What's a floppy?

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Shakey

Shakey

I still get floppies from people at work. They're cheap and disposable. I never really used Sony floppies though, the only ones I remember are Imation or IBM.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

That's it, then. Time to migrate everything.
Biggest problem I foresee is trying to reflash BIOS code on my older machines.

--Patrick
 
M

Matt²

can older machines (how old are we talking about?) be made to see it from a cd at least?
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Nope. A lot of those old BIOS writers can't run from CD, either because they try to write to the boot device or because the BIOS itself doesn't support booting from CD.

--Patrick
 
M

Matt²

huh.. cause the infamous motherboard I was working on last week was able to run off a cd, but then again, it's a much newer motherboard. It's also supposed to be able to run them off the hard drive and a usb drive.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
If I answered the OP question the way I wanted to initially I'd have to move this to the NSFW area.
 
drawn_inward

drawn_inward

I thought they stopped making these at least 5 years ago. Who are using these things? Are they being used outside the US or something? I haven't even seen a box for sell in probably 10 years. I did find a dusty box of 5.25" discs at a small town grocery store. I think I should have bought them just for the historical value.

I threw out all of my 3.5s last time I moved.
 
M

Matt²

I've usually taken them out of systems because I just hate hearing the damn "BRRRRRRRT!" they make when Windows tries to access them - even if it shouldn't be. :p .. Case in point, the bench computer behind me I put a floppy drive in just to test a couple things.. it annoys the crap out of me. Really at the moment it's just a hole filler. ;)
 
Hylian

Hylian

I remember when I was a kid thinking how much crap you could fit on a floppy drive. Of course just a few months ago I was transferring some files onto my flash drive and I noticed that I didn't have enough space so I went in to delete some extra files to make room for the new stuff and it donned on me I was mad because I had to delete about 100mb of data and yet if I was using floppies I would have to scrounge up over 70 floppies to fit that little bit of useless data. That kinda put it into perspective (but not enough to stop me from going out and buying another USB flash drive)
 
C

Chibibar

lol. Sadly, my district still have 3.5 floppy drives on their machines. FINALLY the latest pre-approve list remove the floppy.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
you know, 2mb of storage still is a ton of space depending on what you are looking at. I can fit ridiculously large data files on 2mb. if I recall correctly and entire AFM software package (nanoscope DI) still fits on a floppy.

I say keep 'em
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Flap it about a bit to loosen it up, then insert it again.
You might need to run your fingers around the inside edge of the hole to get it going.

(I could go on, but I won't)

--Patrick
 
M

Matt²

PatrThom said:
Flap it about a bit to loosen it up, then insert it again.
You might need to run your fingers around the inside edge of the hole to get it going.

(I could go on, but I won't)

--Patrick
Click to expand...
then it's a South African "stiffie" ..but we shan't dwell on that!
 
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