The Millennium Bug

[Puffing Devil]

If it does conk out you can get USB floppies.

I wouldn't be so sure - something working with floppies may not have a USB port. Or drivers for a USB drive.

Time to give it up and move to a newer machine and/or a cheap cloud-based accounting package.

 

[najaB]

Time to give it up and move to a newer machine and/or a cheap cloud-based accounting package.

Thing is, you can say that all you want but if your client wants to use old software, you either need to accommodate them or lose a client.

 

[mmh]

I wouldn't be so sure - something working with floppies may not have a USB port. Or drivers for a USB drive.

Time to give it up and move to a newer machine and/or a cheap cloud-based accounting package.

They need to be able to read floppies though - the cloud isn't much use for that.

I think the suggestion was more a USB floppy drive plugged into something more modern, when / if the computer with the floppy drive breaks.

 

[Puffing Devil]

Thing is, you can say that all you want but if your client wants to use old software, you either need to accommodate them or lose a client.

Some clients cost too much to keep. The effort spent accommodating them rather than moving them to a better platform may outweigh any profit. Though if the company is willing to accommodate them as a "loss leader", that's a different story.

They need to be able to read floppies though - the cloud isn't much use for that.

I think the suggestion was more a USB floppy drive plugged into something more modern, when / if the computer with the floppy drive breaks.

The idea was to move the client off the old and onto the new = no need for floppies.

Question = if the client machine breaks, how do they use a USB floppy if there is no USB on the machine?

 

[najaB]

Some clients cost too much to keep. The effort spent accommodating them rather than moving them to a better platform may outweigh any profit. Though if the company is willing to accommodate them as a "loss leader", that's a different story.

At the moment, the only cost appears to be firing up the old PC every now and then to read the data from a floppy, and then presumably save the data into a format that can be read by the 'normal' platform.

 

[mmh]

Some clients cost too much to keep. The effort spent accommodating them rather than moving them to a better platform may outweigh any profit. Though if the company is willing to accommodate them as a "loss leader", that's a different story.



The idea was to move the client off the old and onto the new = no need for floppies.

Question = if the client machine breaks, how do they use a USB floppy if there is no USB on the machine?

If it's broken, it's broken, whether or not it has USB. But that's their concern anyway.

 

[Puffing Devil]

If it's broken, it's broken, whether or not it has USB. But that's their concern anyway.

Now I'm lost. I thought the suggestion was to replace the floppies with a USB drive. My comment was that the machine may be so old that it would not have a USB port. Clearly if the machine dies, then the presence of a USB port is moot?

 

[underbank]

Some clients cost too much to keep. The effort spent accommodating them rather than moving them to a better platform may outweigh any profit. Though if the company is willing to accommodate them as a "loss leader", that's a different story.

We make good profit out of them thanks! Certainly not a loss. Nothing like doing exactly the same thing year after year that both sides are happy with to make quick and easy profit! However, we've "sacked" plenty of clients who've been using cloud software (and desktop Sage/Quickbooks) who've made a right hash of it that caused hours of wasted time sorting out their foul ups!

 

[dgl]

there are floppy disk emulators that can replace most floppy disks, these use flash memory (either a usb stick or memory card) and connect using a standard floppy cable/interface.
quite common for users of floppy disc based samplers (E-mu emulator, Roland S series etc.)

 

[krus_aragon]

there are floppy disk emulators that can replace most floppy disks, these use flash memory (either a usb stick or memory card) and connect using a standard floppy cable/interface.
quite common for users of floppy disc based samplers (E-mu emulator, Roland S series etc.)

They're great for older systems that expect to have a floppy drive attached (keyboards, synthesiers, retro computers), but not as useful when somebody hands you a floppy disk and says "the file's on there" .

 

[A Challenge]

Floppy Disks can't handle much data either, I think they are only 144MB aren't they?

 

[Lucan]

Though as it happens, Windows 95 could crash after 49.7 days, because at that point ..... an internal counter would overflow back to zero

To be fair the concept of a Win95 box staying up for anywhere approaching that long has always been pretty fanciful.

That was the joke, and an even worse indictment. Win95 could not run for more than a few days (or hours) without crashing for some other reason, so that bug went undiscovered for over 6 years.

