Farewell to the floppy disk

[Demon Cleaner]

I only use a floppy drive plugged to my Catweasel, but nothing else. USB sticks are the best alternative to FD imo. You can also store 5kB files without wasting a CD. And it's so fast and errorfree.

[Harrison]

Very true. For small files you cannot beat a USB memory stick these days. And they are so cheap now. You can pick a 2GB one up for under £10.

And don't forget Steve that PC World is the largest high street store in the UK still selling floppy disks until now. They are part of Curries so when PC World stop selling them so does Curries and Argos. This will mean the bulk of high street retailers will have stopped selling them.

This in my view is a good thing as we need to leave behind the old technologies and move forward, instead of holding on to old technologies which just slow down the development of hardware. Look at how long PCI held back graphics card development before AGP and now PCI-E was developed.

[Submeg]

Hmm, its going to piss off my lecturers, they are quite bizzare, they like things only to be on floppy if you have to hand in an assignment. Will have to see if I can stockpile a few.

[Harrison]

Well lecturers are a strange breed unto themselves. Most probably haven't seen the light of day for many years and probably still view the floppy disk as modern and quite revolutionary compared to the tapes they used in their youth.

[J T]

I might urinate on a floppy disk tonight if I can find one.

I haven't used one for ages. For certain things I can see the appeal but they are a bit pony nowadays

[Submeg]

So true Harrison. Maybe I should take one in and burn it in front of them...

[TiredOfLife]

Hmm, can't remember the last time I copied anything onto a floppy.
Very rarely, I might load the odd thing from floppy.

[Stephen Coates]

Flash drives are certainly taking over as they do (as has been mentioned here before) have many advantages.

For alot of my needs though they arn't much good. For example, I can keep a disk which is relvent to a piece of work inside a plastic wallet so it is seperate from and won;t get lost amongst everything else.

They also fit nicely into the folder I take to school everyday, whereas a flash drive wouldn't. (The PCB might do, and the flash chip certainly would, but they tend to have a lot of packaging).

And for some tasks it really doesn;t make any difference which you use. Earlier I had to get a PCB layout from the fileserver in school so stuck a disk in, copied the file to it, gave it to the electronics technician (I think he likes RiscOS), he stuck it in his laptop and made the PCB for me. The file is only about 10k so for tasks like that, who cares whether it is a flash drive or a floppy? (As long as the floppy and drive work of course).

When it comes to portable storage, I much prefer to have a drive int he computer which I can stil a disk into, which is why I like Zip and Jaz as well, but unfortunately not many computers have those drives anymore.

[AlexJ]

Hmm, its going to piss off my lecturers, they are quite bizzare, they like things only to be on floppy if you have to hand in an assignment. Will have to see if I can stockpile a few.

Tell them to get with the times! - all my assignments are submitted via. either email or using this CMS system called Blackboard. It's a pretty good system because all course handouts and ppt slides are on there to download and I can submit assignments without actually going into Uni.