNER !

So, she took a piece of paper and started writing diligently. So much for the USB storage.

And right now i'm writing this message with this floppy-impaired, burn-impaired thing.

iMac is bollocks ! Let's get rid of that crap, and long life to floppies.

[Doom9]

palesi: ever heard of the wonderful invention called "printer" ? I hear people use it to put important electronic documents on paper so they have a copy that will survice even an EMP blast.

[The Edge]

Ooooooo.......tell us more of this mythical device one calls "printer".

Edge

[Ughie]

Originally posted by Neo Neko
Rawrite is your friend. Get rawrite for windows and you can rip an image from any floppy and use it to create a bootable CD with Nero. :D As far as patches in "diskette" form they are rare now and will only be more so. What Windows needs are loopback devices like linux. Then you can treat files on your HD as separate file systems. So you could for instance create a 1.44Mb fat32 file system in a file. Mount it as a floppy. Have a program that wants to write to a floppy write to it. Then take that file and use it in nero to make a bootable CD. .....

If you need a floppy disk to create a bootable cd rom and you don't have some floppy images. You can use a virtual floppy drive search google for ramdisk or ramdiskNT its an application like daemon tools but for floppy drives.

[theReal]

ramdisk or ramdiskNT its an application like daemon tools but for floppy drives

Not only that - it's the best prog to make Ramdisks of any size (the virtual floppy is just one option).

[masken]

Oh, I didn't know this:

http://www.mt-rainier.org/