I never understood the reason for Win95. Microsoft could instead have focussed its effort on Windows NT, a vastly better system, and produced a light consumer version by 1995. In the 90's PC's were becoming more powerful by the week, and by 1995 most new consumer grade PCs could have handled a lightweight NT. As it was they kept the awful Win9x/ME series going on life support for another 5+ years, mainly to satisfy gamers I understood.

FWIW I still boot Win95 on an old PC sometimes, purely to run a fast scanner which never had drivers for anything better.[/QUOTE]

 

[Puffing Devil]

Floppy Disks can't handle much data either, I think they are only 144MB aren't they?

Kb not Mb!

I remember one of the first PC's I used in the late 80's had a massive 40Mb hard drive!

 

[underbank]

Kb not Mb!

I remember one of the first PC's I used in the late 80's had a massive 40Mb hard drive!

My first computer was the ZX80. Me and my friends would compete to write the biggest programs out of the single screen of code - amazing what you could achieve by efficient coding. When we moved onto the ZX81, then Spectrum/Commodore 64 etc it wasn't as much fun! It's like the way work expands to fill the time, programs expand to fill the memory.

 

[krus_aragon]

I never understood the reason for Win95. Microsoft could instead have focussed its effort on Windows NT, a vastly better system, and produced a light consumer version by 1995. In the 90's PC's were becoming more powerful by the week, and by 1995 most new consumer grade PCs could have handled a lightweight NT. As it was they kept the awful Win9x/ME series going on life support for another 5+ years, mainly to satisfy gamers I understood.

Not just gamers. Pre 1995, Windows was just a thin veneer over DOS, and most serious software either ran in DOS mode, or accessed the hardware directly because the Windows/DOS/BIOS interfaces provided were slow and awkward.

Windows NT was designed to run on all sorts of hardware platforms (from NT4 at least) by means of a Hardware Abstraction Layer. This meant that you had to use the interfaces provided by Windows: direct hardware access wasn't possible. (And Windows NT still wasn't well supported by hardware manufacturers, either.)

It took the popularity of Windows 95 and 98 to get programmers using the Win32 interfaces instead. Once major software packages stopped using DOS mode interfaces, they could be expected to run on NT platforms as well.

Microsoft aimed to ditch the old Windows 9x branch and bring all home users over to their NT OS in Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), but some things weren't quite ready in time, and a stop-gap was released in the form of Windows ME. Now there's a Millennium Bug for you!

 

[cjmillsnun]

Floppy Disks can't handle much data either, I think they are only 144MB aren't they?

Kb not Mb!

I remember one of the first PC's I used in the late 80's had a massive 40Mb hard drive!

1.44 MB not 144kB or 144MB in a 3.5" HD floppy, although ED could go to 2.88MB

and definitly not kb or Mb (we're talking Bytes not bits!)

 

[Giugiaro]

There are different types of Floppy disks, besides size. I learned that type of density can be an headache to deal with.

Like how I learned that modern machines don't read and write double density floppies, and such disks are hard or impossible to find...

 

[Giugiaro]

Bloody hell, this thread suddenly exploded!

 

[Bletchleyite]

I thought the last manufacturers of disks had shut down about a year or two back? Or was that just Sony (inventor of the 3.5" hard floppy).

As an aside, the Minuteman II control software is loaded using real floppy disks!

[Although the linked story says that the floppy disks would be replaced in 2017, they still hadn't up until the middle/end of 2018]

You might be right about the media, but drives are still knocking about, used if not new. If the only purpose is to read disks sent in by others that'll do

 

[Bletchleyite]

There are different types of Floppy disks, besides size. I learned that type of density can be an headache to deal with.

Like how I learned that modern machines don't read and write double density floppies, and such disks are hard or impossible to find...

A HD drive can read a DD floppy. The problem comes with writing. The HD head is half the width of the DD head, which means a HD drive just skips half the tracks when writing a DD floppy. Unfortunately, if the floppy isn't totally blank, this means the wider DD head sees both the narrow track written by a HD drive *plus* what was there before and not overwritten, and so can't read it properly.

I also used to find (in Atari ST days) that there were problems using HD floppies in a DD drive (even if formatted as DD), but I couldn't entirely understand why that was. Perhaps they used different magnetic materials, a bit like regular vs Metal type cassettes.

 

[Bletchleyite]

They need to be able to read floppies though - the cloud isn't much use for that.

