anyone have an idea when floppies will die out...

[Guest]

"ur 486 is not going to handle ur 40x burner, or ur zip drives"

Actually they probably could with the right controllers, and drives, but BIOS boot support might be a problem.

 

[mbetea]

ugg! i can't believe zip drives are around still. evil, evil, evil. out of the 3 comps i've ever had, i've never gotten a stable system after hooking one up. tried parallel, internal and usb. actually parallel one worked the best, but was SOOOOOO friggin slow. i remember before i had a burner, used to keep all my backups/apps on zip disks, 16 total. man it took over 2 hours just to transfer stuff :/

Windows XP cd makes a great coaster

 

[Guest]

It seems like we should be able to use any ATAPI (or some other standard) drives, DVD, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, whatever. It's pretty clear the technology has been there for several years now. I'm starting to think it is a M$ conspiracy.

Weird that the USB zip didn't do better than the parallel one. I notice you didn't mention SCSI, they had one of those too didn't they? Maybe the SCSI version was faster.

I wouldn't want a standard based on zip disks though, after all the are still magnetic like a floppy, aren't they. That is one of the main reason I hate floppies, maybe zip disks are better about this, but floppies are so painfully unreliable. I would be afraid of zip disks for fear they could be as bad.

 

[eden]

Most of us are still on Serial for the Keyboard and Mouse ya? Or wait is that another port with another name...
I get confused with Serial and Parallel and PS\2...

--
The other day I heard an explosion from the other side of town.... It was a 486 booting up...

 

[AMD_Man]

hehe, I'm on a USB keyboard and trackball.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[Guest]

ur probly right, zips are just my choice. but are CD-RW's really faster than zips??? I guess a regular internal one would probably be a bit slower, but are u sure USB isn't faster?

<i>It's alive!!! hahahahaha!!!</i>

 

[Guest]

hey everybody, does anyone know wtf this cable is on my 486? it's on the keyboard and it looks like a ps/2 plug xept bigger, and with less pins.. I think? right next to it is my serial mouse

please explain

<i>It's alive!!! hahahahaha!!!</i>

 

[mbetea]

ya they did/do have scsi zip drives. at the time i never thought about getting a scsi card or anything, probably would've worked a lot better...and quicker too! surprisingly the disks themselves were pretty reliable. i don't know how many times i transfered files/formatted disk/etc. and kept going, i think my sis actually still uses the parallel on her comp at school. floppies are terrible in that area. i went through a whole box of 25 sony floppies once, not one disk worked!! least in the 2 comps i had in the house. the joy of cdr's. the only thing i use a floppy for now is when i installed win2000, to load my promise drivers. that's the only floppy i have, other than that i don't mess with it.

Windows XP cd makes a great coaster

 

[AMD_Man]

Yeah, A zip drive generally transfers less than a MB/s. Writting to a CD-RW at 12X is at about 1.75MB/s.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor

 

[Guest]

oh... okay. thanx, I just had a feeling that zips were a helluva lot faster than just 1 MB/s. I use them all the time at uni when I'm using their kick ass connection for downloading stuff (movies, mp3's, etc. warez? oh goodness no! ), and they just seem to be alot faster than that... hmmn

A question for people ou there listening... what do all of u guys do? school? uni? job? bludge off the dole?

<i>It's alive!!! hahahahaha!!!</i>

 

[Guest]

dude... ! none of 25 worked? I don't know what's going on there, but I have personally neva had a floppy fail me.

I've never had IE crash on me either... am I one,lucky sob or what?

<i>It's alive!!! hahahahaha!!!</i>

 

[dhlucke]

I had all my floppies but one fail on me in the last 8 months. That's the only floppy I have now, but since I have everything I need on a CD-RW, and I don't even have a floppy drive in my main computer, I don't need it. I don't even really know where it's at right now either.

Why would your 486 suffer from a lack of serial or floppy support on future motherboards? I'm talking about future computers not older ones. If you want to use your floppy on that 486 that's fine, but if you want to bring home that floppy you'll have to buy a ls-120 or something else imop. I think the world has evolved past the 486. Even schools with their horrible budgets are getting in the Ghz range.

Just my opinion. We can't just worry about backwards compatability forever with computers. They advance too quickly. I hope they get rid of the keyboard and mouse port as well since those can easily be connected using USB. The joystick port can be forgotten as well hopefully.

<font color=red>God</font color=red> <font color=blue>Bless</font color=blue> <font color=red>America!</font color=red>

 

[CALV]

I have floppies in all my pc's, invaluable, what if I wanted to modify a boot disk from dos? maybe to add a new scsi controller or somthing, ok, if you can magically make my older pc's boot from cdrw, then magically allow the driver floppy to be reda from the same device, then ok!
And how about my router/firewall, running freesco, it RUNS from a floppy lol


If they squeeze olives to get olive oil, how do they get baby oil?

 

[eden]

Also it's not like you can make some copying in DOS on CDRWs. The thing is old and barely knows new technology!
DOS loves floppies and always will, the command A:\ is just there waiting. I like DOS, don't you?

--
For the first time, Hookers are hooked on Phonics!!

 

[GhostKat]

Too bad the LS-120 are so hard to find now a days. Can't just pick them up at Best Buy anymore.

For those that may not know, Macintosh computers don't have floppy drives now-a-days. and if you want to boot from a cd-rom, you put it in the drive and then cycle the power and hold down some certain keys. If you want to pass files, you either do it with a USB storage device, e-mail it to people or burn a disk if you got the burner option.

My motherboard can beat up your motherboard!

 

[globe111]

actually serial ports are quite necessary for a LOT of UPS's out there.

XP 1700+ Soltek 75drv2 512 MB Mushkin rated 233 Radeon 7500 Audigy MP3+ Sony 16x10x40

 

[jimmyswimm]

While reading through my "Upgrading and Repairing Pc's" 13th edition book, fine book I tell you what, I was reading about processors and the 16 bit(real mode) to 32 bit(protected mode) processor and how 16 bit OS's were still goin on. Page 67-68 for those of you with the book. Anyway, what Scott Mueller was saying was that the 386, yes the 386, was the first 32 bit processor, but the userbase being stubborn as we sometimes can be didn't like the fact that we had to change software. So, the 386 was backwards compatible with the real mode(16 bit). Thus leaving us with the 16 bit OS's (DOS/Win 3.x). Even now fully 32 bit OS's (Win NT, Win 2000, Unix/Linux) aren't as popular to the mainstream market. Only by Microsoft basically yanking away the support and previous versions that have it has Microsoft accomplished getting away from the public. Although angered a few people believe me I know I worked M$ customer support. Yea yea microsoft support what's that?? haha. I know I've gone off on a rather long tangent but my point is this if it took THAT long to get from 16 bit to FULL 32 bit in terms of taking advantage of it think of what that means for other "legacy" components such as floppy and serial getting taking out.

<b><font color=blue>The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. :lol: