the beginning of the end for floppies

----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Cisin" <cisin at xenosoft.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 3:20 PM Subject: Re: the beginning of the end for floppies It's around. Good photo stores still sell it (although there are fewer and fewer such stores). There are also plenty of mail-order establishments who sell it. Even Kodachrome made it until last year (processing ends December 31, 2010 however). Kodak even announced a new Super-8 movie film earlier this month. It's also possible to make your own black-and-white photographic paper (although it's not super easy) and there are alternative processes that are easier that can be done in the darkroom (e.g. cyanotype, platinum-palladium printing, gum prints, ...). I suspect, though, that we will not be manually making our own floppy disks in 50 years. What annoys me about the floppy disk situation is that floppies remain the only really inexpensive and easily reusable medium out there. CD- and DVD+/- RW have issues of reliability and compatibility (and are not very resistant to damage), and flash drives are too expensive (they're fine for people to buy and use but a little expensive for the typical person to buy and give away). ZIP and JAZ were never popular enough. I still use floppies, even on modern systems. For some applications, they're more than big enough. I even installed a floppy drive into my desktop a few months ago, so that I wouldn't have to use a USB floppy drive. Jim