Bye-Bye floppys? Should I be sad?

Alright, so they're only not being sold in one store I've never heard of. But I got this little " Awww... no!" moment even though I haven't used a floppy disk in a year and a half.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6314251.stm

Click linky for more info.

Be not sad. Before you were a twinkle in your daddy's eye, I was saving data on a casette tape attached to a TRS-80 computer.

Today, one of my buds showed me an 8-gig memory stick that reads and writes to the host computer at 120X speed. Life is good and only getting better with regards to computer technology.

This sounds like it is from someone who never had to deal with Floppys randomly corrupting data.

Floppys are cool in a retro way, but modern USB drives are definitely a worthy heir to their throne.

I'll take my portable 100gb usb-powered hard drive over a floppy any day of the week.

Kind of a pain to use on the Win98 machines, though.

Speaking of which, does anyone use PCMCIA cards anymore? While idly fingering my laptop I realized I had a couple slots for them, but I don't think I've seen one used since maybe 2001.

I bought cassette tapes at Walgreens a little while back, and the cashier had to help me find em. -_-

Lots of laptops at work use Verizon Aircards that allow net access anywhere in the country, but even they're slowly migrating from PCMCIA to ExpressCard.

^ true.

Plus I just found a mouse that stows away and powers up in that slot too.

Tsh, noobs.

You're not 1337 until you get the HD implanted into your brain like me and Keanu.

I had a cassette and a TI-99/4A.

Implanted in your brain?

Well, they though zip-drives would replace floppys...
They never really took off...

The last time I used floppies was in Iraq....where they didn't work worth a crap. Could be the fine dust in the air, who knows?

Well they cost a ton, were unreliable, and were really slow, and there was more than one type in too short of a time period.

And biggest of all, you needed a zip drive on each computer to use them. USB flash drives just require a usb port, without any drivers... this means that 90%+ of PC's are capable of using a usb thumb drive.

A floppy is the only way to install Raid drivers for my Asus motherboard

I had a Trash-80! It had a voice synthesis program as well. I remember that no matter what you tried, you couldn't get it to swear.

Honorable mentions go to my Vic-20 and C64. I had a cartridge called Fast Load for the C64. That way, when I'd load up programs on the 5 1/4 in floppy drive, I didn't have to wait a half hour for it to load. I think it copied the program onto the cart, then load it much faster.

I did my first graphics programming on a C64.

And as a school project in high school, I programmed a side-on picture of a Connie refit firing phasers and photon torpedoes. The entire picture was static except for the actual beams and torpedoes, and it used every erg of memory that computer (an Apple IIE) had available to it- all 64K.

The pic of the Enterprise was actually pretty good, though. I used graph paper to trace the blueprints in order to compute the pixelations, etc, so the proportions were exactly correct.

Am I the only one here to sing the praises of the Atari 600XL? It had built-in BASIC!

Good riddance to the goddamn floppy Those things were unreliable as all hell. It could work in one computer, then start sputtering and never load in the next one. Getting my current computer (Which is approaching three years old in October) was the excuse I needed to never use one again, seeing as Compaq didn't install a floppy drive in the damn thing. I've never looked back.

I'm not missing floppies at all. My wife was a little perturbed when I brought home the latest new computer without a floppy drive installed, though.
But she's skeered of computers anyway. Meh.

I still have a working 386 with both 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" floppies - also still have the old games on said floppies.(need to get htem moved over to a CD)
Damned mad that Sierra never imporved their Covert Action game.

Just recently they have released a couple driverless raid mobos. No floppy necessary!

I never had a problem with floppies. Of course, that was before I started messing around with audio and graphics...

>> My old copy of X-Wing was on floppies.

Now I need to find a new one!

1.44 MB



Good riddance.

I will happily keep the floppy drive I recently installed in my PC.
And I ain't scared. I'm just smart. It's not wise to abandon the technology so quickly just because it's old.

-J.

Amen to that!

I heard that some "old-timers" had to be reactivated to help out in Iraq; the sand was killing the computers and no one knew how to do things on paper!
Not saying it's true; just saying I heard this; still it does make sense. If the kids didn't have the computer in front of them, they wouldn't know how to make correct change!

I have an external usb floppy drive, as a just in case option. Haven't had a floppy drive installed in a PC for about 6 years now.

But since you can make boot discs out of CDs, I might use it once a year.

I can't remember the last time I used a floppy, but while they were infinitely superior to tape drives, I feel about as nostalgic for them as I do for those modems that had to be connected to a phone handset...