Anyone still using floppies?

[bobdoering]

Bill,

You may send IBM an email and request some of these cards.

Just an idea...

Stijloor.

Think they haven't been 5Sed?

 

[Stijloor]

Think they haven't been 5Sed?

You'd be amazed what companies have stored related to their history.
Also, they may keep a supply for educational/historical purposes.
Never hurt to ask.

Stijloor.

 

[jradford]

I had a friend a few months ago send out a "help me" e-mail. He was looking for someone with a 5.25 drive. I guess they had an older client with information on one of those disks. No help from me, there is not a single 5.25 drive in my building.

I was actually looking into the possibility of a 5.25 drive for USB, I guess those drives do not run on IDE, so they will not support USB? Doing an internet search, there were a couple people posting about how to convert a 5.25 to run on USB ,but it is not straight forward.

 

[Rebecca Bowes - 2010]

No, quit using them years ago.

I just saw an ad online and it made me wonder--is anyone still using these? I guess someone is, or they wouldn't be selling them.

I have a seven-year-old desktop computer that has a 3.5" floppy drive, but it's been a long time since I've used it. The price of this package of 25 is $6.99, and for that price you can buy a flash drive that's much faster, much more convenient, and will hold nearly 30 times as much data as the whole box of floppies.

It's also still possible to buy 5.25" floppies, (and drives) but that might be easier to explain because there are a lot of people who like to mess with old computers.

 

[Bill Pflanz]

For those of you still living in the 70's, there are still lots of 8 track music around but it is much harder to find the players. They can be worth lots of money. I have a 39 year old table top radio with speakers made by Motorola that has radio tubes. It still works fine and I even had a tube replaced in the past. It is amazing how many collectors there are for "old" things.

BTW, thanks for the suggestion, Stijloor. I may email IBM and ask. My brother is a main frame programmer (since 1969) and never kept any of the 1000's of cards that he used.

Bill Pflanz

 

[JaneB]

Achorste, not just flexible plastic sleeves, but early on, floppy disks were very soft flexible disks of thin plastic, encased in sealed paper 'envelopes' to protect them from fingers, dust, etc and also make them stiff enough to enable them to be inserted into drives. This pic is about as close as I could find. The black bit is the protective envelope (often white in reality) and you can see the inner floppy in 2 places where the casing is cut out: around the centre hole, and in the part that the computer read, that large ovoid at 6 o'clock.

The floppy also went into another outer case of stiffer card. You took the floppy out of its case, & inserted it carefully into the drive, keeping fingers clear of the 'read' bits. (Today's floppies are much easier!)

If you were to tear apart their protective envelope, inside was just a very soft, thin plastic disk, so soft and floppy that it just bent over when held in hence the name.

Funny & true story re. floppies (from a friend doing phone computer support).

Some man rang and said he had followed the directions to insert the disk into the disk drive, but it didn't work at all, and now what should he do?

It took her quite some time to discover that when he said he'd followed the directions, that he had interpreted 'remove floppy disk from cover & insert into drive', to mean 'remove the floppy from its outer housing, and then tear open/rip apart the protective paper covering and remove the soft plastic thing. Then push the soft floppy plastic inner part into the drive'.

And even though he'd found it very difficult (not surprisingly!) to get it into the drive, he'd persisted until he'd done so!

 

[Jim Wynne]

Achorste, not just flexible plastic sleeves, but early on, floppy disks were very soft flexible disks of thin plastic, encased in sealed paper 'envelopes' to protect them from fingers, dust, etc and also make them stiff enough to enable them to be inserted into drives. This pic is about as close as I could find. The black bit is the protective envelope (often white in reality) and you can see the inner floppy in 2 places where the casing is cut out: around the centre hole, and in the part that the computer read, that large ovoid at 6 o'clock.

The floppy also went into another outer case of stiffer card. You took the floppy out of its case, & inserted it carefully into the drive, keeping fingers clear of the 'read' bits. (Today's floppies are much easier!)

If you were to tear apart their protective envelope, inside was just a very soft, thin plastic disk, so soft and floppy that it just bent over when held in hence the name.

Funny & true story re. floppies (from a friend doing phone computer support).

Some man rang and said he had followed the directions to insert the disk into the disk drive, but it didn't work at all, and now what should he do?

It took her quite some time to discover that when he said he'd followed the directions, that he had interpreted 'remove floppy disk from cover & insert into drive', to mean 'remove the floppy from its outer housing, and then tear open/rip apart the protective paper covering and remove the soft plastic thing. Then push the soft floppy plastic inner part into the drive'.

And even though he'd found it very difficult (not surprisingly!) to get it into the drive, he'd persisted until he'd done so!

I once spilled coffee or soda on a 5.25" floppy and figured it was a goner. Having nothing to lose, I slit open the outer sleeve and removed the disk inside. I opened another (new) diskette and threw the disk away, saving the outer sleeve. I then proceeded to rinse the disk under warm water and blot it dry. I put into the clean sleeve, taped the edge shut, and put it in the drive. It worked, at least long enough to copy the data off of it.

 

[JaneB]

I once spilled coffee or soda on a 5.25" floppy and figured it was a goner. Having nothing to lose, I slit open the outer sleeve and removed the disk inside. I opened another (new) diskette and threw the disk away, saving the outer sleeve. I then proceeded to rinse the disk under warm water and blot it dry. I put into the clean sleeve, taped the edge shut, and put it in the drive. It worked, at least long enough to copy the data off of it.

Heh, heh. Yes I had to do something similar once too - them new non-floppy but so-called 'floppies' just aren't the same by a long chalk! (And a jolly good thing too.)

 

[Rinascimento]

I rarely use them now but have some just in case

• I want to reinstall my MSProject upgrade and need the first disk of the old version to show that I am really upgrading
• Sometimes I use my old Ghost and Partion Manager recovery disks
• I have my Finereader Floppy disk that is required to activate the full capabilities of the software on the CDROM.

I also remember using 100k (or 120K) SS 8 inch floppies on a CP/M OS computer. I am sure they would be hard to find now.

 

[Pancho]

Coincidentally, I finally threw out my last shoebox of floppies about 2 weeks ago while spring cleaning the server room.

Still kept some Zip disks around and a single Zip drive. Those were hot at the turn of the century. (I luv to say that! )