Invented by IBM, the death knell sounded by Apple. Sony has announced it is going to cease selling diskettes altogether, with the last bastion being Japan. Sales will be ceased there too, even though Sony still managed to sell 12 million of them there last year. While Memorex and Imation still produce and sell diskettes, this move by Sony surely means it won’t take long for the rest of the market to vanish, too.
In case you’re wondering – I prefer the term ‘diskette’ for the 3.5″ variants, and reserve the term ‘floppy’ for the 5.25″ and 8″ variants, for obvious reasons. Being born in 1984, I have used the 3.5″ variant for more than a decade for various purposes – most notably as a medium to install boot loaders onto; poor man’s GRUB, if you will. Of course, document storage was its prime purpose. And, I still have my original MS-DOS 6.0 diskettes, as well as the diskettes for Windows 3.0.
Instead of writing a long history of the diskette and floppy, I decided to tear open one of my floppy drives and take some random high-resolution shots of the internals. Why? Well, I had never taken a floppy drive apart before, and was curious. Do I need any other reason?
Let’s talk memories in the comments, shall we?
Now I need to find some way to lose my data… hmmm… where did I put those magnets?
Sorry, I don’t share your opinion of “good riddance”. The fastest easiest (IMHO) way to install NT based additional drivers will always be the floppy (just try to do that with a flash drive, go ahead, knock yourself out)….That may only be one example I can immediately think of, but it’s a big one…
To be honest, I only had to do what you say once or twice, but I get your point. And reading through this thread, it seems that I was able to buy pretty much every faulty 3.5″ diskette on earth. I lost countless hours and money to those things. So please forgive my bitterness.
Diskettes sucked… I’m glad the world has finally left them behind. It’s been so long since I’ve seen a computer with a floppy drive that I think they were practically dead a long time ago. Not sure how it’s “news” that one of the three remaining companies selling those things finally pulls support though… if anything’s news, it’s that people still are (for whatever reason) buying and selling those wretched things.
I haven’t used them for very many years (and mostly for school) but when I did… I hated those pieces of s***. Slow as hell, and about as unreliable as anything can get in electronics. Used them mostly in the late 90s to early 2000s.
Edited 2010-04-26 20:49 UTC
Yeah. And I wonder when Windows users will actually be able to use our A and B drives for something useful
I mapped my 500GB USB backup drive as A: two years ago.
NT5 is sooo 00s. Try upgrading to NT 6, which will accept drivers from a flash drive just fine.
Not really no. Depends a lot on the hardware as well. My Asus M2A-VM motherboard is supposed to support booting and what not from USB but it doesn’t. This is particularly annoying in regard to bios updates. Only way in reality to update bios is to use floppies, since it won’t recognize files on a usb stick (tried several different ways and none worked). Besides that some of us are still using windows server 2003 as a tertiary system
It’s not one of those odd motherboards that only support loading firmware from a FAT16 filesystem per chance? Also, keep in mind that USB boot does not always mean it will read files off the USB stick. Sometimes that just means it will transfer control of the boot process over to a valid boot record on the USB media. USB BIOS upgrade usually isn’t the same as boot from USB. As with anything PC, there’s going to be years of legacy floppy-only boot systems yet. Floppies themselves are hardly a loss though in the grand scheme of things, and most new boards support USB BIOS flash and boot off USB both. The writing’s been on the wall for a decade, so if some motherboard manufacturers haven’t gotten with the times that’s their fault. Not that it makes anything easier if you’ve got one of those boards of course.
As for Windows Server 2003, well you brought that pain on yourself.
Nothing worse then spreading an archive over 10 floppies, and have #7 get corrupted.
I bought a CDR drive _really_ early, and never looked back. Didn’t really care so much with DVDR drives, or the new Blu-Ray recorders, but man, I couldn’t wait to stop using floppies.
That’s pretty good if you managed to get only one corrupted disk, #7, in a ten-disk set. With my diskette track record way back, I would’ve probably ended up with 7 corrupt disks…
Its worse when your near the end, cause after 20 minutes of “i’m gonna make it… i’m gonna make it…” it makes the “SDLDKFJ!@#@#” moment that much more painful
Please don’t make me relive my worst memories of playing the Monkey Island 2 (11 disks on the Amiga)
My favourite part about floppies was the ability to increase the space on low density disks by drilling a hole in one of the corners. ah, good times
Yes, I’ve been trying to do the same with SD cards and it doesn’t work.
Funny you should mention that. I was talking to a technically inclined person just last week and he didn’t know that was possible.
