04-26-2010, 01:37 PM

According to this article the floppy disk will not longer be made from next year.
Sony to end floppy disk production | Storage & Backup | Macworld
I'm amazed they are still being made now.

And you know the weird part about this story? NASA still wants floppies. And is having trouble finding some.
BBC News | SCI/TECH | Nasa searches web for shuttle parts

The shuttle operators also need eight-inch floppy disk drives that went out of fashion nearly 20 years ago, and have long since been replaced by much smaller disk drives and CD-Roms.

Good luck NASA as those large floppies are even rarer then the hard smaller ones.

04-26-2010, 01:44 PM

I thought they stopped production of them years ago .

04-26-2010, 01:56 PM

Those floppies bring back so many memories. That NASA article was interesting, who would have thought.

04-26-2010, 02:09 PM

Originally Posted by DriftNismo

I thought they stopped production of them years ago .

We still have some at work, although nobody used them.

But get them while you can, especially if you ever think of owning a classic mac (like my SE30).

They will soon be collectors items, especially if NASA snaps up all the supply.

Perhaps everybody should rally round and send NASA a load of USB sticks in the shape of Space Shuttles (now those would be cool)

Update, they already exist

04-26-2010, 02:28 PM

Pretty sure the floppy died May 6, 1998.

04-26-2010, 02:41 PM

You'd be suprised how many System Administrators use them. Especially in a PC environment, doing system rebuilds and using a floppy to load the SATA RAID drivers...

04-26-2010, 04:18 PM

You would also be surprised how many older PCs one runs into. Sometimes the only way to trouble shoot them is boot with a floppy. I see that a lot with senior folks. One reason why I keep a set of floppies around - MS DOS 6.22, Partition Magic boot set, Drive Image, and a trusty boot disk with Norton Utilities on it.

Regards.

04-26-2010, 04:29 PM

Originally Posted by chscag

You would also be surprised how many older PCs one runs into. Sometimes the only way to trouble shoot them is boot with a floppy. I see that a lot with senior folks. One reason why I keep a set of floppies around - MS DOS 6.22, Partition Magic boot set, Drive Image, and a trusty boot disk with Norton Utilities on it.

Regards.

Here too. We often run into systems that need a floppy for one reason or another. I keep a box of them at my desk with different utilities.

04-26-2010, 06:43 PM

If I'm not mistaken wasn't Apple the first computer manufacturer to discontinue the floppy ??

04-26-2010, 07:14 PM

I find it sad that the shuttle program is still using this sort of hardware. Frankly, I think I now understand better why two of them were lost even....

04-26-2010, 07:20 PM

Originally Posted by baggss

I find it sad that the shuttle program is still using this sort of hardware. Frankly, I think I now understand better why two of them were lost even....

I have a buddy of mine who is an engineer at Nasa, He was telling me the inside of the space shuttle looks like something out of the 1980's technology-wise.

04-26-2010, 08:35 PM

I remember reading quite a bit about the shuttle after the Challenger explosion. That comment would fit in with what I was reading. Switching to newer technology is not as simple as swapping out a disk drive in your trusty Mac. When the things were built the process took several years to design/build. At some point the design has to be locked down and further changes cannot be made easily. Meanwhile improvements in technology march on.

I thought I saw something in print once saying that some of the launches that had to be scrubbed had to be because the computer systems/programs were not sophisticated enough to manage upper level winds above certain parameters.

05-02-2010, 11:41 PM

I had Doom on Floppy.

Still remember all the frenzy about the Zip Drive and Iomega stock in the 90's.

05-03-2010, 12:36 AM

Originally Posted by tonyt42

I had Doom on Floppy.

Still remember all the frenzy about the Zip Drive and Iomega stock in the 90's.

lol.... I remember those Iomega 100MB zip disk, They were all the craze back then.

05-04-2010, 09:20 AM

Originally Posted by Slydude

I remember reading quite a bit about the shuttle after the Challenger explosion. That comment would fit in with what I was reading. Switching to newer technology is not as simple as swapping out a disk drive in your trusty Mac. When the things were built the process took several years to design/build. At some point the design has to be locked down and further changes cannot be made easily. Meanwhile improvements in technology march on.

I thought I saw something in print once saying that some of the launches that had to be scrubbed had to be because the computer systems/programs were not sophisticated enough to manage upper level winds above certain parameters.

You're absolutely correct.

But on the flip side of that, until fairly recently, NASA has been slow to adopt newer computing technologies for spaceflight. They also didn't design their systems with much scalability. This was one of the major improvement we would have gotten with Orion. NASA and Intel are now pushing harder to certify newer processors for spaceflight.

Another flipside... one of the biggest delays in SpaceX launching their Falcon9 rocket and Dragon capsule has been due to coding issues...

Oh, and a shout out to a North Louisiana peep..
<--- originally from West Monroe.