The People Who Won't Give Up Floppy Disks (bbc.com) 96
Slashdot reader quonset writes: The last floppy disk was manufactured in 2011. Despite no new supplies being available for over a decade, there are still people, and organizations, who rely on floppy disks. Each has their own story as to why they rely on what is essentially 1970s technology.
From the BBC: Tom Persky, a US businessman, has been selling "new", as in, unopened, floppy disks for years and still finds the trade lucrative. He runs Floppydisk.com, which offers disks for about US$1 (£0.80) each, though some higher capacity versions cost up to US$10 (£8) per disk, he says. Persky has customers all over the world and you could split them roughly 50-50 into hobbyists and enthusiasts like Espen Kraft on one side, and industrial users on the other. This latter category encompasses people who use computers at work that require floppy disks to function. They are, essentially, locked in to a format that the rest of the world has largely forgotten.
"I sell thousands of floppy disks to the airline industry, still," says Persky. He declines to elaborate. "Companies are not happy about when I talk about them." But it is well-known that some Boeing 747s, for example, use floppy disks to load critical software updates into their navigation and avionics computers. While these older aircraft might not be so common in Europe or the US these days, you might find one in the developing world, for instance, Persky hints. There are also pieces of factory equipment, government systems — or even animatronic figures — that still rely on floppy disks.
And in San Francisco, the Muni Metro light railway, which launched in 1980, won't start up each morning unless the staff in charge pick up a floppy disk and slip it into the computer that controls the railway's Automatic Train Control System, or ATCS. "The computer has to be told what it's supposed to do every day," explains a spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transport Agency (SFMTA). "Without a hard drive, there is nowhere to install software on a permanent basis."
This computer has to be restarted in such a way repeatedly, he adds — it can't simply be left on, for fear of its memory degrading.
The article also includes this quote from a cybersecurity expert at Pen Test Partners. "If floppy was the only interface, the only way to get malware on to [the computer] would be via said floppy disk. That's quite a limiting factor for the attacker..."
From the BBC: Tom Persky, a US businessman, has been selling "new", as in, unopened, floppy disks for years and still finds the trade lucrative. He runs Floppydisk.com, which offers disks for about US$1 (£0.80) each, though some higher capacity versions cost up to US$10 (£8) per disk, he says. Persky has customers all over the world and you could split them roughly 50-50 into hobbyists and enthusiasts like Espen Kraft on one side, and industrial users on the other. This latter category encompasses people who use computers at work that require floppy disks to function. They are, essentially, locked in to a format that the rest of the world has largely forgotten.
"I sell thousands of floppy disks to the airline industry, still," says Persky. He declines to elaborate. "Companies are not happy about when I talk about them." But it is well-known that some Boeing 747s, for example, use floppy disks to load critical software updates into their navigation and avionics computers. While these older aircraft might not be so common in Europe or the US these days, you might find one in the developing world, for instance, Persky hints. There are also pieces of factory equipment, government systems — or even animatronic figures — that still rely on floppy disks.
And in San Francisco, the Muni Metro light railway, which launched in 1980, won't start up each morning unless the staff in charge pick up a floppy disk and slip it into the computer that controls the railway's Automatic Train Control System, or ATCS. "The computer has to be told what it's supposed to do every day," explains a spokesman for the San Francisco Municipal Transport Agency (SFMTA). "Without a hard drive, there is nowhere to install software on a permanent basis."
This computer has to be restarted in such a way repeatedly, he adds — it can't simply be left on, for fear of its memory degrading.
The article also includes this quote from a cybersecurity expert at Pen Test Partners. "If floppy was the only interface, the only way to get malware on to [the computer] would be via said floppy disk. That's quite a limiting factor for the attacker..."
We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:5, Informative)
We have floppy disk emulators that connect to everything from 8" to 5.25" to 3.5" using their original interfaces. Not to mention hand-held devices with their SD Card interfaces.
It's astonishing that the maintainers of these systems are not aware of these 100% functional modern alternatives to physical floppy drives.
Re:We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:5, Insightful)
You think the people who won't pay to upgrade their system to something more modern are going to pay for an emulator? They're just going to run it into the ground and then yell at their I.T. guy (who has been warning them for years).
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they are like $30 it seems though?
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More than that, but it comes with other stuff too.
https://www.bigmessowires.com/... [bigmessowires.com]
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Re:We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:5, Insightful)
More like "Hey sign your name to this form guaranteeing this emulator is 100% perfect and won't ever crash a jumbo jet".
