61
votes
Why the floppy disk just won't die
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- Authors
- Jacopo Prisco, Adrienne So, Angela Watercutter, Louryn Strampe, Parker Hall, Jack McGovan, Will Knight, Peter Guest, Aarian Marshall, Paresh Dave, Caitlin Harrington, Johanna Chisholm
- Published
- Mar 6 2023
- Word count
- 1421 words
“Nowadays it’s very hard to obtain floppy disks. We actually get them from Amazon,”
These two sentences seem to contradict each other.
From a commercial procurement perspective, an online marketplace being your only source for a critical consumable is a pain in the ass. You might have corporate compliance processes that require sending a purchase order with your Ts&Cs, you might have an accounting system you need to lodge an invoice in, and getting a tax invoice from a seller through a platform like Amazon or Ebay can be a runaround.
You've probably got a maintenance guy buying the disks online with a personal credit card and jumping through hoops every month or so trying to get reimbursed. You'd only bother if there was really no other option.
Fair. I work from home and we have a business account with Amazon. I don’t even blink an eye at ordering things for work through Amazon. That’s how we get things. But yeah if that’s not your usual flow and it’s mission critical goods it’s certainly a problem.
It’s less problematic than if they had to go through eBay or Facebook Marketplace or something.
The other issue is that you don't have a direct connect with the seller. So if, say, there's only one seller and they decide to stop tomorrow, you probably won't know till you go to order the next batch.
I assume the issue is only having a single, online, supplier and you can't get them anywhere else.
Go on Amazon and look. They are expensive, limited in supply, with a range of quality, and highly variable shipping delays. This is not ideal for a bulk user.
Keys, metallic strips with notches, are still used to lock and secure doors. Kinda similar in a way. If it's not broke, don't fix it.
Both are pretty broke.
I dunno, keys still solve the problem pretty well and aren't prone to the types of outages or issues that smart locks have.
That said, I work in tech and haven't held a floppy disk in my hand in at least 20 years. But I don't work on legacy systems like airplanes. I had heard there are still navy ships that have windows 3.1 running.
I mean the basic "metallic strips with notches" i.e. flat Linus Yale key is an outdated technology quite equivalent to a floppy. There are much, much better designs for both. 2 keys opening both the building door lock and two different apartment locks, lockpick-resistant, force-resistant, magnet-resistant etc.
Floppies can be reliable in good conditions, but even CDs are superior in resilience, storage, speed, space, weight, especially if you consider the mini CD format, and its support is ancient. Windows 3.1 had a CD driver iirc. Not to mention USB, though you don't need that for a floppy emulator.
Personally, I cannot imagine thinking one's safer with floppies when they require an overcomplicated chain of extremely specific, proprietary solutions. Wind blows the wrong way and that house of cards collapses, forcing you to replace it all anyway—but on the collapse's terms and timeframe instead of yours. Floppy-to-USB emulators are dirt cheap and don't need to be custom-made (contrary to what the article says) unless the original floppy drive was custom made, in which case that was the mistake and it just keeps taking.
You can usually keep a key functioning for the lifetime of the lock though, so that’s hardly a comparison.
Also the alternative has a ton of dependencies, unlike old fashion keys in pinned locks.
Isn’t the point that floppy disks are in fact broke?
How are they broke? They may not be useful for your needs, or even my needs, but why do you say they are broke? It’s a magnetic tape, one of the most reliable ways of storing data without having to use lasers and crystals.
They don’t make new ones anymore, the remaining stock is physically degrading, and shortly they simply won’t exist.
I mean the point of the whole article is that the remaining media is no longer reliable.
I was looking through some old things last week when I saw a floppy disk...I can only imagine the day when I tell my grandchildren about these antique devices.
There are so many things in tech like this like old banking systems using dated systems or maintaining old code since modernizing it requires too much work and no one understands what it does anyway. Remove one line and the whole thing breaks for seemingly no reason.
In some cases it's worse than that. The company only has compiled code - like an exe - which was created on systems you can't get anymore. They're relying on ancient manuscripts without a Rosetta stone.
It doesn't make sense to rewrite everything, though. Without all the information on how it was first created, you're starting from scratch and taking the risk of breaking it without realizing it. That's an expensive exercise when you could spend that budget elsewhere.
It's also an exercise that will eventually be necessary but due to the costs every generation of management keeps kicking it forward to the next one. I sure hope our banking systems won't be forced to upgrade due to catastrophic failure.
A few years ago I worked for a software company and part of the core software that did our calculations was written in COBOL. There was two guys who had been there forever and both were laid off. One immediately got a super high paying job at a huge financial institution, and when the company realized how impossible it was to hire anyone who knew COBOL at their preferred salary range, much less someone who could understand how our software worked, they ended up having to hire the other guy back as a contractor at a massive rate.
