We all know the story about US military still using floppies for its nuclear weapons program...

We all know the story about US military still using floppies for its nuclear weapons program, but other than that (and stuff like hobby/retro computing), is there any other practical application of floppy disks?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/mYW2jfsZ2Ro
tedium.co/2016/12/06/iomega-zip-disk-click-of-death-history/
reuters.com/article/us-usa-banks-cobol/banks-scramble-to-fix-old-systems-as-it-cowboys-ride-into-sunset-idUSKBN17C0D8
web.archive.org/web/20160627022544/http://rkirchhof.com/Electromigration.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

if it aint broke dont fix it

Nothing else
They're useless

magnetic memory still has the least data degradation compared to other storage media as long as it's properly stored and maintained.

this isn't really a plus for floppies themselves, but it's why tape drive backups are still the gold standard for long term data storage

Wait, they do?

Yeah guise, let's abandon the system that' worked for over 40 years, put everything on the cloud and might as well add some neural networks while we're at it, what could go wrong...

Massive amounts of legacy hardware/machinery in the engineering world uses floppy discs and arcane file formats to this day because
>if it aint broke dont fix it

Same thing with old synths and studio gear in the music world.

Zip disks were fairly popular at one point but they didn't become a standard, perhaps because they were proprietary.

>Stored bits
>Calling that useless

u r useless

I like "if it still works don't fuck with it"

How do they know if their shit is still working?
What will happen if they want to nuke NK just to realize their nukes arent launching because some silly floppy IO error?

Unless it runs extremely slow and interferes with your work efficiency.

Many of my clients still run their 50+ employees businesses with copper networks and some even have 100mbit ethernet cards.

... and they wonder why their backups take hours upon hours instead of a few minutes.

Many Digital Pianos still use floppies.

I bet they've still got some esoteric software or hardware that doesn't work with newer stuff

LS120 > Click Click Zip

this.

Also a lot of CNC machines from the 90s. They are fully operational and do the job just fine so there is no reason to throw them out.
They sell USB flash drive-to-floppy "converters" too.

Optical discs take some time to spin up, and you have to be careful not to damage the underside. With flash drives you have to wait for the driver to install each time you use a new drive, or use it on a new computer. Floppies had a simplicity to them.

Most of them don't. They just plain don't want to spend the extra money and run everything on ancient systems. What's 20k-40k for a business that makes around 600k€ a month? Jesus christ.

Those that did believe me when I told them it was worth it thanked me afterwards because it changed the way they work because of how much faster everything is. We're not talking extreme machines here, simply i3s or i5s and fiber lines.

Battleships never changed away from their electro-mechanical fire-control systems.

What do you mean fiber lines?
Instead of ethernet utp cables you use optic fiber?
In an office?

if you think you're more clever i've got some bad news for ya

I use a Dell USB floppy from an Integrity server, on an order at an old job Dell mucked up and sent a floppy with every server, they credit the company back and we pooled half of them to the IT dept and half to ourservles.

Reminds me of what my brother tells me about his work in a (non-US) governmental agency, they have a 100mbit intranet divided between 20-50 workers and all project files are stored on a NAS, figures that the bosses dont care about upgrading since they dont actually have to make a profit

Battleships were obsolete before microchips existed

You were obsolete before you left your mother vageen.

And still in use at the same time as an Aegis-class destroyer.

Industrial usage. I saw a floppy for printing machines.

ISP fiber, yeah. I am not talking about fiber intranet, it's not necessary for them.

They're running all their machines which require internet access via a 10-20mbit line. That's the good days.

>Aegis-class destroyer.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Aegis, is in fact, Aegis/ AN/SPY-1, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Aegis plus SPY-1.

Saw this stuff couple of days ago, it's actually pretty neat. I don't know if a traditional loom storing its pattern on a floppy disk is considered as high tech or not.

youtu.be/mYW2jfsZ2Ro

...

>you have to be careful not to damage the underside

You have to be more careful to the top side - that's where the data is actually located.

This only applies to high-end storage. The floppies on sale today are worst of the worst. many of them won't even work brand new and the ones that do will deteriorate quickly.