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Once bureaucracy get's involved, yes. Otherwise, it's for loading software updates while on the ground. I sincerely HOPE they aren't relying on the floppy's hardware to detect all errors when loading.
There would be money in certifying emulators (Score:2)
But floppies and drives are cheap and it's easy to image floppies to write replacements. I used to Winimage all sorts of boot floppies, DOS and Windows install floppies etc.
Winimage is still available. First order of business when I got a floppy that mattered was to image it before use, write another floppy and test that copy. I kept my image collection in CD-R for reliability.
Re:We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:5, Funny)
More like "Hey sign your name to this form guaranteeing this emulator is 100% perfect and won't ever crash a jumbo jet".
Pretty sure Boeing has confirmed you don’t need a floppy disc emulator to do that.
Re: We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:2)
This is a 747 - from the era when engineers rolled Boeing, not bean counters.
Re: We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a 747 - from the era when engineers rolled Boeing, not bean counters.
Damn. I can only imagine the (formerly?) proud retired Boeing engineer, reading that.
I would imagine it’s similar to those that had a hand in making HP RPN calculators. Standing by watching the utter destruction of a revered product line, decades old.
When they say they don’t make ‘em like they used to, no one thought they were talking about humans. Capitalism was so greedy it created its own demise; the fucking MBA. Also known as the MBA fucking.
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And the fatal crash rates on those classic 747s are three times the rate on the MD80, and ten times a 747-800, 737 NG, or A320.
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And the fatal crash rates on those classic 747s are three times the rate on the MD80, and ten times a 747-800, 737 NG, or A320.
Were they? The 747 has been in operation since 1970, has 60 hull losses where flaws were rarely the culprit.
The 737-800 line was introduced in 1997, has 23 hull losses, with many attributed to design flaws. With the MAX variant getting ultimately grounded.
Smearing over the cause of those hull losses with “per million miles flown” statistical peanut butter, tends to speak volumes about the actual safety. Why are there dead whistleblowers again, if this can be chalked up to Boeing tradition pro
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They were.
http://www.airsafe.com/events/... [airsafe.com]
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How about, "We can't buy NOS parts from the airline manufacturers, so we have to buy used stuff from a guy selling out of his basement. Totally complies with regulations!"
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Do they also have to sign forms saying that the floppy disks themselves won't crash the jumbo jet?
Unless they are using certified media, they are relying on the system itself to detect errors.
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The talk is about countries that use really old jets. Those are the nations of the likes of Pakistan. If you want to understand what that means for aviation, here's a nice breakdown of one of the Pakistan's air crashes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Where a Swedish pilot can't get his head around the fact that only around 60% of the pilots in that airline were actually certified pilots in 2020, and the rest just forged their documents so they could fly for a living. Welcome to the third world, where few p
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More like "Hey sign your name to this form guaranteeing this emulator is 100% perfect and won't ever crash a jumbo jet".
I don't think they got the signature from the floppy disk maker either.
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San Francisco has little reason to trust IT people over mid level managers [wikipedia.org].
(Not to say I disagree with the idea, but in real life, upper management generally goes with whoever they understand better, and that's generally not the technical people.)
Re:We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:4, Insightful)
To replace a part on the 747 would require going through a certification process... which I doubt anybody has any interest in paying for.
Re: We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:2)
Certification is a global thing. Third World countries that operate a 747 fleet don't just fly from one end of the country to the other.
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In third world countries?
Yes in third world countries. That's the thing about air travel. It goes beyond the country border you're in. Certification is required for planes not just based on where they come from but also where they want to transit and travel to. 3rd world countries none the less travel to first world countries. 3rd world airlines code-share with 1st world airlines, and are part of an alliance with 1st world airlines.
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I was thinking certification too, but are another poster pointed out outs global.
But for other things, well that train system is a one off. For anyone except senior management, moving top an emulator is all risk no reward. You won't have the resources to validate it and if it goes wrong you're probably looking at changing industry sectors for a fuckup of that magnitudemagnitude.
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OTOH, re-fitting one train so you have a known solution in your back pocket when the day comes wouldn't be a bad idea.
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Until they have a $200 million airplane stuck on the ground with no replacement parts available, with six figure maintenance costs per year whether it flies or not (and if they don't keep in current, it will likely never fly again).
Mind you, I mean that literally - they won't care until then.
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Which will not be able to fly it to countries that conform to international standards on aircraft certifications, which is nearly all of them.
Good luck with that.
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It's astonishing that the maintainers of these systems are not aware of these 100% functional modern alternatives to physical floppy drives.
