GOVT IT to be brought kicking and screaming into 21st Cen

[Oni Koneko Damien]

The last one I ever saw was a crappy Independence Day video game coded to a floppy that was corrupt anyway.

Holy shit, I think I had that game too! It game bundled with one of their toys and didn't work worth a damn... though the floppy was a really cool translucent blue colour.

And you damn kids are making me feel old. I remember back in school when we had to deal with the 5-1/2'' floppies, not your newfangled, compact 3''. Hell, I remember visiting grandparents in the UK who had a system which still ran off a fucking cassette deck.

[Stark]

5"ers had the advantage of being able to pull the media out the hole and put them in new cases in cases of distortion. No springs you see.

[Dragon Angel]

LOL, I remember those 5-1/4" disks too. We had to use them to run games on old Apple IIc computers, back during my elementary school years. Oh, the fun times in a monochrome black and green world...until some moron eventually managed to destroy those truly floppy disks. There went the old classics we all loved: The Oregon Trail, Carmen San Diego... -_-

And then, the school administration upgraded all of their computers to Windows 3.11, and joy was heard throughout the land.

I think I sighted my dad with some of those even bigger floppy disks - were they about 8 inches? One of his jobs just refused to upgrade their systems.

[Stark]

Yeah, there were all kinds, even the crazy Amstrad 3'5s that were longer than they were tall for NO REASON.

[Marcus Aurelius]

But how will I install OS/2 Warp 4 if I don't have floppies with which to make the boot disks?

It's actually much worse than that. You can't install Windows XP from a stock installation CD without a floppy drive if you need third party drivers for the installation; typically hard disk controller drivers. For example early SATA controllers had no drivers on the installation CD of Windows XP prior to SP3 and the same applied to some newer SCSI and SAS controllers. The only way to install third party drivers during the XP installation is to use a floppy drive. The Windows NT installer (XP is NT 5.1) had not changed much after Windows NT 4.0 came out in 1996, even though in 2001 the floppy drive was already clearly on its way out.

You can slipstream SATA drivers (and service packs, and updates) into the Windows install folders and create your own installation CDs. I only ever used a floppy disk during install once, several years ago.

Yes you can and I've known that for years, although I did not know it when I first encountered this problem in 2003. However, if I remember correctly the EULA does not technically permit making copies of the installation CD if you have a normal end user single system license. In any case, slipstreaming drivers to the installation CD is more like a workaround than a genuine solution, if we talk about home or small office use. Although one certainly can slipstream without them, third-party tools like nLite are needed to make the process easy, and they did not even exist back in 2003.

Yeah, there were all kinds, even the crazy Amstrad 3'5s that were longer than they were tall for NO REASON.

Standard sizes used by major manufacturers were 8", 5¼" and last but not least the still used 3½" floppy disks. Amstrad used 3" floppies. At least 2.8" floppies existed in addition, and possibly others. And yes, I did not have to google that.

[charlemagne]

Yeah, I played King's Quest I-III from 5 1/4" floppies back on my first computer (a 286 machine my dad brought home one day). I think I still have the discs somewhere stored away in the basement, together with a 5 1/4" floppy drive. I kept it because I always wanted to some day put the drive back in a computer and check if the discs were still readable, out of sheer curiosity, but when I tried it 10 years ago or so, the power connectors had changed by then and now it's really just only dead weight.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I'm probably one of the few people on this board who still has a working 3 1/2 and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive in my computer.

I own both and in fact several 3½ drives, but currently only a 3½" drive is attached. The 5¼" drive worked fine the last time I tried it, but that was in 2002... Once I even tried to acquire a 2.88 MB 3½" drive, but since pretty much only IBM sold them, it proved too difficult. Extended density 3½ floppies are even rarer and their price was nearly ten times the price of HD (1.44 MB) floppies when you could still buy them as new.

More useless trivia: although a 1.2 MB 5¼" drive can be used to read 360 KB "double density" formatted disks, you should never write them, because if you do they will become unreadable in a genuine 360 KB drive. In other words 1.2 MB 5¼" drives are only read compatible with 360 KB disk.

Oh the days... Is just fear for the day when I get so old that nostalgia no longer feels the same as it used to.

[Uraniun235]

However, if I remember correctly the EULA does not technically permit making copies of the installation CD if you have a normal end user single system license.

Who seriously gives a shit? Would that really stop you?

[Thanas]

I'm probably one of the few people on this board who still has a working 3 1/2 and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive in my computer.

Same here. Why? Because I still get old floppies. The academic world clearly has not progressed to the standard of "all USB, all-CD" yet.

[Guardsman Bass]

There's a floppy drive on my old PC, but it has been years since I last used a floppy. I think the last time I used one was at a library, where they had screwed around with the settings so that it was basically impossible to use a Portable Drive (they've changed it since then).

