Why do we still have Floppys!?

[A_Username]

So, my question is "Why do we have a magnetic disc drive, if the data capacity is insufficient for today's media needs?"

I perosnally love floppys I use them to transfer small pictures, word documents, and powerpoints for work. I use a Sony FD Mavica which takes floppys or memorysticks, and let's not forget the ever faithful Windows Startup Disk or RAM check disk. A floppy disk saved my computer. I use floppys everyday and I find them very useful. And they're a lot cheaper than CD-Rs. And they are kind of uinversal, everywhere you turn you see a computer with a floppy drive, just like most every house still has a VCR.

Don't be Dissin' the floppy. It will never die.

A_Username

[Harshboy]

A CD saved my computer...so HA!

[bicostp]

Floppies are still useful for recovery and low-level maintenance for PCs.

When I updated the BIOS on our old Dell OptiPlex GX1 from A3 to A10, it was on a boot floppy. When some dumb kid went into a couple computers at school and screwed up the administrator passwords, a boot floppy was all it took to get back in the machine.

They're fun too, like when you make a DOS boot disk automatically start an old, un-exitable DOS game like Dig Dug and boot every machine in a couple rooms off it...

[benheck]

Yeah I agree. Pretty useless. I haven't used the one on my big computer in probably 5 years, my laptop doesn't have one and I don't even miss it. You can get a 128 meg USB thumb drive for the price of 3 gallons of gas (well almost) so again, floppies are dead.

By and large floppies have been useless since the 90's. Though that Mavica digital camera with a floppy disk was pretty awesome back in the day. It was one of the first early successful digital cameras. Back then, most other digital cameras used slow-ass serial port interfaces (not USB, just plain serial port)

ZIP drives were the bee's knees in the days before cheap blank CD-ROM discs. I know some of the "younger ones' might not remember, but CD buring wasn't really practical until 1998 or so.

-Ben

[Indigno]

Yeah I agree. Pretty useless. I haven't used the one on my big computer in probably 5 years, my laptop doesn't have one and I don't even miss it. You can get a 128 meg USB thumb drive for the price of 3 gallons of gas (well almost) so again, floppies are dead.

By and large floppies have been useless since the 90's. Though that Mavica digital camera with a floppy disk was pretty awesome back in the day. It was one of the first early successful digital cameras. Back then, most other digital cameras used slow-ass serial port interfaces (not USB, just plain serial port)

ZIP drives were the bee's knees in the days before cheap blank CD-ROM discs. I know some of the "younger ones' might not remember, but CD buring wasn't really practical until 1998 or so.

-Ben

Actually, I have a zip drive in my server that I'm building, so that I can make frequent backups of the database n such. They're not very practical for everyday use, but they are usefull for storing files away and leaving them alone for long periods of time.

And another reason I still like floppy drives is because of a new OS that's being made called Menuet. The entire thing is coded in assembly and fits on one floppy disk. It has a full GUI and everything. Even though it's still in alpha stages it's still extremely useful as a recovery OS (though I'm not forgetting my Hiren's boot cd - godsend)

[Bay_Wolf]

I just got a floppy drive for my new computer that I'm building and I personally just can't see that a computer is complete without one.

Regards

[legoboy]

Even though I can't use them, I still have a pack of unformatted 5 1/4 inch floppies.

[Triton]

zip was a lifesaver for me today, had to put 30mb worth of drivers on a computer (this one) with no usb drivers ethernet drivers etc zip disk saved me a lot of trouble

[grahf]

I actually installed a floppy in my work computer, and have one on all my other machines. There is just a coolness factor with floppys.

[Sword_Gun]

SD cards are expensive here, very expensive, a 64 MB one is like $50.

Yea I can afford it, but do I want it?
Not really.

[daguuy]

floppies are the only way to transfer files from my PC to my laptop (yeah, i use a 20 year old laptop, it's the only working one i have ) other then that i just upload and download from my site get get stuff to more up-to-date computers.

[Harshboy]

SD cards are expensive here, very expensive, a 64 MB one is like $50.

Yea I can afford it, but do I want it?
Not really.

64 Mb for $50!? Whow, wher e i live you can probally get a 1 GB or maybe even a 2 GB SD card for that price.

[Sword_Gun]

Lucky!

1 Gigs are like $100 and 2 gigs are hitting about $200

We have weird prices :S

[ganonbanned]

well actually where i live floppies are $.50 more expensive. 5 CDs (generic, but work as good as anything else) with no case are $2.00, and 10 floppies are 2.50

[teraflop122]

Floppies are still around because they are cheap, convenient, and more universal than alternatives. The moment you run into a windows 98 computer, your USB drives become virtually useless- a problem in quite a number of schools. Most OS's can read and write to floppies, but less to CD's.

Whenever I do school work, I store it on a Floppy because I know that any computer I encounter will accept that medium. I made especially sure to encorporate a floppy drive into my personal build, for that purpose and installing to RAID arrays.