It's astonishing that people like you are still not aware of contracts, warrantees, and what money is.
I've had a gotek in my win98 gaming rig for over a decade now, proving your statement completely wrong.
Yet there is no way in fucking hell I am going to be the one to void a 15 million dollar support contract with two hour part replacement service just to modify a machine I do not own and start replacing their parts.
If you actually tried what you say to do, you would be fired and sued into homelessness fast
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Ad hominem attack much?
Taking your tone with my response: Nothing you have said is even remotely true.
GoTek are cheap and long proven on CNC machines. (Score:2)
GoTek are also popular among Atari and Amiga enthusiasts. There's plenty of info on using them. I converted my machinistbro's Bridgeport EZ-Trak knee mills several years ago.
They use virtual floppies on USB flash drives and plug onto the existing floppy header. You can cycle through many virtual floppies if you care but most users just use one. There are many Ebay sellers so don't overpay.
https://www.gotekemulator.com/ [gotekemulator.com]
Re:We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:4, Insightful)
There's lots of issues. Aviation moves very slowly - and many aircraft use disks to get updates - not software updates, but things like map updates (and these things have to be updated on a monthly basis).
Given how many planes are out there, and that while most of the US fleet would be relatively modern, the older planes get moved to airlines elsewhere in the world.
A floppy emulator would have to get certified - the GoTek may cost like $50, but now you're going to have to get it certified as a replacement, and then supporting the replacement by providing the alternate media formats. This is especially critical because those updates are almost always provided on a subscription basis, and always tied to a specific aircraft. So you cannot just take one disk and use it across a fleet of aircraft, you have to have it specifically for that one.
So your information provider must support the format you use. Because in all honesty, you want it as brain dead simple as it is - ideally all they have to do is stick the drive in the slot, and power up the flight management computer. If it can just check for an update disk, apply the update automatically and be done with it. It also needs to write a receipt showing that the update was applied successfully so it can be put into the logbooks, and the USB drive can be put away for safekeeping (if anything happens, that receipt will be checked to verify that the aircraft was using current data).
And to be honest, I found a couple of boxes of floppy disks - brand new still iln shrinkwrap. Probably bought them at the height of my pirating days where we'd copy disks from friends and you buy them in bulk so you'd never run out. Also got some brand new floppy drives still freshly made (original Sony manufactured drives, at that).
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They've had 13 years to get a certified replacement.
Re: We have had floppy disk emulators for years (Score:2)
There is exactly zero chance that you can use something that different and uncertified to update a 747. That said, the fact that muni is still using this ancient software is an embarrassment.
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This was my very first thought reading the article also, there's zero reason to continue using physical floppies on devices that require them when more reliable systems are available.
again and again.... (Score:5, Informative)
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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Why bother if not a hobby? (Score:1)
There's a bunch of cheap IDE-to-SD adapters available to help rid oneself of the floppies. Those I've tried work very well.
Re: Why bother if not a hobby? (Score:2)
The floppy disk interface long predates IDE, which came out in 1986. Most motherboard had separate IDE and floppy drive headers well into the late 1990s and even 2000s. Many then removed the floppy headers, and subsequently the IDE (PATA] headers as well
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Yeah, I forget the Russian military-industrial complex and their ancient "Bulgarian" CNC machines all the time. They must be a major customer.
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There's a bunch of cheap IDE-to-SD adapters available to help rid oneself of the floppies. Those I've tried work very well.
You trying something does not certify it for use in mission critical applications. Anyone doing this as a simple hobby has already worked their way around the problem. There's a big difference between a piece of hardware working for you, and you using that piece of hardware in a secure government system, mainframe, or even on a 747.
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It's not IDE: that's basically a replacement for old hard disks.
I don't think I've ever seen an IDE floppy dive, myself. Every one I used had the floppy drive interface.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
The IDE interface, like CF, PCMCIA is basically the ISA bus in a different form factor. I don't think I've even heard of an IDE floppy with the possible exception of super disk drives which could also use floppies.
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I have a 120 megabyte "Superfloppy" drive which uses an IDE cable. What sucks about it is that if you want to boot from it, that is harder, as the PCs of the time expect floppy disks to be on the floppy drive interface. However, for a Zip drive competitor, it did the job okay... however, they didn't make it, as Iomega wound up more popular and the Zip drive format had a few nice things with it, like password protection and being obviously not a floppy disk.
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LS-120 [wikipedia.org] drives mostly used IDE (and that probably includes the ones installed in an external case with a USB adapter). They had their own 120-MB format they supported, but were also backward-compatible with ordinary floppy disks.
