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[-] Coreidan@lemmy.world 55 points 2 years ago

What in the hell are they using them for? They hold so little data I don’t see how they can even be practical at this point.

[-] kuneho@lemmy.world 35 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

where I live (not Japan), trams are updated with a suitcase worth of floppy disks (and these are the more modern trams here)

[-] bfg9k@lemmy.world 30 points 2 years ago

Older Boeing's use floppies to update their flight computer data even today

[-] HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works 19 points 2 years ago

And Boeing is obviously trustworthy when it comes to maintenance.

[-] reinar@distress.digital 7 points 2 years ago

ones with floppies are alright, beware modern ones.

[-] Emerald@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago

if it aint broke dont fix it. That door plug on the other hand

[-] TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

I remember using floppies and they broke a lot. Probably more than USB drives

[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

That's weird, I've always thought of floppies as pretty durable. The 3.5" ones anyway; the older larger ones were flimsier. On the 3.5" ones the little metal cover would get bent sometimes, or occasionally crushed if someone put one in a back pocket and forgot before they sat down; but in my career I've had a lot more thumbdrives broken off in the port than bent/crushed floppies. How did you find most of yours broke? Maybe I had an abundance of clumsy colleagues... or maybe I joined the IT workforce too late to have witnessed the tsunami of broken floppies!

[-] anarchy79@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

Thumbdrives broken off in the port?? That's some degenerate levels of sexual frustration coming to light, brother..

[-] voracitude@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Work in IT as long as I have and if you don't learn not to judge, you at least learn not to bother judging 😋

[-] anarchy79@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Preach it, person. Sysadmin here, the job fades you to humanity.

[-] TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Bent and crushed floppies were less of a problem than simple failures of reading and writing them, which in my memory happened much more often than they do to USB drives now. I don't see people breaking usb sticks in half that often either.

[-] cordlesslamp@lemmy.today 19 points 2 years ago

One thing came to mind, Irreplaceable infrastructure computer systems from decades ago.

There are powerplants and oil rigs that use computer from decades ago which is irreplaceable (either due to technical or cost effective).

[-] ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 15 points 2 years ago

either due to technical or cost effective

Mainly due to proprietary hardware+software solutions which cannot be ported now and remaking them with new hardware will require redoing the same processes as before (probably with additional stuff added by later laws) all over again.

[-] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 11 points 2 years ago

If you try to replace just the hardware, you get fun solutions like a modern computer with a VM running Dosbox on critical infrastructure. Hey, if it works and your boss is willing to sign off on it...

[-] ulterno@lemmy.kde.social 3 points 2 years ago

Hehe, a similar thingy happened in one of my previous companies. The CPU was easily spoofed using qemu but in that case the whole OS was almost immutable with hardcoded bus configs for the video card (some old pre ATI card), which I was unable to pass through, causing the project to be taken out of my hands. I feel like it didn't go forward after that.

[-] coffee_poops@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 years ago

Their government agencies still used a lot of them.

this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
568 points (100.0% liked)

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