Last Floppy-Disk Seller Says Airlines Still Order the Old Tech (businessinsider.com) 61
Tom Persky, the founder of floppydisk.com who claims to be the "last man standing in the floppy disk business," said that the airline industry is one of his biggest customers. He talked about this in the new book "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium" by Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar. Insider reports: "My biggest customers -- and the place where most of the money comes from -- are the industrial users," Persky said, in an interview from the book published online in Eye On Design last week. "These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it's 1990, and you're building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you'd want to use the best technology available."
Persky added: "Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer." He also said that the medical sector still uses floppy disks. And then there's "hobbyists," who want to "buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks."
Persky added: "Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer." He also said that the medical sector still uses floppy disks. And then there's "hobbyists," who want to "buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks."
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The previous attempt [slashdot.org] didn't mention "buy my book" loud enough, so they'll just have to try again a few times.
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Thank you for letting us know that you are not yet satisfied with Slashdot Reruns (tm). We will dial it up until you are satisfied.
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Seriously, don't the editors read their own posted crap?
You must be new here?
Never have, never will!
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It wasn't human error.
Slashdot still runs off of a low-grade floppy disk originally mailed out by AOL, and a corrupted FAT created an extra link to the article.
Will the drives last 50 years? (Score:1)
Almost certainly not, even in storage as the caps will probably die. And then its no good having a stack of floppy disks if you've got nothing to read them with. Perhaps the avionics industry should do a partial upgrade.
Re:Will the drives last 50 years? (Score:5, Informative)
The drives are still made and sold so no issue on those yet. I bought a USB one on Amazon less than 2 years ago as we had something on work that was miraculously still on a floppy disk and needed to be copied off. I just checked and there's still plenty of them for sale on Amazon.
Also the 50 year statement was from 1990 so we're already more than 30 years in with no problem still attaining drives so its not likely to be a problem.
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Beware (Score:2)
Your Boeing 737 is still booting its operating system from a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk.
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Your Boeing 737 is still booting its operating system from a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk.
A quick Google search for "Boeing floppy disk" yields several articles like this:
Boeing 747s Still Use Floppy Disks to Get Critical Software Updates [gizmodo.com]
But they're 3.5" disks ...
Re:Beware (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Beware (Score:5, Informative)
> We tested all the floppies on his machine first, just because there was no hard disk a virus could install to
That didn't stop me from getting a "form" virus back in the day, if you swap floppies it stayed in RAM and copied itself.
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Your Boeing 737 is still booting its operating system from a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk.
5.25" vs. 3.5" clarifications aside, why the warning here? Did you "beware" yourself off the 737 anytime in the last decade of personal or professional travel and USB dominance? I kind of doubt it.
And I'd venture to guess your life is quite valuable to you. Hell, we know it is. People gladly pay extra for guacamole...
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Make sure you have multiple copies (Score:1)
Re:Make sure you have multiple copies (Score:4, Funny)
Not completely gone ... (Score:2)
I actually have a USB 3.5" floppy drive in my closet and a few disks in a box or two -- one has 6 unused.
Big market for emulators ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently replaced a floppy drive on my old ATARI ST1040FM with a GoTek floppy emulator for about 25 GBP. It can now store up to 99 floppy images on a tiny USB stick. If Airlines etc. are still using machines with floppies then, as a stop gap to installing newer systems, they should consider doing something similar.
The Gotek is fantastic and is a proper replacement for a floppy dive (the O/S sees it as a standard floppy drive, you can boot from it etc.). It's a very reasonably priced upgrade which takes away the reliance on floppy technology.
There's also some really good freeware available which will read/write floppy disk images files so you can read your existing floppies to image files (or create new image files from scratch), add/remove files etc. Then you simply copy the image to a USB drive, plug it into the Gotek and select the image. Works an absolute treat.
So it looks like there's a nice opportunity for someone to go and sell them some devices !
P.S. I also added a SatanDisk to the ATARI so it now has 2 x 512Mb SD cards acting as virtual hard drives (bootable). So I now have a mind blowing amount of storage available for the ATARI :)
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The cheapest gotek I could find was fifty euros. In the process I found a bunch of others, starting at $250 and going, much, much higher. That was just for electric pianos and CNC machines. In the airline industry, everything needs a certificate, which is a tried-and-true way of driving up the prices, though not usually actual product quality. As well as manufacturer approval and certified technicians to install the certified replacement in a certified manner.
