Where did all the floppy disks go?

[ZuluLima]

Get some while they last. It must have been 4 months ago I could go to any office supply store and get a pack of ten 3.5" floppies for around $5. What happend? Now they're no where to be found except on the internet over $8 for a 10 pack. Various places and buisnesses still rely on them for simple graphics and such. They can't be on the wayside already?

[Topcat]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

I havent put a floppy drive in a system in over a decade unless it was specifically requested by the customer, and that's only been 2 in the last 10 years. I still have a drawer full of floppy disks and floppy drives. Occasionally I'll use one to flash a BIOS on a really old board that won't boot off a USB flashdrive. Most the time I use a HDD or if its one that's had a bad flash and is posting off the boot block and the only way to interface with it to fix the bad flash is to have a workng floppy. other than that, floppies are of absolutely zero usefulness these days.

[c_hegge]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

Agreed. I haven't needed one in years now.

[selldoor]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

heheheh - they are all in my "study" Loathed to throw anything out I have
amassed quite a collection- did use ONE last year to send someone a
bios flash for some antique pc or other which only recognised the floppy drive.
Took me an hour to find an old laptop with a drive in to write it but what a sense of achievement when I got his email saying it had worked.

[H0RN3T]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

Like above, unless you're fixing old PC's there's really no need for em now... finally

[Rob Northen]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/...e-floppy-disk/

[mariushm]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

They're still available here in few stores, and I can order them from distributors.

There's quite a lot of sewing machines that import sewing patterns through floppies, a factory in my home town had plastic injection machines that used floppy for the parameters... had one of those machines that made shapes for the plastic injection machine from aluminum or steel and that one also only had floppy to import the drawings...

They won't go away soon.

[dood]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

BIOS and Ghost disks is all I use them for anymore. Some older industrial control machines still use them (as said above).

I have two sealed 10 packs at work still.

[Heihachi_73]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

Get some while they last. It must have been 4 months ago I could go to any office supply store and get a pack of ten 3.5" floppies for around $5. What happend? Now they're no where to be found except on the internet over $8 for a 10 pack. Various places and buisnesses still rely on them for simple graphics and such. They can't be on the wayside already?

Any business relying solely on floppy disks has no place in the 21st century. You can pick up an 8GB USB stick for less than a box of floppy disks, and the only PCs to be left out are those which completely lack both USB and PCI slots, for example a 386 from 1991.

An 8GB USB drive can hold well over 5000 floppy disk images, and isn't restricted to multiple disk archives if a file happens to be more than 1457664 bytes (or less if the disk's sectors are slowly failing in the 15+ years of storage).

[mariushm]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

Any business relying solely on floppy disks has no place in the 21st century. You can pick up an 8GB USB stick for less than a box of floppy disks, and the only PCs to be left out are those which completely lack both USB and PCI slots, for example a 386 from 1991.

An 8GB USB drive can hold well over 5000 floppy disk images, and isn't restricted to multiple disk archives if a file happens to be more than 1457664 bytes (or less if the disk's sectors are slowly failing in the 15+ years of storage).

Can he also go back to 1995-2000 and tell the people that built the industrial computer controlling the $10-30k cnc machine to invent USB before selling it?

[ratdude747]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

Can he also go back to 1995-2000 and tell the people that built the industrial computer controlling the $10-30k cnc machine to invent USB before selling it?

Agreed. Some are so proprietary that they don't have PCI (like the Mac LCs that powered 2 CNC rigs at my old HS) or if they do, the code is so hardcoded that USB isn't supported nor could it be easily rewritten to support it.

I even know of a guy who owns a large furniture shop partially powered on ancient IBM dummy terminals (he has a bunch of extras that are used for parts). Good luck de-floppying that system.

[Topcat]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

Any business relying solely on floppy disks has no place in the 21st century. You can pick up an 8GB USB stick for less than a box of floppy disks, and the only PCs to be left out are those which completely lack both USB and PCI slots, for example a 386 from 1991.

Not necessarily. I recap old socket 7 Soyo boards all the time for the CNC guys....these have floppies and ISA slots with proprietary DOS based software....I dont think I need to mention the 6-figure amounts it costs to replace these machines......when the newer ones won't do anything any better than the old one that needs 3-dollars worth of caps in it replaced...

[brethin]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

I still use both 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 Floppy drives in a couple of my machines.

[mariushm]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

I wonder how hard it would be to "mod" a floppy disk unit to work with a SD card or with usb memory.

Surely, the patents for the floppy units would be expired by now and microcontrollers are fast enough they should be able to "fake" the interface and send the answers to whatever signals come through the cable.

Is there something .... uhmm... was just about to ask if there's something other than small demand stopping such devices from showing up and then I just googled it for them to see if they exist...

Apparently they exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_...dware_emulator

http://embeddedsw.net/EMUFDD_Floppy_...ator_Home.html

[Ami Sapphire]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

I have around seven machines that can use 3.5" floppies. However, I have only four I still use them on regularly:
Cyrix Computer (PCChips M571, my very first computer, previous gaming PC)
The 7th PC (Atrend ATC-6240M, first successful recapping repair; sis occasionally uses it for old DOS programs)
my vintage gaming computer (PCChips M520, turning out very well so far, have to reinstall everything however)
Dad's cheaply built computer (FIC FA15T, stuff usually gets sent from here to the other three PCs via floppy)

I love using old stuff, that's why they are in my possession.

Reminded me: One PC (Cyrix Computer) acted up on the floppy drive side so badly recently (to the point that it kept disappearing in Windows, seriously), but after replacing the PSU, it finally worked right so far. Hope it's not the floppy controller. I loved that previous PSU...

[Heihachi_73]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

I know about industrial/proprietary/embedded computers (e.g. not your average desktop PC) and the like still requiring 'legacy' devices and programs that cannot easily be replicated or used in current systems, but I can't imagine every second office building having fleets of 20 year old beige AT clones or black and white 68K Macs running spreadsheets or word processors of the same vintage.

[kc8adu]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

i still use a ton of floppys here fixing old swi cnc boxes.got an mx2 at the shop i just fixed and my own m3 on a bridgeport.
work machines all have drives in them to support them.some of these cnc boxes stack 2 microfloppies in the space of 1 3.5".i shred old laptops to keep a supply of these.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

I only use them if i'm too lazy to slipstream drivers to a cd, or my fully mass storage slipstreamed cds fail to work (due to inproper driver matching-in which case I just use nlite to slip and burn the right drivers to the cd)

other than that. I know a guy who does BASIC programming and keeps everything on floppies. Has like 3 sony USB floppy laptops drives with all their heads aligned the same so no problems (did I mention he also has 3 laptops)?

[gerg]

Re: Where did all the floppy disks go?

I use them constantly at work for imaging and bios updates but then again my servers are from 2001 and won't boot off of a usb drive and no one has been able to get ghost to properly work on a cd (very very old version of ghost that we are licensed for)