I left shortly after and have no idea how long they had to keep him on or if they ended up modernizing or backfilling, but it was the first time I realized how pervasive COBOL still is in our society and how hard it is to find people who still work with it.
I'm starting to think I should learn COBOL. Seems like an insanely well-paying proposition merely due to the sheer lack of devs.
Give it a try and let us know your experience.
I don't think the experience required comes easily though, so I doubt it's as easy as it sounds.
When I was a kid I got a job at an ace hardware, all their computer systems were ran off dos. And back then I thought it was ridiculous. This is like, 25 years ago.
Like, you learned the system you could fly through the commands and wait for the thing to catch up.
Wow. This really had an impact on me. I haven't thought about those comps or DOS in years.
I am a 3rd generation IBM'er. Fortunately it dies with me as my grown children have found other things to to with their lives!
My grandfather recently passed age 98. He started working for IBM right after a short stint in the army during the Korean Conflict. He initially was essential a repairman and worked in the maintenance department. He was...problematic...but VERY smart and could schmooze and worked his way up into management and eventually higher management.
I am probably using very IBM specific terms but most people should get the gist.
Then my mother got pregnant with me in a not very good way RIGHT before RvW and after a humiliating HS graduation was 'given' a job, (yea! nepotism!) and worked her way up from secretary to , and I am not joking, senior auditor. This was during the Sarbanes-Oxley era. Good times.
Then after a troublesome time when my under diagnosed self decided that 6 years full time following the Grateful Dead was more valuable then the 4 years at university ... I was given a job at IBM. And I was GOOD at it. Very good. I struggled with corporate culture though. And times had changed.
I just wanted to say how your comment made me look up old DOS screens and it made me smile and feel very nostalgic! I had not thought about those looks in ages! I audibly gasped when I googled it and my 20yo daughter was here and I explained and she said she had heard of DOS but not seen it!
So thank you for this gift! I will be sharing this thought with my mother next time we talk!
I work in a tech adjacent space for warehouse/logistics and so much is on these legacy platforms. Nothing gets changed in these spaces either without massive ROI. We have spent so much time band-aiding things or supporting things well outside the window because otherwise it risks not being able to grow as new shops open up for them which pick up the new tech but still use the same back ends.
There definitely seems to a slow growing move/wave towards upgrading a lot of these places but it's a slow process like pulling teeth and boiling frogs, as I remember just a few years back where we spent weeks arguing with them because they refused any change to the wireless network because they still had thirty year old devices working on the network and our tech was fumbling due to it and ultimately we had to adjust our stuff.
Unreal.
It seems really unfair to say that companies are still using floppy drives because they haven’t bothered to update them. The fact of the matter is that the software and hardware on these systems are only designed to use floppy disks. “Updating” these could mean replacing machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The airplanes are a pretty good example.
Floppy disk emulators that work with PC-formatted disks are actually pretty cheap; you can get one from Amazon right now for about $30. It’s the specialized ones that are difficult. Floppy disks are analog media (think of them as cassette tapes, but radial) and different systems record data in different ways. Amiga systems, for instance, actually vary the speed of rotation depending on the positioning of the head. These differences are why disks written on one system may not work on other systems even if it uses the exact same kind of physical disk.
Mirror for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/VoWmB
Thanks. I should have known to include a non paywall version as well.
I bought a 10-pack of new-old-stock 3.5” floppies on eBay recently for $10, just to play with an old Sony Mavica camera that I picked up dirt cheap. So far they still seem relatively easy to find.
Do you know when those floppies you bought where manufactured?
No, they didn’t come in any original packaging. They are Sony-branded though.
Cool. It looks like Sony stopped making floppies in 2011. So yeah, if they're genuine, your floppies are at least about 12 year old.
Right? Same. I have a Mavica FD-73 and a giant stack of floppy disks, plus I use floppies pretty regularly to install stuff on an old 486 I use as a hobby. My floppies are a grab bag of different brands, but I still don't recall ever having one fail, and I've not yet had any issues acquiring them. If anything I have too many.
The last time I ever had to fight with any were some really crusty ones from a piece of software from 1995 and two of them didn't want to read well. A different copy with less environmentally-exposed disks still installed just fine.
Seriously are new ones that bad? I've probably shot thousands of photos to the same floppy I always use in the Mavica, rewriting it over and over again since it only stores 20 at a time. I've always considered it a plenty durable workhorse of a format.
I wondered the same, though my most recent experience was using one to carry a single Word document between home and school for weeks on end back in 1996
Actually, come to think of it they also survived being jammed into the mysterious new CD tray by my mother
I have a feeling it's because they aren't being careful with how they store the disks and because the environment in a maintenance airplane hanger probably has lots of solvents around.
