Floppy disks- anyone still use them?

studentphil

Acorn and BBC computers are the oldest ones I remember.

tawnyowls

My first PC was a Commodore 64, which cost 330 quid - my brother and I saved up for over a year for it. My 64MB flash drive cost about (100 times the good old C64's memory of, yes, 64Kb) cost around a tenner.

Shame other things haven't gone down as much in price, eh?

esuhl

I couldn't live without floppies as boot disks. Creating bootable CDs is more hassle, particularly with old PCs that don't read RW CDs.

I remember 5 1/4" disks clearly... anyone remember the 8" WANG variety?

Aaah.. I remember the days: http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

Louisepp

I had a vic 20 I learnt 'basic' cos that was the way to go

I also had prestel which was weird. This was before I had heard of the internet. Remember those days?

Unfortunately people were rarely on the other end and I don't ever remember talking to them. I could get information from it though and even booked a hotel room once via it. Sadly, the hotel didn't get the booking as though they had set up the factility, they never checked it as nobody ever used it.

Still....ended up getting a free nights board and meals

Right. Floppies. Use them all the time in my job. I'm a musician and my digial piano come orchestra still uses floppies, so I have to on the computer.

My latest comp didn't have a floppy drive. Came via insurance claim and I never thought to question. Ended having to get a removable one and swap it over with my CD drive when I need it. Bloomin' nuisance.

Fifer

esuhl wrote:

I remember 5 1/4" disks clearly... anyone remember the 8" WANG variety?

It was actually IBM who introduced the 8" floppy (but Wang adopted them). A 1MB dual sided version was developed by Burroughs in their Glenrothes, Fife plant and the same team developed a 5 1/4" version but Burroughs corporate management decided it would be "too inexpensive" to make enough money, and shelved the program. Doh!

Many of the Burroughs team went on to work for Scottish hard disk pioneers Rodime.

Need_More_Money_2

I had a vic20 with a huge 3.5k of memory. Later upgraded to an enormous 16k. Hardly anyone could write programs to fit into 3.5k of memory anymore

studentphil

How much is a Floppy these days?

It must work out a lot more per KB than a Flash pen.

studentphil

I have one floppy these days from my 1993 PC- the forst PC I had aged 7

studentphil

studentphil wrote:

How much is a Floppy these days?

It must work out a lot more per KB than a Flash pen.

About 5 quid for 10 (14.4 MB) and I got a pen drive ages ago 128 MB for 8 quid- so disks are just not money saving.

I bet you can not even go around to any large firm's IT dept and get the old floppies they were going to bin for free as they are hardly used now.

Omertron

studentphil wrote:

I bet you can not even go around to any large firm's IT dept and get the old floppies they were going to bin for free as they are hardly used now.

I bet that there is no IT department out there that still uses floppy disks at all... Out IT department has rebuild disks for all PC/laptops should they need to reformat and install them.

I've recently copied all my mum's floppy disks onto a 128Mb USB drive that I got free from a conference (also backed them up to a CD) so she could throw the floppy disks away.