When was the last time that you used a floppy disk? While still used as the save icon in modern software packages like Microsoft’s Office suite, it’s unusual to see one out in the wild. Given that a typical floppy disk offers up a minuscule 1.44MB of space – not even enough to house a three-minute pop song in MP3 format – there’s seemingly no reason for these disks to stay in circulation.
But while the average user might not have any cause to use a floppy disk, there are those out there who can’t settle for anything else. They’re in dire need of the disks, which most manufacturers have stopped producing. The floppy disk might seem like something better left in the 1990s. Instead it’s a product that’s alive and well in the 21st century.
When my friends and I were in the US late last year, we got into an accident with our rental car – an old and kind Canadian lady rear-ended us while doing 110kph on the I-89 near the town of Lebanon, New Hampshire. The accident was entirely her fault, so she accepted all responsibility, the state trooper made an incident report, and sent us on our way to the nearest Avis office so we could get a new car, because the car’s rear end was all mangled up. We were a bit shaken up, but luckily, nobody got hurt, and the Canadian lady bought us a bottle of maple syrup, and I bought a cheesy Vermont baseball cap to commemorate our grand adventure of meeting a state trooper.
In any event, it turned out the nearest Avis office was at the Lebanon Municipal Airport, an absolutely amazing place that seemed frozen in time – a tiny airport with an adorable terminal and sliding doors leading straight to the runway. Mildly condescending adjectives like ‘adorable’, ‘quaint’, ‘cute’, and ‘darling’ don’t do this place justice. In the terminal, while we waited for one of two airport employees present to fill out some paperwork, I noticed something remarkable: there, in the middle of the terminal, next to an old soda machine, sat an old TTY, a Minicom IV.
Much like the TTY, the answer to the question of old technology lingering around is always the same: because it works.
Those of us with an interest in alternative operating systems, once the focus of OSAlert, know that small OS projects are still distributed as disk image files. MenuetOS, of course, still fits on a single floppy disk.
Some system tools still require booting a floppy as well. Maybe not as much today as five years ago, but long past the time when computers stopped coming standard with floppy drives. Flashing ROMs, partition tools, hard drive diagnostic tools…
I bet a lot of floppies are still working in industrial settings as well, like CNC machines.
To be fair, if disk-swapping isn’t required, I just burn the floppy image into a bootable CD-RW.
…and, on the one machine I have where disk-swapping may be required (a P133 I keep around for retro-gaming), I spent about $20 on eBay for a floppy emulator so I can reformat any cheap 2GB+ USB mass storage device into a stack of 1000 floppies rather than relying on ever-scarcer physical disks.
Given that I picked up a working Atari 520STFM one year on big garbage day, I may also pick up an Atari ST-compatible floppy emulator once I have the disposable income.
Uhhh…its actually a good security measure, this is why the US military kept using five and a half inch floppies with their missile silos, when you don’t require a lot of data? Security by obscurity actually works.
There is also plenty of old servers out there that you cannot update their firmware without using a floppy, older desktops too, as USB was simply not trusted for that purpose. Of course nowadays you would be better off just tossing the system as that late PIII or early PIV will use more power at idle than a new Sempron 2650 or 3850 will at max while doing more IPC by several orders of magnitude but sometimes places just don’t have the cash.
Some computers, mostly older cheap off-the-shelf models, can’t even boot from a CD.
Thom’s answer is correct: they’re still in use because they work.
That’s precisely the way things should be. If you have a well-defined problem and a floppy disk-based piece of hardware solves that problem, why would you want to complicate it with something newer? Does your CNC lathe really need the ability to give a Facebook Like to a design? Does your embroidery hardware really need the ability to Tweet your latest pattern? Isn’t adding a web browser to your nuclear launch system probably a bad idea?
This reminds me of the wonderful story of how Britain used to rely on a similarly low-tech means of securing fire control for its nuclear weaponry. Up until the early years of the Blair government (’97 or so), most of the UK’s nuclear warheads were armed (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7097101.stm) using keys similar to the ones used in bicycle locks. A low-tech solution that clearly worked.
