I use floppies to transfer the day’s writing from my laptop to my desktop. I’m another one with the USB port in the back of the computer, which is a pain to get to. I could hook the laptop up to the house network, but half the time the connection doesn’t work right, and it takes time to hook it up, power up, and then transfer. With a floppy I just pull it out of the bag and stick it in the drive.
I do have a CD burner on my desktop, but I don’t see the point in burning a CD for yesterday’s draft so that I can work on it on my laptop today. And I don’t have a burner on my laptop. The floppy is re-usable, and since I’ve already got floppy drives on my computer and floppies are cheap, it’s just easier.
My boss doesn’t have his own computer, he uses his girlfriend’s and uses the ones at the library to get online. He doesn’t email me large files, nor can he download large files if he isn’t at his girlfriend’s house. He doesn’t know thing one about CD burning, and any time he has to give me a file it’s on a floppy.
You can pretty much count on everyone having a floppy drive. Until something else is as ubiquitous as floppy drives, they will and should stick around.
Yep, still use them. Until every computer in the world (or at least that I come in contact with) has super-fast internet connections I will still use them.
My computer at home is a doll, she does exactly what I want her to do, and she doesn’t have internet, and I don’t want to replace her just so that I can have internet at home, which I don’t want. I have no problem with using floppies !
So the floppies carry stuff back and forth from my friend at home to other friends, like this one, with Internet connections.
When I put together my PC last year to replace an ancient dusty box, I nearly didn’t bother with a floppy, but the drive was so damn cheap (even in black), that I thought “why not?”, I’ve used it twice- nothing I couldn’t have worked round anyway, but it saved time.
On my old box I probably used the floppy once a year - but it got me out of shit! (I also got a PS2 keyboard for the new PC, tho I use USB for mouse and KB, it cost £2.98 I think, and has de-pained BIOS updates etc enormously)
[Old Geezer Mode] Once upon a time, I won a competition, the prize was a pair of floppy drives and a controller - it was worth more than the computer I had (a Sinclair QL !) [/Old Geezer Mode]
Yes, I do, sometimes I have to use one to install a cd drive for example… Or a HD.
But it seems people are changing into USB Pen drives instead of floppys. But XP reads my digital camera media as a small HD, so I use that instead sometimes.
Yup. Need 'em to bring work to school and back. Mostly use CDs for PP presentations and the like, but if we’re working on an essay or I’m going to head to the library in my free period, I need the floppy.
Tell me I’m not the only one who mentally giggled at the subject line…
I use them occasionally, mostly for boot purposes or for transferring small files to other computers. (Mostly at work: the e-mail server is prone to hiccuping at the worst possible times, and my work computer occasionally gets all screwed up as to how to attach files to e-mails.)
I got rid of the last of my floppies when I discovered 80mm CD-RWs. Just as portable, bootable, re-writable, and a whole lot bigger. Combine that with some SD cards and an acceptable pervasivness of high speed Internet access, and I’ve completely abandonded those dirty little near-squares of plastic.
I’ve been trying to get my users (yes, I am an evil IT person) to stop using floppies for several years now. The replacement option is a USB flash memory stick. Most people seem to like them much better and I carry my entire software library on 2 of them. No need for CDs or floppies.
When I was in school I used floppies for my assignments, because the machines in the labs didn’t have CD burners and I didn’t trust my internet provider at the time enough to support a constant connection.
If I were to build myself a new computer today, I probably wouldn’t include a floppy drive. I’d go for the USB memory sticks (or keychains, or whatever they are now) because they have a larger capacity while taking less physical space in my pocket.
Then again, a floppy drive is, what, five bucks? Why not throw one in there just in case I want to play Galleons of Glory for the first time in years?
I still have a floppy drive. Not only that, I can actually boot from it, and I believe mine is the last Mac made that can boot from a floppy. (It’s a WallStreet PowerBook and it had an optional floppy drive expansion bay module, and can boot from it. Subsequent Macs could use USB floppy drives but you can’t boot from those). For you non-Mac folks or younger Mac folks who don’t know, a Mac boots all the way to GUI when it boots from a floppy. The funny thing is that in order to shoehorn an OS onto 1.4 MB of disk space they Apple used a hacked version of System 7 even though they call it 8 (you can tell from the graphic elements). There’s something surreal about seeing those 1989-vintage menus and window widgets on a machine that can also boot MacOS X.
Use them? Maybe once every 18-24 months I’ll have some reason to rummage through my old floppies or I’ll just be in a retro-geeky mood. Mostly they are as dead as 5.25" floppies as far as I’m concerned.
Less see?
Sony Mavica camera, our second one, reconditioned of course.
Lots of old stuff from years gone past.
Dual 3.5 floppy drives in my desktop and used often.
Rebuild old puters for those that can’t aford new. (give aways )
Carry book marks to other puters when traveling.
Boot disk.
Old computer standing by to keep jonesing to minium if main puter gets cranky. used to update bookmarks …
Travel a lot and transfere thj9ngs back and forth to laptop when I can’t access my inhouse network.
I like to shuffle like a deck of cards.
Cheap to mail to friends.I know manny peoples who are still at 28.8 and 166 hz with 1.0 Gig drives on 75hz MB’s. They don’t do CD’s.
Puter to puter incompatability issues with home burned CD’s.
I’m actually starting to feel like Brent Sierra in my office. While he’s the only diehard Mac user there, I’m the only oen who uses floppy disks. When my drive utterly failed this week and I went to our IMO for help, she continually asked my why I was even using the thing.
I have 'em on all 3 (!) of my home PC’s, and I’m too cheap to get a LAN. So, whenever I want to x-fer between computers, which is rarely, and i KNOW the data will be smaller than a floppy, I use that. If it may be bigger, I use a digital camera, even though it uses up battery power. Don’t want to bother with spanning floppies.
The last time I needed to use the one working floppy drive I had to make a boot disk, I discovered that it was full of spiders. One big black momma spider and tons of wee little baby spiders. I started spraying them with canned air (since another poster on another thread pointed out that it killed insects) and when the big momma spider died and rolled over, I found myself looking at a very pretty red hourglass figure on her belly.
I threw that drive out.
I haven’t used floppies since. Not because they’re infested with black widows, but mostly because I either move things around on the network, or I’m handling files that are so big (2+ gigs) that the only effective way to do it is to transfer to a firewire hard disk and then hook that disk to the other machine, like an 80 gig keychain drive.
Most of the manuscripts we get in from the ed offices still come in on floppies. In the publishing world floppies are as common as dust. We actually used to box them up and send them for recycling to a place that charged by the pound to recycle them/take them off our hands.
I do. It takes about a second to load something onto floppy disk, and a second to load it onto another computer. They are handy for schoolwork and stuff.
