Sony announces the death of the floppy disk

I know it sounds dorky, but I had a "funeral" for the floppy disk.

I filmed the entire thing:

http://www.thecynch.com/video-funeral-for-a-floppy/

-Cynthia

OMG! I remember the ones that were laserdisc size lol - 360KB of storage lol - that was on the 80's (yeah I know the 5.25 ones are the real 80's ones) - ahh what times and they were crappy as hell too! Next up X86 CPU standard - hello quantum age (hopefully before I die).

Sometimes handy. Sometimes a pain in the arse. Especially when one died with some important work on that I didn't have a back up of (I know, I do generally have backups on multiple types of media for the important stuff).

Installing NT4 of floppy (it was available, it came on about 80 disks though) was an experience I would not like to repeat.

Admittedly, we have not really used them at work for a while. I remember one time, my boss ordered so many boxes that I was able to build a 7 foot tall wall that was 10 foot wide and one foot deep out of boxes of floppies. Took us around 3 years to use all of them.

Anyhow, i digress. Floppies were handy, but frequently failed. Much the same as USB flash sticks, but with less loss of data when they fail..

per wiki...

"The earliest floppy disks, invented at IBM, were 8 inches in diameter. They became commercially available in 1971."

"In 1976 Shugart Associates introduced the first 5¼-inch FDD and associated media. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing 5¼-inch FDDs"...

"Sony introduced its own small-format 90.0 mm × 94.0 mm disk.; however, this format suffered from a fate similar to the other new formats: the 5¼-inch format simply had too much market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a large number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted"

That was a tough 10 seconds of research! Good thing Windows XP and Firefox called up Steve Jobs and he told them how to implement that new "copy/paste" feature Apple's about to unleash upon the world

I hope optical media goes the same way soon. I've hated optical media since I got my first 4x drive on a 386. The spinning, the errors, the slow transfers, the scratches. The only reason I may consider missing it is that I can rip my music CDs without worrying about some flash disk DRM that will surely appear in the future. Otherwise, these mechanical drives all need to go the way of the now-dead floppy.

I had to use a floppy drive and a floppy disk on a dead motherboard - I could only replace the badly flashed BIOS with this setup - and it was an Intel mobo...

I know p0ln, I did it myself :) It's not complicated when you know your way. The point was more to the fact that for most people, this is more than they are used to.

Second, don't expect MS tech support to give you any help on there over the phone :) I do know people who do call them :-O Although you don't always get what you're looking for and this can be tedious, I do not discourage people around me from calling MS. It save me a lot of calls from friends of friends of brother in law (i.e. perfect strangers) who get tipped that someone he know (me in this case) 'know computers and will fix all your problem'... You know what I mean :-p

Back when this was ALL Being mapped in Lab,between 1962 & 1965, Sony was emerging from Mitchel Air Base, as located on Long Island. Planners first dumped on Public, by adding "C" Drive concept, limiting storage in multipartition enviorment for software downloads. Making Identification of Partition HARD.

then came Floppy, My Pet Toy was Named: Floppsy, Large & soft Polyester fur. Brought Flopsee' Back from Mitchel Base to U of Minn, 1956. & in General, theDOG had changed name from Meg to Gig, Warners, Meg, My Home & Sister, Gig,(Gail) RAD Family, neighbors still voted meg, as loved cartoons, Not Understanding High Voltage. Yet Flopsee' was based in 1954, Flopsee' companion was Rusty, So Already OLD set.

Sony renewed Floppy from Dustbin in planning stages of Public computing, Yet public waited till end of national Security Act, 1980, to Retail loppy. By then Floppy workaround had been mapped as chip, 1964. As Floppy is Hard Banger in Volt & Slow, Oh, So Slow. Figures Item Forced Upon public by TELCO Mob.

Today,Floppy cost same as CD-r, so why use such poor delicate item, except to increase problems, thats' entire idea with Floppy, in First Place.

Now USB stich later 1960s' event is taking, Good & offers Many mutliple spaces that are large enough to be Truely Super multiple File Storage, one stick, millions of small files.

Has ANYONE Seen Flopsee', Oh, Poor Dear. Just Waiting To Tell Story of RIP of Unprecidented Porportion in Computing. No Wonder Public Had to Wait. IT Is Killer.

drashek

Its much easier to slipstream the driver in NLite than be buggering about with F6 floppys and txtsetup errors.

The fact you then have a ISO of a bootable OS with all intel ICH* drivers(or whatever you choose) makes your job forever easier.
Also easy to add audio, lan, video so you can make a custom build for your PC.

http://www.nliteos.com/

Here in Bulgaria tax men still uses floppies. They want the monthly and annual reports about purchases and incomes of the firms to be presented either via internet signed by so called Universal electronic sign (smart card) or in a floppy disk.

The only reason they sold 12 million copies is because 50% of them either fail or give you read errors so you have to carry the same data on at least 2 disks.
This was probably the move required to phase out these old, slow and unreliable data storage units.
I for one won't miss them.
I remember the first time I had to copy the Win 95 kit from a friend. It was on 52 disks I think and I only had 8 of them, so it took a few trips to get it done :). That was a loooong day.

Many see the floppy as a dead horse since many moons ago, but there were one thing I see was keeping floppies alive, either as internal or USB connected. Mainly Windows XP.

You see, under XP, which date from the dark ages, many of the new platforms need extra drivers to install the still very beloved OS. Think about RAID, newer chipsets, etc. Under those configurations, XP (as with any newer of the Vole OS) sometime require to add drivers during install, from a separate media, but under XP, the only source which it understood is a good old floppy, internal or USB floppy (no USB flash key support here). Think where floppies are still probably very valuable, like IT guys...

Yes, there are some voodoo way to bypass this limitation, like streaming the drivers on the install CD, but it's not for the regular Joe...

So, now that Windows XP is phasing out, that last bubble of air keeping the floppy from drowning is gone. So go and backup your old 90's floppy (if there are still readable!).

Just the other day I found a box of them in the garage, spent the afternoon sifting through ten-year-old data. Good times.