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There used to be a type of floppy..the LS120 drives...that connected to an IDE interface. It was kinda weird, but it did work with 3.5" floppies.
LS120 [wikipedia.org]
Ya never know (Score:2)
After a big EM pulse explosion, trebuchets may be in big demand.
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From the first link (Score:5, Insightful)
The slow death of the "floppy" or "diskette" began in 1998 when Apple decided not to include a floppy drive in its G3 iMac computer.
Hardly anyone had Apple computers. It was the CD-ROM. Games stopped being sold on a stack of 1.44mb and instead came on CD-ROM. The widespread adaption of the CD-ROM burners around 2000 put the nail in the casket.
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Hardly anyone had Apple computers.
Really? In looking for a good source for a statistic on that the best I got was a few mentions of Apple's market share being about 10%, which isn't nothing.
The widespread adaption of the CD-ROM burners around 2000 put the nail in the casket.
You mean like those CD-R drives available in the second generation "slot loading" iMac from 1999 and 2000?
The first generation "tray loading" iMac G3 from 1998 was pretty useless out of the box for not having a CD-R, floppy, or much else for writable media. USB floppy drives were a thing and were popular accessories for the early "candy colored" Macs o
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Very true. The Zip drive did go a long way to kill the floppy drive, but what killed all those media types, be it a Castlewood Orb drive, SyQuest, Iomega, 120 meg floppies, CD-PD, MO, PCMCIA flash cards (which turned into CF), was the USB flash drive. Those became common. I wound up using a metal Sandisk Cruzer for a number of things, as at the time, it offered a way to back up to the cloud, portable apps (not the Portable Apps site, which is better, but similar), password protection, and was rugged enou
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In the late 1990s Apple's market share for personal computers wasn't even 10%. That is when the company was on the verge of failure and they brought Steve Jobs back.
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Apple sold 5 million iMacs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Once 2000 came around, we had a ton of "shovelware" in places like CompUSA. A CD-ROM with a ton of various stuff on it, stuff that used to be on floppy, and because CDs could be stamped relatively cheaply, it was easy to get a huge amount of stuff (for the time) onto a CD or two. It was nice back then, as those CDs wound up having something useful on them, just out of sheer statistics.
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First Macs were very common in the university setting which is where you usually "need" floppy disks.
Very common in one small sub area of a market that was virtually devoid of personalised laptops back in the time we are talking about is not meaningful. Yeah I would say Apple was the most common laptop at university for sure. I saw several people bring them to lectures. On the other hand I say several hundred people bring nothing at all, because that was what university was back in 2000, and the labs were full of HPs and Dells.
Apple's market share was insignificant. It had no impact on the floppy disk.
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My university had a computer room with 200 Macs for public usage.
Laptops were not really existing. Portable computers where usually small suitcases. Imagine a very big shoe box with a handle and somehow detachable display.
Nearly every Prof in computer science had a Mac, so had every PhD student.
Of course we had also a couple of hundred Suns. Dozens of of every (unix) workstation brand you can imagine. DECs, Appolos, SGIs, Iris, but those were extra secure special rooms.
Keep in mind, Macs came in addition to
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Probably code bloat as well. Iirc monkey island 2 was what 10+ floppies? And some you had to have in-hand because the game would suddenly demand "insert disk 8" or whatever.
When you'd pirated that from your friends copy of a copy of a copy and then found out disk 8 was corrupted, that sucked enough to be sure you got a CD on the next computer.
I still have some. (Score:2)
I actually didn't know they stopped making floppy disks in 2011. I still have two boxes of 10 3.5" disks and a Sony USB floppy disk drive, though I don't think I have anything stored on them and can't remember the last time I used the drive.
boot sector virus? (Score:2)
>>The article also includes this quote from a cybersecurity expert at Pen Test Partners. "If floppy was the only interface, the only way to get malware on to [the computer] would be via said floppy disk. That's quite a limiting factor for the attacker..."
I seem to recall getting a lot more viruses back in the floppy days, even with no internet connection.
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That's because you shared floppies. I'll guarantee that no one is sticking the floppy for the BART system in some unscanned system and getting I Love You loaded on it.
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In a time when few people had their own computer it was routine to carry floppy disks with their files on them. To me this looked like an ideal vector for a virus to spread. With people owning laptops they didn't need to swap drives as often, instead swapping individual files which had no executable data in them. That worked to keep viruses contained until macro viruses were a thing, and we can thank Microsoft for that. People that used networked systems were also at least moderately protected from viru
Don't copy that floppy! ;) (Score:2)
Greaseweazle and Copy II PC Deluxe Option Board 2.0 have your back. The trick really is in preserving pristine data from this fragile medium, including the copy protected bullshit.
