Don't Kill The Floppy!

[smerf]

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

[A4000_Mad]

"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".



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-)  :-)

[marcfrick2112]

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....

[trekiej]

I wonder if hooking a solid state drive to the floppy port be worth it.

[Bamiga2002]

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.

[persia]

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.

[persia]

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...

[HopperJF]

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.

[digix]

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.

[hamtronix]

Die floppy die!

Thats German for The floppy The.

[DrWhoop]

"Nobody who speaks German can be an evil man"  :-D

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

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?

[_yak_]

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.

[Jope]

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

[marcfrick2112]

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.....

[Jiffy]

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.