That was my first though for aviation. I have several goteks for old computers and that's fine, not sure I'd trust it so much to fly a plane. But as I understand it, they only use them in planes for loading in data (which must include some form of verification), not for anything critical in flight, so would they still need certification?
For most other industrial uses, I can't see why people wouldn't have moved to emulators long ago.
p.s. if you're after a gotek, try aliexpress, you can get one for about $22
Re:Not if it needs certification (Score:4, Interesting)
But as I understand it, they only use them in planes for loading in data (which must include some form of verification), not for anything critical in flight, so would they still need certification?
As far as I know, yes, since the emulator would be plugged in to the airplane. What if it shorts between +V and ground or between some data pin and +V etc. Will it affect the airplane in some way (other than being unable to load data from the emulator)?
For most other industrial uses, I can't see why people wouldn't have moved to emulators long ago.
Because there is no real need for it. The equipment works, workers know how to use it, floppies are still available. They would probably only consider using an emulator if the floppy drive died and they could not get another one.
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There's no need for it now, but I would at least want to have that proven out as plan B for when floppies are just gone.
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Airlines are a big enough customer that until they no longer need them, floppies will not be "just gone".
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The last manufacturer closed up shop already. The remaining inventory will run out when it runs out.
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> so would they still need certification?
Data integrity is only one part of it. EMF emissions, heat/cold tolerances, vibration tolerance, not-unexpectedly-letting-the-money-smoke-out-at-34,000-feet-because-chinesium tolerance; there's a slew of things that need to be tested before it would be allowed into an airframe. I'm sure there's a niche ready to be filled by a device built from the ground up for the task, but I would be surprised if any current, off the shelf hardware would pass muster.
Besides all
airlines software needs an lot of faa testing (Score:2)
airlines software needs an lot of faa testing.
So I don't think any call home DRM will pass that / will need an failsafe mode that may need to bypass DRM.
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There are companies that basically sell a GoTek professionally - I believe GoTek even links to them because they are official sellers.
I believe they even have them certified so they can replace the floppy drive in an aircraft with one of those devices. Of course, these cost considerably more than $50 or so - it wouldn't surprise me if they cost $5,000 for it. Chances are it costs enough that unless the drive fails, it won't be changed - the updates only happen once every 56 days or so.
But yeah, professional
Re: Not if it needs certification (Score:2)
The problem Iâ(TM)ve found is that in many cases the floppy drive itself is built into an inaccessible location and even if you could get to it, it would require disconnecting a lot of other equipment, some of it which needs to be completely recalibrated. And some of these devices canâ(TM)t be recalibrated without some great expense.
Then there is the issue that sometimes the software is dependent on timings and thus writing to fast flash may not be expected, although Iâ(TM)m sure that could b
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Re:Big market for emulators ? (Score:5, Informative)
"Switching from floppy disks to something else would require regulatory actions which will turn out to be more expensive than just continuing to do what works."
Boom. This is the main point. Anything to do with aircraft flight has to go through a long, expensive certification process. If you want to change it at all, the new thing has to go through the same process all over again. Replacing floppy disks is a big expense, even if the replacement "works just like the old stuff did."
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I recently replaced a floppy drive on my old ATARI ST1040FM with a GoTek floppy emulator for about 25 GBP. It can now store up to 99 floppy images on a tiny USB stick. If Airlines etc. are still using machines with floppies then, as a stop gap to installing newer systems, they should consider doing something similar.
The thing is, a lot of applications (not necessarily industries, but applications within that industry) use older tech because it works and nothing newer is as reliable.
It's the same issue the car industry is having right now, due to a few fires in some factories some of the older chips they use are in short supply. These are older chips so they aren't widely made any more however the car industry still uses these chips because they're proven to work over the lifespan of a car (which can be 20 years or more
VE400 (Score:2)
I've done a lot of work cabling (Score:2)
... up RS232 serial ports, some to VCP over TCP adaptors, so that really old CNC equipment, that were real-to-real tapes, some even had paper tape drives, can be loaded directly from modern CAD/CAM software. And of course there were those with floppy drives too. Boxes and boxes of floppies containing G-Code.
The machines just keep ticking along doing the sort of jobbing work they've always done. Seemingly as good as new.
