Everyone should have a few floppies, if only to play the "When I were a lad" game with your grandkids etc. a few years down the line - or for real fogey-cred show them something TRULY weird like an 8" floppy or a laserdisc...
But the last time I used one in anger was nearly a year ago, when I wanted to give my nephew a couple of small utilities - and found, when I got to his computer, that it didn't have a drive.
I won't mourn them, I've lost way too much data to them.
The last time I used a floppy for anything serious was ...
... last month, or maybe the month before, when I copied the "tomsrtbt" image to one to use as a rescue-boot floppy to cope with a system that had gotten munged. I still find them useful for things like that (and I may wind up running "floppyfw" at some point as well), even if other folks' computers lack of floppy drives makes them less useful for slipping small files into my pocket for transport. (Hey, the closest thing to a USB thumbdrive that I have is my PDA, it seems wasteful to burn a CD containing only about a megabyte of data (and I've had fewer seird glitches trying to write floppies than trying to burn CDs), and sometimes it's better to be able to hand someone a diskette than to jot down a URL. *shrug* But I cope, using CDs and the temp directory of my web space for the things that I would otherwise use a floppy or an itty bitty thumbdrive for.)
Nuh uh! They're every bit as floppy, not to mention flippy and flappy and don't fly worth a damn. You're just used to looking at 'em with their clothes armour on.
Of course, you can fling 'em a lot farther across the room when they're still in that square plastic casing than when they're naked.
i was shocked as hell when i started work at ${current_employer} and found that they actually expected me to load kernel modules off floppy disks. i haven't used floppies in i don't even know how long. i remember i used a bunch of 5.25" floppies as part of a bulletin-board display -- i.e., i stapled them to the cork as a sort of "TECH BYTES!" decor thingie -- in around 2002 or so, but ... i guess i probably haven't dealt with them since... windows 98-ish times? yow.
besides, usb key fob storage, so *shiny*. and it has blinky lights! blinky lights are way better than the croaking sound of a floppy drive head moving around making you wonder if it's eating your disk like your car stereo ate your favorite mixtape...
My dad has a lot of stuff backed up on floppies, and has been reluctant to switch in the past. His theory is that at 84, he should be able to keep the technology that works for him.
Really? I've been mulling over getting a SATA drive 'cause they seem to be rather faster than the old fashioned one I've been using. What horror do I need to fear?
The XP install CD doesn't have SATA drivers on it, so when you begin the install you have to press F6 to install a hard drive driver, which can only be done off a floppy disk (I assume it has to be an IDE floppy, not a USB one). The floppy disk is specific to the motherboard (or SATA daughterboard), and should come with it. I assumed that it would be possible to work around this, since I had two IDE optical drives, but no, it wants a floppy. I believe workarounds exist, but it was easier to steal a floppy drive out of an old machine than to try a workaround.
Oh no! The horror. Now J will definitely want to keep the stacks of 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 that we have. I had been trying to convince him to pitch the older format, but alas. We actually found 2 old drives in our pile o'stuff, and they're sitting out, ready to be mounted into our current computers. Sigh.
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But the last time I used one in anger was nearly a year ago, when I wanted to give my nephew a couple of small utilities - and found, when I got to his computer, that it didn't have a drive.
I won't mourn them, I've lost way too much data to them.
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... last month, or maybe the month before, when I copied the "tomsrtbt" image to one to use as a rescue-boot floppy to cope with a system that had gotten munged. I still find them useful for things like that (and I may wind up running "floppyfw" at some point as well), even if other folks' computers lack of floppy drives makes them less useful for slipping small files into my pocket for transport. (Hey, the closest thing to a USB thumbdrive that I have is my PDA, it seems wasteful to burn a CD containing only about a megabyte of data (and I've had fewer seird glitches trying to write floppies than trying to burn CDs), and sometimes it's better to be able to hand someone a diskette than to jot down a URL. *shrug* But I cope, using CDs and the temp directory of my web space for the things that I would otherwise use a floppy or an itty bitty thumbdrive for.)
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clothesarmour on.Of course, you can fling 'em a lot farther across the room when they're still in that square plastic casing than when they're naked.
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besides, usb key fob storage, so *shiny*. and it has blinky lights! blinky lights are way better than the croaking sound of a floppy drive head moving around making you wonder if it's eating your disk like your car stereo ate your favorite mixtape...
This will be a problem for my dad
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I still have some programs on floppy disk. I suppose I should see about getting a friend to copy them to CD.
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