In 2019, US missile silos finally gave up on physical floppies.
2.88 MB 3.5" disks were used extensively in industrial equipment and control systems, some of which are still in use. They're like DC power utility companies: legacy stuff rarely dies completely when there are economic, technical, political, or knowledge limitations
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legacy stuff rarely dies completely when there are...
Indeed. At least as recently as ten years ago there was a sawmill in Oregon that ran on punch cards. In the first years of this century a former co-worker tested a completely analog fire alarm system that ran on water power, air pressure, and a Model T generator (it passed). I know of Radionics alrm panels that are 20+ years old on classified facilities, still working as originally configured, and for which there are no plans to replace. There's a Bio-hazard Level 4 development lab in the Pacific Northw
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I think the punch cards might not be as big of a risk as the floppies. If you absolutely positively need a box of punch cards and the last box in the world was sold 10 years ago, you could likely have a supply made in a local print shop on some suitable card stock for an affordable amount of money. Now consider how you might get a bespoke box of floppies made.
rofl (Score:1)
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I have actually punched a deck of cards and submitted them as a batch process on an old mainframe. I still have a deck or two somewhere. No, I'm not quite that old. I was a teen when I did that and the equipment was retired but never actually decommissioned.
The cards are normally die cut because that is faster and cheaper in bulk, but it can be done otherwise for a small run if you really needed to. That would be slower and more labor intensive, so more expensive. That's why I said :absolutely positively ne
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I refurb old IBM systems from the 80s. I put USB floppies in them. Works great and cheap. One small stick could contain hundreds of disk images and they work identically to the originals. I suppose weird copy protection schemes with bad sectors and such might confound them, but that kind of stuff is inherent to those schemes.
Even robots boot from floppy disks (Score:2)
As seen here: http://sn.doink.ch/wp-content/... [doink.ch]
They should .. (Score:1)
They should be forced to use a PS2, rotary phones, TVs w/o remotes, VCRs, stick shift cars, etc. LOL
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Forced? Hell, that stuff was built way better than today's non-repairable throw away garbage. Stick shift, hell yes, a shame that's not common any longer.
Used to love floppy (Score:3)
When my house flooded, the device and all my written works survived the waters, but did not survive my friends and family that helped me after the flood. They threw it and all my disks out because they looked old.
I should have had remote backups, but the moral of the story is make sure your critical infrastructure doesn't appear old.
I still use them (Score:3)
I restore vintage computers for myself and others. Part of that restoration includes getting the floppy drives working 100%. New 1.44MB floppy diskettes are still fairly easy to source, 720K not so much. Same with 1.2MB easy to get while 360K difficult, single sided even harder. If you properly store floppy diskettes they work for a long, long time. Floppy emulators are ok, but stay away from the cheap Ali express junk from China (which is 99% of the stuff out there).
Legacy systems (Score:2)
I used to be peripherally involved with a legacy system that had, with some effort, been converted recently from 8" floppies to those new-fangled 3.5" gadgets. It used a unique file system that required a particular format. I figured out a way to use Linux to format the floppies and write disk images. We noted a sharp drop in floppy quality after about 2008.
The system used more modern storage at runtime, but making it boot off something more modern (e.g. USB) would have required a boot ROM upgrade. This w
Past a certain age (Score:2)
...all your disks get floppy.
I'm curious (Score:2)
Did nobody ever make a device to emulate a floppy drive but actually use something else for storage (like a ridiculously small portion of a USB flash drive)?
Re: I'm curious (Score:2)
Of course they did. It's just a Google search away.
A 2MB SmartMedia card will not be enough for a 2.88MB floppy, though.
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Just about all the old storage is emulated. From pc floppy disks to GPIB hard drives to MFM hard drives. ESDI is about the only non emulated interface right now but sooner or later someone is going to have to design one. ESDI wasn't as popular as scsi but lots of unique machines used it. Stuff like big Symbolics boxes or the IBM RT.
About that "cybersecurity expert" (Score:3)
my dad used floppies (Score:2)
media wonks have it backwards (Score:1)
There is nothing I want to hear MORE than "Our life critical system depends on only 2 MB of software. It has worked reliably for decades."
Nothing could be worse than we're doing with modern day cars. Those touchscreens will depreciate faster than any other part of the car. Internet-connected junk. And they're completely unnecessary. They're just displaying useless battery statistics because they don't have a purpose.