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SpringHeeledJack
26th Apr 2010, 20:51
Having just seen this : BBC News - Sony to stop selling floppy disks from 2011 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8643844.stm) i was wondering just who would be still using the floppy D as a storage medium ? I can't say that i've consciously used one, having been a late-comer to the world of computing, post floppy, although i seem to have been next to people who did use them in the past.

When did any of the ppruners last use this medium and what were the positive/negatives ?



SHJ

seacue
26th Apr 2010, 21:02
Yesterday I copied info from a number of 5-1/4-inch floppies.

I notice that the office worker where I volunteer uses 3.5-inch floppies for some sort of backup.

I haven't written a floppy "in anger" for quite a while.

henry crun
26th Apr 2010, 21:14
I have a stack of them covering games to various editions of DOS and Windows.
Havn't used them in years, but for some reason I cannot convince myself to throw them out.

mixture
26th Apr 2010, 21:35
When did any of the ppruners last use this medium and what were the positive/negatives ?


Floppy disks are an inherently unreliable medium, not to mention their distinct lack of useful capacity and the fact that they are incredibly slow.

They have no place in todays home IT environment. Tape still lives on in business, but floppies are long gone.

With the advent of cheap USB sticks and hard drives (internal and external), and even cheaper CDs there's no reason to use them anymore.

frostbite
26th Apr 2010, 21:42
I still have several hundred (mostly 3.5") lurking around the place.

There are millions of £s worth of programs for the Commodore Pet, Atari STFM etc., on there but I'll accept offers.

Will even throw in the several hundred tape cassettes for the Pet, Sharp MZ80K, Apple II etc..

HuntandFish
27th Apr 2010, 15:04
Still got some punched cards ! Now thats historic storage

419
27th Apr 2010, 18:30
Tape still lives on in business, but floppies are long gone.

Still used in this bit of aviation related equipment. (Helicopter tracker and balancer/analyser). That's a floppy sticking out of the bottom.



http://www.dsi-hums.com/images/stories/DS%20Website%20Images/8500C+.jpg

Blues&twos
27th Apr 2010, 22:17
I still occasionally use 1.44MB floppies at work on some of our oldest control systems for transferring small blocks of code I've modified. These systems don't have Windows/USB (they're typically early to mid-1980s systems, mostly due for retirement in the near future...or probably the not so recent past if I'm realistic...).
Alternatively I can transfer these code blocks using a laptop and a serial cable, but it's much quicker using a floppy than firing up a computer, finding the lead, remembering the MS-DOS commands etc.
Floppies are pretty much useless for everything else though.

Saab Dastard
27th Apr 2010, 23:27
Floppies are still sometimes useful for BIOS updates, diagnostics, booting up old OS's, for playing old games like Doom.

But only if there's no alternative.

And you may well need one to install SATA drivers for a clean install of Windows XP.

SD

P.Pilcher
27th Apr 2010, 23:31
Oh - I don't know. Some of my home electronic organ playing mates use them to store stop settings on, and I went to a recital recently where the organist offered to play some requests. Once she had decided what to play it was on condition "that I can find the right floppy disc"! Apparently she was still amased how many stop settings she could store on one floppy.

P.P.

Loose rivets
28th Apr 2010, 04:27
I used to sell those cheap. Can't remember how much for, but the full retail was £90 for a box of 10. Yep, that's not a mistake. 90 quid.

Mind you, I sold maths co-processors then for £385. Bargain. Full Blue price was £1,750.

Imprimus Wren 150 mb hard drive, a thousand pound upgrade.

Big colour monitor, £2,600.

It's a different world now . . . you even have to have a brain to work the OS. Windows? I said it would never catch on.:uhoh:

Funny how one could design a cathedral using DOS 6.22 or less.

