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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: HopperJF on August 29, 2007, 01:08:48 AM
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I think floppy disks are fantastic. They sure as hell aren't perfect mind, and can be broken quite easily by putting them near magnetic fields or in moist conditions, but CD's aren't much good in that respect either. A few deep scratches and you're screwed. Sure, CD's and DVD's can hold a hell of a lot more data than a typical 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy disk, but that is besides the point and downright unfair to compare a medium born in the early 80s with something that only hit the computing mainstream just over 10 years ago. So why then, do I like this storage medium so much?
Well to be honest when faced with that question, I haven't really much idea. They are small and humble, but given the choice of choosing to write a file under 1Mb to a CD or floppy, I'd go for the floppy any day. You can't beat a floppy disk for transferring small files. Or at least that used to be the case...
For years, it seemed the floppy was un-killable. 8" was shortlived, 5.25" was phased out by the mid 90s, but the 3.5" disk has been with us since the early-mid 80s and has since been a very popular storage medium. Such classic pre-CD era machines such as the Amiga 500, wads of 286s, 386s, 486s running DOS onwards, Atari ST's have all used floppies as the standard storage medium. It has been with us for over 20 years, and no one really thought they would go away even when CD-Rs came along. But that is now changing. Over the last few years computer manufacturers have began selling a lot of new machines without floppy drives. I personally think this is awful! They are great for creating emergency boot disks for example, a lifesaver if you're computer goes down. They are great for small text and Word documents, spreadsheets, smaller databases. CD's are too much of a pain to use... rven CD RW's do not offer the simplicity of the drag and drop method when working with floppies. You have to wait longer for the drive to whir up and the disk to start spinning, and you can't delete individual files as easily.
Systems such as Windows XP and OS X have made things easier, but simply erasing a couple of files on a CD and putting new ones on there isn't as simple as it should be.
USB sticks are much better in this respect.
I would love to see the USB stick become the successor to the CD-ROM for example. Just plug it in and go. No waiting for the lens and the drive to whir up, instant access. Read, write, delete, drag, drop as you please. You don't have to worry about scratching USB sticks or floppies either. The critical parts are safely housed with exterior casing.
So while the world gradually shifts away from the floppy disk, I can guarantee that I will continue to use them for the forseeable future.
CD's/DVD's I think should be phased out by something similar. Too often precious files are lost due to scratches. CD's/DVD's should come in a similar plasting housing to that of a floppy, CD cases are ok (if a pain in the ass when they snap/break), but I am talking of permanent housing here.
So that is why CD's suck IMO and floppies kick ass. :-D
MiniDiscs, USB pens, anything I don't care! Just phase out the damn scratchable disks, they are boring and more fragile!
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I dont know how long its been since I've used a floppy on a regular basis. On my main system (linux box), I dont even have a floppy drive installed.
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I think it's the actual nostalgic and emotional use we got out
of slotting a disk in the side of our Amiga's.
I sure as hell loved pushing that eject button, and slotting in a new disk, it FELT good. and was instant.
how gay is it pushing eject on a DVD, wait for the drive to spin down (up to 15 seconds) then farts about abit, and eventually you get your disc out.. id love a DVD drive that just spits your disc out the moment you push that eject button. i wouldnt care if it was on fire at the time. as long as it came out..
as far as floppy USE goes. they are unreliable. slow and limited capacity. but I still prefer them to cd/dvd's...
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outside of feeding a few into my Amigas, I haven't used a floppy disk in I don't know how long. And, honestly, I'm happier this way. Kill the floppy! (Actually, I think it's already dead...) And I'm all the happier for it. No more slow-ass track-and-sector copies. No more waiting minutes for the stupid thing to format (only to have it die out having the last sector verify wrong). No more worries about the little metal door bending and sticking in the drive (3.5" only). No more worrying about accidentally folding (5.25" and 8" only). No more worrying about disk alignment errors.
GOOD RIDDANCE!
You *DID* hit on a pet peeve of mine, though. I reserve the right to throughly beat anyone who hands me a CD with only 1 400KByte file on it! :lol: e-mail it to me, throw it on a usb stick, ftp it to me, throw it on a network share, toss it on a website for me... I don't care. JUST DON'T WASTE EVERYONES TIME AND RESOURCES BY BURNING IT TO A CD. :lol: If it takes my CD drive longer to spin it up than it does to read the entire contents of the disk, I WILL launch it at your head!!!
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I'm happy to see floppies gone.
I dont think CD/DVDs were ever a very good alternative, just more of the same; - big clunky drive mechanism to spin some disk shaped media.
USB flash memory killed floppies for good, most newer machines can be booted from USB, and flashing you bios is a lot safer with a USB thumbstick than a mouldy old floppy.
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Funny this essay was written, nice job. Saw external floppy drives at Staples yesterday while shoplifting, er shoopping for cdrs... :-D
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I recently bought my first floppyless machine, a PIII laptop from 2000 :-D (not counting the floppyless A1200 I have though).
I can't even remember the last time I used a floppy drive, the one in my desktop PC is probably rusted shut.