I’m 22, he’s 33. I think I was like 10 years old when I started doing that.
Edited 2010-04-26 19:32 UTC
and what about doing one hole near the center of the disk (I don’t know its technical name) on a 5″ 1/4 ti99 disk to make it double sided ? 🙂 (yes, I AM that old)
O’ little plastic square.
Your shield blocks my touch.
I write but your tab block my path.
Yet your lock needs no key.
I claim you with my marker.
Label your contents for all to see.
Read but no write,
Lock tab might!
Read and Write,
Grinding noise and light!
You had many accessories.
Labels, pouches, large plastic bins.
I bought you in boxes of ten.
Oh no I lost one!
Format A: again.
Ha, I remember trying to convince my mom that my Mac Plus needed an external floppy drive, because just one wasn’t enough. I eventually got it, and then a 20MB hard drive, too. And my friends were jealous!
CDs are too big and pen-drives are too small, 3.5 floppies are perfect… and they last forever!
It’s funny, I can use my 20+ years old AMIGA floppies without problem… but my 5 year old DVD-Rs are unreadable. Writable optical media sucks, I’ve lost tons of data with CD-R and DVD-R. 3.5 floppies aged really well.
PS: OTOH 5.25 floppies were unreliable sh*t. I hate them so much.
Correction: They used to last forever.
At some point in the last 10 years, it seems 3.5″ floppy disk quality dropped to less than dismal. These days, I’m lucky if I can get a floppy disk to last two weeks after writing some files to it. I know it didn’t use to be like that, but it seems like it is now.
And yet, I can pull disks out of a box from 10 years ago and read them just fine!
Maybe the drives just aren’t writing the bits hard enough any more
Update: BTW, same with CD-R – I’ve got a ton of Kodak “gold” CD-R from the late-90s that are still readable.
Edited 2010-04-26 19:57 UTC
I still have to use 5,25″ floppies for museal purposes – use, not just show them. Most of them are older than 20 years and still work perfectly – in the computers they are intended for, also 20 years and older, still in perfect and working condition, like the robotron A5120 I recently got with a bunch of 5,25″ floppies, taken out of service in 1989.
For the form factor, I think 3,5″ disks and CF cards (and MiniDiscs, if you still now them) are ideal – not to big (as CDs and DVDs and their successors), not to small (as USB pen drives or SD cards). Sadly, MiniDiscs haven’t prevailed for purposes we have to use CDs or DVDs today.
I still have to use 3,5″ floppies in very few places, and today’s products seem like “use once, throw away” disks. After some short time of use, errors apeear, and using fdformat on the disks doesn’t “repair” them, but shows more and more errors if you continue formatting them.
Finally, I’m glad that disks are not in use anymore, but the alternatives aren’t so much better as advertisement wants us to believe.
Same here, too. Even 20 years old disk work – but finally, it’s a matter of how you store them.
I often say, with a bit of truth in it: “The older hardware is, the longer it lasts.” For example, old 16x CD-ROM drives seem to be much more error tolerant than today’s modern high-speed DVD drives. Hard disks, in use since 1995, often still work flawlessly today, while you already plan to substitute a hard disk in 6 or 12 months if you buy it today.
Just try to image if CDs, burned today, stored without any packaging (just like disks) can be read in 10 or 20 years. 🙂
Yeah, I was just thinking, “Crap, where am I going to get floppies for my Amiga 4000?” Then again, I have always had bad luck with floppy drives, and disks becoming bricks, but for some reason… only PC floppy disks. The Amiga and Atari STs I have still work.
Last forever? In my experience it was the exact opposite. Mine even got bad sectors when I looked at them in a wrong way.
Do miss the noise they made though
While I still used floppies heavily I noticed there was a huge quality difference between manufacturers; with some manufacturers the floppies would go bad in 2 weeks, and with some manufacturers the floppies would last for 10 years straight. After a while I had learned which brands to trust and only bought those. I suppose the disks would STILL work if I still had them and a working floppy drive!
Yeah, BASF and TDK were unbeatable…
Thumbs up for TDK.
I’ve got quite different experiences: my floppies for Commodore 64 (the oldest ones from 1985) are still readable, while 3,5″ diskettes I’ve found as unreliable. Not sure, maybe DD 3,5″ (you mention “Amiga floppies”) were a bit better, but not HD ones. The exception again are 5,25″ ones… my 200 diskettes 5,25″ HD from 1990-95 are still readable.
So duct tape a pen drive to a floppy.
Well now you know why there’s still a tape drive market.