Japan is a heavy floppy disk user base (Score:2)
So? (Score:5, Interesting)
The technology worked in 1990. Why wouldn't it work now? If there was a viable reason to upgrade, engineers are quite capable of putting forward a cost/benefit analysis to their boss. The fact is, it's working fine. It ain't broke, so don't fix it.
This is a symptom of a mind virus that's always been around: it's old so there's something wrong with it. Families tear out perfectly good kitchens and bathrooms because they want it to look new. People buy clothes to wear once. It's ridiculously wasteful.
In particular it's an affliction of the young, because anything that existed before you is clearly ancient. :)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing is old tech, another is dead tech.
There's no more manufacturers for floppy disks and drives. The only seller in business is recycling the disks.
When you operate multi-million dollar machines that gives multi-million dollar profits, or when life depends on it, you want to solve problems before they happen. You don't wait the brakes of your car to fail to only then replace them. And you replace them because they're worn out, not because they're not fashionable anymore.
If it was with me I'd see a floppy drive as a "ticking time bomb" problem just waiting to happen at the worst moment possible.
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No, what you do is carefully analyze the situation and have a plan. That means you look at things like how long are the airframes themselves expected to stay in service. How many spares do we have and how many do we think we need. Can parts be cannibalized from retired airframes. What is the actual risk. What is the likelihood of the floppy disk being the thing that makes an airframe unusable. And, one of the most important considerations - how much do the alternatives cost. For instance, if the cos
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The technology worked in 1990. Why wouldn't it work now? If there was a viable reason to upgrade, engineers are quite capable of putting forward a cost/benefit analysis to their boss. The fact is, it's working fine. It ain't broke, so don't fix it.
That's not the problem. Don't you remember that the storage capacities of those floppy disks are insanely low by today's standards? Remember 20 or so years ago when people had "zip drives"? I would think that those would work under Windows 10 but there's no advantage over USB flash drives and the flash drives will have much higher capacities. Eventually Persky will die and maybe his kids won't want to do this any more.
I worked for a company I won't name in the 1990s who did the majority of thei
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The technology worked in 1990. Why wouldn't it work now?
Well, newer media beat floppies in terms of speed, reliability, availability, physical size, durability, and cost. Any of those are good reasons to update the tech. They may not be good enough reasons to initiate a hardware refresh but while you're at it, it's one of the things you'd naturally try to change.
What surprises me is it's not like airplane avionics are static. They get upgraded all the time. I doubt there's any 737 running avionics over 30 years old (and would be surprised if any is old enough to
Re:So? (Score:4, Interesting)
About 9 or 10 years ago I worked on upgrades for a major airline's PCA (Pre-Conditioned Air (or Pre-Compressed Air)) system. That's what airplanes hook up to when parked at the gate so they can heat, cool, and ventilate the plane without using expensive power from the engines. It had been built decades before, and was about 1,600 Tons of refrigeration and ice storage that delivered 25F glycol solution to the air-handling units at the gates. They showed me the controls system, which was run by a DOS program on an ancient PC.
Since the hardware and software were so obsolete, I asked what back-up they had. They handed me a 3-ring binder user manual with a 5-1/4" floppy in it. If you know anything about old floppies, you know it's a good chance that that's the same as no back-up
There is no chance that they could get any drop-in replacement from the manufacturer for the bespoke controls. They eventually abandoned the system for cheaper but more-expensive-to-operate electrical units at each gate.
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Nuke codes etc (Score:2)
If I remember correctly, the nuke codes etc for SAC are still based on floppies. Not sure if they're 3.5s or 5.25s.
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IIRC, recently they were still using 8"s.
Again!? (Score:1)
737 Max (Score:2)
Remember the 737 Max? Why did it happen? Because it is EXCEEDINGLY expensive to qualify and certify something new in the aviation industry.
Replaced Long Ago (Score:1)
If you're curious you migh
Only to hide their reliance on punch cards. (Score:2)
Re: Only to hide their reliance on punch cards. (Score:2)
"beads on twine were more reliable information storage media."
You just about described magnetic core memory.
Red Dwarf - The Promised Land (Score:1)
Holly's backup is on a 5 foot by 5 foot floppy disc. With a drive to match.
Oh and how else is the floppotron going to keep playing? (see silent.org.pl) (or look for floppotron on youtube).
Ridiculous! (Score:1)