Are floppy disks becoming a thing of the past?

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I was out computer browsing yesterday, and I didn't notice any floppy drives on the new computers. I asked a sales rep if there were any floppy disks, and they said no.

That was really weird.

thats been happening for a few years now, started with the OEM's Hp, and Dell,

Yeah, there's not much point anymore. They can store only a meg and a half, and you can get CD writers for like $20 plus pennies per CD.

The only people who actually uses floppies these days are technicians. And even then, it's not used all the time.

Think CD's are more of a popular bootup option, but would have thought that DVD's would have been up there as a popular choice.

YO Tim!

WAKE UP MAN! It is now 2008!

If you really miss those old floppies head down to the local thrift store... while you're there pick me up some 8-track tapes and a betamax please!

Oh... and don't be shopping for any ZIP drives or disks either or I'll have to wop you upside the head next time I'm in Texas!

Floppy disks? Those were phased out years ago, mate. Why bother with an unstable floppy disk when you can just burn what you want onto a CD-R?

there are uses for the floppies other then geeky coffee coasters, many operating systems (such as win 2000 pro) and harddrive install drivers (maxtor and seagate and western digital for instance) require you to make a boot disk with them.

since most machines (even this laptop i post with, no 3.5 drive) don't have 3.5 drives i would imagine that you could install one from an older machine into expension slot

USB Flash sticks are the best replacement for floppys and so small too

USB flash drives are exceeding 4 gigabytes Tim. Floppies are only 1.44 megabytes.

To put it in perspective, a modern picture that would fill your desktop might be 440 kilobytes. You could only fit 3 of them on a floppy.

Floppy disks now belong in a time capsule...gosh, it didn't take them long to become obsolete!

I have floppies that still work from the early 80s.

course those are low density 5.25 floppies (the ones that are really floppy, big and black)

the 1.44MB 3.5 inch floppies are total crap. the 720K low density ones were ok.
even the 1.44MB floppies used to be ok but anything you can get now (and even back in the late 90s) wont hold data for very long. perhaps it was somethign wrong with me. but I could get disks right out of the box with bad spots on them or that wouldn't even format. and even after I had them formatted and put data on them they would loose data sometimes in the same day that I wrote to them.


heres a picture of my coco3 with tandy FD-501 disk drive I'm in the process of imaging my floppy disks to a hard drive and then to a CD so that I don't loose the data on them.

I had the same issues with floppies. They were really unreliable. It went so far, that I always carried my trusted 720kB floppies with me when I wanted to exchange data. And Floppy drives are sloooooooow. I guess it would be faster to load something from the other end of the world via internet than to load it from a floppy.

when I used to store things to floppy disks, they usually ended up unreadable after a while, and I haven't used them now for a long time

my current desktop does have a floppy disk drive fitted but it has been unused for quite some time

My laptop came with a drive too but I never used it

They're a past thing. Besides being extremely slow and fragile, they just handle 1.44 MB. The minimum for a actual average user is much more. I only don't throw away my floppy drive cause sometimes I need it to load some memory tester or other utilitary too small to spend a entire CD to burn it.

I use floppies to install windows/ linux on cds that can`t be booted from. I aslo use them for Virus Checking computers that won`t boot and troubleshooting OS/ Hardware issues when i have a computer repair to do in the shop for a customer. I also use them to store USB Mass Storage device drivers on for older OSes that don`t have them and want to use my 2GB flash drive to retrieve vulnerable data from a crashed computer or install ultilities on an older machine wuch as Ms Office, Virus Protection or CCleaner. Also i i do use floppies i make them in a nice comclealed box and use the older ones form the early 90`s or format disks form old spftware suites form the MS-DOS days and use the,. They are much more reliable than the new, colorful, Memorx Crap you see at Wallyworld.