Slashdot is running a story on the slow and painful death of the 3.5″ floppy drive. I would like to see the major manufactures start to default machines without a floppy drive. While we’re at it, let’s include an on-board Ethernet adapter by default and lose the parallel, serial, and PS/2 ports too.
As Ben Brown put it so well, “What good is a parallel port!?”
According to PC World New Zealand, “Sony, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM won’t even let you ditch the floppy drive when you customise a standard consumer desktop PC.” Gateway does sell PCs without the floppy drive.
Much respect to Apple, who has way been ahead of the game on this one.
While checking our Dell’s options, I noticed that they now hightlight options as “Dell Recommended” – a nice touch for Mom & Dad who don’t know megabytes from pixels.
The “floppy” drive is to computers what…
The penny is to change.
Andrew Ridgeley is to Wham!
this message is to furthering the discussion.
The only time I ever use my floppy is when I reinstall an OS. I use it for one purpose–MS-DOS startup and fdisk.
I’m not sure how you could get around that without the floppy, although you can always use Windows’ built-in partition managers when you install. I’ve never been a fan of that, though.
I don’t know who your Mom and Dad are (well, er, okay I do) — but my Mom and Dad know more about megabytes and SDRAM and the like than I do.
While proudly allowing a friend to play with my new powerbook today I was caught off guard when he described apple as being “too cheap to give you a floppy drive?”…
How do I respond to that!?
Jevon: there is no cigarette lighter in my 2000 Jetta (there’s a power outlet, and you can buy an adapter, but it doesn’t come standard). I don’t think VW left this out so they can make money by selling lighter upgrades — I think they left it out because far fewer people smoke than don’t (and maybe even out of fear of liability for encouraging or facilitating tobacoo use — who knows!). And I think most people would be hard pressed to call them cheap for leaving it out.
I too have a floppy-less iBook. But before that I’ve had a floppy-equipped PC for 5 years and I’ve used a floppy five times: once every year to process the Budget Speech which for obvious reasons can’t be sent by email. I suspect that this year I’ll be receiving it on CD-ROM.
In any case, using floppies is like sharing needles: it’s an invitation to infect your computer with viruses.
That all said, I do have a collection of 3-1/2 and 5-1/4 inches disks in the attic that I should really pull everything from before it’s no longer possible to read them because I don’t have a computer so-equipped. Or before they magnetically degrade to the point of unreadability.
I have a PC with a floppy, and I never use the damn thing. I only took it because it came standard with it and I couldn’t get it any cheaper by configuring it without one. (I couldn’t, in fact, configure it without one at all. Damn you IBM! *shakes fist*) I intend to get an iBook soon, and my mom keeps asking me, “What are you going to do about floppies?” Doesn’t seem to understand that I never use them. Granted, it would be a lot harder to understand; the OIG in Kentucky tends to use floppies a LOT for digital pictures, which is so fricking slow…but I don’t work for them, so it’s not my place to say.
I have a few of the real floppy 5-1/4 (or so) disks from jobs and law school in 1990 (or so) and I wish there was a place at a library or a company where I could convert my Word Perfect 1.4 into a more modern archive. But I will have to do it every ten years or so.
What is the point of having archives on media that can’t last 12 years – worse than 1930’s pulpwood novels! There is nothing wrong with the three inch floppies in themselves. Bring back linen and vellum.
Who care if a PC comes with a floppy drive? It’s not like it’s hurting anything. Even if you don’t use it they do come in handy from time-to-time for PC users. All in time, I say give it another 5 years or so.
I will add to this discussion by saying that I dont remember the last time I actually picked up a disk and placed it in a floppy drive. I would need one to install a copy of Windows 98/ME but now with bootable CD-ROMs and Win XP that step is no longer needed.
We have an old antique Sony digital camera kicking around the office that takes floppy disks. Sure it was good in its day but the time alone for you to take a picture and save it to a noisy spinning floppy is just painful. (Let alone carry a box of disks around changing it after every 1.4 Meg)
Peter: its nice that some car manufactures are leaning away from the cigarette lighter but for some unknown reason, my car has two.
Btw: my parents would fall into the category of what is the start button?
What a funny co-inky-dink…
I recently switched to Mac from PC, and asked a friend–who recently did a reverse switch (the poor, misguided soul)–if she had any old software apps I could use. So, she sent me a list of stuff. And this morning, as I browsed down the list, I noticed a majority of the apps were still on floppy.
“Who the hell still uses floppy?”, I asked myself.
Neither my new Titanium (a.k.a. “Pagan” — yes, I love it so much I named it), nor my husband’s G4 tower has a floppy drive. The last time I saw a floppy drive was a few nights ago when I packed up my 1 1/2 year old HP Pavillion desktop to send it out on it’s way to eBay heaven (or local school, maybe).
Anyway, I never used the floppy on that, nor the floppy on my old Sony VAIO (which is now owned by my sister). The space would have been better used for say, a zip drive, or extra battery for the laptop…
I wish everyone would just have a mass epiphany and move on forward, away from floppy drives (and Navigator 4.x for that matter).
In Defence of the Floppy:
“We have an old antique Sony digital camera kicking around the office that takes floppy disks.”
Those “antiques” can be pretty handy. Let’s say in you’re in a rock n’ roll band. You want to take lots of pictures of your zany rock n’ roll antics and post them on your website so people can see just how rock n’ roll you are.
Taking regular photos on film is cool, but it relegates an unlucky member to a week of scanning. And since buying a laptop, let alone bringing it to shows both at home and on the road is pretty much out of the question there’s really no other storage method for digital photos.
Toting a box of floppies here and there may not be the most convenient thing, but it’s cheap and hassle-free so long as you keep them away from the nasty magnetic pickups on your guitars.
Rock on.
I still use my floppy drive often, mostly for transferring text, Word, and other small files between multiple machines.
Matt: I guess I was referring to it as an antique because I have a digital camera that takes smart media. That one card can hold up to 128 Meg depending on the size of the card you buy. Its also much faster then writing to a floppy after every picture. Once you fill the card you can just plug it into the USB and move the pictures to the hard drive. (I am a fan of smart media but there is also compact flash cards to use instead of the floppy. I’m also pretty sure that the new Sony cameras are using recordable CDR’s)
(As I type this I have the screensavers on TV behind me complaining about not having a floppy drive in their laptop demonstration of Linux)
I found the yellow bars good for proofreading on the dell site, as I almost forgot something. I wish I could have gotten a floppyless mac, but sadly could not afford it…maybe next time ’round.
Hi
can we make bootable floppy disks for selling other software that then autoruns. i have somehting i have done but want to make it bootable i heard this is a breach of copr right from microsoft.
Cheers Jay