Obsolete hardware

[ewx]

[Poll #1139837]

Comments

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

[*] I have a USB floppy drive

[simont]

When I bought my most recent computer (just over a year ago), WoC said they didn't install a floppy drive as standard any more, but offered to put one in for an extra £4. I decided it wasn't worth it, and haven't regretted the decision yet.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I only use floppy drives now on my BBC Micro, which, in turn, I only use for its Hybrid Music System, either for listening to the music (which I'd have sampled digitally and turned into a CD by now if not for this problem (http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/86714.html?thread=371898#t371898), or for using my Music 4000 keyboard, which is the only thing stopping me forgetting altogether how to play the piano or read sheet music).

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

The only thing I put in my floppy disk drive these days is my USB stick, and that's by accident because the slots are close together.

The House contains some 3-400 floppy disks which I "must check out one day to see if there's anything important on them". Hah, yeah, right.

[reddragdiva]

The household FreeBSD server is a Compaq AP400 Professional Workstation, i.e. a workstation built with server components (ECC RAM and all). It doesn't boot from CD, so reinstallation requires finding a floppy and installing bootables on it.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

I have a gizmo for reading many different types of memory card where my floppy disk drive should be. I don't use it; I plug my cameras in via USB.

[pm215]

You forgot [*] I have a computer with a floppy drive, but it's broken.

3" : an Amstrad CPC 6128
3.5" : http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/orlith/ and others
5.25" : http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/carenath/
8" : http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~pmaydell/hardware/faranth/

I also have a spare 8" drive in the junk pile.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

"Other" is my BBC Micro with 5.25" 80DSDD using Solidisk DDFS, so giving 640Kb per disk.

I don't play it much because of the hassles with UK/US TV standards. But it still works :-)

[gerald_duck]

Why the "only" in "I only have computers that don't even have a space for a floppy disk drive"? I do have some computers with no space for a floppy drive, but also have others that have either space or drive.

I have floppy drives with capacities all the way down to 80KBytes.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

D'oh! Only just noticed the "only" in the "I only have computers..." option. Well, I do have some computers with no space for a floppy drive, just as I have some with spaces and some with drives.

I also have a piano with a floppy drive, which is why I occasionally use diskettes for data storage. Very, very rarely I'll use one for work, but thankfully USB flash drives are a lot more accepted in customer environments now than they were five years ago.

[pndc.livejournal.com]

I have 880kB and 1760kB floppies too, thanks to the Amiga...

And about 2,500 of the damn things that are just taunting me, that I really should image into .ADFs while they're still readable.

[nunfetishist.livejournal.com]

I didn't say never for using a floppy, because I have done in the past. Although I've not used a floppy for storing documents in at least a decade, and I don't think I've had to boot a machine from floppy in at least 5 years.

[armb.livejournal.com]

I haven't used a floppy for a while, and when I did it was on a computer that had no floppy drive (the XP CD I had doesn't have SATA drivers built in, and will only look for additional drivers on a floppy).
I did have a spare drive, but that computer's power supply didn't have a connector for it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/armb/284977764/

Before that, something to do with resizing partitions on a Windows formatted disk to make room for a Linux install, IIRC (on a computer that had a drive).

I do still have an Amiga in a cupboard, and if I ever do anything with it that might involve floppies (it has a hard drive, but no network card).

[uisgebeatha.livejournal.com]

HP Beast is old enough to have a floppy drive still. It had some use when I was transferring things from old disks I had lying around, and it occasionally gets used for things like memtest86.

At work none of the Dells have disk drives built in but we have a solitary USB one. We also have a job lot of floppies our software used to fit on, before the Enterprise Bloat occurred... ;)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

[✓] A floppy drive failure killed my parents, you insensitive clod

[david jones (from livejournal.com)]

I have an unconnected floppy drive that I intend to use purely for the stepper motor. So I can build a robot to take over the world.