Japan Wins War On Floppy Disks (reuters.com) 52
Speaking of Japan, joshuark shares a report: Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernise the bureaucracy. By the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling. "We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" Digital Minister Taro Kono, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analogue technology in government, told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday.
If it ain't broke.... (Score:1)
I wonder where the US is currently at in this race.
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I wholeheartedly oppose the move away from classic, efficient technology, but floppy discs have not been made since 2011.
Efficient?
Right now you can buy a 128GB thumb drive for about $10. To match that data capacity, you'd need a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks almost as tall as the Empire State Building.
yeah that's the fuckin point (Score:1)
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Still free to do that, but it is ridiculous to have your fate tied to floppy disks when that ecosystem has been abandoned for years.
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Why use 137,438,953,472 bytes when 1,474,560 bytes will do trick? A page is 80 characters wide and 66 lines tall, on average about 4k per page. That's 300-400 pages per floppy disc. That's plenty for most purposes. We don't need embedded videos of dancing babies and other bullshit.
Because you need a special janky mechanical peripheral to read the disk, rather than the USB port that's already on your system. Pages of plain text are rarely used now. A floppy can't hold even a single modern-day photo, and even fitting one moderately sized PDF is iffy. Keeping this fragile antique drive on thousands of systems for one old-time app with files that happen to fit is just silly.
BTW, despite what your file browser software may incorrectly imply, all mass storage devices are measured and sold
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Those floppies technically have a capacity of 2Mb, it's the inefficient formatting used by dos which reduces them to only 1.44Mb of available space. Other systems could fit more on the same floppies.
You also had extended density floppies which were twice the capacity again, but those were rarely used.
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You can store more than 1.44MB, but not reliably. Those higher density formats aren't used because of data loss. The 1.2 MB floppy was the worst of all floppies, the 360kB was the best besides the really big boys like 8". The 1.44 was pretty good. 720kB on one of those is even better. I had Amigas and they would do 880kB on 3.5" DSDD and something like 1.78 MB on 3.5" DSHD, but they also tended to be more problematic to read. Even the same drive would sometimes struggle to read them later.
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The Amiga did 880/1.76 as standard, and could do 1.1/2.2 if pushed (by using more sectors per track, and two extra tracks on the outer edge)... The media was rated for the extra sectors per track (hence the official 1/2mb capacity), but not for the two outer tracks.
I found the Amiga floppies no less reliable than any other, although the Amiga used floppies far more heavily than other platforms so you were more likely to wear out your drive.
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I had HDDs on my Amigas and ways to emulate floppies and whatnot so most of the time I could avoid needing them. I also go back to when home computers commonly didn't have HDDs and we did everything from floppy and/or tape. Anyway, my personal experience with a range of Amiga models was that you were much less likely to be able to come back and read an Amiga floppy than one on pretty much any other platform. I played with a lot of weird formats and filesystems and if I really wanted my files to be there whe
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High density 3.5" disks were often sold as "2MB" capacity. That's the theoretical raw capacity, but formatted I think the highest density was the Amiga format which gave you around 1,760 KB.
The 1.44MB thing seems to date back to the first 5.25" PC floppy drives, which IIRC used an off-the-shelf controller IC. They kept doubling the data rate and different drives had different RPM motors, but that initial somewhat low density set the standard.
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Yes you can, but I still say diskettes were the best for temp storage. To bad they were not much larger.
I know independent professional people who will distribute their work on USB Drives instead of using email. Why ? Encryption is hard, especially when dealing with many non-tech customers. Most of these works are under 1G in size. So buying multi-gig flash drives to pass out and maybe never get back is an expense they would rather not have.
I know you can buy smaller drives from Amazon rather cheaply,
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I wonder where the US is currently at in this race.
Generic Viagra has been a notable help with lingering floppy dick drive.
.....but it makes my vision a little blurry
Bitcoin (Score:3)
I keep all my Bitcoin on floppy disk. More secure that way.
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Try barcodes or QR printed with a laser printer on plain paper. ;)
This should have more longevity (hundreds of years?) than any floppy disk (ten, twenty years?).
Don't forget to keep the barcode/QR software source code printed on paper, too
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Older floppies are more reliable than new. I use 8 inch floppies often enough and even those written in the late 70s are perfectly readable.
Re:Bitcoin (Score:4, Funny)
Older floppies are more reliable than new. I use 8 inch floppies often enough and even those written in the late 70s are perfectly readable.
You can read both bytes!
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" two decades since their heyday" (Score:2)
If I remember correctly, in 2004, it was almost impossible to find a new PC with a non-ZIP floppy disk drive
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Personally, I distinctly remember having a 128MB thumbdrive in 2004 that I was using for collage coursework, and mostly using CD-Rs for larger files. I'd say the heyday of 3.5" floppies was a decade earlier.
Today in 2024 we have the modern disc ... (Score:2)
If I remember correctly, in 2004, it was almost impossible to find a new PC with a non-ZIP floppy disk drive
Today in 2024, we have computers selling with the modern incarnation of the floppy disc. The SD Card. Same functionality, different tech.
