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"Last Man Standing" floppy disk corp figures 4years left to company

»www.theregister.com/2022 ··· usiness/
quote:
Floppydisk.com is a US-based company specializing in selling and recycling floppy disks, and founder Tom Persky describes himself as the "last man standing in the floppy disk business." The company, which has been around for decades, provides other services such as disk data transfers, including CD and DVD duplication, but most of its revenue apparently comes from selling blank floppy disks. Persky features in a newly published book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, which looks at the way the venerable storage medium continues to be used for some purposes, even though Sony, the last company to manufacture new floppy disk media, ceased production over a decade ago. But who on Earth is still using floppy disks? According to Persky, there are industrial outfits using machinery that requires floppy disks. (This writer recalls once visiting a university that had lab equipment that still booted up from an 8in floppy.) Only last month, it was reported that the Japanese government was forced to change some laws because they still required floppy disks and CD-ROM media to be used when sharing data with many government departments. The airline industry is also a big customer, Persky says in an interview taken from the book. "Probably half of the airfleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics," he said. Some medical equipment in the healthcare industry still requires floppy disks to transfer data in and out, but the biggest customer is said to be the embroidery business as there are a large number of embroidery machines still in use that were built to load designs from floppy. Other customers include hobbyists, who typically want to buy 10, 20, or 50 floppy disks at a time, which may or may not include those involved in projects such as the Floppotron computer hardware orchestra.
Weren't RAID drivers for the longest time only workable from 3.5" floppy disk, I want to say?

Figure this may tickle tech nerds' bone(r) for the day

/raises toast to the venerable and unkillable floppy disk medium

Regards

lhvetinari
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lhvetinari

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Press F6...

maartena
Elmo
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said by HELLFIRE:

Weren't RAID drivers for the longest time only workable from 3.5" floppy disk, I want to say?

On very old servers maybe. And maybe only using 2003 Server. I know Server 2008 and up 100% supported the loading of extra drivers on startup of the install dvd by using a USB stick by pressing F6. Floppy CAN still be used in theory, but most drivers nowadays exceed the space a floppy can hold.

The Boeing 747-400 series, some of which are still flying today, takes navigational computer updates from floppy disks. Typically, once a month the navigational database is updated during routine maintenance. These updates contain changed flight paths, changes to airport runways (airports always seem to be under construction somewhere), etc, etc.

When the pilot presses the auto-pilot button (its a little more complicated than that, but you get the point) along with a communicated altitude they received from ATC, the navigational computer will pick the right path and off you go. Those databases change constantly though - Russia flight ban anyone? - so yeah, the planes need to be updated. And a plane launched in the late 1980s/early 1990s isn't getting their updates through wifi or 4G when they land.....

legendNYC
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Re: "Last Man Standing" floppy disk corp figures 4years left to company

From SANS NewsBites: Japan’s Digital Minister Wants Government to Stop Using Floppy Disks

The Japanese government still requires the use of floppy disks for roughly 1,900 procedures; the country’s minister of digital affairs is calling for that to change. The US Department of Defense stopped using floppy disks in 2019.

Editor's Note [Neely]:
Yeah, we all did a double take at "Floppy Disks." This is really about keeping systems modernized. Japan still has business processes which require the use of disks - floppy, CD, MD, etc. The challenge is to keep processes current with modern technology and to make sure that you've migrated data stored on old formats to new media which can continue to be used. Don't be the one saying "Yes, I have your data here, excuse me while is search online for something that will read it." When looking at updating processes, make sure not to overlook implied security, actual or perceived, e.g., fax machines are seen as point to point and therefore more secure than digital transmission, irrespective of actual implementation.

Anon0d5d0
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This is the old buggy and horse ideology. That last one standing made the best damn horse and buggy going...
and now it's time to migrate the data to flash drives and backup hdd combined with safekeeping procedures or cloud.
Magnetic media was defined as something you could drop in a safety box and years later still be readable. Later on optical media became that media. Now optical media is at a crossroads, of a sort. Old timers keeping it alive, and yet, most of tech seems poised to turn the page without long term archival solutions. This is pound foolish in a way as so much innovation can be lost with the span of decades and disasters big and small.

We would not have so much historic video if it were not for archivists keeping video alive on video tape betamax dtr, and vcr. 50 years from now, this could be treasured media, or not... The pyramids were created in part to keep stories of life alive past cataclysms etched & painted on walls without it's historical context much of it's meaning is lost.
lawsoncl
join:2008-10-28
Spirit Lake, ID

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lawsoncl

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said by Anon0d5d0 :

Later on optical media became that media.

Except the market was flooded with low quality recordable CDs and DVD that didn't last very long. We had CDs and DVDs become unreadable within 2 years of burning, despite proper storage. I still have 25 year old 8mm tapes that read back just fine.