BTW if you're really pissed off at optical media for not having a plastic housing, why not get a CD-drive which accepts caddies and buy a kingsize supply of those ;-).
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And paper tape, don't forget paper tape.
Seriously, those crappy floppies have been replaced by flash drives, they hold a heck of a lot more and are a thousand times more reliable.
http://www.tammisworld.com/archives/floppy.jpg
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I kinda like the zip drive. you get the feeling of a floppy, but with a MUCH greater capacity...
It is really nice having a floppy drive with the capacity I dreamed of 10 - 15 years ago... :-)
Edit:
and the zips lasts a bit longer than the good old floppy disks did/do....
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And without floppies, we wouldn't have such cultural gems as this: http://www.murple.net/crap/dontcopythatfloppy.wmv
Im not a big fan of floppies because long term, they dont last as well as other options, and hold less data. That said, they do have their place (at least on my C64 and Amigas... well, the 64 at least hehe). I think computers ought to have them though, even if you never really use them. I have had to resort to booting broken Linux/Windows PCs with a floppy when the CD wasnt working and the hard drive was mangled. You may not need it for years, but when you do, its nice to have.
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When I remember all of the problems that I'd faced because of the disk errors. For sure, I'am happier without floopies now.
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I like FDD and diskettes too. Its cool to see it working when you open the top cover.
Calibrating heads has been the only real problem I had with them.
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I totally agree with TS. I _love_ floppies, especially on my C64/128 systems and on my Amiga 1200/2000/3000. Even on my peecees, I still use them on a regular basis. I have all my computers networked, but still find swapping out smaller files through disk by far the easiest way. I fully agree with some of the posters that floppies are slow and not extremely reliable, but they are so deadeasy to use, I will use them for years to come. And with several thousand of both 3.5" and 5.25" disks, I most likely will not run out of spares...
And, ofcourse, nothing beats the nostalgia value of sliding in a disk in either your C64's or Amiga's diskdrive. :-D
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and just remember kiddies
"dont d d dont dddd dont dont copy that floppy"
:lol:
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Hi,
Actually I like the 3.5" floppy's being discontinued, not because I didn't like using them but because when my wife got mad at me about spending to much time on the computer she used to grab a couple of floppies and hurl them at my head, do you know how bad those 3.5 inch floppies hurt when they hit you?
Now the CD's usually float before they hit, they don't hurt as bad.
She hasn't learned about the usb sticks yet!
I think I'll hide all mine!
I am really failing at my work, two posts and can't figure out how to make anyone angry, it's just one of those days.
smerf
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"she used to grab a couple of floppies and hurl them at my head"
:lol: Try being hit in the head by a 2GB Jaz disk mate. The mrs just lobbed one at me because when she asked "Do you love me for my pretty face or my sexy body?" I replied "It's because of your great sense of humour dear".
(http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o164/Cyberstorm604e/IomegaJaz2GigDisk.jpg)
I much prefer the tough Jaz and Zip disks to the easy to scratch CD-R's and messing about with all that finalising business. I also still love using floppy disks 8-) :-)
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I guess I don't 'like' the floppy, I just find that I need to use one periodically. Example, even for my Compaq PC which had no floppy, I found I needed one to install the driver for my Wingman joystick... sure WinXP has a driver built-in, I can download a driver.... but these seem stripped down compared to the offical driver on floppy. Also, it's handy to be able to transfer small files to my dad's 2 A1200's that have no CD-ROM drive.
And it's kinda handy to boot up my A1200T from a floppy disk, should I need to....
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I wonder if hooking a solid state drive to the floppy port be worth it.
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I know floppies are way old, but i still prefer one on my miggy and PC aswell. How would you make images of your DD disks (with Amiga) for eg. SPS? How would you flash the BIOS of your BPPC/CSPPC without a floppy drive? Beats me :).
USB would be a nice choice but we don't have bootable USB in Amiga. I think newer PC's have this capability.
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My nine year old was reading this and said, what's a "floppy?" I told him it was like a phonograph record only more so.
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persia wrote:
My nine year old was reading this and said, what's a "floppy?" I told him it was like a phonograph record only more so.
Also reminded him when he was two years old he "freed" me from floppies by systematically taking the little metal slider off of every one of my remaining collection...
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I wasn't expecting so many replies!
Basically I can agree with everyone's points here, floppies ARE primitive and unreliable, but the fun factor is just not the same with a CD. The instantanous just slotting a floppy in and accessing your files for example. This is another reason why I prefer the new USB sticks to CD's.
I stand by my suggestion though, CD's/DVD's should be phased out and replaced by something like a more modern floppy, like USB sticks or a new kind of disk which is harder to damage.
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hehe, yeah we all have som kind of feelings toward floppies..
What I like about floppies is that you can put them in your pocket, and that they're easy to write/rewrite. And floppies have been very necessary for a lot of people in recent years too, and even now, when you're installing Windows on a pc and it doesn't contain a driver for your harddrive controller. This is the case with A LOT of them...most raidcontrollers.
