San Francisco to pay $212M to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks

The headline here is manipulative.<p>&gt; The $212 million contract includes support services from Hitachi for &quot;20 to 25 years,&quot;<p>The $212m is a 20-year service contract for the new technology and the costs of installing it, not a one-time cost to remove the old floppy disks.

I would like to see if I can sustain an argument that is is literally the definition of &quot;technical debt&quot; in it&#x27;s purest form: The cost in inflation adjusted dollars to do this, probably exceeds the incremental upgrade cost had it been done across the lifetime of the system.<p>Does anyone have the chops to do the thought experiment? It means working on the labour and input costs for the time period, assuming a rollout and semi continuous upgrade through different ages of technology, as opposed to paying out a diamond bracelet worth of cost at the end to jump over technology intervening moments.

In 1998 those disks were already outdated technology.

I guarantee you the dos setup will be sorely missed

This is BS. I&#x27;m not an engineer but I&#x27;m sure one can create an emulation layer, connected to a SSD, put whatever data&#x2F;software on it, and have this work. It certainly wouldn&#x27;t cost $212M. I bet a college student could do this. Oh, look <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Floppy_disk_hardware_emulator</a>, it&#x27;s already been built. This smells of corruption.

my lord.