...

Because Congress couldn't think past the "BATTLESHIPS ARE COOL" idea. Which they are. That didn't make them useful or cost effective.

>magnetic memory still has the least data degradation compared to other storage media as long as it's properly stored and maintained.

I'm fairly sure PROM has even less.
Should be pretty much immune to EM blasts as well.

What are these things? Same as on the Stargate human bridges.

On carriers they use them to track planes.

It's in case power goes down or other complete system failure.

But that an issue with industries that do use lot of old tech. Once something *does* break, whoever is in charge of fixing it is going to wish their corporation had higher budget for upgrading their hardware/software infrastructure.

so? do you want to use SSD, gaming RAM and LEDS in you nuclear rig?

Sorry my man but I'm not about to get rid of a factory machine worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a newer slower machine just because it only works with windows 2000. Someone is simply going to have to find a way to make it work.

Well, if you have some floppies around, you could launch a nuclear nissile. Just saying.

I work in a hospital lab, the Bactec blood culture incubator uses floppies and so does one of our coagulation analyzers.

What machine and how does it susceptible to modern technology?

I imagine a grain grinder from the 1800 would still work perfectly fine in 2k17.

A stepper? Not so much

Back-lit glass panels

>Same thing with old synths and studio gear in the music world.
so much this

>I cannot into comprehension, the post

if isn't broken, don't fucking touch it

Apparently nobody here ever heard about useful life of an asset

Well, not like US military is making any money tho (it's the opposite), so to hell with it, I guess

Storing these GIFs

...

Is it true that most of the worlds banks are running on old ass software and operating systems?

Airplane flight plans

Security through obscurity.

That is a female human. You are supposed to trick it into thinking you are worthy of impregnating it.

There's a lot of systems that run 2.x/3.x of the Linux kernel. Stability matters a lot more then some bleeding edge technology.

Zip Disk: The infamous Click of Death

"In early Zip drives, the drive heads would often misalign in everyday use. When you put a disk in one of these broken drives, it had a pesky side effect of misaligning the disks themselves, making them unreadable. And when you put a broken disk inside of a working drive, it was a great way to misalign the drive head of the previously-working drive. It was almost like spreading a disease.

Edwards played the problems off in the press, suggesting that the issues affected less than 1 percent of the drives on the market.

That proved a fatal error—and led to Edwards’ ouster from Iomega in early 1998, amid a period of bad press and quickly declining fortunes."

fromtedium.co/2016/12/06/iomega-zip-disk-click-of-death-history/

Banks still use COBOL. It's not sexy, but you could make bucks if you know it.

"Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset"
fromreuters.com/article/us-usa-banks-cobol/banks-scramble-to-fix-old-systems-as-it-cowboys-ride-into-sunset-idUSKBN17C0D8

Keep in mind a lot of updates are adding features, and that those features aren't usually necessary for an already working system
and that they have a risk of introducing a vulnerability
Once you have everything working and locked down it can be better to just not mess with it any more than you need to
especially when it manages millions of dollars of bank transfers on a daily basis for example

>75 yo
>still working

those gramps must retire and let the new generation earn that money. It's not fair.

>"HURR DURR STOP USING OLD SHIT GRAMPS!!!!111!!! XDDDDD"
Go play with your Alienware laptop.

>russia

learn to read, cuck. Teach me that and I will gladly maintain 40yo code for 100 dollars per hour.

>Stability matters a lot more then some bleeding edge technology.

Is not stability as a lot of people thinks is this why those systems has not been hacked and still running?
>1 Common public just has no access
>2 They have fixed protocols of how fix things

Why has not been replaced ... cuz just werks, for example COBOL has not been replaced because is as efficient or stable as they say is because you wont fucking risk something that just werks for something that maybe gonna be better but maybe gonna have a failure and you wont be able to fix it at time.

Thats fucking fantastic.

>when you realise your bank and its ATMs are using COBOL

Security reasons. If you steal a diskette with nuclear codes on it, you probably can't stick it anywhere in your laptop.

