Bring out your dead [disks]!
February 3, 2007 4:26 PM Subscribe
The end of the world is nigh! For 3.5" floppy disks anyway, as one of the UK's biggest computer retailers announces its decision to stop selling floppy disks. But then again, perhaps there never was such a thing as a 3.5" floppy disk to begin with. Oh dear... I'm so confused. In that case I guess now, at the end of all things, it's probably a good idea to find out how floppy disks work.
I used to have an Amstrad PCW9512 word processor/CP/M computer that used 3-inch flippable floppy disks. They were in rectangular carts, a little longer than wide, and stored about 700K on each side. It was a GREAT word processor, the WP app written mostly in assembler for its 4 MHz Z80 and with no hard drive it blew away the PC's of the day (state of the art there was WordStar 4) and in my experience compared favorably to the best available today. Alas I had to abandon it when the weird disk drive failed and there were no replacements to be had.
posted by localroger at 4:35 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by localroger at 4:35 PM on February 3, 2007
Heh, I stopped using floppies in the 90s, and CDs in 2001 and DVDs last year. Lets get our shit together so we don't need compact flash and removable media altogether. We should get rid of wires at the same time.
posted by furtive at 4:45 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by furtive at 4:45 PM on February 3, 2007
Glad to see it. More modern tools like USB drives are far more useful and failure-resistant. Eventually, it'd be nice if one of the flash card formats became a standard replacement - the 1gb SD card seems like a good format for that.
I would like to know why floppy disks and drives seemed so ridiculously failure-prone in their later years. Early on, when computer systems relied on them, they seemed much more durable, but later in their life it seemed like you could hardly use one twice before it came up with bad sectors.
posted by Mitrovarr at 4:46 PM on February 3, 2007
I would like to know why floppy disks and drives seemed so ridiculously failure-prone in their later years. Early on, when computer systems relied on them, they seemed much more durable, but later in their life it seemed like you could hardly use one twice before it came up with bad sectors.
posted by Mitrovarr at 4:46 PM on February 3, 2007
Ah, thanks for reminding me. I saw an article about this earlier and had planned to copy all my old stuff on 5.25" and 3.5" discs to my harddrive to transfer to DVD.
Uh, oh crap. I think my dad thew out my old boxxen with the 5.25" drive...
posted by porpoise at 4:53 PM on February 3, 2007
Uh, oh crap. I think my dad thew out my old boxxen with the 5.25" drive...
posted by porpoise at 4:53 PM on February 3, 2007
Why did 3.5" diskettes max out at 1.44 megs? It seemed like everything was growing exponentially in capacity and floppies have been stuck on that number for about 15 years or more.
posted by Rumple at 5:05 PM on February 3, 2007 [1 favorite]
posted by Rumple at 5:05 PM on February 3, 2007 [1 favorite]
Only times I've used a floppy during the last 5 or 6 six have been when I've need to load a RAID driver while setting up XP. Why MS couldn't enable USB or CD-ROM drives for that I do not know.
posted by aerotive at 5:08 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by aerotive at 5:08 PM on February 3, 2007
You can slipstream SATA drivers, but it is kind of a pain in the ass. I could never figure out why I could not use the CD drive or USB port to do it. The keyboard and mouse are all USB, so it is not as if USB ports are not available during that time.
posted by geoff. at 5:12 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by geoff. at 5:12 PM on February 3, 2007
A number of years ago, I realized that any kind of media that required mechanical motion is prone to some kind of mechanical failure. I was one of those in the 1980's that bought into the "perfect sound forever" hype about CD's. Soon enough, I learned how CD's can skip and repeat, just like good old LP's. Tapes can get eaten.
My fantasy was always derived from Star Trek, where data was encoded on those cool primary colored plastic squares. That's it, I thought, THAT'S what we need!
Now, even the Star Trek media fantasy seems clunky, compared to USB flash drives or postage stamp sized digital camera memory cards.
(Obligatory witty conclusion that alludes to welcoming new USB overlords)
posted by Tube at 5:14 PM on February 3, 2007
My fantasy was always derived from Star Trek, where data was encoded on those cool primary colored plastic squares. That's it, I thought, THAT'S what we need!
Now, even the Star Trek media fantasy seems clunky, compared to USB flash drives or postage stamp sized digital camera memory cards.
