The floppy is dead!

[An t-iasg]

I have an old laptop (9 years old) and the only reason I still have it is because it has a floppy drive. I still have pictures from our Grand Canyon vacation in 2002 to get off floppy disks. I might not care about them if I was planning another trip out there but I probably won't anytime soon. So I'll either get around to transferring them or the memories will be lost. I could fit all the pics on a 1 GB USB drive with lots of room to spare.

Mgamer, I used the "soft" 5 1/4 floppies you were talking about in college in 1988!

 

[HeathB]

Could you try looking for a working drive on e-bay? I'm sure someone somewhere still has a working floppy drive, unless you're talking about those huge floppy disks that were actually, well...floppy. But those went the way of the dinosaur a looong time ago.

 

[HeathB]

even as it goes "dead" i mean i am sure it wont be easy in 5 years but i am sure you can still find a way to get the info off floppies. maybe the true place things to get "lost" are those unpopular media like those jazz drives the author was talking about. maybe one of these flash media that really isnt used much now so will be even harder to find a way to get it off. though there will always be a will there will be a way. there is always those tech people who always seems to have that super old part..... i might even be able to find a 5 1/2 drive around here if not i have a few friends i am sure i can get one.

i just dont see it. again ill point out if you look at them every few years you will know that media iwll be on its last legs. it really isnt too hard to see even for non techy people. more data like that is lost to fires theft losing it or the media breaking down/comp crashing by far.

Ohhh, 5 1/2! Back when floppy disks were actually floppy. I could never get that darn norton commander or dos to load though...

 

[corrado33]

I still have a green USB floppy drive. What a combination! It's like the best of the old. It still works too. It came out about the same time that mac was releasing their colored iMacs, before they had nice flat screens and they became popular. (Think right before OS X was released) The drives were built to match the iMacs. (In color) Still works awesome though.

Oh, and if any of you had macs when you were younger, I found a floppy drive with "After Dark" on it. It was an application that let me choose a lot of cool little screensavers for my mac at the time. I loved it. Wiki entry for it here.

Cool program nonetheless.

 

[HeathB]

Without floppies I'd never have gotten to play Oregon Trail. Hehe, and they thought we were learning things.