Old Technology Dies Hard

I consider 3.5″ Floppy Drives old technology. The disks for them are majorly small in capacity, they are suspect irrepairable damage if you leave them in the drive too long, or accidentally snap the top off them, or leave them sitting on your speakers…..

They have been replaced over the years by flash drives, usb memory sticks, portable hard drives, firewire drives – hell, even your iPod and other MP3 players can store whatever data you need.

I’ve been building computers for myself and friends over the past 2 years and never once added a floppy drive to a machine. I order laptops for people regularly, never one adding a floppy drive. I’ve got a drive installed on a machine at home for the past 4 years and can proudly say that its never been used, and never will.

So I find myself in disgust yesterday that I was forced into buying a portable floppy drive in order to get a license for an application. Sure, you pay loads of money to get the cds, and you pay out more money to get the support. But when you want to move the application to a new machine, you have to send the license to floppy disk using a special license-moving facility, and the disk acts as a key to install your new application.

Of course when your new machine doesn’t have a floppy drive, your fancy expensive application has nowhere to go and nowhere around it.

Considering the last company I worked for has drawers and drawers and drawers of floppy disks archiving their material I guess it can’t be written off just yet!

2 Comments

  1. Kentar November 22, 2005 at 8:08 pm

    Have to say I love Floppys; but only because of the nostalgia I feel when I think of when they were really the next big thing back in the days of the Amiga 500+ the floppy ruled. Although my laptop has a floppy but that was standard……..

  2. Ken November 22, 2005 at 8:14 pm

    Oh I remember them well, my first PC (back around 1989/90) had the big 5.25 drive with a lock on it to stop the disk flying out… crazy.

    I’ve got a shelf full of floppies myself, most of them full of rubbish to be honest but they’re there all the same, haven’t binned them yet!

    Never thought I’d have to use them again though!

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