(Obligatory witty conclusion that alludes to welcoming new USB overlords)
posted by Tube at 5:14 PM on February 3, 2007
The kind of pedantic aspie dickholery present in the second link is a textbook example of why I have grown to loathe nerds.
...but a . for the floppy regardless.
posted by bunnytricks at 5:16 PM on February 3, 2007
...but a . for the floppy regardless.
posted by bunnytricks at 5:16 PM on February 3, 2007
"Pedantic aspie dickholery" is my phrase of the month.
posted by aerotive at 5:20 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by aerotive at 5:20 PM on February 3, 2007
I have to admit, I do sort of miss the days of the 5.25", being able to double the capacity of the disc through the clever use of a hole punch made me feel like such a hax0r. Of course, that is before I had any idea what a h@xor was, but I understood the feeling. And it was good.
posted by quin at 5:41 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by quin at 5:41 PM on February 3, 2007
The first machine I had that used 3.5" floppies was the Amiga 1000. (well, really, my family owned it, I was just the primary user. :) ) They were double-sided, double-density disks, and held 880k. The first box we ever bought cost $50 for 10. I remember being floored at how expensive they were. Boy, did we treat them carefully!
The PC version of the DSDD disks held 720k, and were later doubled to 1440k when they went High Density. And there they stayed for the next twenty years or so. IBM, for awhile, was shipping 2.88MB floppies, but you never saw them. I suspect, though I don't know, that they were being too proprietary, like with Micro Channel, and nobody bothered making them because the royalties were too high.
For awhile, Zip disks became quite common; they held 100mb and were quite fast if you had them on an IDE port. They were not, however, reliable at all, and Iomega was among the worst companies ever to exist. There was real need for the larger storage amounts, which drove heavy early adoption of the Zip, but it died out completely once people figured out that you could trust neither the media nor the company.
After the Zip and Jaz (the next generation of Zip, which held 1gb but was very expensive) failed, people pretty much just used CD-R, DVD-R, and, later, networking. Once you have a high speed pipe into the house, downloading a few hundred megs just isn't that hard. Most people don't actually generate that much of their own data, so there just hasn't been a pressing need for large, rewritable, portable storage.
Modern flash drives, though, have gotten so cheap and so large that they have reinvigorated the non-networked method of file transport... to some degree, they have reinvented Sneakernet.
Last year sometime, I bought a 2gb SD card, which is a little bigger (and quite a bit thicker) than a postage stamp, balanced it on my fingertip, and marveled that I could barely feel the weight of a device that would store nearly 1500 floppies' worth of data. The newer 4gb cards get close to 3000 times as much. I don't think I could physically lift the weight of three thousand floppies.
They were incredibly useful for the time, but I won't miss them much. One thing that worries me, though... floppies are the emergency boot of last resort. When they really and truly die, will that end up junking the vintage machines that are still floating around? I wonder if people will do 'floppy emulators' that actually use flash media?
posted by Malor at 5:49 PM on February 3, 2007
The PC version of the DSDD disks held 720k, and were later doubled to 1440k when they went High Density. And there they stayed for the next twenty years or so. IBM, for awhile, was shipping 2.88MB floppies, but you never saw them. I suspect, though I don't know, that they were being too proprietary, like with Micro Channel, and nobody bothered making them because the royalties were too high.
For awhile, Zip disks became quite common; they held 100mb and were quite fast if you had them on an IDE port. They were not, however, reliable at all, and Iomega was among the worst companies ever to exist. There was real need for the larger storage amounts, which drove heavy early adoption of the Zip, but it died out completely once people figured out that you could trust neither the media nor the company.
After the Zip and Jaz (the next generation of Zip, which held 1gb but was very expensive) failed, people pretty much just used CD-R, DVD-R, and, later, networking. Once you have a high speed pipe into the house, downloading a few hundred megs just isn't that hard. Most people don't actually generate that much of their own data, so there just hasn't been a pressing need for large, rewritable, portable storage.
Modern flash drives, though, have gotten so cheap and so large that they have reinvigorated the non-networked method of file transport... to some degree, they have reinvented Sneakernet.
Last year sometime, I bought a 2gb SD card, which is a little bigger (and quite a bit thicker) than a postage stamp, balanced it on my fingertip, and marveled that I could barely feel the weight of a device that would store nearly 1500 floppies' worth of data. The newer 4gb cards get close to 3000 times as much. I don't think I could physically lift the weight of three thousand floppies.
