Floppy disks- anyone still use them?

studentphil

i never got one guy who used floppies, he did his work on the network and he was logged onto a networked machine in class but yet he used to always bring his work for that class on floppy and he only had to click into his documents to get the copy he had saved on the network

RoCas

There's NOTHING floppy in our household :rotfl:

Savvy_Sue

studentphil wrote:

I can remember just about when computers used 5 1/2 inch floppy disks- those were the days!!!!!!!!!

:rotfl: You remember NOTHING! DH used to code instructions onto cards, send them off to UCL Computer Department, and wait a week for the 'results' to be posted back to them to see if they'd done it right!

And I've worked with punched cards, paper tape, dedicated rooms for the computer which needed to be kept cool, a dedicated computer OPERATOR who did nothing but keep the thing working (actually seemed to do very little, but it was felt necessary to have one). I remember the first 'Word Processors', which did nothing but that, and remember being shown the astonishing things a Mac could do and saying "But why would I want to do any of that?" :rotfl:

Thanks for the tip about 'removing' the USB stick safely, Ivan. I was telling a colleague that things weren't as sensitive as they used to be, reminded me of having to type 'Park' before shutting a machine down, to 'lock' the hard drive in position in case an accidental knock damaged it ...

BTW, we've still got a Northstar Horizon that boots from 5.5" floppies ... not in use, you understand. I think I could have persuaded DH to donate it to Bletchley Park but they'd already got one. And several Archimedes machines around the house ... I'd still be using one of them if the software had been more interchangeable with MS stuff.

Back on topic: yes I still use floppies. Have just ordered a new computer at work and searched a long time to get one with a floppy drive. Easier than cannibalising an old machine, which I'd have done if I'd had to. Not all our machines have floppy drives and it's a pain in the posterior when I want to move data to a machine that doesn't have one. We've recently bought a couple of pen drives, but one of them has vanished already. Bit like all the biros really ...

studentphil

My Mum used to work with very old computers back in the 60's and 70's but I must admit the only one I have seen is in the computer lab at uni but it is on a glass cupboard.

aurora_borealis_2

IvanOpinion wrote:

a-b, I have heard this and often the problem is that the person does not use the 'remove hardare' option corretly. For performance reasons windows stores loads o stuff in buffers in memory and then writes it out when it gets a bit of free time. The 'remove hardware' option forces windows to flush its buffers. If this is not done then data can be lost including total corruption of the drive.

ivan

Guilty

Thanks for that. I wish I'd known before!

studentphil

Safely remove handware is a must or it can damage your kit.

everythingblogcast

studentphil wrote:

My Mum used to work with very old computers back in the 60's and 70's but I must admit the only one I have seen is in the computer lab at uni but it is on a glass cupboard.

Have you ever played with one of the old computer system with the 5 1/2" floppy. My High School had about 5 of them.

everythingblogcast

buses7675 wrote:

Hi All,

Yeah, I remember our Acorn Electron (still got it somewhere!) took about 10 mins to load any of the three games we had for it, Blockbusters, Bulls Eye or Overdrive! - Get a tape error and you'd have to start all over again!

Another problem with floppy disks too, especially if you are trying to copy photos is that, as well as being slow, some digital cameras take pics so detailed that any single image is over 1.44MB, so wouldn't even fit on one disk! Also you are far less likely to get a disk error on a USB flash pen drive, like you are with a floppy!

Pen Drives are also good for recycling, as they last longer (in theory forever?), you can use them again and again and as you can get more on a single disk they are smaller too and use less raw materials for the data storage - kind of!

Cheers

Steve

Steve and everyone else, you do know that Pen Drive/Flash keys/USB keys etc are made in similer concept to the Black Box on an airplane.

Savvy_Sue

Janepig wrote:

Did you know that in America and (I think) Australia floppy disks are called "stiffies". DH was on a training course run by an American afew years ago and nearly died when the trainer asked "has anyone got a stiffie"!!!!! Just as well they're not in use as much now.

The Australian equivalent of Sellotape is Durex ... so a friend whose nickname was Kinky reported, after he'd worked in a bookshop with an Australian, who'd once called across the shop floor "Hey Kinky, sling us the Durex!" :rotfl:

studentphil

everythingblogcast wrote:

Have you ever played with one of the old computer system with the 5 1/2" floppy. My High School had about 5 of them.

Ever so briefly!!! They are interesting if nawt else.