The Floppy is Dead! Long Live the Floppy!

kingthr

The death of the floppy been a long time coming. Some of us have forgone the floppy drive many moons ago, only to resurrect it from the bottom of the draw for drivers during an XP install. Now that Vista (and virtually every other OS available) can install third party drivers from other sources like a USB memory stick, it's finally hammered the last nail in the coffin of the floppy disk.
It seems 1.44MB became too small some 10 years ago when the iMac decided to negate it, then in 2003 Dell stopped shipping the drives in its high end machines. Component retailers have been still selling them for those that still required replacement drives and disks, however PC-World has just revealed that as soon as it's sold its current lot of floppy drives and disks it won't be restocking.
Do you miss the classic format? Remember when you could buy whole games on the 1.44MB disks? Or are you glad these things have finally bit the dust and maybe we can save ourselves some case, motherboard and shelf space in future?
Further floppy standards have also been eroded: whilst CD drives based their speed ratings on the "150Kb/s" floppy disk standard, the DVD revolution changed this basing the "x" rating on how long it took to read/write a disk (1x on CDR took the same length of time as 1x DVDR, but 1x DVDR = 1.4MB/second).
Incidentally, the save icon in many programs like Microsoft Word for example, is still an image of the floppy disk, so the homage will continue for many years yet to come.


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