Farewell to the floppy disk

[Harrison]

I also noticed how no one commented on me saying about how disks enable me to keep electronic copies of work along with paper copies because of their very thin size.

CD steve? They are even thinner than a floppy disk and have no moving parts! Also extremely cheap, and you can guarantee more computers these days will have a drive able to read a CD than a floppy disk.

How many years ago did Apple discard floppy drives from their systems? Thought when Apple did that you would have been convinced the floppy disk was dead.

[AlexJ]

I think they don;t have much choice at school but to have floppy drives.

In my last year of school they replaced most of the PC's, and this time opted for no floppy disk drives on them. Speaking to the technician, he said that too many people's work had been lost on floppy disks going corrupt and that flash drives were cheap enough now for anyone to afford. Also he said their home computer didn't have USB then it would likely be old enough for it's software to not be fully compatible with Office 2003 etc. causing problems.

[Submeg]

My lecturers would then argue with me, I would hit them over the head with the 100 floppies sitting on their desk and then I would go to jail....a lose lose situation if you ask me

[Harrison]

The argument over the cost of flash drives is now not possible as you can buy a 1GB USB pen drive for under £5. A pack of floppy disks would probably cost nearly as much.

[Submeg]

Is that directed at me? My argument with them would be the fact that they are using out of date technology

[Harrison]

It was actually directed at Steve as he was arguing that many students couldn't afford a pen flash drive compared to a pack of floppy disks. And at £4.99 for a 1GB USB unit, and even less for smaller ones (£1.99 for a 256MB unit) it's not really that much of an argument.

Maybe the schools should be giving each student a pen drive when they start, instead of wasting money on free iPods to stay in school for an extra year!

[Stephen Coates]

If you go to my school, you will see that all out new computers lack CDROM drives but still have floppies! (I was actually surprised about this - I thought it would have been the other way round).

And when I was on about cost, I was refering to people using the disks that they already had - not buying new ones.

As for Apple, well, when they made the iMac I was still using my Amiga 500+.

CDs are not conveniant for tempory storage, like taking a small piece of work to school. Because you have to put the file into CD recording software and then record it to CD (which usually takes longer than copying to 10k file to a disk in Windows Explorer.

A CD is only slightly thinner than a disk, and spins round at very high speeds, so you can;t say that they don;t have moving parts and are smaller. Nothing actually moves within the disc, but there are plenty of moving parts in the drive, however there are absolutely no moving parts at all in a flash drive.

[Submeg]

Damn straight!

[Stephen Coates]

It was actually directed at Steve as he was arguing that many students couldn't afford a pen flash drive compared to a pack of floppy disks. And at £4.99 for a 1GB USB unit, and even less for smaller ones (£1.99 for a 256MB unit) it's not really that much of an argument.

Maybe the schools should be giving each student a pen drive when they start, instead of wasting money on free iPods to stay in school for an extra year!

Thats actually a good idea.

I'm sure I would have more use for a flash drive than an iPod.

Although I have aplied to go to college anyway at the end of year 11 so don't need any incentives.

[J T]

At my work people were ordering iPods trough the central system but classifying them as removable hard drive/IT supplies.

Cheerky gits, but worth a try. Needless to say this was stamped out pretty quickly.