Blu-ray is supposed to be better in this area though.
http://www.delkin.com/products/archivalgold/archival-blue-ray-delki…
My experience is that 5 1/4″ disks lasted for ever but 3 1/2″ you’d be luck to get 2 writes out of them. Gosh makes me feel nostalgic for the day when Norton was actually useful.
I find that although flash drives are vastly superior to floppies, students are still adapt at loosing their coursework etc.
“We have a file server why have you carefully avoided using it?”…..sometime it makes you want to weep
Well a little more than a few years ago you could get a whole OS in a small box of floppies. Information density has increased dramatically. It seems to be the way of immersion
You still can fit FreeDOS in a floppy
Many companies still use DOS programs that control production machines.
These PC still use MS-DOS and still need their floppy to change their production machine setting.
The best part of 3.5″ floppy disks that I remember was that AOL was always sending me free ones!
Yeah, once worked for a company that sent trial software on a floppy for free. When cleaning up the database of customers, I noticed that there were 50 duplicate addresses. We contacted the guy and he just admitted he was signing up under false email addresses to get the free floppies. We stopped sending free floppies after only a web visit. You’d have to call and talk to a sales guy to get the demo.
But I never solved the mystery of whether I should [A]bort, [R]etry or [F]ail.
Lol!, good times, good times…
When CDs became a big deal, I wondered how they could make them so sturdy that they didn’t need a shield like a floppy disk (obvious differences in materials aside). It wasn’t long before I figured out that CDs only live long if you handle them like they are precious.
Wouldn’t CDs be better if they were encased in a plastic shield?
And that’s why I thought MiniDisc’s were awesome and going to take over the world. The awesomeness of a cd combined with the protection of a diskette. If the price had dripped to $100 before they were obsolete I would have bought in.
Remember s.c. “caddy” for CD? Always been wondering, why actually it didn’t become a standard.
Yea my cousin had one of those. I think I remember hearing that it was dumped because it increased manufacturing costs.
Blu-ray was actually supposed to use a caddy but they went with a polymer coating instead.
We had those at my high school when I was younger. The only discs I remember was the encylopedia britannica set. When I bought a MD player later I thought of those discs and wondered the same thing. Why did they ditch the caddy for CDs?
One word: MiniDisc.
The disc is inside a kind of caddy, and it’s almost the (handy) size of a 3.5″ floppy disk (in fact, it’s a bit smaller, a size between the mentioned disk and a CF card). So both data carrier protection and form factor are quite intelligent.
With today’s DVD drives, you really wonder why you need a drive the size of a whole computer (like a Mac Mini) to read a medium the size of a 5.25″ floppy that hard unreadable when the surface (on the downside) is minimally scratched… or when it chemically or biologically dissolves into funny colours and patterns. 🙂
But isn’t MiniDisc proprietary? Hi-MD, the new variety of the format, seems to be.
> But isn’t MiniDisc proprietary? Hi-MD, the new variety of the format, seems to be.
Yes it is. Isn’t the Micro floppy, the 3.5″ floppy this article is referring to also, just licensed to many companies?
OK, two more words: ZIP and LS – both well-protected, and of capacity over 100 MB each.
Oh, you mean the one with the ongoing media and drive deadjustment “hardware virus”? 🙂
Still, 100 MB is a capacity that doesn’t impress anyone today. Even 10 times as much – 1 GB – is considered “too few” today…
Well, I am surprised they are still being produced at all. And now we have the cards and sticks and what-not… I wonder what will be next … maybe instead of a USB stick, a bluetooth device? They probably already exist, don’t they.
Can we please just kill off floppy disks already? And while we’re at it, kill off the best reason to use floppy disks as well: Windows XP and its stupid “You can’t install on a SATA hard disk without putting SATA drivers on a floppy” installer.
Hi,
Unfortunately, I agree, but for different reasons.
The best reason to use floppy is that it’s very well standardised and relatively simple – you can write a floppy device driver in 2 days (including testing) and know that it’ll work for all floppy drives (even those ancient 5.25 inch things) in 99.99% of computers that have floppy drives.
On the other hand, for USB flash you’d be looking at a few months work and enough (PCI, UHCI, AHCI, EHCI, etc.) code to fill a floppy, and never be too sure if it works for all flash/storage devices and all USB controllers. CD-ROM is much worse (ATA/ATAPI, SATA, SCSI, SAS, USB, etc.).
The problem here is “need a driver to install a driver”. For example, if a company creates a new type of USB controller that an older OS doesn’t/can’t support, then getting the USB controller driver from a USB device isn’t going to work.