I still have a 3.5" that has all my old university work on it (backed up to a few different locations, not floppy) that I plug into an external drive every year or so to see if it can still be read. Last month it still worked on Win11. It started life on Win3.1!
Windows 11 doesn't have Floppy disk drivers afaik. Do you've to install them from third party??
I think it still just works with USB floppy drives. I never installed anything that I remember to grab photos from my Mavica disk on Windows 11. Just plugged in and there it was under This PC.
I have a cheap-ass USB floppy drive from Amazon that did just work when I plugged it into a Windows 11 machine.
Dell USB external 3.5" floppy drive on a dell box. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
It's interesting how many organisations are still technologies like floppies that have been long out of date in the world of private users. I guess that the rapid progress and change that technology has historically seen just isn't really compatible with applications like these that usually see an investment being made and kept in use for years or decades.
My kn2000 pcm keyboard actually have a floppy drive build in. No idea if it works, got it for cheap in a second-hand shop. Apperently, it can be used to upgrade the keyboard with new instruments or something.
I saw Hermeto Pascoal in concert a few weeks ago and he was playing a keyboard with a floppy drive. I found a review that said it's a Yamaha DX-7. Sounded great!
Is there a way to build a floppy disk adapter? I’m thinking of the cassette to AUX adapters there are out there for older car radios. It would be more complicated and a lot thinner, but maybe it’s just a wired disk with an exterior conversion-box with a USB port.
Sony released back in the day a Memory Stick to Floppy disk adapter, like a Micro SD card to regular SD card adapter. You had to put some batteries into the adapter and a special driver on the PC, and those adapters worked similarly to a cassette to AUX adapter. But that Sony adapter is the closest thing to a USB to Floppy Disk adapter, nowadays you can get some floppy drive replacements on eBay (i think they were called GoTek adapters or something along those lines) which let's you mount floppy disk image files from a USB to an old computer.
I have an old Mavica FD-87 camera that came from Goodwill with the original box and manuals. They advertise the floppy to memory stick adapter in the literature that came in the box, and it actually only gets half the write speed to the memory card that it gets to a real floppy disk, lol. The additional capacity would be very useful, though, as this camera can only store 6 jpegs shot at its maximum resolution of 1280x960 on a floppy disk.
When I look at the ~45MB RAW files coming out of my Nikon Z6 nowadays it makes me laugh.
I use those gotek things a lot. I repair old manufacturing equipment. They often use floppies to reload parameters and operating systems on old CNCs. There are thousands of these machines in operation today. Like, a significant percentage of the manufacturing done in the US is on machines that are more than 30 years old. Parts for complicated modern equipment like aircraft, rockets, cars, etc are often made on old equipment whose manufacturer has long gone out of business. And the current owners have no access to anyone who knows how they work. Replacing each machine could be anywhere from $50k to millions of dollars.
Luckily a lot of the machines that use floppies used the standard ribbon cable interface that PCs used. So you can swap them over to the Gotek emulator things and use a USB stick.
I found myself wondering how often that would be possible on these airplanes, etc. They were talking about in the article. It could be their techs just don't know how or are afraid to mess with such critical systems. Or maybe there are regulations about those kind of modifications. It's also possible Boeing made their own weird floppy drive with a proprietary protocol.
the article mentioned some upgraded to a floppy to usb emulator which seems like a good compromise
A weirdly expensive one, too. On my 486 I have a regular floppy drive on B:, but a Gotek drive on A:. It's just a USB port with a couple buttons next to it. Plug in any FAT32-formatted USB drive with floppy disk image files on it and it emulates a floppy drive with head seeks and read times and all that, but pulling data from USB. To switch disks just hit the up or down button to flip through files. There are no drivers and no setup--to the old computer, it's a perfectly normal 3.5" floppy drive. You can still get them for like $30, or $50 if you want a fancy little OLED upgrade with filenames displayed.
The adapters mentioned in the article aren't just any old adapters for consumer machines, but specialized adapters for the industrial machines which have to be made specifically for those machines, which is why they are much more expensive.
I guess the reason the planes don’t use the USB emulator is some kind of safety regulation. Surely at some point though, it will be safer to switch rather than risk failure due to floppy drive issues?
Hey guys, I lost floppy 3 of Quest for Glory 4, can someone spot me one?
Yo.
In the retro gaming world it seems that SD card floppy disk emulators are common -- physical hardware that connects to the floppy disk port and pretends to be a floppy disk, but is actually reading from the SD card. It seems that some of those examples in the article could be replaced by such a device, but I don't know how hard they are to source for whatever specific drive they use or whether there are robust enough solutions for commercial use, but if not it seems like there's a market for such a device if people are paying so much for a dwindling supply of physical disks. Perhaps that's what the article meant by "usb emulator", but I'd think that SD would be an easier solution.