Explain yourselves.
3d printed save icon xDDD
>>108789330
>>108789330Nuclear subs and silos. Airliners used to until very recently.
>>108789330There's pretty much no practical reason to use those in 2026 when we have USB flash drives that have over 100,000x the capacity.
>>108789451This is blasphemy.
>>108789330my IIsi doesnt have a network card so i need to transfer files from the LC475 using floppies. i mean i guess I could use apple talk but thats pretty slow and i have plenty of floppies so.
>>108789486>no practical reasonNo, there's still old equipment out there that people have to use floppies to get data onto. From my understanding, this is often older but still fully capable industrial machines. Not to mention factories or equipment that's still being ran on some 386 computer or something.
>>108789330>>108789486they're actually good for use with a compatible password manager to keep your logins secure. and yes >>108789399 I 3D print them when I do this, since a new diskette is needed for each new login. you'll see this in industry pretty frequently.
>>108789486Exactly because of that they are good to use. You can store sensitive information in it and nobody will ever steal it from you if they invade your house.
>>108790076I installed office... 4.5? maybe it was 5.5. boxed set. 47 floppies.
i use them in a digital camera from 1998 to take floppy disk photos
another example
>>108790094>i use them in a digital camera from 1998Are you sure that's a floppy and not an MD?
The Japanese do
>>108790101Sony had a digital camera that used floppies, the... Mvica?. My mom had one, it was cool. could store like, 5-6 photos. MD is amazing but i dont think they ever used it for photo storage.
>>108790109*Mavica. and TIL they made a digital cam that used hi-md, neat.
>>108790101its a mavica fd-91, it uses 3.5" floppy disksMD would be cool to play with but its not as limiting as 1.4mb is, you get 6-8 1024x768 images at most out of a floppy disk and they look like sub 200kb jpegsMD would just be a less convenient alternative to a mini CD or something for a camera
I have an old cnc lathe that still uses a floppy to load the program. I could upgrade it to usb/ethernet but its like a $2k module and the lathe is getting scrapped in the next few years.
>>108789330I have a small stack of about 50 floppy disks. Just ordered a USB drive to check them and see how many still work. Hear most floppies in the wild have about a 50% death rate as of today.
>>108790163depends on a lot of factors, id say that average is probably pretty close for everything in active circulationsome different types of new old stock ones last better than others, i only buy fujifilm and TDK ones because they consistently have been reliable as newmeanwhile memorex i find at least a quarter of my disks are dead when i test them all
>>108790101You could still fit 10-20 shittily compressed JPEGs on a floppy disk and just share it with anyone without them needing a card reader, MD was too uncommon for that role and higher end cameras either used CF or had built-in hard drives so it never got that popular for photography even though it probably could have been nice for it>>108790109Apparently they made one gimmick CyberShot that used MD that's probably unobtainable now
>>108789330It is pretty hard to justify, specially when there's flashcards or IDE emulators for anything.For example, i want someday to get an MSX 2 computer, but even in this case it ends up being useless because pic related.
>>108789451I use an old live CD for a coaster.
>>108789330I do. I have a lot of retro ystems ranging from 90s PCs through Amigas. I also have commodore and CPM 5.25 inch floppies and the amsrad 6120 and Spectrum +3 three inch floppies and yes they still work.
>>108790303I have a working ZX81 and a 16 RAM expansion and tapes that load for it unmodded and a TV that it works with. ALso have original spectrum 48Ks and tapes last tape I loaded was mrs pack man by atari actually a really good port. This might interest you, I have a Spectrum +3 with a 3 inch Amstrat CF2 disks and I have an original Multiface 3 for it that allows me to load games from tape and freeze them and dump the memory state to 3 inch disk.....which I do sometimes. I have all the 8 bit games of note on casette all the big boxes wih keboard overlays etcI have my original copy of Zork and wordstar ona 5.25 inch floppy as well. Only mainntenece I have even had to do was replace perished drive belts on he floppy drives which is pretty easy.Yes I could mod he hardware but I like to keep it original, no composite mods etc. Bare minimum to keep them in working condition without any fundemental modification to function so some recaps but no 'correcing' designs or adding SDcards. MSXs are cool too.I also have spectrum next and a retrogames spectrum 48/128K with the rubber keys, I don;t mod original hardware though. They have machine soul. You do not program a ZX81, it programs you.
The only two PCs I have from the modern Era I have with fkoppies are an NT4.0 dell optiplex and a Dell Windows 2000 Pro machine, the rest are CPM, 8 bits, Amigas and Atari STs but yeah I use them about once a week I pull one off a shelf and a grabs some tapes or disks and play some games or code onn them a bit, mostly bis of assembly or basic or on the more modern ones borland C. It zens me out. Surisingly enough casee apes and disks were remarkably robust and 95%+ of mine are 30 years + old
>>108789330I inherited a Huskvarna embroidery machine that only takes floppies. The machine works, but does need some maintenance as the needles aren't aligned and break. Joann closed so I don't know where to get it fixed. Might as well try myself.
