Magic Floppy Disk: Difference between revisions

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* Of course, a lot of older machines automatically booted from the floppy drive, allowing you to bypass the OS and many safeguards - which allowed you to do many things that are rather good, and other things that aren't so much. Now that (a) floppy drives aren't installed in modern computers and (b) the setup is different so you'll actually have to change the boot-up sequence to start from the floppy, it doesn't work so much.

** Early DOS computers ''without hard drives'' had to be booted with a floppy that contained the entire OS. The genuine IBM PC would boot into a ROM-resident BASIC interpreter if the floppy was not present. Most clones didn't have this feature, rendering them useless without the magic disk.

* The U.S. government still uses floppy disks for some internal functions [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/05/27/us-military-using-floppy-disks-nuclear-operations/ as of 2016], as well as at least a few inter-departmental reporting requirements. This is mostly due to how [[Technology Marches On]] ''very slowly'' in government, but there are at least some reasons to continue using them, such as compatibility - any computer with a disk drive for a 1.44-MB floppy disk can read and write to any floppy disk, but computers' abilities to write to CDs and DVDs still vary widely. In addition, if all you want to store or transfer is a few dozen text documents, the capacity of a single floppy is plenty.

* The U.S. government still uses floppy disks for some internal functions [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/05/27/us-military-using-floppy-disks-nuclear-operations/ as of 2016], as well as at least a few inter-departmental reporting requirements. This is mostly due to how [[Technology Marches On]] ''very slowly'' in government, but there are at least some reasons to continue using them, such as compatibility - any computer with a disk drive for a 1.44-MB floppy disk can read and write to any 3.5" floppy disk, but computers' abilities to write to CDs and DVDs still vary widely. In addition, if all you want to store or transfer is a few dozen text documents, the capacity of a single floppy is plenty.