I think the suggestion was more a USB floppy drive plugged into something more modern, when / if the computer with the floppy drive breaks.

Yes, that was precisely the suggestion in order to be able to continue with that client - if they are a long standing, loyal and lucrative one, risking losing them over the matter of a cheap second hand USB floppy drive would seem churlish.

If OTOH they're a pain, it could be a good excuse to get rid

 

[mmh]

I think my favourite bug is still "Open Office can't print on Tuesdays"

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html

 

[Bletchleyite]

Now I'm lost. I thought the suggestion was to replace the floppies with a USB drive. My comment was that the machine may be so old that it would not have a USB port. Clearly if the machine dies, then the presence of a USB port is moot?

The idea was to move from reading the floppies on the old desktop to reading them on their modern machines with the aid of a USB floppy drive.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I think my favourite bug is still "Open Office can't print on Tuesdays"

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html

People talk about M$ being buggy bloatware, but Open/Star/Libre/whatever Office is to me a far worse example of such.

 

[mmh]

People talk about M$ being buggy bloatware, but Open/Star/Libre/whatever Office is to me a far worse example of such.

Absolutely. I've had the displeasure of having to use Libre Office for spreadsheets recently. Just give me proper Office! It works!

 

[etr221]

1.44 MB not 144kB or 144MB in a 3.5" HD floppy, although ED could go to 2.88MB

and definitly not kb or Mb (we're talking Bytes not bits!)

Which can be quite enough...

And I have (or at least) had some software to split (and then rejoin) files into (by default) 1.44MB chunks to fit.

And - what I think was being referred to upthread - an external USB attached floppy drive (for 3.5" disks).

 

[pedr]

I think my favourite bug is still "Open Office can't print on Tuesdays"

http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html

I don’t entirely understand all the technology at the heart of it, but this tale of an IT tech who had to deal with users reporting that they couldn’t send email further than 500 miles is fun: http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html?

 

[etr221]

MS Excel I think still has its 1900 bug (now feature), that it inherited from Lotus 1-2-3... that it has an extra day between 28th February and 1st March that year - no, 1900 wasn't a leap year.

 

[Bletchleyite]

MS Excel I think still has its 1900 bug (now feature), that it inherited from Lotus 1-2-3... that it has an extra day between 28th February and 1st March that year - no, 1900 wasn't a leap year.

That's one of those things that they may have to leave in (or at least make the fix switchable) as anyone who it bothers will have coded around it, so if they fixed it on the quiet there would all of a sudden be a load of sheets that didn't work.

 

[krus_aragon]

A HD drive can read a DD floppy. The problem comes with writing. The HD head is half the width of the DD head, which means a HD drive just skips half the tracks when writing a DD floppy. Unfortunately, if the floppy isn't totally blank, this means the wider DD head sees both the narrow track written by a HD drive *plus* what was there before and not overwritten, and so can't read it properly.

I also used to find (in Atari ST days) that there were problems using HD floppies in a DD drive (even if formatted as DD), but I couldn't entirely understand why that was. Perhaps they used different magnetic materials, a bit like regular vs Metal type cassettes.

The issue with Double Density (DD) and High Density (HD) floppies isn't so much the head width, rather it's the nature of the magnetic surface of the disk, and its coercivity (strength of magnetic field required to write to it). If you mix and match systems, you can sometimes find that data you thought had been overwritten correctly can "revert" after a few days or weeks.

Head width relates to a different issue: in the days of 5 1/4" floppies (possibly the older 8" too), early drives could put down 48 tracks per inch of disk radius. Later drives with improved stepper motors and narrower heads doubled this to 98tpi. By double-stepping, a 98tpi drive could read and write a 48tpi floppy disk. But if it were to overwrite data laid down by a 48tpi drive, it would erase/write data in the middle of the wider 48tpi track. The new data would read fine in a 96tpi drive, but if taken back to an old 48tpi drive, the wider head could pick up a mixture of the wide, old track and the new, narrow track, giving read errors.

There were other issues with 5 1/4" too, including hard vs soft sectoring, encoding data with FM or MFM modulation, and other details that escape me at the moment.

You might be right about the media, but drives are still knocking about, used if not new. If the only purpose is to read disks sent in by others that'll do

I've just done a mental tally of the various floppy drives in our house: ten! (5x 5 1/4", 5x 3 1/2" of various denominantions)