>The key word here is reliability — and that’s likely the reason floppy disks are still being used in medical equipment, ATMs, and aviation hardware as Tom mentioned. The cutting edge of technology is fine for your smartphone or a video game console. But when it comes to mission-critical hardware that literally controls a potential nuclear holocaust, “tried and true” carries more weight than “new and improved.”<p>Great gobs of bullshit. Floppies aren't reliable and they never were. The disks are easily damaged, susceptible to contamination from dust, they wear out quickly; the same goes for the drives. As an example, the Tektronix 3000 series oscilloscopes came equipped with floppy drives, and that was by far the most common reason (like many times more often than any other reason) for repair on the things. Thankfully after they started coming equipped with ethernet, you could forget about the floppy drive. Take note that all the examples mentioned relate to industries which are very conservative WRT implementing technology, and have an onerous approval process to get new tech in use; that's not evidence that floppies are somehow superior, but rather that the process for approving new tech. is sometimes too burdensome. When I was in college, a large fraction of my IEEE chapter's non-dues fundraising was through sales of floppy disks to students; because the damn things weren't reliable.<p>The "This Morning" segment included is a fluff piece, and completely at odds with recent (well, 2013/2014, not too distant past) reporting of serious problems with the stewardship of nuclear weapons. I am not sure why any sane person would want to gloss over those problems<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268880352/air-force-cheating-scandal-widens-to-92-nuclear-officers" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/30/268880352/...</a><p><a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-Force-scandal-cheating-by-nuclear-launch-officers-video" rel="nofollow">http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2014/0116/Another-Air-...</a>
I've had to use them up until just recently. To run reverse engineering tests on an SNES console, I've had to use an old copier device. It's a box that plugs into the cartridge port and will load games off of floppy disks. (and of course, it can copy games plugged into the box onto said floppies.)<p>Usually takes around 5-10 minutes to split an image file into four parts, write them to floppies, and then load them one at a time onto the copier. And it's only that fast because I'd do it in parallel. The disks would usually fail after a few hundred write cycles, so I stocked up on quite a few.<p>Thankfully, I now have two alternatives. A flash cart that takes an SD card, and soon a boot loader for the expansion port that will let me load my own code through the controller port via serial.<p>So I'm done with floppies at long last; but now my new fun is sourcing 5V-tolerant components, and card edge connectors for an extremely rare pitch size :D
One word that I don't associate with floppies is 'reliable'. I don't know how many times I had bad sectors on my floppies back in the day. There's no protection against magnetic fields, the material on the plastic disk isn't always OK (hence the 'single sided' 3.5" floppies you could buy and which you could transform into double-sided floppies by punching a hole in the corner ;))<p>So it was surprising to me that floppies were seen as reliable in the article and e.g. usb sticks aren't (they're not mentioned as an alternative at all, which I find a little odd)
Could you make a simulated floppy disk which worked in existing physical drives, but contained flash (and thus lots of more storage, potentially more reliable, etc.)?<p>I know there are floppy DRIVE emulators like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator</a> but I want to emulate the DISK.<p>There are also of course software solutions to this in a lot of cases, too, especially if you can virtualize, but sometimes hardware is needed.
Another floppy disk hold out are the many musical keyboards/synths manufactured in the 80s and 90s that used floppy drives to load patches and sequences. Hell, patch, there is another anachronism that has a lot in common with the floppy disk icon :)<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesizer#Patch</a>
A floppy disk ejected from the drive and stored in a safe with a Marine with a rifle standing in front of it, is 1000x more secure than <i>anything</i> connected to the Internet. Maybe a million times more.
Many complain here about how bad the disks where, but nobody seem to remember the sudden quality drop in the late 90s. For me it was very different to use a (not very used) 10 year old disk than using a freshly bought one, any brand.
It's a common source of ridicule amongst German IT workers (esp. commuters) that our high-speed trains ("ICE") still use disks to transfer seat reservations. And it's not that infrequent that you'll hear "seat reservations can't be displayed" being announced at the platform, probably because the train couldn't be anointed by the holy plastic wafer.
It's truly frightening to see logic used to justify use of floppy disks in nuke silos: reliability, "tried and true", no need for internet connection! None of these make any technical sense. This software likely is getting no real testing so all these assertions are pointless. The naive assumption that whatever built in 90s was bug-free, most reliable and most secure is completely baseless. It's almost guaranteed that the software possibly has many bugs and issues that wouldn't have been addressed without advances in tools and techniques such as TDD, ability to do massive exhaustive testing, ability to measure code coverage, better safety features in languages, fixes in standard libraries, patches in kernels, provable algorithms for multi-threading and so on. Just think about old flaky FAT disk format VS advanced far more reliable new disk formats. If you can develop new fighter planes, you can sure develop new control software that is at least as reliable as previous generation.
