
A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks - selamattidur
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/us/politics/slowly-they-modernize-a-federal-agency-that-still-uses-floppy-disks.html
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danso
The headline is a bit misleading...the Federal Register, I guess, does _use_
floppy disks, but apparently it's only because other agencies transmit
information to them in that way.

A couple years ago, the Federal Register did a complete overhaul of their
website, using an outside contractor:

[https://www.federalregister.gov/](https://www.federalregister.gov/)

To me, it is the epitome of a well-designed, thorough, user-friendly, data-
cognizant website. I don't think there's a government website so well thought
out as the Federal Register's.

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bmelton
There are a myriad of agencies still using floppies in some capacity. I know
for a fact that the ATF still has them available, even if maybe they're only
around for investigate purposes. The Department of Treasury's Bureau of
Engraving and Printing (BEP) (and possibly the Mint) had them the last time I
was there, as they're used in the machines that make the moneys.

I have it on good authority that floppy disk drives can still be found in the
NSA and the Pentagon (though they've made a very strong push for multi-tenancy
SAN as primary storage over the past decade), etc., etc.

That this one particular agency still receives files on floppy disks
necessitates that they still have floppy disk drives, though I must say that
I'm a little surprised they haven't simply dictated to their upstream
providers that they're switching.

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CapitalistCartr
I use floppy disks. To load programs on my CNC machine running NT 4. Its pre-
USB. Not everything can be easily upgraded.

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mariuolo
What about a floppy drive emulator like this:
[http://i.imgur.com/s0MHRq7.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/s0MHRq7.jpg) ?

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CapitalistCartr
That's a good idea. Thanks.

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gwu78
I think this is great. For the sole reason that it implies the data being
transferred fits on a floppy, or a series of floppies. And that in turn
implies that it's free from the senseless bloat and inefficiency that often
makes "modern" computing so annoying. Software and web programming follows a
sort of "inverse Moore's Law", it just keeps getting larger, with speeds
remaining constant. Like a gas, it expands to fill space.

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fiatmoney
There is absolutely _nothing_ wrong with floppy disks, as long as a) you have
readers and writers on both sides, b) your data fits on them, and c) you can
get replacements for the foreseeable future. The point is having a process
that works. Just because they don't work for most use cases doesn't mean
everyone should switch away from use cases which they do address, at a
potentially high cost.

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lsc
The failure rate of floppy disks (or rather, the incidents of uncorrectable
bad sectors) is dramatically higher than newer media like flash thumbdrives.

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beachstartup
so what? i've worked for large, successful private enterprises that still use
1960's technology, such as mainframes, tapes, and terminals.

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thesprawl
"some agencies still scan documents on to a computer and save them on floppy
disks. The disks are then sent by courier to the register."

So painful to read.

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d23
> So painful to read.

Have you considered some sort of reading program? It's not as hard as one
might think.

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kevinchen
I'm sure there are many, many more federal agencies that use floppies.