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You could get LS120 instead, that could still read and write legacy floppies, and at 2x or even 4x speeds even.
I tried to get rid of all that crap, though I may still have one or two drives somewhere. It's so very worthless now. If I really wanted to read a floppy odds are good it would be some format that a USB or ATA drive would refuse to read.
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Many systems in 2004 still had floppies. I believe Freesco (a Linux router that fit on a floppy) didn't stop development until 2019. I know "brand new" scientific instruments from that era still relied on floppy for data transfer, only in the last decade or so did we really stop using them.
LOLZ (Score:5, Interesting)
One problem is that there's an application that hasn't been updated since the early 90s used by most smaller municipalities as part of managing their city. There's replacement software, but it's expensive, far too expensive for all the smaller towns in Japan. That application required something weird with the floppy disks hence why they didn't just migrate to Gotek or something ages ago. I think you can run the application itself in anything that can run MS-DOS, but the way it wrote data to the floppy disk was the problem.
This will definitely though help people to stop using useless USB floppy drives and just use usb-drives instead, but plenty of old systems will still use floppies for decades. Planes built in the 90s are still using floppies unless the makers designed a retrofit.
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Floppy disks were often used for copy protection because it was easy to manufacture uncopyable ones. Just place one of the magnetic flux transitions right in the middle of where a bit is supposed to be read, and it will randomly read 1 or 0 as the speed of the drive motor varies. Read the track several times and if the bit changes, it's a genuine disk. If someone copies it, the computer will re-write that bit to be constant on the copy.
Floppy disks are getting expensive in Japan now. The drives are still fa
Oh no! (Score:1)
Now they'll have to change their anime with people passing around highly sensitive and secret information on floppy disks to something else.
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Now they'll have to change their anime with people passing around highly sensitive and secret information on floppy disks to something else.
Can you imagine watching anime pr0n and getting an "Accessing floppy disk..." (in Kanji characters no less?) overlay message right at the GOOD PART?
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naw, it is Japan, so all the 'good parts' are fuzzed out anyway.
I have heard that. Must be a phobia regarding hair that causes them to do that.
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Can you imagine watching anime pr0n and getting an "Accessing floppy disk..." (in Kanji characters no less?) overlay message right at the GOOD PART?
I can imagine watching all the pr0n in the world, but I might lack the proper passport [slashdot.org] to be allowed to actually do it.
Just use 3.5" SD Cards (Score:2)
Now they'll have to change their anime with people passing around highly sensitive and secret information on floppy disks to something else.
Not really, SD Cards are visually similar enough. In the future, for greater capacity, the SD cards get to 3.5 inches in size.
Continued use of fax melts my brain (Score:2)
My Epson WF 3640 MFP gave up the ghost so I was looking at the latest MFPs from all the big manufacturers to see what I would buy next.
I was totally amazed to see that here in mid-2024 nearly all MFPs still come with FAX, even this year's models.
It felt like trying to find a new car that didn't come with a cassette player.
Faxes are recognized by law as a legal document (Score:3)
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Given you can also just e-sign or email a signed copy, I still think Fax just need to hurry up and die.
Re: Faxes are recognized by law as a legal documen (Score:2)
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"Don't forget that Fax is considered secure and confidential even though it isn't encrypted. It is end to end and direct."
Considered by who? if people believe that then that belief is based entirely on ignorance.
It seems self-evidently clear that TLS is better than wide open comms. Its also naieve to imagine that the phone system is any more end-to-end and direct (i.e secure) than the internet is. Hell a lot of business phones are actually VOIP anyway.
I certainly don't want to be obliged to have to pay for
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My Epson WF 3640 MFP gave up the ghost so I was looking at the latest MFPs from all the big manufacturers to see what I would buy next.
I was totally amazed to see that here in mid-2024 nearly all MFPs still come with FAX, even this year's models.
It felt like trying to find a new car that didn't come with a cassette player.
As long as faxes are still heavily used by federal and state governments, they'll be readily available.
So They Say (Score:2)
"No more analog? By your command..." (Score:2)
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Isn't this how the Cylons won the first battles in the rebooted TV series?
I think it was more about wireless networked computers than analog vs digital.
"caprica123" (Score:2)
Emulator? (Score:2)
Has somebody made a hardware floppy emulator that takes vfat USB flash drives or SDcards?
That seems like a useful 2009-era product.
Inefficient but who cares when small microsd's are a buck or two in volume?
Remember those floppy filers? One floppy's volume could hold all those microsd cards.
GoTek are proven for many years. (Score:2)
https://www.gotekemulator.com/ [gotekemulator.com]
They're popular for retrofitting expensive equipment like CNC machinery which are airgapped and not at risk. Hobbyists also use them for vintage computing.
Two decades? (Score:2)
" fax machines and other analogue technology" (Score:2)
Analogue fax? I highly doubt Japan was using it recently.
I was using fax machines since the 1980s and don't recall ever seeing an analogue one. They used similar tech to dial-up modems.
We have had digital fax since the 1960s.
You won this time Japan! (Score:1)
Love, Floppy The Disk!