-Brendan
If you are writing your own drivers for commodity platforms that still support floppy drives, you’re wasting your time. There are multiple open source projects available with various licenses that already provide drivers. (And new hardware generally supports floppies only via… USB.)
When was the last time you had a USB controller that didn’t work? EHCI is the standard interface for USB 2.0.
To me, the biggest problem with Minidisc is that it was from Sony. They tried very aggressively to monetise the format before it really took off. It was firstly launched as a music format, and as such was very appealing. However, it was launched in a hurry, due the the already launched Philips DCC format. Hence it sounded crap, due to unfinished ATRAC development, was VERY expensive, and the portable units (one of the big selling points) were huge (no smaller than available CD players) and the battery didn’t last long.
There was a re-launch of the the format in 1996, and in fact I bought a hi-fi deck (which I still have), with all of its problems solved, at least as an audio format. However, even though there was a variant called MD-Data for use as a PC storage medium, Sony had nobbled it so that you had to use special MD-Data discs which had the same 120MB (from memory), but were VERY expensive. Only much later, after CD-R already had a stronghold did the situation improve.
To be honest, I really loved the format when I got into it, but it suffered by being too little too late in many ways, and more frustratingly, more for marketing than technical reasons. sigh…
Sorry for highjacking this thread. I have fond memories of floppies too, honest!
Toonie.
I owned two MD players and loved them both. Even after the mp3 player craze caught on I still used my MD player because the sound quality was so much better than any mp3 mplayer I listened to. The biggest reason for me ditching my MD player was that it could not interface with Linux. I got a Cowon iAudio after that. It has excellent sound quality AND interfaces with linux without a problem. I think being a closed format was another big reason MD and Atrac died.
Years ago Verbatim made a selling point of marketing fungus-resistant floppies in tropical countries where humidity is high, and fungal growth has cause the death of many a disk. (I remember one article saying that for 5.25″ floppies, carefully cut open the jacket, slip out the disk, wash gently with a none-abrasive solution, air dry, then insert back into the jacket, and then into the drive to backup the contents onto another floppy.) Those Memorex and Imation-branded floppies are very much on sale here in the Philippines, and I still buy them! So many utilities (PartitionMagic, memtest86+, NTFSDOS etc.) can be installed on bootable floppies, and unlike many USB drives they can be write-protected. BIOSes today still support booting from them.
It’s not just in PCs that floppies still have a use. Yahama made keyboards with floppy drives that read FAT floppies. That’s one reason why I still buy them: our church organ can play MIDI files off floppies.
Great, so now, to transfer a single document/file/app from one system to another, I have to waste a 700 MB CD-R, instead of a 1 MB floppy? Or grab an 8 GB USB key?
What about the needs of those with just a little data to transfer? Think about them.
🙂
> What about the needs of those with just a little data to transfer? Think about them.
Pen and paper? Or if you need erasable then pencil and paper.
In case you’re wondering – I prefer the term ‘diskette’ for the 3.5″ variants, and reserve the term ‘floppy’ for the 5.25″ and 8″ variants, for obvious reasons.
The term floppy refers to the disc inside the plastic shielding. Also hence the term “disc”.
I think it’s a shame, in some ways. XP installs require a floppy disc for adding raid drivers which is just easier than slipstreaming drivers into the install image.
Firmware upgrades, too. It just seems wasteful to use an entire CD for this.
On the other hand, of course, it’s rare to find a PC with a floppy drive anymore. I don’t think cases even have a slot for them. So unless you come armed with a USB floppy drive, a CD is always the best safest bet anyway.
XP just needs to die. It’s worn out its welcome. As for slipstreaming, sometimes that’s actually more productive if you’ve got a lot of installs to do on identical hardware but for whatever reason can’t use a drive imaging solution.
Why use a CD at all? Firmware upgrades could be read off of an SD card or USB stick, some BIOS actually do support this such as those in the MSI line of Netbooks.
Nah, most PCs still have one external 3.5 bay. Typically it’s filled with a card reader on modern desktop systems instead of a floppy drive, but most desktop tower-style cases still have a slot for them and all motherboards I’ve seen still have that floppy drive controller and port. Smaller desktops though, like Nettops, don’t. And, even if you’re armed with a USB floppy drive, there’s no guarantee that the BIOS will be able to boot from it if need be, or that the os on the floppy will handle it correctly. USB floppy drives use the mass-storage protocol, so behave more like a hard drive than a traditional diskette drive. Some older operating systems like MS-DOS can’t handle that and won’t boot properly unless the BIOS provides USB floppy emulation.