Why I love Floppy Disks
Floppies have what we now consider very limited storage capacities, the hgihest I know of being the 2.88 MF-2DD floppes. and the lowest being 160k 8 inch floppies.
Since their capacity is low, they aren't useful for modern day things. However, like many of use, if you use older systems you'll find floppies are your best friend when they and their respective drives work.
The limited capacity isn't that bad considering file sizes back in the day, and the kicker with floppies is that unlike CD's floppies can be easily formatted and reused providing there's no errors.
his of course is a great thing, to be able to reuse, time and time again, and not have to keep on buying CD's which are getting more and more expensive.
Floppies, especially standard 1.44mb ones are pretty cheap, considering a local seller is selling for $0.15 each.
Since their capacity is low, they aren't useful for modern day things. However, like many of use, if you use older systems you'll find floppies are your best friend when they and their respective drives work.
The limited capacity isn't that bad considering file sizes back in the day, and the kicker with floppies is that unlike CD's floppies can be easily formatted and reused providing there's no errors.
his of course is a great thing, to be able to reuse, time and time again, and not have to keep on buying CD's which are getting more and more expensive.
Floppies, especially standard 1.44mb ones are pretty cheap, considering a local seller is selling for $0.15 each.
Comments
Alas, the problem was, good luck getting any of this on a PC. SCSI was rare outside of proto-HEDT, parallel was dog slow and required weird drivers and wasn't bootable, and installing an ISA card just for a disk would be a PITA. So this basically condemned the PC to floppy drives until USB mass storage took off. ATAPI was a thing, but non-floppy mediums didn't take off in the west due to the previously mentioned reasons. (I note Macs had SCSI standard, and MO just worked, but they lacked the market share to influence the numbers. Mac SCSI was also slow without DMA.)
Good riddance to the floppy disk. Slow, little space, unreliable.
* The last year (1999) I have records for indicate that Iomega Zip sold 9.5 million units while all the flopticals combined for a mere 3.2 million; CD-ROM and DVD writers sold 6 million; MO accounted for 1.8 million; Castlewood Orb and Iomega Jaz carried the limping rigid disk market to a mere 1.2 million. Normal 3.5" floppy drives were 113 million with another 44,000 5.25" and 8" drives.
I love the floppy disk drive. There was something very satisfying to the locking clunk of the 8" RX-02.
So yes, good riddance I say. I'll take a flash drive any day.
Try using a flash drive on systems from before 1995 though.
I'm speaking from the perspective of a person who likes vintage systems.
I prefer Zip disks over the standard floppy. They're much more reliable, faster, and they store a lot more. Great for transferring data back and forth on old systems, or doing backups.
I have no time to baby floppies when using older systems. I'll do the minimum and avoid after that. (Exception: My Mavica.)
That's what I love about old laptops - just grab an adapter and pop in a CF card.
They're pretty much the computer equivalent to the old VHS tapes, one other thing we should all remember
Have you ever tried one of those FlashPath adapters with your Mavica? I see them on eBay once in a while and was wondering how they compare to using regular floppy disks.
As for VHS, I have only one functioning tape in my house (the rest have either been discarded, completely ruined by a VCR, or failed to play at all). It's a recorded TV broadcast of a certain old James Bond movie from sometime in 2005. And the tape actually skips the commercials (it was recorded that way by the VCR).