SuperFloppy

Ah... I loved my LS120 - still got it in my desk drawer with other random obsolete crap. A lot easier than zip-spanning across 20 floppies and waiting for one of the disks to have an error...

I'm just amazed that USB keys have only been around for such a small amount of time.

Halogen days

I remember being accosted outside the sixth form physics lab by the biggest geek in the school, brandishing the biggest magnet in the school, going "alright, got any floppies on you? Fnar!". Try doing that with a flash drive. Kids these days, etc.

Time warp

No offence to the writer, but the best thing about this piece is the link to that old Ars review. That is some funky 1990s web design.

Loved the bit about wondering where 'floppy' came from

Whilst you might think people wonder why they're called floppy drives I remember myself being curious and examining a few by ripping open the plastic at the age of 10. Best thing was that they all still worked even when I put them back together having got my grubby fingers all over them.

A fond farewell o7

Ahh the early days of PC gaming, when the latest big budget games like Syndicate came on 13 3.5inch floppies and the joyous fun of working out which order they needed to be put in in order to stop PKUNZIP throwing a hissy fit.

36 years, huh....wonder whether CDs and DVDs will make it that far.

Sometimes they still rear their ugly head...

...especially on older hardware and operating systems. For example, as recently as last year I was trying to install Windows XP onto my RAID array, but hit the rails as I didn't have a floppy drive to load the drivers and so of course the installer couldn't see the controller...

Also some of the old Compaq SoftPaqs insist on decompressing to a floppy drive.

It's been a slow and painful death but it won't be missed. But I'll always remember you enhanced 1.6MB capacity under RISC OS :)

So being

What 12 years out makes Jobs a visonary rather than a flamming egomanic?

Been a ghost of itself for a long time anyways

Before people wax too poetic on just computers they ought to remember the Sony Mavica cameras that used floppies, I still remember the FD-95 my workplace had, It's hard to believe it was once considered an expensive and high end piece of equipment.

What some people haven't noticed is floppies have gone downhill quality wise for years. My father had a 8088 from 1984 that I used in college and up to 1991, still booting off of one 5 1/4 floppy for the OS and another for the program/storage. I also had my 3 1/2 DOS floppies from 1994 that I kept until about 1999.

The last time I bought any floppies was in 2000, and all of them lasted less than three months before going bad. USB keys are everywhere now, but I prefer SD cards; I keep waiting for someone to make an array to plug in a few dozen of them for the equivalent of a live tape library of backup storage. I can dream, can't I?

don't let the door hit your arse on the way out

signed

someone who had the job of fishing the fallen-off shutters of the 3.5" disks from drives (sometimes more than 1 per drive).

Floppys finally break surface tension and slip away to the deep

I have built more than just a few computers, with Linux of course... For my own machines I always included a legacy device that the BIOS would still support... a genuine 5.25 teac FD55G drive.

That is if anyone remembers, an awesome 1.2 Mb "real" floppy (1.6Mb for this floppy monster)

About once a year I would actually write something cryptic to it just because I could.

maybe a word processor .odt file writing to the disk formatted in ext2 (did I mention that it is Linux)

If I wanted to really reach back I might put in a 360K (yes I actually have two that function.)

In teaching computer science to a class of young students they would be fascinated to see a machine (externally demonstrated) actually move and do something... like watching a steam locomotive, they were slightly visceral, they got a reaction of interest.

But something happened last year, I built my latest almost super computer and decided it was time. I have not even reacted to the existence of 3.5's for about ten years... so why would the exclusion of its predecessor cause emotion... it is after all a true antique.

That was it. The last of the dinosaurs.

So I put it on display near its big brother the teacosaurus 8.75

Maybe I will make a little viking ship and put a 5.25 floppy in it and set it on fire in the backyard swimming pool.

Roger, switch on the autopilot and don't call me Shirely.

There's a lot of airliners out there that will need upgrades then... most airliners use 1.44MB floppies to load data into their flight computers.

Scary to think that while in the air you are at the mercy of a "Floppy read error: file not found. Abort, Retry or Cancel?"

Now I've got Echelon after me...

How long will it take for microsoft to keep up?

As mentioned before, if you have some newfangled SATA or SCSI driver that your choice of windows doesn't support, you are prompted to press F6 to load these drivers.

And it looks for them at drive A:

The only other way to work around it, is to use nLite or vLite to create a combination windows disk with the drivers already embedded.

Which may cause stress if you're in an organisation that requires new software to be assessed before being implemented into procedure. Not something you can cassually download from the net and try out see if it works.

Yet, to this day, Microsoft insists that you have two options:

The A: drive, or you can get nicked. Your choice.