It's interesting to speculate what would have happened if the parallel innovations of CD and internet had not sidelined the floppy, since software was already outgrowing them : the last version of Visual C++ that I installed from floppies came on IIRC several dozen disks, requiring the thing to be carried in a couple of sturdy carrier bags - clearly not a sustainable situation.
When I was in high school, some kid's 3.5" floppy didn't read. He was all upset about losing some images he had been working on in a paint program.<p>I slid open the window and turned the center hub to inspect the surface, which soon revealed a glaring fingerprint; some prankster almost certainly had done that on purpose.<p>I peeled the black, plastic casing open, and took out the disk, which I then gently washed with cold water and soap in the boys' washroom, drying it with a paper towel.<p>I slid the disk it back into its casing, and popped it into the drive. It read perfectly.
I remember the various floppies (5.25", 3.5") to be the most <i>unreliable</i> piece of technology I have ever worked with (almost on par with Datassette tapes). Read errors were commonplace.
I liked this story. I still have a few floppies in storage as mementos of times long since past. Maybe I'll consider sending in to make them useful for someone somewhere else.
The 8" disks I used were actually pretty good for reliability[1]. The 5 1/4" drives were just plain problematic. Doubly so if you used a "Disk Doubler"[2]. The 3 1/2" were pretty nice after the 5 1/4", but I'm still not sure they were ever as good as the 8". I'm glad to be rid of the whole lot of them with USB Flash drives.<p>I will say it was quite exciting to buy an Indus Floppy Drive for my Atari 400 (upgraded to 48Kbytes). It was amazing going from the 410 cassette player to the floppy. The door popped up in a most satisfying manner.<p>1) I'm with the other posters that "tried and true" and "know quantity" is probably a better way to look at it. Also, the stuff using the floppy drives probably just works.<p>2) for the younger crowd, at one time 5 1/4 floppies came in single sided and double sided varieties. So, depending on the floppy drive you bought the correct one. The price wasn't all that different. 5 1/4 floppies have a notch on the side that tells you how to insert it. Put it in wrong and the drive won't close since part of the mechanism goes down through the notch. Now, some "genius" decided that if you had a single sided drive and cut a notch in the other side of the floppy you could use both sides of the disk in much the same way you could play both sides of a record. This 'genius' started selling a device that was basically a hole puncher with a metal attachment that held the floppy properly to punch the hole (really a small square punch). You then could use both sides. Now, inserting the disk upside down would work, but the disk spins the opposite direction. You can guess how this interacted with the fabric that removed dust built into the floppy. <a href="http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING_YOUR_DISK.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue10/036_1_FLIPPING...</a> is an old article on it and Wikipedia has pictures <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_disks" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Flippy_di...</a><p>Serendipity is an amazing thing, as I type this "I'm Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)" just started playing on my music player. I'll leave it to someone else to explain the purpose of the pencil when talking cassette tapes.
I recently bought a new 3.5" usb floppy drive because a few friends wanted some stuff off their old disks, no telling how much will be recoverable, but willing to try.<p>It's interesting how little I've thought about the old formats for years. How many floppy/zip/jazz etc disks have useful data on them to this day. I worked doing support for iomega back in the day and the only thing it made me was slightly paranoid about multiple copies in multiple locations for anything really important.
The Morbidelli U26 still runs like a tank, this article is bang on. The industrial control units are proprietary as are the drive pinouts. That said, it does support KERMIT, but it is a lot more difficult to train people to use a serial terminal than it is to just keep using floppies. Apparently they are still running 15K Euro:
<a href="http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473" rel="nofollow">http://www.kitmondo.com/morbidelli-u-26/ref157473</a>
Vintage electronic music gear, which is still widely popular with certain genres of music, use floppies heavily.<p>12-bit samplers like the E-mu SP-1200 and Akai MPC60 which are still popular with hip hop producers rely on floppies. A number of other classic samplers and synthesizers use them as well. There's a lot of demand for floppies in that community.
A lot of CNC machines still use floppies. There are some great USB interfaces (that emulate a floppy drive to the CNC controller) that let you use USB sticks. You still have to format the USB stick to 1.44MB (so... buy lots of very small ones) for it to work, but it's been much better since we've switched to these.