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Do you or anybody you know still use Floppy Disk?

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I have some old drives laying around, but haven't used them in a while. I used to use them to run tests on new builds before I installed them in the case and also used a zero-write proggy to nuke HDD's etc.

Fern
 
I still use it as a "Save" icon in my applications. Most of the people I'm developing for still remember what that things is, and it's use in previous applications.

Someday we're going to have to find a new icon that means "Save".
 
We were doing end of year cleaning and someone walked into my office with a massive stack of floppy disks...

"No, no, no, don't even bring those in here. Trash!"
 
Nope, but I still can't bring myself to throw the old software/driver/whatever disks away. Aside from installing some old software at work about 10 years ago, I haven't used a floppy myself since the 486 was a current machine.
 
It's been awhile. I had them around because booting off of a USB device was still kind of dicey. A lot of stuff had to be working properly for that to happen - not so good if you're trying to troubleshoot something. Booting off of a CD was also just annoying because quickly adding a file or tweaking something meant reburning the disc.

BIOS flashing also didn't always work so well if done off of a thumbdrive.



Now you damn kids these days have your Windows-based BIOS flashing utilities and USB thumbdrives that actually boot properly.





XavierMace said:
My dad was thrilled because they finally retrofitted his Wire EDM's to use USB thumb drives instead of floppys. This was no joke like 2 weeks ago.
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This stuff fascinates me.

New equipment is expensive!
Yes, and it's also expensive to waste labor doing menial crap like waiting for an old floppy disk to do its thing, or worse yet, a roll of paper tape for an old NC machine, when a perfectly good network cable could do the trick in an instant. And the newer machine would probably offer all kinds of fun new features you'd find a way to use.
Your operators should be turning out parts that make the company money. Customers are more willing to pay for parts than they are for someone to serve as a data transport platform when wires or radio waves can do the same job a lot more quickly.

It depends on the company's culture though, that's for sure. There's a lot of "This works fine. Go away and stop trying to change things."
And Kodak decided that digital cameras were going to be little more than a short-lived fad. I'm sure that that decision was influenced by the nagging thought "But changing will be expensive!" Being late to a new market is also expensive, moreso if that market is also busy digging your company's grave.
That's also referred to as "stagnation."
 
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I know someone around here that was telling me how a couple years ago they were looking for a school to send someone to for some type of machine language programming training as they had sometype of old inventory program and the last guy that knew anything about the language had retired. The search turned up some place in the middle east as the only location still offering training so they pretty much said screw it, we'll just run it best we can till the replacement is ready to come on line.
 
We have some shitty old Tektronix scopes in our lab that have a floppy interface. It's the only way to get screen caps off of them. Recently got rid of all the older PCs at the office too, so I had to do a Fry's run and get one of those cheap USB floppy drives. 🙂
 
lxskllr said:
Nope, but I still can't bring myself to throw the old software/driver/whatever disks away. Aside from installing some old software at work about 10 years ago, I haven't used a floppy myself since the 486 was a current machine.
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You're waiting for a Y2K repeat and the need for fortran programmers, aren't you?
 
Had to install windows on a machine once via floppy and disc #32 or so kept failing, and of course tech support wants me to do it again and again. Don't recall if it ever worked.
 
highland145 said:
You're waiting for a Y2K repeat and the need for fortran programmers, aren't you?
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You never know!

Rarely I have a need to work with archaic software, but it can be a real time saver. Odds are I'll never need the floppies, but if I do, a replacement will be difficult or impossible to find. I weigh that against the trivial storage issue, and keep them until a later date. I'll look through the great archive of crap with the intention of thinning it out, but I mever manage to do it.
 
lxskllr said:
You never know!

Rarely I have a need to work with archaic software, but it can be a real time saver. Odds are I'll never need the floppies, but if I do, a replacement will be difficult or impossible to find. I weigh that against the trivial storage issue, and keep them until a later date. I'll look through the great archive of crap with the intention of thinning it out, but I mever manage to do it.
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I've got the same problem. Norton ghost on a floppy...I might need that one day.

At least they aren't 5.25 like in Printer's link....or cards...😱

Or paper tape...OMGWTHBBQ

😀
 
lupi said:
i know someone around here that was telling me how a couple years ago they were looking for a school to send someone to for some type of machine language programming training as they had sometype of old inventory program and the last guy that knew anything about the language had retired. The search turned up some place in the middle east as the only location still offering training so they pretty much said screw it, we'll just run it best we can till the replacement is ready to come on line.
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COBOL?

caps
 
it was about a year and eight months ago when I heard him tell the story and don't recall if he said the exact name, but he's a mechanical engineer by trade who got posted to management of the software group so he probably wouldn't have remembered anyway.
 
I haven't used one in over a year (IIRC for a BIOS/firmware update) but I still have three never-used internal 1.44MB floppy drives, cables, and a couple 25-packs of diskettes packed away somewhere around here. Also purchased two external USB floppy drives a few years ago, to have them just in case, because so many motherboards began to nix the onboard floppy controller.
 
s0me0nesmind1 said:
She won't accept it even when it's not floppy unless it's a blue moon, a wolf just howled, and she had a P-E-R-F-E-C-T day.

But first you have to hear about the perfect day.
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That's cause you ain't got game (disks) son.
gamedisk.jpg
 
Last time I used a 3½" floppy probably was to flash an updated BIOS to my mobo. I think the BIOS code became corrupted and had to be replaced. I don't trust a low-level critical job like that to Windows. Before that, a few years ago I used a floppy to install the RAID drivers in a Win XP install (different machine) so the machine could boot from the RAID1 array.

I still have an old machine with both 3½" and 5¼" floppy drives in it If I ever need to read very old media. Have not needed that, though, for a LONG time.
 
I still have a small box of floppy disks and even a couple of floppy drives somewhere in a box of parts. But I haven't used one in years.

I got to thinking recently that other than for for the occasional operating system installation, I use my USB keys less and less with every passing month. I keep media files on my network file server and use Dropbox as a way of working with common files on multiple PCs. I'm almost ready to ditch the USB key on my key ring.
 
About 6 years ago I transferred or copied the last files I had on floppy to CDR, although I did hold onto a few original DOS install disks, Win 95/98 boot disks etc.

I also have a fully functioning Athlon XP based system running Win 2k that has a FD installed, several loose 3.5 inch drives and even one functioning 5.25 inch drive sitting around in box's, along with a couple UBS FD's.
 
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