They were incredibly useful for the time, but I won't miss them much. One thing that worries me, though... floppies are the emergency boot of last resort. When they really and truly die, will that end up junking the vintage machines that are still floating around? I wonder if people will do 'floppy emulators' that actually use flash media?
posted by Malor at 5:49 PM on February 3, 2007
i don't even use cds or dvds anymore. with a fast enough connection, you can get anything you used to need a disk to get in minutes.
posted by localhuman at 5:58 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by localhuman at 5:58 PM on February 3, 2007
I recently tried to rescue data off a Win2K laptop with a failing hard drive. Safe mode wasn't reliable, there was no way to add another HD to the bus, and a Win2K reinstall was out of the question. Guess what the only kind of media I could rescue files onto was? Floppy. No, not even a flash drive could be supported. All I could say is "holy Mary, mother of god, here it is 2007 and I have to find a damn floppy disk".
Fortunately someone wisened me up to Knoppix and I offloaded everything to flash drive. Fucking Windows and its floppy dependencies.
posted by rolypolyman at 6:00 PM on February 3, 2007
Fortunately someone wisened me up to Knoppix and I offloaded everything to flash drive. Fucking Windows and its floppy dependencies.
posted by rolypolyman at 6:00 PM on February 3, 2007
. . . starting the steampunk society of the copper plated 5 1/4" floppy that has unlimited capacity for the anachronistic.
*excluding those renaissance fair folks, their music, their pasties, body odour and everything else except the ales. . .and the wife of bath.
posted by isopraxis at 6:07 PM on February 3, 2007
*excluding those renaissance fair folks, their music, their pasties, body odour and everything else except the ales. . .and the wife of bath.
posted by isopraxis at 6:07 PM on February 3, 2007
I would like to know why floppy disks and drives seemed so ridiculously failure-prone in their later years.
Over at Slashdot's discussion of this topic, someone suggested that it has to do with dust buildup and the decreasing frequency of floppy disk use in recent years.
posted by good in a vacuum at 6:14 PM on February 3, 2007
Over at Slashdot's discussion of this topic, someone suggested that it has to do with dust buildup and the decreasing frequency of floppy disk use in recent years.
posted by good in a vacuum at 6:14 PM on February 3, 2007
If only they had gone through with making an inch equal to 2.5 cm. Then we wouldn't have to deal with all this crap. It would be nice for manufacturing and repairs, too.
Walk in to any hardware store in the States or in Canada and ask for metric drill bits and they look at you as if you're a moron, an alien, or perhaps a really stupid alien.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:14 PM on February 3, 2007
Walk in to any hardware store in the States or in Canada and ask for metric drill bits and they look at you as if you're a moron, an alien, or perhaps a really stupid alien.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:14 PM on February 3, 2007
remember when games used to come on like, 15 3.5" diskettes tied together with a rubber band, in a box that included a sheet of dark-colored paper that had serial numbers printed on it, in such a way that it could not be xeroxed?
posted by phaedon at 6:41 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by phaedon at 6:41 PM on February 3, 2007
The PC version of the DSDD disks held 720k, and were later doubled to 1440k when they went High Density. And there they stayed for the next twenty years or so. IBM, for awhile, was shipping 2.88MB floppies, but you never saw them.
Around the same time, there was a short-lived play for SuperDisk/LS-120 drives that seemed like a logical next step -- a drive which could read and write 1.44MB floppies as well as 100MB SuperDisks. Anyone remember those?
posted by edverb at 6:49 PM on February 3, 2007
Around the same time, there was a short-lived play for SuperDisk/LS-120 drives that seemed like a logical next step -- a drive which could read and write 1.44MB floppies as well as 100MB SuperDisks. Anyone remember those?
posted by edverb at 6:49 PM on February 3, 2007
So am I the only person that regularly uses floppies? Actually, I just got through spanning an archive over four of them. I use them for getting small amounts of data to people that I don't trust with my thumbdrive.
posted by bob sarabia at 7:05 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by bob sarabia at 7:05 PM on February 3, 2007
Technology rolls ever onward: Turn an Old Floppy into the Starship Enterprise.
posted by cenoxo at 7:05 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by cenoxo at 7:05 PM on February 3, 2007
I recently purchased an LS-120, unknowingly though. The local university holds public auctions of computer equipment, by the pallet. Plus furniture, test equipment, etc. Anyway
one of the systems I got had an LS-120 drive.