>>108790370I have a 400+ PC CD and DVD library of games and software spanning from the mid 90s through to just before steam keys fucked physical media. Complete ligit library of old OS keys as well. I play them quite a bit, currently playing through warhammer mark of chaos on a XP machine, really enjoying it. I have a big box games like Gunship 2000 for OS that are on floppy as well
The last time I used them was in 2005ish>still using 56k modem at home >slow as shit, browsing image sites is not fun>school has broadband internet access>download Star Wars wallpapers (Episode 3 hype) >1024x768 hell yeah>store as bitmap because 13 year old me didn't know about image compression>fit maybe 1 or 2 images on one disk>next day, arrive with a backpack full of floppiesA little later, I figured out that 256 colour bitmaps were smaller than the 32 bit ones, so I did that. They had a crunchy charm to them. After this whole ordeal, my dad gave me a 256 MB flash drive and that was that. For larger amounts of data that I would trade with friends, we'd burn optical disks. I still have a bunch of those lying around, with crunchy .flv porn and videogame trainers etc
They've stopped manufacturing them in the early 2000's and by then all 3.5" floppies were of shoddy quality and would randomly lose their data. Thank fuck flash storage became widely available not long after.
>>108789330i have a gigant .db file i jacked from a ngo i worked at and i feel like that type of data should be on a floppy that you hide in a book just out of dumb moviebrain reasons.
>>108790094>>108790100yeh floppiez def take better pics
>>108790151What's wrong with the lathe? Is it 3 phase?
>>108790094SOVL
>>108789330Planes still use them and they are awesome. >be me>hourly airline mechanic>hey anon you want the gravy job?>you know it>ok here clock in>hands me a card for 6 hours>download the flight recorder data>go to the tool room>check out several stacks of floppy disks>and those 1990s disk organizers>sit in the aft equipment bay>swapping in and out floppy disks>and listening to my warhammer books on tapeTechnology fucking sucks. Imagine all the fucking around us workers used to do before tech became lightning fast. All those billable hours. Gone. >why don't they just update it?Because of the way aviation works. An airplane, especially passenger airplanes, have to follow strict regulations. One of those regulations is the type certificate data sheet (TCDS). Its a list of all the part on an airplane, and the vendors qualified to make those parts. In order to make changes to it, the plane must undergo a whole new testing process with the FAA (very expensive, very time consuming). So the companies that make these changes must charge insane prices for the updated parts, because the cost to certify them is so insanely high. There is an updated version of the flight recorder that uses a thumb drive and probably takes 10 minutes to download. But it costs $40,000 last I heard. The cost to update the entire fleet would be in the millions. So instead they pay me to sit on my ass for 6 hours.
>>108789330I got some dungeon synth releases on floppies
>>108789486USB flash drives expire. Tape stores better.
>>108789330Your airline, updating navigational data in a Boeing 747
>>108789330I have an old version of rslogix 500 that I use for old surplus PLCs ive collected. The licenses on the floppies are long gone, but if you put the floppy into the drive then start the program it will work. That is my only usecase.
>>108790101I always loved Sony's formats as a product but hated how everything was proprietary and expensive.Like the memory stick was alright, but ridiculous in price compared to SD.They make nice form factors and tech but the non-standard of it makes it pointless.
>>108791719Damn and is that a 5 inch bay instead of a 3? I can't tell.
>>108790426For some bizarre reason, floppy disks manufactured in the 80's are much more resilient than the 90's/ 2000 ones
>>108792391nah thats 3.55.25's are actually floppy and dont latch into the mechanism themselves like 3.5's do, so they have locking leversbefore someone else points this out, yes there are exceptions to this but they are far from the standard(https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/52632/Toshiba-External-5-25-inch-Floppy-Disk-Drive/)
>>108792500i comparison heres how 99.9% of 5.25" floppy drives functionso they dont just physically fall out or get pulled while spinning because you can do that with 5.25's
>>1087893302006 CNC mill still uses floppy to transfer programs.
What are some crazy things people have done with floppy?I know people use the drive motors and sleeve cover as a musical instrument.But I'm talking more like hijacking the interface sort of like how people did with magnetic tape decks.And other odd shit like this >>108790076 where people have hoppers and robotics to automate this absurd shit on legacy systems.
>>108792382They even shot themselfs in the foot with the expensive as fuck memory stick for the psvita.
>>108792691>hoppers and robotics to automate this absurd shit on legacy systemsI can't find the pictures for this but I know they exist. Something about the Japanese government using them.It would automatically load and swap the discs while continuing the process. Goofy shit.
>>108789330To install Windows XP RAID drivers, or other storage media during install.CNC machines still use them.
