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After the floppy, what next

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by thechas

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In a discussion about the impending demise of the 3 1/2" floppy disk drive, the general consensus was that the floppy drive is required to support most networks.

My question to you now is:

Assuming that the manufactures installing floppy drives, how will you support these new systems?

For the sake of discussion, let us assume that the new motherboards DO NOT have a floppy drive controller. So, the option of installing an internal floppy drive yourself is at least more complicated than it is now.

Chas

5 replies

by guruofdos

I have noticed, on the few mobos I have come across WITHOUT a floppy controller, that they either support bootable Zip, or USB floppy. I carry an IDE Zip100 drive with a couple of Zip disks, one with a boot for 9x including the Oak CD ROM drivers and one with a set of 95 OSR2.1 cabs on it. That gets me going 99 times out of 100!

by djent

I think we need a new media to replace the floppy. CDR is not bad but not universally available and needs windows or Linux to work. Zip is flakey and expensive at best. maybe something like flash cards with BIOS support for boot device enough capacity to be useful and a media price point to encourge use.

by cactus pete

With Intel replacing the BIOS with EFI, I would look to them for an answer... After I rea dthe article, if it covers this aspect, I'll post the findings...

by mwelch

What I'm seeing these days is that the CDRW has come down in price to the point where the 3 1/2" floppy overtook the 5 1/4" (about $50). I'm starting to see a major manufacturers not offer the floppy, but have a CDRW in the PCs. With a bootable CD, the OS can be re-installed without a need for a floppy. The price of a CDRW disk has come down significantly too over the years to be compairable to a 3 1/2" floppy back in its hayday. It would be interesting to research out the prices of media and the drives when the 3 1/2" took out the 5 1/4".

I have been waiting a long time to find out what media was going to replace the floppy. There were some that were up and coming (LS-120, zip)- but never made it mainstream like the CDRW has.

The biggest benefits that CDRW has besides the size is the really fast data transfer rate and the availability of machines able to read the data - even if they can't write to it.

by djent

There are still alot of CDROM drives that cant read CDRW disks or boot from CD. The floppy was alwas considered a short term transient media, this would fit solid state just fine. Now we need enough capacity, reasonable price and BIOS support.

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