I use floppies a bit still. One of my computers here actually boots on a floppy all the time. You see.. it's a Pentium2 pc. The operating system (linux) is on an ide harddrive connected to the motherboards builtin controller. And then I have a separete sata-card in it with 4 extra harddrives for storage. Problem is, with the sata card in it, the machine will only boot from the satadrives. No bios option to fix it. So this computer boots from a floppy with just a bootloader on it, which then loads the operating system from the ide drive. Just a little bit clumsy, but what can you do.
I have found one very nice storage option though... a small usb harddrive. Something called "Freecom FHD-XS" which has a 20gb 1.8" drive in it. It's the same physical size as a stack of 3 floppies. Goes perfectly in my pocket. And it needs no drivers whatsoever.
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Die floppy die!
Thats German for The floppy The.
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"Nobody who speaks German can be an evil man" :-D
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Agree with the nostalgia factor (loved that solid eject feeling on my first A500), but several years, and several Amigas later, I replaced the floppy in my A1200 with a 2nd hard drive. Still have that box full of old disks, however, for if I ever get the time to grow nostalgic, again. :roll:
BTW, what's the best way/place/environment to store floppies, for maximum reliability?
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My PC has a floppy drive but I haven't used it in years now (the PC is about 5 years old). It has probably collected so much dust that it wouldn't work anyway. I can't even test it since I don't have a single floppy anymore.
But it wasn't CD that replaced it. For me it's the Internet mainly and later USB sticks or flash cards. I use the CDs only for moving large amounts of data between computers and for archiving. If I burn something on them, I either put it in the closet or copy it back to the HDD somewhere as soon as possible. Scratching them and destroying the data is just way too easy. I hate them for that.
But all in all, I'm glad the floppies are gone.
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All my machines have a floppy drive, even the OQO (www.oqo.com) has a USB FDD.
I still need them every now and then. :-D
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Yup, same here... Had to add a USB FDD to my Compaq PC, to install the joystick driver, and to update the BIOS of my CD burner.... all other computers have floppy drives standard, even my Linux box.....
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Not _all_ my computers have floppydrives, but most of them still have. Some of them are used very frequently (C64/1541, SX64), some of them hardly ever. Sometimes I will not touch any disk in weeks, followed by using dozens of them in a weekend.
They are slow, not very reliable and can only hold small amounts of data. But they are dirtcheap, always work and are extremely easy to use. And I _love_ the nostalgiafactor.
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Count me in the floppy haters group. Remember the agony of backing up my old BBS with 130 HD floppies. Remember having to go back them for an install and finding bad floppies. :cry: Today, if I really need to back up something, it's going on a USB external SATA drive. CD/DVDs are showing their age, but it's still an option for one shot data transfers like OS ISOs. That way they won't get scratched up if they are used so rarely.
Dammy
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@HopperJF
I totally agree with you..............love the floppy for its ease of use and sometimes you just want one program or one game on it.......not 500 games so that you have to sift through it.........its kinda like a cartdridge. BUT........once you get yourself a SUBWAY USB card for your Amiga..........you will change your mind! even if you dont...........what youcan do is get a PCMCIA card from DAZZLE that makes those 4 in 1 readers that read Memory Stick, MCC and SD cards etc... then all you have to do is start ollecting small sized SD cards wich you can get real cheap......and they will be like floppies except more instant! love these...........but the USB thumb drives are lovely too, although slower than I expected. but its so easy to transfer from PC or Mac to Amiga now. Get one! You will not regret it! Plus you can use USB devices such as wireless keyboards and mice from Logitech.
I love my SUBWAY!
I still use floppies though.......just not for games as I have WHDLoad.
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Hey its 2007. Next year it is 2008. Floppys are dead.
But they are ok on old computers.
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I agree for 2007 floppies are dead, but since I am a retro nerd I have them on my modern PC and Macs. Got a SuperDrive USB here on my iMac G5!
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You still need a floppy for SAFE bios upgrade :lol:
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Don't kill the Datassette !!!111one
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You still need a floppy for SAFE bios upgrade
If you have a modern ASUS mobo with XP, no floppy needed and it's very safe. Might for a non-M$ based one though, haven't tried.
Dammy
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Actually, I still have 5.25" floppy drives in a few of my systems.
But the floppy nostalgia is my reason for liking SD cards. It's like a mini floppy, only with greater capacity and a little more rugged.
[edit]
see my avatar
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In some ways, the floppy is still usefull IF you have older computers. In a pinch, they are usefull with PC's. I have a PC out in the office library, and if I don't want to take the time to connect the compact flash through the USB port because its only a few pictures, its preferable.
For backups, floppies suck, especially with the bigger HD's these days. CD's and ZIP disks are preferable. But if there's a demo or game in DMS you want to take a quick look at, having some floppies around are indispensible! The old hardware requires you have a few at least.
Its true though, its the end for the venerable old floppy.
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Have two machines. No floppies.
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You can't even fit one photo on a floppy, I don't think zip drives are in production anymore, flash drives are the method of choice for moving files between networked and non-networked computers or to and from work/uni/school.