Two had ZIP 250 drives. Lots of other oddball hardware too--weird SCSI drive and controllers,
one PC with a cyrix processor, one with some weird Via chip.
posted by aerotive at 7:08 PM on February 3, 2007
one of the systems I got had an LS-120 drive.
Two had ZIP 250 drives. Lots of other oddball hardware too--weird SCSI drive and controllers,
one PC with a cyrix processor, one with some weird Via chip.
posted by aerotive at 7:08 PM on February 3, 2007
The LS-120 was a nice idea, but nobody used the 120s because they were all using Zips.
Myself, I was a user of the SyQuest EZ 135 drive, which my high school self felt was far superior to its main competitor the Zip, if by nothing else its 35% larger capacity. Of course, I think even fewer people used the EZ 135 than the LS-120.
posted by heydanno at 7:11 PM on February 3, 2007
Myself, I was a user of the SyQuest EZ 135 drive, which my high school self felt was far superior to its main competitor the Zip, if by nothing else its 35% larger capacity. Of course, I think even fewer people used the EZ 135 than the LS-120.
posted by heydanno at 7:11 PM on February 3, 2007
They were double-sided, double-density disks, and held 880k. The first box we ever bought cost $50 for 10. I remember being floored at how expensive they were. Boy, did we treat them carefully!
The first floppy disks I bought held 360k. I remember buying them for 25 kr (~$4) each -- probably twice as much in today's money -- and marveling at how cheap these high-tech things were.
posted by martinrebas at 7:50 PM on February 3, 2007
The first floppy disks I bought held 360k. I remember buying them for 25 kr (~$4) each -- probably twice as much in today's money -- and marveling at how cheap these high-tech things were.
posted by martinrebas at 7:50 PM on February 3, 2007
Oh god did Zip disks suck balls. Iomega somehow convinced almost all of the colleges and universities to buy them, and buy big. They must have made $100 million off of them alone. And because of how "hardware lifecycles" and all that bullshit works, my college was still buying every single fucking computer with a Zip drive well into 2004, only recently beginning to gain some sense.
posted by blasdelf at 8:00 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by blasdelf at 8:00 PM on February 3, 2007
Oh my. I had forgotten that I had an Avatar Shark drive.
The drive is dead, but I still have 2 gigs of data across 8 miniature "hard drive discs".
Man oh man those thingers were expensive.
posted by porpoise at 8:25 PM on February 3, 2007
The drive is dead, but I still have 2 gigs of data across 8 miniature "hard drive discs".
Man oh man those thingers were expensive.
posted by porpoise at 8:25 PM on February 3, 2007
I still have a pile of LS-120s in one of my desk drawers at work. Fun fact: Toshiba had 3.5 (suck it, aspie) floppies that went up to 2.88 MB.
With specials and rebates, it's possible to get an 8 GB USB drive for not too much dough, 64GB drives are availble for 3-4 grand, and 128GB drives are slated for 3-5 years in the future. I wonder how long it will be before hard drives are just as quaint and novel as the stack of 8" floppies I have in the closet, and every OS will be a U3 or Live Boot product.
posted by boo_radley at 8:45 PM on February 3, 2007
With specials and rebates, it's possible to get an 8 GB USB drive for not too much dough, 64GB drives are availble for 3-4 grand, and 128GB drives are slated for 3-5 years in the future. I wonder how long it will be before hard drives are just as quaint and novel as the stack of 8" floppies I have in the closet, and every OS will be a U3 or Live Boot product.
posted by boo_radley at 8:45 PM on February 3, 2007
Semirelated: there was also a relatively good piece I read about an unexpected reason why Asian manufacturers love USB: aside from the obvious fact that it allows you to interact with the PC, it provides a simple, consistent way to power a device. If you can make something work on 3.3 volts, a computer (or Wii, or Tivo, or half of the car stereos I see now) can power it. No weird wall warts any more.
posted by boo_radley at 8:51 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by boo_radley at 8:51 PM on February 3, 2007
Going back to 8 inch drives, you really understood way they were called floppies.
posted by JackFlash at 8:59 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by JackFlash at 8:59 PM on February 3, 2007
Hey-o!!
posted by boo_radley at 9:00 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by boo_radley at 9:00 PM on February 3, 2007
to add to nostalgic floppy stories...my first video game Elvis Lives? was on a floppy, written in Pascal. My friend who works for Mythic, and helped me with the game mentioned it recently in a press release about Warhammer. Those fuckers have staying power.
posted by evilelvis at 10:08 PM on February 3, 2007
posted by evilelvis at 10:08 PM on February 3, 2007
I just remember Dvorak's nineteenth prediction of Apple Imminent Demise: The iMac was going to ship without a floppy drive, which, of course, would doom it (and Apple.)
