Floppies

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According to today’s (5/17/05) Lockergnome Tech News Watch, Sony — the inventor of the 3.5″ floppy diskette — is discontinuing making floppies. Other makers will continue to manufacture 3.5″ floppy diskettes, but for how long? Personally, as much as I dislike the floppy’s tendency to fail — as well as their relatively small data capacity — I feel that floppies are essential for those of us who build and repair computers, and I’m going to image each and every floppy I own immediately. What do you think? Can you live without floppy diskettes? Are they going the way of the dodo?

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Hi, and welcome to the Lounge!

As someone else who builds & repairs computers in my spare time, I still find a use for floppies. 99% of the time, a CD or USB drive are a lot better, but on the odd occasion when a CDROM has gone on the fritz or USB ports aren’t working, the good ol’ floppy has been a life-saver.

It will be sad to see them go, but times (must) move on.

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You will remember that if you want to add in drivers (say for a RAID controller) right at the beginning of installing Windows XP, these will only be accepted from a diskette. No CD or anything more complicated.

John

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Does it specifically look for a floppy device or default to drive A:? In a machine with no floppy controller (maybe even just no drive), would the cd rom be installed as A:? In which case you could load the driver from CD. Failng that, you would need a bootable CD that mounted a CD-ROM or USB/Flash drive as A: before starting the windows installation.

Floppies have until now had the benefit of being cheap and almost universally usable – but I can’t remember the last time I wanted to share a file that would fit on one!

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And given that I’ve read a number of statements here in The Lounge and elsewhere about new machines being manufactured without floppy drives, I guess it really is happening. I must admit that of all the floppy-based things I have stored, about the only thing I’ve USED in recent years is SpinRite and my trusty old Win98SE DOS boot floppy (customized with a few apps I added). I plan to keep several copies of that boot floppy around for as long as I can still use them. Whenever I build a machine or rework one from the ground up, I always boot the thing with this floppy just to review the BIOS and make sure the motherboard IS bootable and seems to be working. Then I start adding hard drives, CDs and other peripherals to complete the hardware, prior to installing Windows. I still remember how emotional it was when the old (BIG) floppies (were they 8″ ?) were replaced with the 3.5″ version. Many of us still have some of those old ones in boxes in the closet.

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I agree with booting from a floppy when building a machine in order to make sure everything’s working correctly. Incidentally, the two floppies I use the most are the same two you mentioned. They are essential tools, no doubt. I also use the NT4 boot floppies frequently. As to the remainder of my floppies — several shoeboxes full, including 5 1/4″ DOS floppies — I plan on using Anders Rungren’s Floppy Image program to make bit for bit duplicate images, then burn them to a CD. The Floppy Image program is excellent, by the way, and is, I think, still only fifteen dollars for a perpetual license. If anyone’s interested, I can post the URL.
Liberty

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Why don’t you go ahead a post the URL for some future Lounger searcher to find. Thanks.

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Here ya go Al. http://www.rundegren.com/products/floppyimage/%5B/url%5D.

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Thanks, Doc, for posting the link — I hadn’t realized that I’d spelled the name wrong.

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I didn’t either … until Google told me.

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Al

Unless you’re thinking of the 8″ floppies that came with the IBM 3274 terminal controllers, the PC ones were 5

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Thanks John. I was thinking of the 5.25″ variety but my brain slipped into low gear on the dimension. But now that you mention it, we did have 8″ floppy diskettes on other products too. It seems to me that the early word processing equipment used in our plant was the DisplayWriter series, out of our Austin, Texas plant if I’m not mistaken. (IBM Archives: IBM Displaywriter)

Doc: Thanks for the link. No wonder I couldn’t find it – misspelled name!

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Yes, the Displaywriter had 8″ diskettes too. I have no idea why the operator in the photo looks so pleased — all our secretaries used to curse them as being far too slow and inflexible (but of course they had never used WordStar!).

