this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

It's okay, in 75 years Japan's government will still be keeping them alive. That's why you can still buy floppy discs on Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Japan just gave up the floppy (officially), but there will still be other legacy users.

Until VERY recently the US nuclear arsenal required 8" floppies. Disks that went out of favor in the early 70s because they can only spin for a few hours before they start to corrupt.

The one that most blew my mind was that my local Walmart only stopped selling blank BetaMax tapes in the mid 00’s. By the time the store was built they weren’t even selling movies on VHS anymore, but the blanks were still worthy of limited shelf space.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Are you sure they were BetaMax and not Betacam SP? Beta SP (as it's more commonly known) is a high quality format that was still being used by TV stations when I was working them as late as the 2010s. There were a few other later much higher quality formats like ED-Beta.

Also, I believe some camcorders also used Beta formats.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I'm sure camcorders were the reason. But no, they were BetaMax.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Nonsense. Plenty of American businesses still rely on them too.

I still use floppy disks from time to time. There are several USB floppy drives in my shop at work for when the network has issues and we have problems posting G Code to our mills.

[–] pastermil 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate on this American businesses requiring floppy disks?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

"Required" might not be the right word, but here's an article about how the San Fransico Trains are updated via floppies - https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-muni-trains-floppy-disks/

In the US at least it's not about required, but more legacy support. There are still a lot of old systems that work, but use old technology.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Shits crazy I can still buy compact flash cards, and zip cards

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I sort of understand still selling CF cards. They were used in high end photo and video equipment until not too long ago, and they have storage space comparable with smaller SD cards and USB drives. Plenty of equipment using CF is still perfectly good and still worth using.

I've never heard of a zip card. If you mean the old zip disks (I think the largest was 250MB or so), I can't imagine any reason someone would ever use one of these. Even new, zip drives were notoriously unreliable and not all that widespread. I had one, and I rarely used it in favor of CD-R or RW.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

CF is still used in high-end DSLRs. Like, it's still the "premium" storage option.

CD burning is still kinda useful for hifi. I wouldn't use it for data these days.

Iomega ZIP disks. Those things just clicked all day.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Zip disk sounds right I saw one working on a machine when I had to reinstall windows NT off of 3 floppy's. Then had to replace the hard drive with a compact flash cause I needed it to be 4gb to recognize. Lotta niche things that are still around that work perfectly well if 30 years out of date