WRONG.
Floppy drives *ALWAYS* sucked. The only reason we tolerated them was that for a long time, we didn't have an option, for a long time after that, we didn't have a portable option. 360K is pretty useful, when you don't have a hard disk. 1.44MB is useful, when your hard disk was 40MB. Back when crap like Arcnet cost real money, and 4MB Token Ring and 10base2 Ethernet cost real money squared, floppies were the only way Joe User could move files around.
But there were two kinds of floppies -- the ones you couldn't read now, and the ones you couldn't read later.
Apple gambled, and won. CD-R put the knife into the back of the Floppy's thighs, flashdrives declared that "I'm not a man" and cut the floppy's head off.
None too soon. Now, if there was just a way to kill hard drives and get rid of fans, we'd add three nines to reliability of every computer on the planet.
posted by eriko at 10:15 PM on February 3, 2007 [1 favorite]
WRONG.
Floppy drives *ALWAYS* sucked. The only reason we tolerated them was that for a long time, we didn't have an option, for a long time after that, we didn't have a portable option. 360K is pretty useful, when you don't have a hard disk. 1.44MB is useful, when your hard disk was 40MB. Back when crap like Arcnet cost real money, and 4MB Token Ring and 10base2 Ethernet cost real money squared, floppies were the only way Joe User could move files around.
But there were two kinds of floppies -- the ones you couldn't read now, and the ones you couldn't read later.
Apple gambled, and won. CD-R put the knife into the back of the Floppy's thighs, flashdrives declared that "I'm not a man" and cut the floppy's head off.
None too soon. Now, if there was just a way to kill hard drives and get rid of fans, we'd add three nines to reliability of every computer on the planet.
posted by eriko at 10:15 PM on February 3, 2007 [1 favorite]
I may not be able to store 4 .dll's on one, but god damn if they don't fly pretty far when you chuck them at your coworkers.
posted by ninjew at 10:40 PM on February 3, 2007 [2 favorites]
posted by ninjew at 10:40 PM on February 3, 2007 [2 favorites]
Once again, eriko consistently proves to be one of my favorite technical people here. And he is absolutely right. I have four living Macs and three dead ones within a cat's throw (Live cat. Dead cats go farther, but living ones stick the landing, and that's important).
Most of them have floppy drives and with a very few exception, none of them have been used. I dig old machines. And I embraced the SCSI Zip drive thing early on. I liked that I could power up an old Mac Classic II with the right connectors.
But if you ignore everything else, his point about CDs leading us to USB drives is what you want to pay attention to.
I know that USB is finally becoming a worthwhile standard. And it kind of catches me out that it isn't embraced across the board. I have come across motherboards that don't allow booting off of USB. And someone needs to slap the manufactures down and compel them to comply.
Seriously, at this point, your board shouldn't distinguish between the 1 gig USB thumb drive and the 300 gig remote drive I attached.
Either might have an operating system, and both should be worthy.
posted by quin at 11:05 PM on February 3, 2007
Most of them have floppy drives and with a very few exception, none of them have been used. I dig old machines. And I embraced the SCSI Zip drive thing early on. I liked that I could power up an old Mac Classic II with the right connectors.
But if you ignore everything else, his point about CDs leading us to USB drives is what you want to pay attention to.
I know that USB is finally becoming a worthwhile standard. And it kind of catches me out that it isn't embraced across the board. I have come across motherboards that don't allow booting off of USB. And someone needs to slap the manufactures down and compel them to comply.
Seriously, at this point, your board shouldn't distinguish between the 1 gig USB thumb drive and the 300 gig remote drive I attached.
Either might have an operating system, and both should be worthy.
posted by quin at 11:05 PM on February 3, 2007
quin, it's my understanding that USB support is complex and finicky. It's hard to do well in the BIOS, where there's limited space. Manufacturers that don't support USB booting are probably doing it because the feature is expensive, either in time or money, and they figure it's not worth it.