[Marcus Aurelius]

However, if I remember correctly the EULA does not technically permit making copies of the installation CD if you have a normal end user single system license.

Who seriously gives a shit? Would that really stop you?

No, but it shows how clueless Microsoft was when they didn't update the installer for XP. It was not like they were thinking "you can slipstream the drivers to a CD you burn yourself", it was more like "floppy drives forever". If it had been the former they would have provided an end user friendly tool for doing it instead of leaving it to third parties to develop one.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I'm probably one of the few people on this board who still has a working 3 1/2 and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive in my computer.

Same here. Why? Because I still get old floppies. The academic world clearly has not progressed to the standard of "all USB, all-CD" yet.

You really get 5¼" inch floppies? I haven't seen anyone using one after about 1995 and yes it was in the academic world. 3½" floppies used to be quite common until about 2005, after which they faded out pretty quickly. That said, CD-R/W drives did not yet dent the popularity of floppy drives much, since especially the older people did not want to learn how to use them; after all a CD-RW is somewhat more complicated to use than a floppy or flash drive unless you use UDF with packet writing, which relied on third party software under Windows 2000 and XP.

Sorry about the double post: I realized too late that I wanted to comment on Thanas' post as well, because this is such an endlessly fascinating subject!

[montypython]

I've had to replace quite a number of 3.5" floppy drives when the heads stopped reading, whereas my old CD-ROM drives still keep going. OTOH, my old C128 5.25" drives still work...

[Thanas]

You really get 5¼" inch floppies?

Yes. About once a year. Case in point:

Recently a professor tried to edit all his articles for compilation posts. Well, turns out he used a special greek font developed over 30 years ago. Surprise, surprise. Turns out nobody had that font, nor was it distributed anymore. So the option was either to rewrite a lot of extensive quotations or track down the font. He eventually found it on an old floppy - but guess what his new Work PC did not have?

Also, some academic journals are notorious for using specialized fonts (Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew) and won't accept anything else. These fonts are oftentimes also of the same age, hence the happy search for "Who still got a copy of XXXX" continues.

And before you say: "Why don't you collect all of them in a hard drive?" Well, good luck with that, seeing as how there is the usual interdepartmental turf war and most people do not even share their old disks unless there is a problem. I have collected about 500 old fonts already, but it is still growing...

[DudeGuyMan]

I've had a floppy drive in every PC I've ever owned. They cost pretty much nothing, and I'm always vaguely afraid I'll end up in a situation where I need one for some unfathomable reason. I never have though.

[Norade]

Last time I used one was in 2006 when I was still in school, USB drives weren't as cheap as they are now and most PC's didn't have a burner. Of course I could most use first class to mail things and my login had the same info on each computer so I mainly used it to get things back and forth between home and work because my computer wasn't online then. Now I'd be hard pressed to find one, though I could have one around in a closet or a basement somewhere. Not that I need one, I have no floppies and te ones had only have dated programs on them hat I didn't use when I had a drive.

[Sarevok]

You really get 5¼" inch floppies?

Yes. About once a year. Case in point:

Recently a professor tried to edit all his articles for compilation posts. Well, turns out he used a special greek font developed over 30 years ago. Surprise, surprise. Turns out nobody had that font, nor was it distributed anymore. So the option was either to rewrite a lot of extensive quotations or track down the font. He eventually found it on an old floppy - but guess what his new Work PC did not have?

Also, some academic journals are notorious for using specialized fonts (Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew) and won't accept anything else. These fonts are oftentimes also of the same age, hence the happy search for "Who still got a copy of XXXX" continues.

And before you say: "Why don't you collect all of them in a hard drive?" Well, good luck with that, seeing as how there is the usual interdepartmental turf war and most people do not even share their old disks unless there is a problem. I have collected about 500 old fonts already, but it is still growing...

Well even if you have an old font file can you use it to view a document written in that font ? A lot of the old font formats may not even be supported anymore by current computer programs.

[Thanas]

Experience suggest that yes, I can.

[Uraniun235]

Well even if you have an old font file can you use it to view a document written in that font ? A lot of the old font formats may not even be supported anymore by current computer programs.

TrueType has been around since 1991 and is still supported on Mac OS and Windows. Postscript has been around since the mid-80s and is also widely supported.

[Netko]

Wow - this thread is a nostalgia win.

I think my last connected drive was the one that used to be in what is now my home server. When converting the computer to that role, I dumped it in favour of having one more place to stick a hard drive into (I think I had 6 drives in there at one time). I'm sure I have a couple in my old spare parts cabinet stored away for a rainy day.

