When's the last time you used a floppy diskette?

[Mixolydian]

Just curious. I used one this week while working on an older late 90's computer. It's been a few years since I used one before that.

 

[Ausm]

I have to now and then on the older systems on the Company network.

 

[darkewaffle]

Few years ago fixing my parents' old PC when it wouldn't boot and had to run some sort of repair utility off floppy.

Except for quite old systems, just about anything you did with a floppy can be done with a USB drive now.

 

[DrPizza]

A 5 1/4" floppy floppy? Or one of the little hard plastic floppies?

 

[Ausm]

A 5 1/4" floppy floppy? Or one of the little hard plastic floppies?

Now that's Old School!

 

[rsutoratosu]

I own 2 3.5 usb drives just for this purpose.. someone had some files they "needed" last week.

One of the usb drive reads the floppy at 4x normal speed.. its very good

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...p?EdpNo=705517 this one

 

[Train]

I can even remember the last time I used tape drives. It was 1989 on a Commodore PET.

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

I seriously can't remember the last time I used one of these. It's starting to get that way with CD's for me anymore.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Maybe close to a decade or so ago. But probably not used much in over 15 years or so.

 

[MixMasterTang]

I would say the last time was probably 6 or 7 years ago.

 

[bigrash]

Probably like 10 years ago.

 

[blankslate]

Over 10 years ago.

 

[BurnItDwn]

8 inch, Never used one of these.
5 & 1/4 would have been mid 90s.
3 & 1/2 would have been when I updated my bios on my socket 754 board board after I bought my first athlon64

 

[Zeze]

I don't remember the last time I touched my DVD drive.

 

[Imp]

At least a decade ago... Maybe in highschool, definitely grade 10. I'm now 4 years out of college.

Now that computers take even USB keys as bootable devices, little point in even having an internal DVD drive anymore. External Blu-ray/DVD player would be better.

 

[jaha2000]

Everyday. We have some machines at work that still keep programs on 3.5. All that crap has to get backed up to our server and the USB interfaces for the machines are like 5k a piece

 

[PingSpike]

I tried to use one to run an old copy of ghost maybe a year ago but the disks had all gone bad LOL.

 

[Atomic Playboy]

The last time I drank too much whiskey.

 

[Drako]

LOL, I still have some 8" floppies in the garage somewhere

The last time I used 3.5" was a couple of months ago. My wife has an old Ensoniq Mirage keyboard I was playing around with.

I have not used a floppy on a computer in a couple of years, although I still have a couple of computers with floppy drives.

 

[Exterous]

A 5 1/4" floppy floppy? Or one of the little hard plastic floppies?

About 2 months ago an employee came up to me asking if we had anything that would read a 5 1/4. Apparently we still have a computer built into a very specialized very expensive piece of equipment that still uses those. The company went out of business long ago and no one else makes anything like it so if it fails we have to create our own. We just finished replacing the last computer controller that frequently utilized 3.5" floppy disks. Win 98 first edition no less. Only cost us $50,000 to design\upgrade\build.

 

[preslove]

~2003

 

[jupiter57]

It was in '07 for me.
Old Company Laptop (which I had donated years before) had a FDD, PM wanted me to copy my Daily reports weekly & bring to him.
Floppies were old & didn't work, so I just burned them on a CD.
He didn't know how to read it!

 

[Jeff7]

Nrt-nrrrrrrt....nrt-nrrrrrt.
Ah yes, such a long time.

It's been a few years. As the usage tapered off, it was mainly for BIOS flashes on motherboards that couldn't boot to a USB device, or which lacked an OS-level flashing utility.

I remember using some special formatting utility to get 1.68MB of capacity from a 1.44MB disk, then using them to efficiently transport a compressed Duke Nukem 3D folder to school so we could play it over the network there.

 

[Brainonska511]

A few weeks ago. I had to pull some data off an instrument using Windows 98 as the computer's OS. It would blue-screen whenever you plugged in a USB thumb drive, so I had to resort to the floppy. The trouble then was finding a more modern computer with a floppy drive.

 

[Possessed Freak]

2 days ago. We are getting a 286 laptop up and running in the office for fun. Played Decathlon on it 2 weeks ago. Next goal is to link it to another machine and get the thing online. If we are successful then I will take it to the next conference and actually use it for note taking and browsing (sort of) the web.