• Coreidan@lemmy.world
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    11 months 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
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      11 months 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
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      11 months ago

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

          • voracitude@lemmy.world
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            11 months 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!

            • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

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

            • TwilightVulpine@lemmy.world
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              11 months 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
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      11 months 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
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        11 months 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.

        • Troy@lemmy.ca
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          11 months 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
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            11 months 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.