Comments on: Floppy Disks Go the Way of the Dinosaur

By: userlain

userlain — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:34:01 +0000

This may just be a ramblers thoughts, but up until recent years, flashing your bios with firmware could not be done in windows, it had to be done from floppy. Even today, if you think about it. If you get(or have) a motherboard and drop in a 45nm chip, you have to flash the bios with an update beforehand using an older chip, if this is just a chip swap, then it wouldn’t be a problem doing it in windows. If its a new system however, you will have to fall back on older tech and os(i.e. DOS); and unless your l33t enough to make a bootable dos cd with the required bios file, your going to have to fall back to floppy. Before I start hearing arguments, I should note that a lot of pc’s DON’T boot from flashdrives, and bootable cd’s still use floppy images; in fact nero requires you have one or make one if you wish to make your own bootable cd.

I have several multi-generational pc’s, 2 jump drives, 2 external hardrives; 3 dvd burners, and an ipod, all which I use extensively and push the limits of each and every one. I hardly ever use floppy anymore, even less so since most of my computers and laptops have dosbox; but when it comes to flashing the bios, I will fall back to floppy as 9 times out of 10 as that is the simplest and easiest way to get it done right without screwing something up (which anyone who has done this will tell you is a very bad thing).

By: The floppy hasn’t died — it’s just become virtual — Our Latest Discovery

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:47:15 +0000

[...] on the blog, Harrison explains why the floppy deserves to be dead. Well, for starters: Floppy Disk capacity is virtually [...]

By: Glamorous Reports

Glamorous Reports — Sun, 06 May 2007 07:00:51 +0000

Even a large report or document – Word or pdf – is still likely to be comfortable on a floppy. I find doing away with floppy disks almost pressuring us to create content rich documents that do not need to be all spiced and glitzed up.

I can have been working for a whole day only to produce a 70kB text document (the only overly large text documents I have seen are plain text word dictionaries around 11MB), or 10 seconds converting a RAW photograph to TIFF for printing – at over 50MB if you want to forgo compression with today’s resolutions. I’m just trying to point out that size of file is not necessarily proportional to quality, or expanse. But what else do we do with all our space?

I do concur that floppy’s are horrendously unstable. I could use a floppy and then a day later have it not work in the same drive.

I think USB drives are amazing, but we don’t need to glitz the report!

By: Glamorous Reports

Glamorous Reports — Sun, 06 May 2007 07:00:22 +0000

I can have been working for a whole day only to produce a 70kB text document (the only overly large text documents I have seen are plain text word dictionaries), or 10 seconds converting a RAW photograph to TIFF for printing – at over 50MB if you want to forgo compression with today’s resolutions. I’m just trying to point out that size of file is not necessarily proportional to quality, or expanse. But what else do we do with all our space?

I do concur that floppy’s are horrendously unstable. I could use a floppy and then a day later have it not work in the same drive.

I think USB drives are amazing, but we don’t need to glitz the report!