Sony Killing Off Floppy Disk Production in 2011

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Well, with XP's days behind It, I don't need them for raid anymore 😛

I think I will grab some to keep for such repairs in the future(i still have some, but you never know when it will come in handy).

I remember going to school with like 15-20 of those in a case(and I ALWAYS had at least 3 on me at all times in a little case)....Boy how the world moves along.
 
Buy as many as you can...the price will go up as they grow in scarcity - kind of like 2 inch tape in recording studios. Technicians will love these because they can assist in repairs.
 
I still use them for XP RAID setups, too. And, also to reflash BIOSes on older mobos.

Also, those Digital Mavicas are still used often by people in my field, where we need to upload 640X480 pictures with small file sizes. My company hasn't used them in yearrrrs. We just snap them with a current digicam and resize them. But, I do know of several old-timers still in the field with them. I bet they won't find out about this news until it's too late.
 
[citation][nom]TwoDigital[/nom]That's because Win95 doesn't support USB.[/citation] Er...dude, Windows 95 supported USB since, like, 1996. Nobody ever wrote a generic USB STORAGE driver for Windows 95, and each STORAGE device required its own driver.

End of story. All your USB peripherals worked in 95 so long as you had a 95 driver.
 
But it doesn't make sense to me to kill off a business that sells 12 million units a year. I think a better time to stop producing floppy drives would be when people no longer buy them.
 
[citation][nom]Crashman[/nom]Er...dude, Windows 95 supported USB since, like, 1996. Nobody ever wrote a generic USB STORAGE driver for Windows 95, and each STORAGE device required its own driver.End of story. All your USB peripherals worked in 95 so long as you had a 95 driver.[/citation]

I'm having to stretch my memory, but I recall Windows 95 original never supported USB. You had to install something like Windows 95a (it was a separate version or an update...don't remember) which had shaky beta-like support for USB stuff. I upgraded to 98 because it natively supported USB.
 
[citation][nom]drowned[/nom]I'm having to stretch my memory, but I recall Windows 95 original never supported USB. You had to install something like Windows 95a (it was a separate version or an update...don't remember) which had shaky beta-like support for USB stuff. I upgraded to 98 because it natively supported USB.[/citation]
I did say 1996 for a reason. You could add the USB patch, I think I still have it in a folder somewhere.
 
[citation][nom]vsgm[/nom]if u have windows 7 u could have used a USB Flash drive[/citation]
Well, yes, you could. But I have a USB floppy drive and a library of about two dozen floppies with drivers for installations and boots for various utilities and backup software. Two dozen thumb drives cost more than a USB floppy drive and two dozen floppies. The floppy disks are easier to label than a thumb drive, too.

I'm waiting for someone to come out with a case for thumb drives, like the ones that I have for my working floppies and CDs.

What I'll probably do is burn all of the boot floppies to boot CDs. Any machine nowadays can boot from a CD drive (if it has one). For the driver installations, I'll probably burn images to another CD and copy the one that I need at the moment to a flash drive. So there are certainly ways to work around the floppy. But the industry will need to change practices to accommodate this.

Instead of "insert floppy disk for drivers," what if the software prompted for a subdirectory? Then I could have all my drivers on one USB key.
 
When I was in college, I used to carry with me a 1.44MB Floppy. I am now amazed that it could store all of this:

- My OS
- My Apps
+ Word Processor (can't remember which one!)
+ Pascal compiler
+ Simulation (industrial engineering stuff)
and My DATA too!

I just hope present software could be as efficient as that one... in terms of storage!
 
To me, the floppy died the day I realized most BIOSes supported booting on a USB drive. Why boot on a floppy to flash a BIOS when you can boot on a USB drive that have the flash utility, the BIOS image, a bootable OS, an OS image and some pr0n!
 
[citation][nom]Jan286[/nom]I think alot of them still get used for windows xp setups.[/citation]

Yeah you still need them for raid setups.
 
I only used floppies at home in the late 90's, and in school for a couple more years (why upgrade to CD drives when we can force our students to have a five boxes full of floppies?).

I won't miss them.
 
[citation][nom]skykaptain[/nom]Don't copy that floppy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI[/citation]

LOL that rapper looks a lot like Tay Zonday!!!

they're pretty much the same in the fact that they both fail! 😛
 
[citation][nom]quantum mask[/nom]Anyone remember trying to PkZip 50MB of files across several disks? From a DOS prompt?cpkzip cfiles/*.* a[/citation]

Nah... arj a -va :)
 
The only proven backup method that has withstood the test of time is paper or papyrus.
 
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