Edited 2015-09-29 00:54 UTC
Still in use because they work…Up to a point, the point when they automagically get corrupted just by looking at them. I’ve oft wondered if they should’ve been called Schr~APdinger’s floppy.
I never understood why folks had trouble understanding why floppies are so unreliable, its no different than videotapes or cassettes. When you put data on a magnetic media that is crazy thin and relatively unprotected from the outside world? Its gonna rot.
I’ve had folks shocked when they bring in their 22 year old videotapes to get converted to DVD and are shocked! that their video looks like shit…well videos rot, not playing them can help slow down the rot but its still gonna rot.
That depends on the definition of “works” and “solves the problem.” Does a floppy-disk based solution actually “work” and “solve the problem” if the program starts having issues due to read errors from a worn out floppy disk and you can’t find quality replacements? How about if the floppy drive dies and it takes you two weeks to get a replacement in? To say that something “works” or “solves the problem” involves a lot more than just the technical issues of the particular problem you’re trying to solve.
ddjones,
Obviously I understand your point and I find the use of floppy disks to be comical in this day and age. Electronics are far cheaper/faster/scalable than they used to be, however I believe today’s engineering tolerances are also far less forgiving than in the past. Buying storage media today is nerve racking because infant mortality and other failures have become so commonplace – who else has experienced this? Raise your hands.
Clearly you didn’t use the same floppy drives and disks I used back in the day.
Personally I haven’t had a (hard)disk die on me in over a decade. From my amazing sample size of 1, the quality of storage media are roughly the same as they’ve always been. The past always seems better because we forgot about all the junk that died ages ago.
dpJudas,
Sometimes the media would go bad, but loosing an actual floppy drive…I really doubt that very many of us (if any) have experienced that. There was very little that could go wrong since they don’t even have an onboard controller. I generally feel that for the most part computers became obsolete long before they actually broke down. IMHO the situation today is reversed.
I know it’s just anecdotal as well, but I’ve lost quite a bit of hardware and storage media in the past decade due to early failures. Perhaps I am a statistical anomaly, however just looking at public hard drive reviews today, the number of customers who are affected by DOA and infant mortality is just terrible and I do believe it’s because computers components are failing way more than previously – I attribute that to cost cutting and lower tolerances.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236661
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149407
Next time you look at nand flash media, especially MLC or TLC, take a look at the specs – their endurance gets much lower each generation than magnetic media and even their own ancestors. Even with the latest advanced controllers I’ve experienced several failures (although I do tend to push them hard).
Edited 2015-09-29 22:54 UTC
Well…floppies usually didn’t fail because they were worn out. They usually failed because of chipset issues, and Compaq (before it was bought by HP) had lost a huge lawsuit over the chipsets they produced for floppy controllers due to failures without reporting failures, etc; so corruption was rampant because the controllers had such poor QA on them.
So this was in the US…. and you’re telling us km/h … us American’s have no idea what that means.
All I know is that 60mph = 100kph, more or less, and I extrapolate from there.
Similar here, but I use 50mph to 80kmh when I want to change miles into some REAL units of measurement
The weirdest thing that ever happened to me – driving around Prague, after just landing, with my UK satnav still set to MPH. The speed limits it showed were hilarious!! I reset it after that first excursion, but it confused me for at least 5 minutes to begin with.
I get nostalgic about a lot of things. Cassette tapes. Vinyl records. Encarta encyclopedia. But I have never felt a single ounce of nostaliga for floppy disks. They never had enough space for my files, got damaged by the weather, were inconvenient to carry around, and got erased by the theft detectors at the exits of stores. Good riddance.
I share your sentiment about their function, but their form has a certain appeal.
Hipster t-shirts?
They are utterly unsuitable for user data on two opposing grounds.
1. They are unreliable.
2. It is difficult to deliberately destroy the data. Floppies are technology from the 70s via the 80s, and are the only item most people will ever see for which the Gutmann method of data destruction is actually appropriate. (That typically takes 25min for a 3.5 inch HD disk, by the way.) At least physical destruction is relatively easy if the data is sensitive enough to warrant that.
Repellent things – I hope I never have to deal with them ever again.
I’m still using floppies. Got one in this machine, and a number of older retro systems still have them here. Some modern retro systems like the ZetaSBC relies on them.
I dunno.. just like the experience and have been using them all my life. I find it pretty foreign when someone says “ha! when was the last time you used a floppy seriously ..okay last month?” and half the people at work leave their hands up.
Still works. Still useful. Not brilliant sure. *shrug*
Bet people will be saying this about flash/thumb drives in 20 years and “zOMGF! you don’t just use the RFID chip in your left bum-cheek? it’s got 400tb of storage even on the cheap model!”
:-\
I think this is more a case of modern kids coming through and not being used to using them so they use newer technologies and rag out on the older stuff. Umm? COBOL? Mainframes? .. still there. Growing slowly.
Everything old is new again and quaint :>
…in healthcare. Doctors subscribe to medical information about their patients, and this is distributed using floppies. In 2015. There is a secure network for medical info, but a lot of doctors still hang on to their DOS-based systems.
https://gundersen.net/functional-floppy-disks-in-2015/
Many medical diagnostic instruments are still using them too – the development cycle is so slow in that sector that instruments running on 486s are only now being replaced. I work with a number of such systems, where software updates are still distributed by floppy.
Well, at least nobody’s able to hack into it remotely since there’s nothing to connect its 10 Base 2 NIC to…
At home I also use floppies occasionally, mostly for things like reinstalling an Amiga hard drive or similar tasks. Glad to see the back of them in mainstream use, but I don’t mind their occasional use in the specialist or hobbyist worlds.
To be fair, there’s a national network for doctors and pharmacies that lets you pick up your prescriptions anywhere in the country without showing as much as a paper slip.
“New” technology in this case would be a shitty implementation of the tty in javascript, using a billion classes and frameworks in a giant clusterfucked attempt to make js do yet something else it was never intended to do.
All hosted on a one.com account.
Welcome to cloudtty(tm)
PS: Don’t forget to patch the thing every other goddamn tuesday.
Yeah, some Hobby OS devs still use 1.44MB floppy disks for testing on real hardware.
Edited 2015-09-29 07:06 UTC
Really ? Even ghetto dumpster PCs can boot from USB. Boot loader development is not kernel development.
Edited 2015-09-29 07:58 UTC
Yeah, really. Some like their OS to run on computers that don’t have USB.
I prefer “old-fashioned” ATMs with buttons on the side of the screen rather than touch-screens. ATM touch-screens are infuriatingly imprecise, being built more for durability and cheapness, and they still have keypads for PIN code entry only.
“Tactile feedback.”
Touch screens, touch pads, and squishy keyboards suck.
Legacy doesnt mean things dont function, there are a lot of applications that can now be easily ran on more energy efficient systems. But the fact is that if you purchased a machine for 10k and it works, whats the incentive to upgrade.i have been forced to replace a windows system with bad capacitors into a new virtual machine enviroment. The provider charges $280 for the motherboard plus install, to replace a motherboard with another motherboard with faulty capacitors. With some major downtime. The problem is not that the system wont run in windows xp or even windows 7, the problem is vendors implement drm into the systems, Which i understand. They also dont offer any end user support, I got in touch with a Russian representative of that company, he provided install cds. In the ends I had the system running on a virtual machine and all the sensors working for a system build of $190, with 8x the ram, about 4x the processing power, good capacitors, more power efficient and the manufacturer still performs calibrations and updates on the virtual machines.
Edited 2015-09-29 14:33 UTC
I could be mistaken, as I’m not an expert in this field having never used a real terminal in the last 20 years or so, but I thought things like the Mini Com TTY were also used by the deaf to place phone calls. Or am I confusing two different things with similar names? I used to hear about them from my friends mom who had them available for loan at the library.
