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Floppy dirves? i dont get it, why didnt they ever make a better one?

C

chiwawa626

Lifer
Here i am in the age of cds and technology, cd writer speeds are around 24 and the floppy is the same speed it was since the begining? why not make a faster one? I know im not the only one using floppys for little quicky things u need to do as well as for bootdisks and stuff...someone really needs to make a better faster floppy drive 🙁...or some bigger disks too, my dad usedto work for bank of america and they had 2.88 mb disks made?
 
why are things still isa?
why are we still using code that was originally used in a 8088 chip??

its hard to drop everything that you have built... that means new standards and everything of old will no longer work
and why not keep the floppy? i still use it enough for it to have a purpose... i use my zip more though



blah i should learn to read more carefully
probably never made a better one because it wouldn't work using the floppy cable.. you'd probably have to make it ata 33 or something... and then you just end up with a zip drive
 
They made the super disk, I think there were others too other than a zip but the thing was they weren't compatable with the old ones so it was just a case of never changing the standard, they are generally less used now but have helped me out in a pinch many times.
 


<< imation super disk drives were backwards compatible with floppies. >>



Yeah I thought about that after I posted it but still it never became a standard to replace the regular ones.
 
E-mail (or collectively the internet) and CDRs killed the floppy drive. Sure they are still everywhere and are really durable but there is not enough incentive for maket companies to go put out a "new" floppy drive. Look at superdisk and zip, I don't see them popular anymore. CDRs and CDRWs are the way to go now.
 
Some LS120 drives weren't bootable off of - thats why that never caught on. (Most of the newer mobos have the option to boot from a LS120 drive though)
 
They came up with the 1.44 floppy, then upgraded to a 2.88 that was incompatiable with 1.44, so that lasted less than a year. Then Zip's came out, along with superdisks about a month later.

In my opinion, Nic's did not kill the floppy, the CD-burner did. I still have my 2x burner that I paid $900 for when I was in college. CD's were still dirt cheap, but not quite as cheap. They were about $1 each, not a nickel. When you could create a multi-sesion disk, that meant you could store like 300 floppy's for $1. Who cares about erasing data. When was the last time you erased a floppy?

and I just used my floppy drive yesterday to run a utility on my HD 🙂
 


<< "...its hard to drop everything that you have built... that means new standards and everything of old will no longer work...

Isn't that the business model for Apple? 😕 >>



It is. Apple didn't have to coordinate with a growing number of PC manufacturers (I'm thinking early 90s here) and form a consortium to agree to create a new standard. 🙁 Apple just waved their proverbial wand and voila, a new bus, a new ISA, a new package!

And I don't believe CDRs have much to do with the floppy's demise. For one, I never heard of a read-only floppy drive whereas CDROM drives were more prevalent than CDR(W) drives at one time.. there wasn't the mutual compatibility offered between all drives that used the same media. As an example, you giving someone a CDR disk with your stuff didn't always mean they could give you a CDR disk of their own stuff in return. ZIP and LS120 did (well, they could give you a floppy disk in return but maybe not an LS120 disk) and I'd say those were the more immediate reasons.
 
zip or ls120 shoulda replaced the floppy.. but who wanted to shell that extra $150 or whatever for a floppy drive replacement? not enough ppl. I don't use it all that often... but i'm going back to just leaving one in my system "just in case." There are a couple times so far that it could have saved me a bit of headache.
 
I built a computer 3 months ago. I rippedthe floppy from a junk machine and haven't used it yet. Three months of usage and I still haven't needed a floppy... times they are a changing...
 


<< Sure they are still everywhere and are really durable but there is not enough incentive for maket companies to go put out a "new" floppy drive. >>



I hope you're talking about the drives being durable because floppy disks are notorious for going bad without reason. Plus that stupid little plastic or metal thingie to protect the disk eventually bends or hooks the drive on the way out.

Floppies still have a legitimate use because educational institutions do NOT buy burners on every computer, nor do they hook them all up to the net. So I still use floppies occasionally to transfer stuff to and from school.

For most other uses, floppies have been replaced, as was said earlier by email, networks, and/or CDRW (especially the bootable kind).

-Ice
 
Super Imation is very quick for reading floppies and writeing to them


my best so far has been a DVDRAM.........9.4 GB of storage spells yum to me



Jen
 


<< "...its hard to drop everything that you have built... that means new standards and everything of old will no longer work...

Isn't that the business model for Apple? 😕 >>



That perfectly expresses one of the reasons I have finally abandoned the Mac after 16 years. Thanks for the link, now I have something to point my Mac friends to when they say, "what the hell are you thinking?" Of course, they always follow that with, "fine, just use Windows then." Great comeback.

chiwawa626, as the others have pointed out, there HAVE been alternatives. LS-120, Zip, and also MultiMediaCard and Compact Flash. Heck, Iomega has made a business trying to get people to adopt a new and improved removeable media. And the two obvious reasons that none of it has caught on is both inertia and business politics. Inertia is just the fact that floppy works, it's the installed base, it's cheap, it's easy, etc... Business politics is, well, chaos created by greed. No one is really at the helm of this ship to make absolute decisions, so like MS, Iomega, Intel and VIA all wrangle over what the customer needs vs. what they want. And while they fight amongst themselves, floppy still keeps working. The real captain of this ship is consumers. And we're a bunch of fickle mush-heads. We can't agree on what the replacement will be, and until we do, board manufacturers aren't going to commit to another LS-120.
 
Isn't there a floppy coming out that will store 3 gigs? I read that somewhere. Nanocompression or something to that effect?
 
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