Farewell to the Floppy

I saw an abondoned floppy the other day in some dark corner of the office and thought I had time traveled! They are nearly impossible to find these days.

My first PC was an 8088 that ran on two 5.25" floppy drives and didn't even have an HDD. When the 3.5" floppy came out, I thought it a huge step forward. My first copy of Win95 was on 7 3.5"s.

Fast forward twenty-odd years. I am seriously considering an Intel SDD for my T61 as my T40 collects dust. How long will it be before the HDD takes on the same status as the floppy?

Me too. Let us mourn for our old friend, the floppy. And let us not dwell on all the bad times we endured together. The huge stacks of DOS / AOL discs. The dirty head dilemmas. The occasional 3.5" wedged into a drive.

Instead let us remember that the floppy brought us precious freedom from the nightmare that was loading programs to/from audio cassette tapes:

*squeeeeelll...screee-screee-squawk-screee-squawk-(10 minutes later)-screee-blargh-blargh-blurk." Only to be greeted with nothing happening on screen because the @#$%@ thing missed a critical squawk about 5 seconds in. Rewind, try again.

Yeah...nevermind. We're way better off with Flash drives and SSD's.

not to mention the "CRC redundancy" errors what ever the hell that means.

moment of silence.....Ok that enough, back to work.

Seriously, I wonder how much that Japenese guy made for inventing it?

I still have an 8" drive in the attic.

It sounds like a conspiracy to me. For certain applications a 3.5 inch floppy is a necessity, such as loading the raid drivers or SCSI drivers when installing XP or windows 2000. For that matter updating the bias on some older computers requires a floppy disk.

The net result will be a forced upgrade to version of windows that will install drivers from a USB, and of course and if you need to upgrade your bias on an older motherboard to make it compatible with windows 7 you may not be able to do it without a floppy. The ultimate catch 22 to sell more.

Though I hardly ever use my floppy other than the applications previously mentioned, I occasionally store sensitive information on a floppy. They may steal your computer, your backup USB drive or your thumb drive but who the heck wants to steal a floppy disk.

Updating the bias on an analog computer was never done with floppies (we're going pre-digital here:). I'm sure you meant bios.

I was always under the impression that 5.25" disk was called floppy and 3.5" stiffy?

3.5"
They aren't floppy!
I remember the BIG ones they was weally fwoppy..I wubbed those fwoppy discs.
Del

Anyone remember the DEC PDP SERIES? or the RK drives?

Anyone remember a drum memory unit? Or core memory? Or should I just go back to my cave and dream of the old days?

Floppies are merely the litter that lines the road to progress.In a few years, no one will remember them, and they will be in museums only.