Yes, it's frustrating, but it's not *completely* stupid. It's a money/complexity issue.
posted by Malor at 11:19 PM on February 3, 2007
Yes, it's frustrating, but it's not *completely* stupid. It's a money/complexity issue.
posted by Malor at 11:19 PM on February 3, 2007
Yeah on the complexity of USB. It's common for a computer science student to write a bare-bones IDE controller for a one-month project. In contrast, I know a dude whose entire master's thesis is on implementing a USB device. A USB controller would be harder.
posted by breath at 1:20 AM on February 4, 2007
posted by breath at 1:20 AM on February 4, 2007
Argh. You are right, of course, Malor. But it kills me that this hasn't become a standard. I mean U. S. B. = Universal Serial Bus. It's been around since '94. That is a eon in terms of computer equipment.
How is it that developers haven't figured this one out yet? It may be expensive, but that is what stealing from the open source community is for. Right?
posted by quin at 1:25 AM on February 4, 2007
How is it that developers haven't figured this one out yet? It may be expensive, but that is what stealing from the open source community is for. Right?
posted by quin at 1:25 AM on February 4, 2007
OK breath brings this into perspective. I had no idea that it was that hard. Still though, you'd have thought that someone would have worked it out by now. Or if not, come up with a different standard that wasn't so impossible to work with.
posted by quin at 1:28 AM on February 4, 2007
posted by quin at 1:28 AM on February 4, 2007
Good riddance. I was praying for the demise of the floppy ten years ago.
I also prayed in vain that it would be overtaken by a flexible portable media like Zip drives or LS-120s or what the fuck ever already! CD-RWs are seriously deficient as a medium and never work on another computer. Nowadays, I guess, it's the tubes or a flash drive that does the trick, but it took us so long to get here.
You had to admire IBM for having the balls to go with their quad floppy long after they'd lost the industry dominance to dictate a standard. (Can anyone say Micro Channel?) I don't believe anyone but Compaq (remember when they were "just like IBM except the logo"?) and some third-party vendors ever bothered, though.
Then there's the whole issue that they were in a hard case, so "floppy" seemed like a misnomer ... For years, I had to correct people who called a 3.5" a "hard" disk.
posted by dhartung at 1:43 AM on February 4, 2007
I also prayed in vain that it would be overtaken by a flexible portable media like Zip drives or LS-120s or what the fuck ever already! CD-RWs are seriously deficient as a medium and never work on another computer. Nowadays, I guess, it's the tubes or a flash drive that does the trick, but it took us so long to get here.
You had to admire IBM for having the balls to go with their quad floppy long after they'd lost the industry dominance to dictate a standard. (Can anyone say Micro Channel?) I don't believe anyone but Compaq (remember when they were "just like IBM except the logo"?) and some third-party vendors ever bothered, though.
Then there's the whole issue that they were in a hard case, so "floppy" seemed like a misnomer ... For years, I had to correct people who called a 3.5" a "hard" disk.
posted by dhartung at 1:43 AM on February 4, 2007
EFI, the successor to the 20 year old pile o' legacy cruft that is the PC BIOS, has much easier and better USB support, especially for booting, along with a number of other neat features.
EFI is used by intel apple macs and itanium-based computers, but microsoft only support it in their itanium versions of windows. They were going to support it in Vista 64 at least, but even that has been relegated to 'a later service pack'. Chances are we won't see support for EFI in windows on standard hardware for years.
EFI was all set to finally kill the BIOS, just as CDR and flash killed the floppy, but since no windows x86 (or x64) box will boot from it, it's pretty much dead for now, alas.
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:50 AM on February 4, 2007
EFI is used by intel apple macs and itanium-based computers, but microsoft only support it in their itanium versions of windows. They were going to support it in Vista 64 at least, but even that has been relegated to 'a later service pack'. Chances are we won't see support for EFI in windows on standard hardware for years.
EFI was all set to finally kill the BIOS, just as CDR and flash killed the floppy, but since no windows x86 (or x64) box will boot from it, it's pretty much dead for now, alas.
posted by ArkhanJG at 1:50 AM on February 4, 2007
I only chucked out all my old floppies last year. Because, I suppose, there could be a pressing reason to use MacPaint 2.0 some day soon, or maybe Word 4.5.
