RETRO-TASTIC It has been near fifteen years because the final new floppy disk was manufactured by Sony. That is a very long time by any normal, and it is particularly prolonged within the ever-advancing tech world. However regardless of the finite variety of disks reducing yearly, there are those that nonetheless maintain on to floppies, whether or not for nostalgia-fuelled pleasure or necessity.
Few issues carry a smile to the face of long-time techies over 30 (or thereabouts) fairly just like the point out of floppy disks. The earliest, 8-inch fashions (80KB capability) arrived within the Seventies and have been in style amongst enterprise customers, with 5.25-inch (360 KB double sided) designs the widespread format for residence computer systems on the time. However it’s the three.5-inch (1.44MB) model that most individuals affiliate with floppies, popularized by Apple utilizing it within the 1984 Macintosh.
When Sony made the final new floppy disk in 2011, most assumed the medium would die off as a storage format, with solely its picture dwelling on as a save icon in apps like Phrase. Nevertheless, as famous by the BBC, there are nonetheless those that refuse to let go of floppy disks.
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One in all these followers is musician Espen Kraft, who makes use of music samples saved on the disks. He says they assist him creatively and permit the creation of music that sounds prefer it actually does come from one other period. He even performs stay exhibits with floppies.
Tom Persky, who runs Floppydisk.com, says the purchasers he sells his $1 – $10 disks to are evenly break up between hobbyists and lovers like Kraft and industrial customers. Persky stated he nonetheless sells “1000’s” of floppy disks to the airline business.
It was solely in 2020 when it was confirmed that airways nonetheless used floppies in some planes. A video of a Boeing 747-400 confirmed it had a 3.5-inch navigation loader drive that needed to be up to date each 28 days.
There have been different instances of floppies being utilized in enterprises up till not too long ago. Chuck E. Cheese was utilizing them for the most recent routines, lighting, and sync knowledge for its mechanical animals till final 12 months. We additionally heard that it was solely in 2019 that the Pentagon stopped utilizing Seventies IBM Sequence-1 computer systems – full with eight-inch floppy disks – as a part of its nuclear weapons techniques.
The newest instance of a big group nonetheless utilizing floppies got here final month when it was revealed that San Francisco’s practice management system was nonetheless utilizing the know-how. The system is claimed to have been cutting-edge tech when it was first put in – again in 1998.
Along with the fee and time necessities for upgrading to new techniques, many organizations stick to floppies as a result of their bodily nature makes the air-gapped techniques that use them more durable to hack.
As somebody who owned Commodore Amiga 500, 500+, 600, and 1200 fashions of their youth, it is easy to know why individuals cling on to floppy disks. Retro video games might be performed on trendy techniques by way of emulation, however there’s nothing like utilizing authentic gear: the sounds, the texture, and, very often, the disks failing to load.