Many commenters here have hit the nail on the head: There are some situations where it’s just too expensive to replace the piece of equipment that still writes to the floppy.
I do IT work in a high-end physics research institution. We have three Nobel Prizes to our building (hoping for a fourth next Tuesday!) and a number of MacArthur Fellows. We’re reasonably well funded. We do have a lot of modern equipment, but as an institute that’s been around since the 60s, we also have a lot of old equipment that Still Just Works.
We have a half-dozen CNC machines that rely on floppy drives and 486s to boot. It’s a $20k+ piece of equipment that’s fails for want of a diskette. We’ve started replacing the floppy drives with floppy emulators, which has worked pretty well.
Worse, we have network analyzers and oscilliscopes that can cost quite a bit whose floppy drives can’t be replaced. The last network analyzer we bought was upwards of $30k for a refurb, so if we can just buy some floppy diskettes and keep using the old one, we absolutely will.
I also tend to buy a few USB to Floppy drives to pass around when someone needs to read a disk. I maintain a collection of floppy drives and at least one computer that can boot up and read a floppy to copy data to USB for people. I’ve even got a stash of LS120 drives and Zip drives, though no-one’s asked me for those in a while.
I really dislike floppies. As others have mentioned, they go corrupt too easily. However, we still have quite a use for them around here, and will for the foreseeable future.
I’ve also got a retro gaming machine at home to run DOS games, but I haven’t fired it up in a while.
Wait! You got into an accident in Lebanon, NH… and dealt with a NH State Trooper… but you bought a Vermont baseball cap to commemorate the occasion?
How odd.
Fred
This should explain it
.
http://s8.postimg.org/4lyjjxytf/Capture.png
As many do, I got nostalgic, thinking about the old days.
Then I started thinking about maybe building computer, some 8 Bit — Z80, 6502, etc.
At first I figured my system would be simple, essentially computer with a serial port, like an old CP/M system.
So, I started researching components, looking at schematics, dug out Ciarcia’s old book. And then I got to the floppy drive.
Well, that takes a Floppy Drive Controller. I’m no Wozniak that can hack up a floppy controller from scratch. Turns out that FDCs are actually kind of hard to hunt down. Same with disk drives, and even disks. I’m sure I could salvage them off of eBay. (What can’t you salvage from eBay)
But I started looking that part and thinking the whole problem through. Can I use a Flash Drive? IDE is actually easier than an FDC.
Then you start looking for IDE interfaces, and folks sell them on FPGAs, etc., etc. And eventually you learn “I can get a Z80 compatible micro-controller that does everything, and even has it’s own Flash storage”. It’s all on a single chip! RAM/ROM/Flash/I/O ports, etc. etc. Runs at a silly MHz (vs 2 or 4Mhz).
But then, in the end, all I’m doing is connecting one of these things to a battery and a serial cable. Well, that seem kind of pointless.
Unfortunately, it made the entire prospect “mostly pointless”.
So, I shelved it completely. Instead, I wrote a simulator and an assembler. That was a fun 2 weeks Christmas vacation. That scratched the itch.
But it if wasn’t for the Floppy, I may have gone hardware on the entire thing.
The article claims that floppy disks are reliable and that is why the US department of defense continues to use them in their NUCLEAR SILOS. WTF! floppy disk are anything but reliable. They become corrupt just sitting around. It is so irresponsible of the US to keep using floppies in such critical systems.
Floppies seem to have gotten less reliable over time, as the major manufacturers stopped producing them you can generally only get extremely poor quality floppies these days…
Couple this with the fact that most floppy drives are old and suffering from signs of wear causing them to go out of alignment etc.
I had several Amigas and thousands of floppies which i made heavy use of (my earlier amigas didnt have hard drives), i very rarely suffered any corruption. Many of those floppies i still have, and the ones i’ve tried recently still seem to work.
I wonder if the old industrial machines for producing floppy disks… require a floppy disk to run.
And why hasn’t floppydisks.com bought one yet?