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Floppy disk - Usability | | Floppy disk - Usability: Encyclopedia II - Floppy disk - Usability | | One of the chief usability problems of the floppy disk is its vulnerability. Even inside a closed plastic housing, the disk medium is still highly sensitive to dust, condensation, and temperature extremes. As with any magnetic storage, it is also vulnerable to magnetic fields. Blank floppies have usually been distributed with an extensive set of warnings, cautioning the user not to expose it to conditions which can endanger it.
Users damaging floppy disks (or their contents) were once a staple of "stupid user" folklore among computer ...
See also:Floppy disk, Floppy disk - Background, Floppy disk - History, Floppy disk - Origins the 8-inch disk, Floppy disk - The 5¼-inch minifloppy, Floppy disk - New formats no standard, Floppy disk - The 3½-inch microfloppy diskette, Floppy disk - Floppy killers, Floppy disk - Structure, Floppy disk - Current situation, Floppy disk - Compatibility, Floppy disk - More on floppy disk formats, Floppy disk - Using the disk space efficiently, Floppy disk - The Commodore 64/128, Floppy disk - The Commodore Amiga, Floppy disk - The Acorn Archimedes, Floppy disk - 12-inch floppy disks, Floppy disk - 4-inch floppies, Floppy disk - Auto-loaders, Floppy disk - Floppy mass storage, Floppy disk - 2-inch floppy disks, Floppy disk - Ultimate capacity speed, Floppy disk - Usability, Floppy disk - The floppy as a metaphor, Floppy disk - Floppy trivia | | | Floppy disk, Floppy disk - 12-inch floppy disks, Floppy disk - 2-inch floppy disks, Floppy disk - 4-inch floppies, Floppy disk - Auto-loaders, Floppy disk - Background, Floppy disk - Compatibility, Floppy disk - Current situation, Floppy disk - Floppy killers, Floppy disk - Floppy mass storage, Floppy disk - Floppy trivia, Floppy disk - History, Floppy disk - More on floppy disk formats, Floppy disk - New formats no standard, Floppy disk - Origins the 8-inch disk, Floppy disk - Structure, Floppy disk - The 3½-inch microfloppy diskette, Floppy disk - The 5¼-inch minifloppy, Floppy disk - The Acorn Archimedes, Floppy disk - The Commodore 64/128, Floppy disk - The Commodore Amiga, Floppy disk - The floppy as a metaphor, Floppy disk - Ultimate capacity speed, Floppy disk - Usability, Floppy disk - Using the disk space efficiently, RaWrite2 (a floppy disk image file writer/creator), Zip drive (a newer, larger and proprietary format for removable storage), On Unix or Unix-like systems the dd program can be used to write an image to a floppy., Don't Copy That Floppy | | |
| | | Floppy disk: Encyclopedia II - Floppy disk - Usability
Floppy disk - Usability
One of the chief usability problems of the floppy disk is its vulnerability. Even inside a closed plastic housing, the disk medium is still highly sensitive to dust, condensation, and temperature extremes. As with any magnetic storage, it is also vulnerable to magnetic fields. Blank floppies have usually been distributed with an extensive set of warnings, cautioning the user not to expose it to conditions which can endanger it.
Users damaging floppy disks (or their contents) were once a staple of "stupid user" folklore among computer technicians. These stories poked fun at users who stapled floppies to papers, made faxes or photocopies of them when asked to "copy a disk", or stored floppies by holding them with a magnet to a file cabinet. The flexible 5¼-inch disk could also (folklorically) be abused by rolling it into a typewriter to type a label, or by removing the disk medium from the plastic enclosure to store it safely.