Pssssst...anyone want any ceramic tipped plotter pens?

mixture
28th Apr 2010, 06:59
Floppies are still sometimes useful for BIOS updates, diagnostics,

Maybe for home-build bodge jobs ... but for branded machines built within the last 5 years chances are BIOS and diags can be either done "online" or through a CD.

booting up old OS's, for playing old games like Doom


Nostalgia rather than necessity :cool: ..... however the word "Doom" does bring back memories... remember "Lemmings" ? :ok:

mixture
28th Apr 2010, 07:02
419,

Helicopter tracker and balancer/analyser

Don't have much time for egg-beaters myself, so can't really argue your wisdom ! :cool:

However I bet there's a more recent version on the market that uses CF cards or something similar, the "Zing Test 1200" (wonderful name!) perhaps ? It's features include "Advanced rotor track and balance" and up to "8GB compact flash". Zing™ HUMS 1200 Series | Condition-based maintenance programs | Mission Ready (http://www.missionready.com/zing/hums/1200_series.shtml)

SpringHeeledJack
29th Apr 2010, 11:13
Thanks for the replies gents and fossils :}

Were the floppies upgraded at all during their life, as in faster read/write abilities and noticeably greater capacity such as happened with USB stick storage in the last 5 years ? Were they susceptible to corruption by being near magnets (speakers and the like) ? For that matter, were they prone to losing data that seems to plague flash cards at times when being plugged/unplugged from various electronic media ?



SHJ

mixture
29th Apr 2010, 13:01
No point re-inventing the wheel.....

Floppy disk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk)
USB flash drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usb_pen)

If questions remain, feel free to come back. :ok:

sfdemo
29th Apr 2010, 15:24
i believe it is already outdated

A A Gruntpuddock
29th Apr 2010, 16:15
Came across this just after reading this thread :-

BBC News - 40 ways we still use floppy disks (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8651750.stm)

frostbite
29th Apr 2010, 16:49
My near fossilised (thanks Jack!) memory tells me there was a bit of software that claimed to increase the capacity of a 3.5" floppy.

Possibly did it by changing the disk format.

Blues&twos
29th Apr 2010, 21:15
Were the floppies upgraded at all during their life, as in faster read/write abilities and noticeably greater capacity

We briefly moved on from 1.44MB floppies to 120MB floppies, then quickly after that started using Iomega zip disks/drives. I still use zip disks for loading modified graphics code onto some of our machines which are running Windows NT as we can't use USB memory sticks.

From good ol' Wikipedia:
An attempt to continue the traditional diskette was the SuperDisk(LS-120) in the late 1990s, with a capacity of 120 MB which was backward compatible with standard 3½-inch floppies.

henry crun
29th Apr 2010, 21:22
Saab Dastard: When you say "booting up old OS's, for playing old games like Doom", are you referring to doing that a current PC with XP; if so, how ?

Saab Dastard
29th Apr 2010, 21:41
As SoCal App says, plus if you have a HD partion with FAT on it, you can access the contents from DOS, Windows 3.x or 9x.

It's been a while since I've used it, but I've booted up some pretty recent hardware into DOS to run Doom over a network.

Basic video and network drivers - plus CD if you need it - is pretty straightforward.

SD

marketaero
11th May 2010, 21:49
Some outdated avionic equipment still come with floppy disks. Some (young) engineers have complained when they troubleshoot some Collins equipment. They are like "what's this small square for?".
That's the only way to upload some configuration file to these dinosaurs.

rickity
11th May 2010, 22:17
I had to go and buy some floppy discs the other day - amazed I could still get them - old stock in WH Smiths £7 for 10, all to reload scsi/sata drivers prior to re-installing XP on a box thats not that old.

Rickity

Keef
11th May 2010, 22:44
I threw out several hundred 3½ inch floppies when we moved house. They were full of "irreplaceable" stuff that I hadn't actually used in years. I kept about a dozen "just in case" with stuff like various levels of DOS boot, and a Linux master boot floppy that "unlocks" the old PC by running Fedora 5 on a spare partition.

I bet I never use those either!

I also chucked several boxes of 5¼ floppies with prehistoric stuff on them. I found my old 5¼ drive and connected it up last year, but Windows 7 didn't seem to like it.

The motherboard in this PC says it needs a floppy to install new BIOS, but I've not tried doing that and I doubt I will.

The floppy is heading for extinction, I fear.

Saab Dastard
11th May 2010, 23:37
I've just been using floppies to boot Ghost over a network - hard disk crash forced a convoluted repair. I discovered it's not easy or straightforward to get a 40GB XP system partition from a 160GB disk onto an 80GB disk, but I managed in the end*.

I find it much easier and cheaper to create a boot floppy (editable, re-usable) than a boot CD, even on CD-RW media.

I've still got a bunch of them (maybe 50 or so), but threw out a couple of shoe-boxes full 10 years ago.

As I say, it's still useful, although Keef is right that it has nearly reached dodo city.

SD

* For anyone interested, I achieved the result by finding a disk imaging tool that allowed the 160GB disk to be cloned to the smaller 80GB disk (Seagate disk tools, based on Acronis), reducing the size of each partition accordingly (providing that the total of used space in each resulting partition could still fit).

I then booted the system with XP CD, ran an install\repair, then mounted the 80GB disk in another system, deleted the non-system partition and used a partition manager to expand the (shrunken) system partition to occupy the entire disk. Job done.

I had previously tried (and failed) to copy the 40GB partition directly to the single 80GB partition on the smaller disk - the clone worked, but would not boot, even after re-writing the boot sector, MBR and XP boot files.

I tried a few other things that I won't bore you with, as they didn't work, although they seemed initially promising.

FullOppositeRudder
11th May 2010, 23:57
The last new mother boards I bought didn't even have the 34 pin socket for connecting a FDD. Additionally I discovered that a M/B I purchased about 12 months ago did not have an option for a 5.25 FDD in the bios settings - the 3.5 option was still there.

It seems that they might become extinct of necessity as we all succumb in time to the lust of new machinery.

You can now purchase an external 3.5 FDD with a USB interface, so they won't give up easily. I still a have few old clunkers here with both 5.25 and 3.5 FDD's operational.

And yesterday I interrogated a machine which had only the C Prompt to start with :uhoh:. It was fun though - I was surprised how much I had remembered. ;) And I had a need to use several floppies again (clunk, whir, click, click, click - pure music!).

regards
FOR

cats_five
12th May 2010, 06:05
<snip>
I notice that the office worker where I volunteer uses 3.5-inch floppies for some sort of backup.
<snip>

Eeeek!!! :ooh: :eek:

If the PC has USB ports and runs XP, Vista or Windows 7 then I's suggest they use a USB stick and SyncToy. But since it has a working floppy disk drive I suspect it's a rather old beast...

MG23
12th May 2010, 07:08
We briefly moved on from 1.44MB floppies to 120MB floppies, then quickly after that started using Iomega zip disks/drives.

LS-120s were great for their time, but the drives only seemed to last about a year before they were struck down by the 'tick of doom' and the disks didn't even last that long.

seacue
12th May 2010, 10:50
Cats_Five:

Quote:
Originally Posted by seacue View Post
<snip>
I notice that the office worker where I volunteer uses 3.5-inch floppies for some sort of backup.
<snip>
Eeeek!!!

If the PC has USB ports and runs XP, Vista or Windows 7 then I's suggest they use a USB stick and SyncToy. But since it has a working floppy disk drive I suspect it's a rather old beast...

I back up as much as I can find on her machine onto a CD [and also a CD-RW]. The floppy is in her comfort zone, so I don't meddle.

The HP laptop I bought 4+ years ago came without a floppy. Feeling the need, I immediately bought a cheap external USB 3.5-in drive. Weeks later I discovered that one of the sheaf of small papers [printed in gray] which came with the machine was a chit for $50 off on an HP external floppy. TOO LATE.

R4+Z
13th May 2010, 06:06
Floppies are still used as a cheap way of leaving on site backups of Telephone systems! If we started using memory sticks, they would soon start walking as people seem to think they are worth having, but who would steal a floppy?

mad_jock
13th May 2010, 09:36
we used to use hundreds of them on rollouts for getting network connections before blowing the OS onto the machine

seacue
13th May 2010, 10:39
I discovered what the Office Worker backs up on the floppies. After she e-mails an address list to the addressing/mailing company, she backs it up on a floppy to keep a record of the recipients of the month's mailing.

sea oxen
13th May 2010, 11:41
I recently cleared out my old floppies - about 15 left from a project I was on in 1999. They'd been bought new and handled with kid gloves as this project was VF important.

Three were still good.

Luckily, they'd been backed up many years ago onto different media, but I'd have been quite upset to have lost the code.

SO