Now I need to work on getting this Zip drive into the garbage.
posted by Wolof at 3:59 AM on February 4, 2007
Now I need to work on getting this Zip drive into the garbage.
posted by Wolof at 3:59 AM on February 4, 2007
> Heh, I stopped using floppies in the 90s, and CDs in 2001 and DVDs last year.
Folks who do hardware still need a dependable boot device of last resort, for those mornings when the HD grinds for a while and then we get "no boot device available." I have Damn Small Linux on a USB drive, but by no means every new machine supports booting from a USB device yet (and of course in any organization you're going to run into machines that weren't bought yesterday--and the older the box, the more likely it is that you'll get HD failure and find no USB device in the CMOS list of bootable devices.) Floppies OK, they can go, but I won't be trashing my Ultimate Boot CD and Linux rescue CD just yet.
At least it's been a while since I encountered a PC that only had a floppy as its external storage and lacked even a CD drawer.
posted by jfuller at 6:47 AM on February 4, 2007
Folks who do hardware still need a dependable boot device of last resort, for those mornings when the HD grinds for a while and then we get "no boot device available." I have Damn Small Linux on a USB drive, but by no means every new machine supports booting from a USB device yet (and of course in any organization you're going to run into machines that weren't bought yesterday--and the older the box, the more likely it is that you'll get HD failure and find no USB device in the CMOS list of bootable devices.) Floppies OK, they can go, but I won't be trashing my Ultimate Boot CD and Linux rescue CD just yet.
At least it's been a while since I encountered a PC that only had a floppy as its external storage and lacked even a CD drawer.
posted by jfuller at 6:47 AM on February 4, 2007
> one PC with a cyrix processor, one with some weird Via chip.
I've still got my old 6x86 Cyrix box running. If you check the System Properties tab in Windows it displays 'Cyrix Instead', playing on the old 'Intel Inside' line. I can't bear to part with it for that reason alone.
It's got just enough power to run Xubuntu and a BitTorrent client so it's still even semi-useful.
posted by boosh at 7:38 AM on February 4, 2007
I've still got my old 6x86 Cyrix box running. If you check the System Properties tab in Windows it displays 'Cyrix Instead', playing on the old 'Intel Inside' line. I can't bear to part with it for that reason alone.
It's got just enough power to run Xubuntu and a BitTorrent client so it's still even semi-useful.
posted by boosh at 7:38 AM on February 4, 2007
ah, the 3" disc mentioned by localroger. These were the most solid discs ever! I received several of these in the mail with no wrapping, and they worked just fine. If the drive band in my old Amstrad hasn't melted, I'm sure they'd still work.
(I kinda thought that the PCW 9512 had a 3½" drive, but no matter.)
posted by scruss at 8:13 AM on February 4, 2007
(I kinda thought that the PCW 9512 had a 3½" drive, but no matter.)
posted by scruss at 8:13 AM on February 4, 2007
Too bad for those of us stuck in situations like blasdelf's - most labs I've worked in have a lovely array of legacy computers. Currently, I need floppies/Zip disks to get my data off most of 'em, since they don't have CD-R/RW drives or in some cases USB ports...
posted by ubersturm at 8:44 AM on February 4, 2007
posted by ubersturm at 8:44 AM on February 4, 2007
I run DBAN from a floppy fairly regularly. It doesn't really make much difference whether I use a floppy or a CD, and I like the novelty.
posted by Kwine at 9:43 AM on February 4, 2007
posted by Kwine at 9:43 AM on February 4, 2007
About four to five times a semester a forlorn looking student will wander into my office and plaintively hold up a floppy and say, "Do you have somewhere I can put this?" Usually my only response is to hold up my trash can.
Good riddance to the things, but I can assure you I'll see them in the hands of lost students with hand-me-down computers for years to come...
(of course I'll still use them to boot my Mac 512 that has my recipes, but that's just to annoy my house guests...)
posted by 1f2frfbf at 12:36 PM on February 5, 2007
Good riddance to the things, but I can assure you I'll see them in the hands of lost students with hand-me-down computers for years to come...
(of course I'll still use them to boot my Mac 512 that has my recipes, but that's just to annoy my house guests...)
posted by 1f2frfbf at 12:36 PM on February 5, 2007
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Close enough.. do you seriously expect everyone not to round the number because you're anal about exact measurements. I do not say my coffee mug holds 8.011 ounces, I say it holds 8.
However, with respect to the store no longer carrying floppy disks... good riddance.
posted by triolus at 4:33 PM on February 3, 2007