mpack wrote:No no, floppy drives predate ATA by a long way. Look in your VM setting - it has a special controller, the FDC or floppy disk controller. Typically this is included in the motherboard chipset of legacy PCs.
None of my PCs have internal floppy drives, that has been the case for at least 5 years now. I do have an external USB floppy drive, but will those be available in 20 years? I don't see why they would.
In any case the whole notion is frankly ludicrous. Most modern files won't even fit on a floppy. I have here a 256GB NTFS USB3 flash drive. Do I prefer that or a 1.44MB FAT12 snail speed and noisy floppy? I'll leave that as an open question.
Noone force you to record 1 GB film on a floppy. But some really small files of kilobytes will actualy fit onto floppy up to thousand. These include minor programs for PCL and microcontrollers or for DOS. I never seen a third party program that would held on in twenty floppies minimum, all games for DOS were on one or two floppies, I have still floppies that hold couple of that minor games and I had also floppies with old stuff of my sister - these were erased to be used in future. I think external USB floppy drives will be available after 20 years. How long such retro can last? I am retro fan. I listen to old hits eighter on my PC and gramophone, I play old games eighter in my PC, VM and even on a real table
On the other side, I have a smartphone and use modern apps. I have WiFi in my house eighter for other members of family and for some visitors
I have Facebook account, Google+ account, Dropbox and Google cloud drives. I don't think these are so old things to recall them outdated... I use different types of drives for different types of media and files and for different use. Dropbox and Google Drive for sharing files, flash drives for back up school and personal stuff and floppies for back up retro stuff