On the other hand, the 3½-inch floppy has also been lauded for its mechanical usability by HCI expert Donald Norman (here quoted from his book The Design of Everyday Things, Chapter 1):
A simple example of a good design is the 3½-inch magnetic diskette for computers, a small circle of "floppy" magnetic material encased in hard plastic. Earlier types of floppy disks did not have this plastic case, which protects the magnetic material from abuse and damage. A sliding metal cover protects the delicate magnetic surface when the diskette is not in use and automatically opens when the diskette is inserted into the computer. The diskette has a square shape: there are apparently eight possible ways to insert it into the machine, only one of which is correct. What happens if I do it wrong? I try inserting the disk sideways. Ah, the designer thought of that. A little study shows that the case really isn't square: it's rectangular, so you can't insert a longer side. I try backward. The diskette goes in only part of the way. Small protrusions, indentations, and cutouts, prevent the diskette from being inserted backward or upside down: of the eight ways one might try to insert the diskette, only one is correct, and only that one will fit. An excellent design.
Other related archives'magnetic core' memory, 1540, 1541, 1570, 1571, 1581, A4, ADF, Acorn Archimedes, Alan Shugart, Amazing Grace, Amiga, Amiga 1200, Amiga 3000, Amiga Disk File, Amiga chip set, Amsoft, Amstrad, Amstrad CPC, An Wang, Apple Computer, Apple DOS, Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, BASF, BIOS, Better Living Through Chemistry, Blue Monday, Burroughs, CD burners, CD-ROM, CDs, CMOS, CP/M, CPC, Canon, CatWeasel, Commodore, Commodore 128, Commodore 1541, Commodore 64, Commodore computers, Constant Angular Velocity (CAV), DAT, DECmate-II, DOS, DVDs, Dell, Dell Dimension, Dell, Inc., Digital Equipment Corporation, Distribution Media Format, Dixons, Don't Copy That Floppy, Donald Norman, ECMA International, Ethernet, Factory Records, Famicom Disk System, Fatboy Slim, Floppy trivia, Floptical, Group Code Recording, HP-150, Hitachi, IBM, IBM PC, IBM PC/AT, ISO 9529, IT, Imation, Internet, Iomega, Japanese, LED, LEDs, Lemmings, MIDI, MS-DOS, MSX, Macintosh, Macintosh 128K, Macintosh IIx, Matsushita, Mavica, Maxell, Memorex, MiB, Microsoft, Mitsumi, Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM), More on floppy disk formats, NTSC, NeXT Computers, New Order, PAL, PC, PCMCIA, PCW, PCs, PET/CBM, PS/2, Panasonic, Pro-350, ROM, RPM, RaWrite2, Radio Shack, Rainbow-100, Risc PC, SCSI, San Jose, California, Shugart Associates, Sinclair, Sneakernet, Sony, Sony HiFD, South Africa, SuperDisk, SyQuest Technology, System/360, System/370, TRS-80, Table of 8-inch floppy formats, Tandy, Tatung, Tatung Einstein, Teac, USB, USB flash drives, Unix, Unix-like, VIC-20, Wang Laboratories, Windows 95, Yamaha, Yamaha MDR-1, Yoshiro Nakamatsu, ZX Spectrum +3, Zenith Minisport, Zip disk, Zip disks, Zip drive, Zip drives, application software, backups, baud, cassette tape, compact audio cassette, compatible, compatibles, composite video, data storage device, dd, de-facto, device driver, digital photography, disk drives, disk operating system, emulator, faxes, fdformat, feedback loop, flippy disk, floppy disk controller, form factor, hard disk, hard disk drive, hard sector, head crashes, hole punch, home, iMac, imperial measurements, infra-red, interlaced, kernels, keyboard instruments, keydrives, kibibytes, kilobytes, magnetic storage, magnetic tapes, mainframes, megabytes, megapixel, memory card, metric, microcode, microcomputers, operating system, operating system (OS), operating systems, paperclip, personal computer, photo transistor, photocopies, plastic, punch cards, recordable, rectangular, rewritable, ring, ring binders, samplers, scissors, sector, solar eclipse, square, streamers, tape drives, the James Bond Theme, track, typewriter, urban myth, usability, word processing, write protect, zone bit recording
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Usability", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
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