Sony Killing Off Floppy Disk Production in 2011

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ksampanna

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I remember the first floppy I ever used was for gaming - Dave 2.
Still remember the drill : Insert diskette --> Open Command Prompt --> cd davedave
These little bastards sure deserve a 12 gun salute & a minute of silence.
Rest in Peace my dear friends.
 

magicandy

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What about Verbatim and Memorex floppies which you can still find around brick and mortar stores in the US? Are those also made by Sony but just re-branded?
 

vsgm

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does ppl have floppy drives in computers now? My mainboard don't even have a floppy drive connector :(
 

gbismack

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I had to flash a RAID card BIOS using a floppy drive a couple months back. It took me 2 weeks to locate a working disk and a working drive to put the files on it!
 

vsgm

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[citation][nom]gbismack[/nom]I had to flash a RAID card BIOS using a floppy drive a couple months back. It took me 2 weeks to locate a working disk and a working drive to put the files on it![/citation]

if u have windows 7 u could have used a USB Flash drive :)
 

pluripotent

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In high school I bought a hole puncher for single sided 3.5" disks which turned them into two sided disks and you only needed to buy the cheaper ones.

Also, there was some kind of formatting that I remember doing that make them several kilobytes larger...I think the standard was like 1.44 megs or something, and if you formatted them this special way, you'd get like 1.45 or 1.5 or something...can't remember.

And if you defraged them you could squeeze a few more files on them. But you were still always running out of space, so you had to jot done the blank space available on them and the smallest file size, and if you could find a file that would fit in the blank space of another disk, you just freed up several more kilobytes!

So you had to have boxes of these things to be able to store anything...but they were soooo much better than 5.25" disks.

Thank god computers have advanced beyond this. I now have an old 4 gig USB drive that is probably larger then the combined size of all the 3.5" disks I ever owned.
 

loomis86

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Floppies??

gosh, I switched over to zip disks ages ago, lol. Actually though, I do remember a time when nearly every computer had a zip drive in it. Boy did they blow it. Zip disks coulda killed off rewritable CDs if they had their act together. And I think I remember a couple different versions of high capacity floppy disks that should've had potential, too, if someone had been marketing them correctly.
 

N.Broekhuijsen

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12 million * 1.44 mb = 17,280 GB.... Not all that much considering it involves keeping a part or entire factory operational... and obviously a much higher cost per MB than hard drives
 
[citation][nom]loomis86[/nom]Floppies??gosh, I switched over to zip disks ages ago, lol. Actually though, I do remember a time when nearly every computer had a zip drive in it. Boy did they blow it. Zip disks coulda killed off rewritable CDs if they had their act together. And I think I remember a couple different versions of high capacity floppy disks that should've had potential, too, if someone had been marketing them correctly.[/citation]

I meant to comment on this. Problem with Zip disks is you needed a Zip drive, CD-ROM drives were much more popular to be found espically since then had been used in the recording industry. Zip disks also had reliabilty issues compared to CD's
 

SlickyFats

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Haha. I am currently working (at work) on a machine that has Windows XP with a DVD reader/Cd Burner a 3.5" drive AND a 5.25" drive. We use the 5.25 and 3.5 way more than we do CDs. Sucks for my boss. Ouch actually sucks for me. He is 68 and will more likely close than update.
 

hellwig

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[citation][nom]Snipergod87[/nom]I still use flopies on occasion mostly if I have to install XP with SATA or RAID drivers.[/citation]

Same here. I have more machines than I care to buy Win 7 for (and I just completely skipped Vista). I keep XP on my older machines because the licenses are still good. Heck, I had to insert a floppy just this past weekend to create a backup of the harddrive.

I don't use floppies to move files around anymore, USB thumbdrives are far superioir, but I'll always keep some floppies around, even if they just collect dust. You never know when you might need one in the future. Heck, I might even still have some 5.25"s lying around somewhere.
 
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