Floppy Disks
 

Having just seen this : BBC News - Sony to stop selling floppy disks from 2011 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

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.

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.

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.

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..

Still got some punched cards ! Now thats historic storage

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/stori...ges/8500C+.jpg

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

419,

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

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

No point re-inventing the wheel.....

Floppy disk - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
USB flash drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

i believe it is already outdated

Came across this just after reading this thread :-

BBC News - 40 ways we still use floppy disks

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.

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:

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 ?