Floppy disk nears obsolescence

[Mac Reporter]

CNN Technology reports:
Tuesday, September 7, 2004 Posted: 3:35 PM EDT (1935 GMT)

"And it's been a long time since floppy disks were even floppy. They used to come in a bendable plastic casing and were 5.25 inches wide, but Apple Computer Inc. pioneered the smaller, higher density disks with its Macintosh computers in the mid-1980s.

Then Apple become the first mass-market computer manufacturer to stop including floppy drives altogether with the release of their iMac model in 1998."

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- When Michael McCreary bought three new computers for his company, he had no need for one of the oldest and most common computer technologies, the floppy drive.

But like many computer customers, he ended up buying floppies anyway. After all, they're cheap and he still has a few of the 3.5-inch disks lying around.

"As long as I need those files, I need a floppy drive around. Then I can toss them," said McCreary, the president of an eight-employee Atlanta-area real estate management company. "The next computers I buy probably won't even have a floppy."

Read more.

[Carlo]

hehehe it's been obsolete with Mac users since 1998.

[elbert]

Floppies? ano yun?

How much are those things these days? Last time I bought one, it cost more than a blank CD.

[Macmon]

In our setting, not everyone is fortunate to leave the floppy as an old form of storage.
I see it in PC shops, in internet cafes, in schools, in the govt, and at home.

It will be with us still for some years but since many second hand shops sell old computers with this technology, it wont go away anytime soon.

As for the 5.25 floppy, now that is obsolete in our setting.

:2cents:

[zChris]

There's a new trend in our office nowadays where everyone seems to have one of those USB flash drives hanging off of their ID clips. I think I havent actually used a floppy at all this year!

Meanwhile, I had a trip a couple of months ago to S'pore with our lawyer to finalize a legal contract. She brought all her files and notes to the meeting. Problem was, she didnt bring a notebook and all her files were in a floppy! Needless to say, the files were never used because we couldnt find a drive to run it in

[carlodl]

It's funny but I also had to help my dad yesterday to get his powerpoint file from a floppy disk into my powerbook. Since I obviously had no floppy drive, I asked 3 of my neighboors who had laptops / pcs at home to help me out but guess what? All their floppy drives were busted! Looks like their drives died a natural death bec. they weren't being used at all!

I ended up going to a internet cafe to get the file out of that floppy. What a hassle

[Arel]

Haven't used a floppy in years.

Question. Does anyone here still use Zip disks? Got several B&W G3s in the office whose internal Zip drives haven't been used in years.

[Tarkuz]

I was using floppy disks measuring eight (8) inches in diameter during the early 1980s!

[poink]

Originally posted by carlodl
It's funny but I also had to help my dad yesterday to get his powerpoint file from a floppy disk into my powerbook. Since I obviously had no floppy drive, I asked 3 of my neighboors who had laptops / pcs at home to help me out but guess what? All their floppy drives were busted! Looks like their drives died a natural death bec. they weren't being used at all!

I ended up going to a internet cafe to get the file out of that floppy. What a hassle

:lol: LOL!!!

i don't use floppy disks AT ALL...unfortunately my sister and my mom still use them...then they complain when the comps get viruses or when the files are corrupt :dry:

once my mom asked me to see if i could recover some documents she saved on a diskette...haaay. tas when i couldn't, turns out she was saving it DIRECTLY on the floppy and she didn't have a copy elsewhere. double haaaaay.

[penmanila]

i still use them everyday, in a government office where documents still have to be ported quickly from one machine to another. (shouldn't be a problem if people were more used to networking.)

on a short-term basis, they're still faster to use than CDs and are pretty tough--would you believe i have some from the late 1980s that i can still read! just think of them na lang as mini-CDRWs in a tough plastic jacket. of course, long-term, they can't hold a candle to well-kept CDs, but i like them from the days when you could boot a mac off one floppy disk and carry the whole MS word program in another, with room to spare for a few documents