Reading through this thread it seems like with floppy disks the risk is bad media, while the readers are reliable with optical media the risk is the reader failing, while the media itself is pretty reliable if stored wellAccurate?
>>108789330>Who still uses these?Japanese businessmen.
I while ago i did maintenance on a old as fuck laser cut robot that used floppy disk to install new programs, and it ran on DOS. That robot has been running with no software problems for almost 4 decades now and they dont seen the point of replacing it because most of the parts are standardized and replaceable.They dont build shit like they used to.
some legacy military stuff still use them, i think even the fucking F-22 has a few individual airframes left where you have to load flight data onto it via floppy. i know a lot of ancient radio systems still use floppy drives tooactually speaking of I've heard a lot of cheap light aircraft still use floppies for the same thing (loading up flight plans and such) and no one wants to retrofit them to at least use a CD/DVD drive because then you have to get it recertified and that shit will not pass if it's old enough it's using fucking floppieswhere i work there's also a lot of XP-era junk still running and a lot of them still have floppy drives. thankfully, we don't have to use them and they have all had DVD and USB ports put in before I got there. many of them are still IDE thoughbeit and it's starting to become a problem as drives die>>108792691theres not much you can use them for other than storage. the "platter" is too small to be interesting even for arts n crafts, floppies have become rare enough that they're not worth just throwing at people like people used to launch AOL CDs into walls and shit, it's basically just to interact with old systems or maybe use as a coaster>>108792758for industrial shit it's really unnecessary and possibly an active detriment to upgrade. on some ancient DOS thing you just have a COM port and it just werks. you try doing any serial shit these days on a modern system, they just aren't made for it, you need 900 USB dongles and ridiculous bespoke drivers just to get the stupid fobs to even work, let alone start communicating with anythingat my job we in fact do have such satanic setups, USB DACs you just put a wire into and now you have a serial port. they fuck up all the goddamn time and aren't even controlling anything crazy, just power relays
>>108789486well, theres badusb
>>108789330>havent seen one of these since middleschoolno one, modern computers don't even have the floppy drivers for these to even read them
>>108789330My dad fixes musical instruments for a living, among other things. And I think he still occasionally uses an old PC running Windows 7 or XP (I don't remember for sure) and a floppy drive. I think he mentioned that Windows 10 has issues supporting it, but I don't remember for sure.Either way, most new instruments probably just use SD cards for everything, but older keyboards and stuff like that still use floppies. And they can last for many years if well maintained, so there's a use case, not just "retro" vanity.
>>108789330I wish we still had something like this. Inserting it feels like sex.
>>108790094>>108790100Neat aesthetic
>>108794340Also, I remember how mind blown I was as a child when he told me that Floppy B's had more storage than Floppy A's despite being smaller in size. It was like magic to me for some reason, how could something smaller hold more data? Imagine showing me an SD card back then.
>>108794442>Floppy B's had more storage than Floppy A'sAnyway, that's probably not what they were actually called, but it's what we called them back then. Maybe the letter of the drive defaulted differently for some reason? Or maybe we were just more tech illiterate.
>>108789330i have them for 90s music samplers. i could replace it with a sd drive but i don't think it is worth doing so.
>>108789330it is only now that it finally clicked for me why they are called hard disks, because rest of storage media were soft disks
>>108795371no they are either hard or [spoiler]floppy[/spoiler]
>>108789330>tfw you said you've got a Microsoft floppy disk and she left without saying goodbye
>>108790109>MD is amazing but i dont think they ever used it for photo storage.
>>108794442I have a 512gb micro sd card which still blows my mind.I still use blu ray for archival backups.
>>108789486There was someone who managed to partially create a floppy disk from scratch, like without some unobtainable chemicals and industrial equipment. Like if push comes to shove that technology can be recreated on someone's garage, we don't need some cleanroom, magic laser machines from Netherlands to create them.
>>108792711No, you dont understand, they won the war against pirates by making their system so unappealing to their core audience (aka pirates) that none of them picked one up.
>>108792691Your picrel were fucking great because it allowed a passenger to completely handle disc changing, track selection, and small volume adjustments from their lap, and laps are soft too, so the portable disc player skipped rarely.
>>108792719wtf how would a puter with floppy only run winslop8 at all?
>>108789330haven't seen anyone here post it yet sohttps://youtu.be/cTPBGZcTRqootherwise besides stuff like this for shit and giggles, industrial machines that absolutely need 100% uptime still
>>108789486There was no practical reason 20 years ago either for the same reason.
>>108792450What's really amazing is that audio cassette format tapes and players made in the early and mid 80s are still serving up data for me perfectly as bytes long enough for he internet o have been born and diehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtBoRp_cSxQ
>>108797164NT strong.
>>108789330I save my passwords in those
>>108792500These combo drives sucked ass, because you could physically use only one drive at a time. You couldn't copy from one to the other simultaneously.