John

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I don’t know about most others, but I LOVED WordStar…

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While you’re at it, better not forget the huge advance from single-density to double-density: 360 KB to 720 KB, just like that.

A single floppy is a dandy reminder that you don’t need a hard drive at all. No one had hard drives in the first place, and we’d better not get into tapes, but you just loaded the kernel (or O/S or whatever) with a floppy, loaded a program with another floppy, read data from floppies and wrote your new data to floppies.

You can still do it all, preferably with small-footprint programs, so long as you have a functioning processor (and any needed peripherals). A text-processor is a good example for a demonstration.

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You can still do it all
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And here’s my worth. Yes you can, the big question would be ‘why’? Removing the rose-tinted glasses that everyone seems to have suddenly donned, the reason life was simpler back then is because everything was simple! While I don’t advocate bloat in any way, the sheer functionality of even the most basic software available now makes older software laughable really. Can anybody here really say they’d prefer to go back to the bad old days of wondering if you had enough space on your floppy for your program, and having to wait for ages for it to load, if it loaded at all! (Always found floppies rather… unreliable) Time moves on, whether we like it or not. Let’s move with it people!

Please don’t hurt me!

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This gives you a glorified typewriter with more privacy than you might otherwise get, and your pocket is your carrying case. The hard drive doesn’t budge, you don’t interfere with it in any way, and it has no record of what you have written unless it is set up to monitor things. There doesn’t even have to be a hard drive, and a program like WordPerfect 5.1, which I think was the last major DOS version, you have pretty powerful capabilities. Floppies can be compressed where once they could not, and their nominal capacity can be exceeded for some purposes at least. With flash drive capability, you can write yourself a shelf of books, completely bypassing the hard drive.

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[indent]

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With flash drive capability

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[/indent]Can DOS see USB ???

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No, DOS can’t see USB, but DOS predated hardware like CDs and USB and to the extent that you can boot to a system that can see these things, it might do so indirectly. It’s an academic question, but if the hardware exists, couldn’t someone write a driver for it to work under DOS?

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Thanks for the reply. It’s what I suspected.

I suppose that one could write new drivers to make USB or CD’s work under DOS. But that then poses the not so academic question, “Why?”. Do we really need new drivers to make old technology work with new systems when we have new technology that, arguably, works better ?? I’d like to think that we are not making changes just because we can, but because they are necessary and will be an improvement over the old ways.

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This gives you a glorified typewriter
_______________________

Yes it does, but without the ability to print your work, which is a pretty important function of a typewriter!! I think (but could be wrong) that you still need a HDD for your printer driver…

I’m not trying to be deliberately awkward or contrary here, but I think we all have a tendency to just remember the good things of old and conveniently forget all the bad stuff we had to put up with too.

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If you are a writer and you have a deadline to meet, and your computer isn’t working because there is a problem with the drive, it

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…and the good old IBM System/36. Ah, happy memories of when life was so much more simple.

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To add to the other posts regarding floppies. I also still find them useful for smaller apps and like Al to use to boot to real DOS mode troubleshooting.
I’ve even gone the route of buying an extra drive just to keep in my hardware archive box. Just in case.
I bought it new for $4.98US.

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To reply to the original post,

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I have a fleet of computers here, and a few at home, and we’ve stopped building them with floppies a few years ago. I have bootable CDs that run things like memtest, so that’s not really a problem, and BIOS updates can be run from the windows now.

I keep a floppy with a cable in the cabinet in case I end up needing it.

Your mileage may vary.

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I’m with John, Big All, and Jim.

On a new build when installing RAID (or SCSI) – you need to create a floppy from the motherboard utilities disk first, then when prompted during the OS install, insert the 3rd party controller disk (the floppy you just made). I suspect (hope) Longhorn will dispense with that archaic practice.

I too loved WordStar – sure beat the heck out of PeachText.

I keep a floppy drive and cable in my goodies drawer.

Bill (AFE7Ret)
Freedom isn't free!

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