Also, a fun anecdote from the local power user scene. Around 1997 or so, a script kiddy tried to hack into the Pentagon, as was the fad of the day. He managed to guess the password to some non-classified server and managed to get in, leaving a trail all over. So, as one would expect, the police show up on his doorstep a few days later. They ransack the place, making sure to catalogue all his computer equipment as evidence, which, unsurprisingly for the day, included both 5¼" and 3.5" floppies. As they're cataloguing (all of the officers involved being from a department dealing with computer crime), one of the detectives remarks to the other: "Be sure to put the big diskettes on top, they're larger so they hold more - we should start the analysis with them!". And the legend was born among power users, after being roundly mocked in the nascent IT press of the day. Have two USB sticks? "We should use the (physically) larger one, it holds more!". Have a (modern) USB stick and a CD? "We should use the CD, it holds more!". And so on

[ShadowDragon8685]

That wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption for a lay person; assuming the same data density, a larger physical medium will hold more.

Of course, that assumption is unforgivable for anyone specializing in computer anything.


I still have a floppy drive in my PC. The thing kept pitching error fits during the rebuild when my friend tried to make it without one. My aunt still has a box of the larger floppy floppies (no, I don't know the actual size, I just know they were the size of thing she used to teach me on when I was like, seven,) on top of her computer hutch. Haven't had a computer that could take the damn things in years.

Such a hoarder. Damn things have probably lost all semblance of data coherancy. She handed me a few of the small floppies a month or two ago, asked me to try checking them to see what they were; they were labled, but she wanted to know. Surprise of surprises, the system didn't recognize them as formatted.

Bleh. Filed those right in the circular file.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I still have a floppy drive in my PC. The thing kept pitching error fits during the rebuild when my friend tried to make it without one. My aunt still has a box of the larger floppy floppies (no, I don't know the actual size, I just know they were the size of thing she used to teach me on when I was like, seven,) on top of her computer hutch. Haven't had a computer that could take the damn things in years.

Such a hoarder. Damn things have probably lost all semblance of data coherancy. She handed me a few of the small floppies a month or two ago, asked me to try checking them to see what they were; they were labled, but she wanted to know. Surprise of surprises, the system didn't recognize them as formatted.

Bleh. Filed those right in the circular file.

I don't know why your computer would not work without a floppy drive. If you mark the floppy type as "none" in BIOS and disconnect the data and power cables, there's absolutely no reason why it would not work.

Your aunt's "larger" floppies were probably 5¼", since you would have to be well over thirty for them to be 8". 8" floppies were mostly used in minicomputers anyways, and I bet your aunt did not have one of those. Though, if I remember correctly, there were some very early CP/M personal computers which had 8" floppy drives, but I'm too lazy to check that right now, so don't quote me on that. In any case 8" floppies were already obsolescent in the early days of personal computers, that is in the early 1980s.

The funny thing about floppy drive data coherency is the fact that the head calibration of floppy drives is entirely mechanical and so there is no automatic calibration during use whatsoever. This means that a floppy disk might be only readable with the drive it was originally written with. I have encountered this problem numerous times during the late 1990s, when floppy drives were still commonly in use but many of the floppies were already several years old. You can never be sure that the disk is unreadable with all drives unless you have tried to read it with at least five different drives, and even then a possibility still remains that some other drive might have skewed enough calibration to read it...

[ShadowDragon8685]

I don't know why your computer would not work without a floppy drive. If you mark the floppy type as "none" in BIOS and disconnect the data and power cables, there's absolutely no reason why it would not work.

I'm pretty sure he was bright enough to try that; he said it was most likely due to the motherboard being a silly Sony proprietary piece that was close enough to standard to give him headaches and make him drill holes for attachment.

Your aunt's "larger" floppies were probably 5¼", since you would have to be well over thirty for them to be 8". 8" floppies were mostly used in minicomputers anyways, and I bet your aunt did not have one of those. Though, if I remember correctly, there were some very early CP/M personal computers which had 8" floppy drives, but I'm too lazy to check that right now, so don't quote me on that. In any case 8" floppies were already obsolescent in the early days of personal computers, that is in the early 1980s.

Without getting out a tape measure and relying on the good old Mk. 1 Eyeball, I'd say that's probably spot-on. In either case, they're ancient and absolutely useless (since nothing at all can read them,) but she pitches a fit at the thought of pitching them.

The funny thing about floppy drive data coherency is the fact that the head calibration of floppy drives is entirely mechanical and so there is no automatic calibration during use whatsoever. This means that a floppy disk might be only readable with the drive it was originally written with. I have encountered this problem numerous times during the late 1990s, when floppy drives were still commonly in use but many of the floppies were already several years old. You can never be sure that the disk is unreadable with all drives unless you have tried to read it with at least five different drives, and even then a possibility still remains that some other drive might have skewed enough calibration to read it...

Crazy. Either way, any and all of these floppies are at least a decade old. Sod 'em.

[Thanas]

To be honest, I found that floppy drives work unusually well when properly stored. I never had a floppy drive dieing on me. Unlike some CDs....