Zip disks failed because of the limitations of the floppy format. The higher capacity you get, the faster the rotation speed needs to be, so that on Zip disks it would actually end up shearing the magnetic media off the disk and damaging the drive head as well. This isn't an issue with hard disks because they're not a contact media.

That's for CDs. Blu-rays and DVDs have the data layer sandwiched between two protective layers

two is one and one is none
when something critical breaks, you already had a backup available and can figure out what to do further at that time

It's true that 3.5" 1.44MB disks made from the 90s onward are typically garbage and die after a couple of uses but diskettes in the 80s were perfectly reliable unless you got a trash brand like Wabash.

Those 8" disks used by the military aren't the Chinese trash brand 1.44MB disks you got at OfficeMax.

I think in general that 3.5" disks are not as reliable as 5.25" and 8" disks were. I've heard plenty of anecdotal evidence from people who've been using computers since the 80s to confirm this. It may have to do with the physically smaller size of the disk resulting in the same amount of data being put in a smaller space.

It is still common for embedded devices and control boards in appliances to use Z80 and 65xx CPUs. Thing is, a Z80 is a laughably outdated chip to base a board around and there are far better modern solutions but in some cases, a washing machine or whatever PCB was designed in the 80s and the company can't be bothered to update it.

>Many of my clients still run their 50+ employees businesses with copper networks and some even have 100mbit ethernet cards

Meaning they have over 50 employees or the employees are over the age of 50? I don't get it.

Unless it's being retrofitted with internet of tat bullshit, i wouldn't worry about outdated chipsets being used for dumb appliances.

They might have made Zip disks more reliable with a bit more time/effort/budget.

I'm a big fan of this post

Doesn't George RR martin do his writing on an old PC?

It's good for security because who has a fucking floppy dick reader?

>It's true that 3.5" 1.44MB disks made from the 90s onward are typically garbage and die after a couple of uses but
Based on my experience, they're decent when it comes to reading, but you can't write to the disks more than about 2-3x before they crap out.

Because you dipshit in critical systems predictability is the most important factor. Also, it benefits security to use outdated tech. Reduces attack surface, keeps things magnetic, there is no risk of electromigration in the long-term, and it is easier to protect magnetic media from an EMP.

>there is no risk of electromigration in the long-term

Older ICs have more electromigration issues than modern ones because chip fabrication has improved a _lot_ since the Apple II days.

Isn't magnetic data the most vulnerable from EMP? I always thought that MAGNETOC would be wiped out by an electroMAGNETICpulse.

Electromigration actually wasn't that much of an issue after the 70s. By the time you get to the 80s, it had mostly been conquered, at least by the best and most state-of-the-art manufacturers. By the 90s, as chip dies got smaller and more dense, it did become a concern again and that led to the switch to copper interconnects in the 2000s.

I know that it was a big problem on Commodore ICs but they were using 70s fabrication processes that were already outdated by the Reagan years.

BTW, if a chip fails from electromigration causing an open circuit, you can repair it by baking it in an oven at 325 degrees for an hour or so. This will melt the interconnect back into place. This of course will not work if the chip has a short; in that case the chip is not fixable and has to be simply thrown away. Shorted ICs get hot to the touch so they're easy to identify.

Some of it might be.

They test everything regularly.

I never heard of this before.

Actually they use ovens as a normal part of IC stress testing.

>Fat ugly SJW Cunt Women in charge of nukes
;_;

Oh my god this

>implying sjws want to serve their country instead of leeching from it

>Missile Officer
>SJW

web.archive.org/web/20160627022544/http://rkirchhof.com/Electromigration.html

Here.

Don't those things use the old 720k floppies rather than 1.44MB ones?

He didn't ask about why the military still using floppy disks, you shithead. He asked about other application that still use floppy disks

Fucking speedreader

Why not? The British army used the Brown Bess musket for 100 years.

this
its better its not connected to the internet

fantastic indeed.. i wonder why it curved ? gravity well or aerodynamic effect ?

Low-quality camera/graphics that couldnt handle something at a slant and moving. Stair-stepping.

Makes you wonder what they did in the 90s when you could stick the thing in any laptop.

It's not about budget. They have a system that can't have downtime and that is VERY dangerous and costly to update.